The Psychotic Break

Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash

I’d get a caulk gun to fill in the cracks where the baseboards join the floor, and between the countertop and cabinets, through which I’m sure I’ll slide to emerge into a place where physics is different, time moves in some strange direction, and nothing we’re sure of holds, but it’s early and the hardware store isn’t open yet. Then again, the man standing by the front door wouldn’t let me out anyway. This is not a hospital, it’s my kitchen, and after a few meds, some coffee, and a hard-fought session of meditation I’ll know he’s not real. But oh he’s here right now and I have to stay inside because out there something is going to happen. Not sure what, not necessarily bad, but I’m afraid of it anyway and refuse to go outside.

I had a date for coffee with a long-time friend who has seen me through the worst of this and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get out. I spoke to him from my bed on FaceTime.

Sleep comes in spurts, and at odd times, and every once in a while a bit of religiosity seeps in and I go full Catholic, throw out what I’ve been reading, and just pray. But a darkness lies behind these prayers, and I’m sure this is not what the church has in mind. Then I read Simone Weil and I think maybe it does.

I have two altars in my room. The one to the left that may save my soul with the Pieta my mother made for me in ceramics class when i was a kid, a buddha draped with old broken bracelets my daughter made from string, another buddha my wife brought back for me from China, a piece of driftwood, my grandmother’s prayer book from before 1920, and stones made from my father’s cremated remains.

I’m a man of deep faith, or perhaps just a deep curiosity about faith, yet the altar to the right is doing more to save me right now. On this folding table sits a glass of water, a journal, and five bottles of the greatest hits of psych meds. On the chair by the table a copy of my application for disability insurance. A place of surrender and supplication like any altar. A place to transform. Still, right now, I transform from one very bad thing to another.

Not very long ago I took two meds for my bipolar disorder 1. But as the mixed episodes have cycled with breakneck speed and enormous weight more were added. And then the hallucinations. And then more. And then even more. Bipolar 1 can present more like schizophrenia than bipolar 2 and cyclothymia, which are more like anxiety and depression. So I take these antipsychotics and other stuff. Nothing new. Nothing with fancy ads on TV where people have dinner with laughing multiracial couples in designer dining rooms and cuddle their cats on new couches in pressed clothes, rather than old sweats and ripped t-shirts. No, my doctor who has guided me though this for 25 years, and he’s younger than me, prescribed good, old school, cheap, effective 20^th century drugs that work. My table is the classic rock station of psych-meds.

These meds, my meditation, and my monk-like existence are working. What was a psychotic break is now merely a neurotic one, which is more than just a matter of degrees.

In a psychotic break what you see, hear, or feel is real, and no one can convince you otherwise. The man by the door was in fact a man by the door, and nothing could refute that. Except all of a sudden he wasn’t. Neuroses is different in that you can still see, hear, and feel things but you know they’re not real. So when I’m walking the dog at night and the people approaching on the sidewalk just vanish I’m pretty certain they were never there in the first place. Neuroses enables you to be more secure in your senses, albeit only a little more secure, because it feels less like you’re going crazy. Actually, it can make you feel more like you’re going crazy because you’re aware your mind is failing. In psychoses you don’t know your mind is making things up because, to you at least, they’re very real. In neuroses, this indeterminate nature of sensual experience which can lead you to question everything can really fuck you up.

And then tactile sensations combine fully with paranoia because, hey, why not? I’ve been dealing with all of this for a very long time and I still cannot get over the impending sense of doom that I feel both inside and outside my body. This is the stuff suicide attempts are made of. Early on in my experience with bipolar disorder I was in and out of hospitals and in and out of episodes. Life didn’t work. Then I learned some skills based around meditation and it all just clicked. (I wrote a book about how to do it; please help me out and buy a copy here).

Now I’m dealing with things I haven’t dealt with in two decades. I can actually feel bad things happening to me when nothing is happening at all. My mind is hijacked by fear and negativity and I feel each thought, I really feel each thought, infuse my body. The stress can push me up and out of myself until I’m watching myself in the room, not part of my body at all, because my body is just too painful to occupy. There’s a very real fear that I don’t come back, and I sort of warm up to that fear and embody it. For the overall sensation in this entire episode, the perversity I’ve come to embrace, is that I just disappear.

The stress of my life has made it nearly unlivable, so of course I want to run away. Everything I’ve written about in this post is a stress response aimed at running away. I sat at dinner with my family overwhelmed by feelings of pain – the pain of my experience and the pain they may suffer in not having me. Right now it would be so easy to cease to exist, in either a metaphorical or a literal sense. But I’ve made vows and I’ve made a life and I’ve made plans with people. I’ve made promises I aim to keep. I have no honest idea of how to keep those promises other than keep taking the meds and keep meditating. And keep praying and keep opening up to my wife and daughter. And, most difficult of all, to keep patient.

I’ve had bad episodes with my family. But never one like this. Back when these were common I never could have had a family. So, as it is with every hallucination we’re in unchartered territory. And it’s territory that threatens to shred everything we bring to it. If nothing else, bipolar disorder is destructive. Deadly, yet beautifully destructive.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask, as a human being who gazes on whisps of clouds before the sunset, for life to be beautiful. But mental illness can tear beauty to shreds. Then again, beauty can be found everywhere. Even in destruction. The mysticism that underpins my meditation teaches that tearing down, that destroying, may even be necessary to find the true beauty of a life. I have been living a life in which I’ve tended to overdo everything, especially violent moods. But in a couple weeks, down at the old rubble of a pier to which we sometime take walks, the birds will be back and flowers will sprout through the most surprising places. Then I can do nothing at all but sit.

I’m stretching. I’m trying to find good in sheer hell. But I know it’s there.