Witness to Withness

Manic-Depression at work

In reality wellness like beauty is in eyes of the beholder. What might look like somebody getting better or more beautiful may be a result of wanting it to be that way. In reality help may be needed in order that full potential is realized.

Home for the Holidays:
         It was great to be with family and I knew that all I needed to do was convince myself and them that I was on the road to recovery. I wanted nothing more than to be considered well and back in college with persons that I saw as normal-people who could make me feel more like the self that I was before the illness. I almost had myself convinced that this could happen. I went to the college a week before I was to be in attendance. I decided I need to have contact with the woman I had obsessed with. Her name was Sue. I was frantic. I had seen my friends and yet that was not enough. I felt the need to apologize and make things right. I was afraid that my actions/delusions had somehow impacted her. There were rumors that people were pointing a finger at her saying that she was like other women there looking for a MRS degree, taking advantage of me and other men. I only wanted to say I was sorry. She had wanted to make the connection and told me so and yet for some reason it just never happened.
I went home after my visit with a heavy heart. I felt ashamed of behaviors that I was sure that I had no control over. How could I be sure that they would not happen again? I became more and more depressed caught in a prison with suffocating, bars of shame. My depression hit an all-time low during the New Year holiday. January term was only days away. I was told everything was in place for me to go back. My life would once again be normal. What was normal!!?
When the ball fell down in New York Times Square, 1977 was officially beginning. I could not have felt worse. I had no idea how I could survive.

          I felt suicidal and that sense felt trapped in a casket of my own making. The first stage of my emotional crisis saw me in the role of God’s champion, deliverer of the oppressed and downtrodden. When I was feeling good I was pretty near indestructible. I could change my sexuality at will, the flavoring of anything I partook of, and one time I recall even putting a burnt cigarette in my mouth and according to my memory I was unfazed. The next chapter would prove to be more menacing. I was convinced that since I did not succeed as God’s witness, I must be the “beast” that is talked of in the book of Revelation. I was a loser and lost and was certain the only reason that God had me alive was so that I might know humiliation.
         The day after New Year I was supposed to get my paperwork in order to start spring semester. I was an awful mess. I could not stop thinking about suicide. It was a state of mind that would not pass and I was terrified as I contemplated my fate. I was too scared to live and too afraid to die. I had never felt worse. It was a dark night of the soul that I will never forget. Many of the people in my family were religious. My mom in particular was panicking. She gave me the phone to college and told me that I needed to tell them that I was not ready to go back. It was one of the hardest things for me to do. I had met with friends a short time ago. I had dreamed of being normal again. All that was put on hold. How could I let this happen to myself and to the ones I loved.
         Mom decided to take me to watch people go down the ski slopes. It seemed innocent enough. It was calming to go somewhere away from my painful negative feeling that I felt forced to keep to myself. If anyone found out, what would they do to me? I thought the worst. Mom took out her cigarettes from her pocketbook and told me that she would give up smoking if I could give up feeling the way that I did. She then proceeded to tell me a secret that she had kept from me. I can honestly say it impacted me in a funny way. “My father and I had you before we were married, yet you need to know that you were loved.” To this day I wonder if there could have been more to the story that I will never know. At my high school this was a fairly common occurrence and many of these girls never married. I can only guess that her religious self-perceptiveness was pricked by my malaise. She would do anything to stop it and to be truthful I wanted to stop it as much as she did. I do remember a light going off in my head. It helped me to understand why I was treated differently than my siblings in some regards. In future times I could not help thinking of myself as the accident, as if I should not have ever been born.
         I was shut up in a self-imposed exile in the basement while I waited for something to happen. I felt like I was a leper or worse. I tried to do things I normally enjoyed like reading. In this case I was reading(trying to read Tolkien. I could barely keep track of the characters. There always seemed to be one too many to keep track of. As I read I entered this world I was reading about. I was isolating from everyone into a world of darkness. Bilbo was holding the ring looking for liberation, while Gollum was doing everything he could to get "my precious" away from him. My desire to live had been taken away from me and I had no idea how to get it back. I went upstairs only to eat meals and then I would go back into my dungeon to envision unspeakable tortures to come my ways for a crime I did not even know I committed. There were no visits or calls from friends. (that I knew of) and family kept it's distance from my malaise. Maybe I was better off this way out of sight and out of mind.