Intoxicating highs and deep darkness: living and loving with bipolar disorder
When you look at me, you may not see anything out of the ordinary. Too much hair. Broad shoulders. Normal height. Normal weight. Normal eyes, normal mouth, normal nose, normal face. Five fingers, five toes, two arms, and two legs that are a bit too short.
But please don’t be fooled. Despite what you may see, I am an evolutionary anomaly. My feet aren’t webbed, and I have no gills. I have no supernatural powers; in fact, my terrible eyesight and hearing would say the opposite. But an evolutionary anomaly I still am because every day I find myself fighting against the basest of animal instincts that has allowed our species to survive thousands of years: the instinct to live. To stay alive. To not self-destruct.
I started this essay two years ago, after yet another drunken manic episode that led to me perched on the ledge of my open bathroom window, deliberating over whether to jump. I dug it up because a very influential man began exhibiting erratic behavior in a very public fashion. A lot has happened in those two years. Like Kanye West, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Finally, after 30 years, I had a name for those intoxicating and grandiose periods of my life when I felt so powerful and so high that I was practically vibrating. I also, finally, had an explanation for the cruel bouts of can’tget-out-of-bed darkness that always, always followed.
This is the part where I say I saw my experience in Kanye’s presidential campaign. In some ways, yes – anyone with self-destructive tendencies can recognize when someone is destroying their life. But really, what made me stop and consider my mental health again was his wife, Kim Kardashian West. In her, I saw my husband. I saw everybody who has ever loved or tried to love someone like me.
These two years were our first two years of marriage. The man who lovingly promised to stay with me in sickness and in health got to learn far too early that the sickness would always be there. That there would be some days that would be better, but that the compulsion to self-destruct would always exist within me.
I still remember showing him the first draft of this essay, when I described this compulsion as “a place as familiar to me as my childhood home”. I feel comforted in this place, I wrote, this place that embraces me with the intimacy of a wrinkled, bosomy aunt. I feel a thrill here, at the possibility of possibilities – here, once again, I am 14 and the fruit of the fig tree is falling into my outstretched arms. I feel resolute in this place. That at last, at long last, my destiny has found me and it is time to meet it.
You don’t want the man you love to hear how badly you want to die. But I started this essay in part because I needed him to understand how I got to that open bathroom window that day. It’s never intentional, you see. I had arrived there in a show of defiance against my beleaguered husband, who was insisting that I was too drunk and that I couldn’t go out again. Fuck your rules, husband, I thought, as I surveyed
the options before me. If I can leap to the window ledge over there and hold on with just the tips of my fingers, I can swing my legs over to the drain pipe there and shimmy down. Maybe you can skip the ledge all together, my wine-fueled bravado slurred in my ear, and go straight for the pipe, and slide down like a fireman.
Before I knew it, there it was and there I was, back in it once again. Suddenly, all was blank, and it was just me and the Place, my oldest and most loyal friend. Can a place be an entity, a godlike figure, a setting and a being to exist and to be? Because in my place, I am Moses on the mountaintop, listening to his God. I am the Magician’s Nephew in the Wood between the Worlds, plunging into the dark void and waiting for Aslan. This is my place, both an endless abyss and a demon, and once again, its voice was all I heard. “Do it,” it whispered. “Do it. Fucking do it. Jump. Die.”
My stupid lizard brain protested that we were only on the second floor. “You cannot kill yourself from such a negligible distance,” Lizard Brain argued.
“Not if you go head first,” the Demon hissed back. “If you go head first, there will be no saving you.”
“But your husband hates gore,” Lizard Brain said. “He will see your insides, spilling out your skull. It will frighten him. You cannot frighten him.”
“It will free him,” the Demon responded, “from the embarrassment that is a drunk wife. From the embarrassment that is you.”
That day, I ran. Past my husband, who grabbed for me, ripping my tattered sweatshirt down my shoulder as I sprinted out the door, beyond his reach and the allure of my bathroom window. For an hour, I stumbled along a nearby street, and dreamed of curling up somewhere I could be forgotten, where I could disappear.
“Lie down in traffic,” the Demon whispered. “Trip in front of a bus.”
“But then all they will know,” Lizard Brain whispered back, “all that you will be remembered for, is that you died in a drunken stupor.”
