Mood Swings and Weeds
In this current episode that has left me fragile and not working at my job things seem better until they aren’t. My goal is to string three good days together and be able to build from there, but right in the midst of growing mental health the slightest thought out of place forms as a provocation and waves of rage and defiance stumble out, physically it actually feels like I’ve blown a gasket, and I fall apart again. As with any failure the best approach is to just start over.
This approach simply leads to more failure when applied to a relationship. Start over from where? My wife, in our fifteen years together, has never experienced me like this. This terrain that years ago would have felt so familiar to me has me lost without a map. For a long time it felt like I had always been well, and I feel like I have always been with my wife. But not like this. Not now, not ever. To start over would require that we quit. Neither of us wants that.
So we both trudge on, long-suffering and little understood, for as I get all the attention she has to learn and cope on her own. I know it’s not fair, but I’m in need of an exhaustive effort of self-preservation and just when I’m able to settle down and reach out to touch her gently some mood swing deflects my arm and the touch becomes a sort of slap. So practiced at loving each other, right now neither of us really knows what to do.
A relationship with a person with mental illness is like the forsythia on our deck at our house in the city. For a few weeks it is magnificent, fiery yellow in full bloom while most other buds on most other plants still promise but don’t deliver. The flowers fill out the plant that, when the flowers brown and fall, has strong limbs but little green to greet the breezes that push it, scratching against the railing, barely blocking the decaying neighborhood below that used to feel like home but now feels threatening and old. For part of the year the plant is downright ugly, and we’ve considered throwing it away. Instead we’ve cut off the dead limbs and the thing still sprouts green and alive. When it blooms it makes the unpleasant verdant and it hurts to consider that we ever wanted to have it go away.
A relationship connects two people, and it helps to have some confidence in the consistency of whom one is relating to. But I’m so inconsistent right now. One minute effervescent and the next minute drowning, I can’t stick with a book for more than a couple chapters and I shirk from most contact with other people, not knowing who I may be if a situation becomes difficult. All this makes the situation with my wife difficult, especially for her, as she tries to attribute some reason to my behavior when, in fact, at the very root of my behavior is the terror that reason has gone very far away.
Our new house sits by a marsh on a tidal tributary that teems with birds, into which we throw crab traps and over which the sun sets with intense colors that are different every evening. Perhaps beautiful things don’t always have to be the same. A walk through the yard is covered with bluestone slabs, and in a period of pained inaction I let the weeds take over. They’re tiny flowering plants called spurge full of sap that attracts flies that aim right for my wife’s legs when we sit outside. And they bite. Her. I thought it might look nice to let nature take back a bit of the yard, but my wife disagreed.
I was reluctant to use weed killer on the spurge. First, we have dogs. Then, when I pulled back a bit of this sticky ground cover I saw all sorts of insects. So much was alive in each tuft. I’m dealing with some very large life or death debates in my head these days and I didn’t want to kill anything. Anything except the spurge. So this morning I woke up and sat out back and meditated as the rising light filtered gray through a dense fog over the marsh. I considered the blankets of spurge overlaying so much of the bluestone. It was too early to go to the hardware store for the weed killer, so I stood up, bent over, and started to pull the stuff out.
It took hours and it was backbreaking. I left piles of the weeds for my daughter to pick up later, and when she was done I swept the walk. It all looks better, as my wife said it would. She’s usually right, and I lean heavy on her judgment when I’m in a bad state, although moods often lead me to fight her every step. And the flies are gone. Tonight we’ll sit outside and watch another sunset paint the sky, sure only that the sunset, my moods and tomorrow will be different. But tonight will be better, for the flies are gone with the weeds and I’m feeling good, tired and sore but good, because I worked; productive, physical, meaningful work. Like a relationship, managing a serious mood swinging episode requires some diligent work.
All of us with mood disorders have to keep doing, and in the doing find strength, meaning and purpose. And in the doing don’t kill anything. Especially those things like love and hope that keep you going. I’m not at my job right now, and I don’t know when my doctor will say it’s OK to go back. But I can keep working, if that work is only pulling weeds, making a property better, a relationship better, and the wash of hues of tonight’s sunset better to sit and treasure.
If you’re interested in meditation and meaningful work, please have a look at my book Practicing Mental Illness – Meditation, Movement and Meaningful Work to Manage Challenging Moods. And if you should buy a copy, please share it with someone it may help. Thanks.