I eventually found my way home, and when I saw the anguish on my husband’s face, the Place pulled at me again. But my husband took hold of me before I could give in, and I spent the rest of the night cradled on his lap, soaking his chest with the silent tears of yet another near-miss. Of yet another failure at suicide. Of the pain I cause others just by being alive. Of the pain I cause myself with every breath I take.
Before we fell asleep that night, I turned to my husband and I told him what I’ve always known but is so hard to acknowledge. That it felt inevitable. That no matter what medications I take, how many therapists I talk to, how many milestones I reach, how many people I have in my life who love me, the Place will always be there. Waiting for me, beckoning me, telling me to selfdestruct. I had a mentor once who lost his temper at me, telling me that I could do so much if only I got the hell out of my own way. I couldn’t tell him then that I was not built to succeed. That I was the dodo bird that could not fly. The pandas that refuse to mate. The Place calls for me, even when I least expect it. And my poor Lizard Brain, exhausted and stretched thin – you shouldn’t have to work so hard. The last time I was in the place, I wrote in my journal: “I didn’t kill myself yesterday because I ate about a pound of candy corn and I couldn’t stop thinking about how embarrassing it would be for the coroner to cut open my stomach during the autopsy and find that my last meal was a pound of candy corn.” I like to read that entry and marvel at the resilience that is my Lizard Brain, storming up the hill while the enemy fires down upon him. Lizard Brain, there is only so much you can do for an evolutionary anomaly, a human built to selfdestruct. You can win the battle, but everybody loses when the weapon of mass destruction lies within.
“It’s inevitable,” I said. My husband was quiet for a while before he pulled me closer, and kissed me hard on my forehead. “Then every day we have is a miracle and we should treat it as such,” he said.
Two years ago, I wrote this essay as an apology to my husband. I see what I put you through, I wanted it to say. I’m sorry you had the misfortune of loving me. As with everything I write, he told me he liked it. But that quote he took issue with: “I don’t remember saying that,” he said.
To my husband and every other person out there who has loved someone with mental illness: here lies the reason I dug up this essay, two years later. Everyone’s mental illness manifests in different ways. But please know that even in my most manic moments, when I am so far lost in my mind, he is there with me, my husband. The Place speaks in my ear like the demon it is, telling me to destroy my life, but now so does my husband. I hear his voice too, even when he is not really there, even when I’m not really there. I hear him telling me to come home. I hear him reminding me what is home. I hear his voice bringing me back to solid ground.
Here is a quote I know for sure he said to me because he said it just two nights ago, when once again, in the midst of another manic episode, I sought to self-destruct. “When you destroy yourself,” he whispered into my neck, “you destroy me too.”
Two years from now, will I have to rewrite this essay? Two years, and I still struggle. But let me tell you how I ended it, two years ago. I woke the next day before my husband, and crept into the bathroom where the Place last called. As I sat, emptying my bladder, I listened to the city shifting awake, her sounds muted in the early-morning light. A neighbor slamming the lid of a plastic garbage can. Feet stomping down the stairs. The tired hum of a bus trudging up a hill, a trolley car’s bell clanging in the distance.
I shut the window, and crawled back into bed. Beside me, my husband stirred. I chose my husband then, two years ago, and I choose him again, now.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
woman society typically doesn’t afford room for pain, vulnerability or even basic humanity. People look at an incident like this and balk at the idea that she would need or deserve the kind of concern that would be readily offered up for anyone else in her situation.
And, the public indignity of watching her trauma be dissected, trivialized and turned into fodder for memes, is something she has to grapple with as well. “Black women are so unprotected,” she wrote on Twitter just days after the incident. “We hold so many things in to protect the feelings of others w/o considering our own. It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.”
It’s also not lost on me that most of the voices who have spoken up for Meg in the last few weeks are other Black women. It is us, who once again find ourselves backed into the lonely corner of simultaneously navigating a society that does not feel the need to protect us, and having to show up as advocates for others in moments like these.
I don’t know what the solution is, or what it’s going to take for the world to give Black women the respect they deserve, but it has to happen. We can’t say Black Lives Matter when Black women still exist on the margins of even that very idea. Black women remain at the vanguard of our struggles for liberation, and deserve to be fought for and protected in the same way.
Tayo Bero is a freelance journalist
feud between the two women were always wide off the mark. Rather, they say, the pair simply had little in common. The book claims Meghan perceived a lack of support from Kate, who, in turn, would try to make contact while not worrying too much if there was no response.
Harry and Meghan knew their values and wanted to control their own brand
Perhaps an unsurprising revelation on its own terms – the couple had their own website and sought to register “Sussex Royal” as a global trademark – but the book describes the pair’s surprise at courtiers’ treatment of them as they sought greater autonomy than Buckingham Palace was willing to grant.
“As their popularity had grown, so did Harry and Meghan’s difficulty in understanding why so few inside the palace were looking out for their interests. They were a major draw for the royal family,” the book reveals.
They believed their own relatives were briefing against them
Prior to “Megxit”, the couple were on such bad terms with other members of the royal family that the couple believed them to be leaking stories about them to the press, the authors claim.
The Queen was taken by surprise by their announcement
According to the book, the monarch was “devastated” by the announcement on the couple’s private website of their plans to take a step back. It claims she was put in an awkward position by the plan for a half-in, half-out royal status, which it was felt had been presented as a fait accompli, although it was nothing of the sort.
The announcement appeared to be rushed out
According to the book, it was known within the palace walls that Harry and Meghan wanted changes to their royal status and had sought discussions with the Queen prior to a six-week trip to Canada at the end of last year.
It says they made the final decision while in Canada and again sought a meeting with Harry’s grandmother, but were told she would not be available until the end of January 2020. The announcement, the authors claim, came on 8 January because the couple got wind that a story was due to break in the UK press.
Meghan was upset people said the decision was hers
“The courtiers blame Meghan, and some family do,” the authors wrote. She, on the other hand, felt she had sacrificed a lot for the royals. “As Meghan tearfully told a friend in March: ‘I gave up my entire life for this family. I was willing to do whatever it takes. But here we are. It’s very sad.’”
The Sussexes have distanced themselves from the book, with a spokesman saying they were not interviewed and did not contribute to it. The book was described as being “based on the authors’ own experiences as members of the royal press corps and their own independent reporting”.
Meanwhile, militia members have now been to almost every protest on the Wasatch Front. They come to protests throughout the state with anywhere between 30 to 1,000 members in full uniform (sometimes homemade, sometimes military-grade), some in bulletproof vests, and openly carrying ARs. They silently stand in the background and observe, always on guard believing they may be called upon to act quickly if something goes wrong.
A protest in Taylorsville was cancelled because too many protesters felt the risk was not worth being there. Robertson took this as a win.
Jason Stevens, of Utah’s American Civil Liberties Union, stressed the importance of the historical context in what happened in the civil rights movement of the 1960s when armed groups, militias, local chapters of the Ku Klux
Klan, white citizens councils, organizations both official and unofficial took it upon themselves to defend what they saw as their rights and property with violent and systemic intimidation and threats to African Americans and others in those areas.
“I am not saying that is what is happening here. But with context, if you are a protester and you see groups like this showing up at your protest, that’s got to be in the back of your mind, this history of intimidation and threats.”
Outside of Utah, these threats are present and real for protesters. In Omak, Washington, small civilian militias are forming to threaten protesters. In New Mexico, there is another civilian militia group that call themselves the New Mexico Civil Guard reacting to rioting and looting.
In Portland, the threats to free speech and the right to protest are coming from the federal government, which has deployed unidentified agents to quell protests by forcibly grabbing protesters and taking them away in unidentified vehicles.
BLM-adjacent groups held a “Stop Kidnapping Protesters” event in Salt Lake City on 22 July, in reference to what took place in Portland. Robertson and his team came in full garb and made a live video. Robertson said: “That’s the name of the protest – ‘Stop kidnapping protesters’. My boy over here translated it as ‘stop arresting criminals’. The awesome thing is these people that are out creating chaos and committing crimes, they are being watched. Law enforcement finally started to go around and pick them up and arrest them. I am all for it.”
Additionally, lines between the second and first amendment are complicated, especially as open-carry laws in Utah make it legal for groups of heavily armed individuals to gather in places where the first amendment is being honored, such as protests.
“If the right to bear arms is overriding the right to free speech, that may be cause for concern,” said Dr RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. “Our constitutional doctrine hasn’t yet had the chance to really tussle with the question of what the presence of guns does to a free speech event. Short of more overt threats of violence, we usually protect protesters with guns in the same ways we protect protesters without them. But if the express goal of the armed individuals is to intimidate people who might otherwise share their views, that’s especially troubling.”
In response to Utah Citizens’ Alarm, Utah protesters are now arming themselves. John Sullivan of Insurgence USA held his first armed protest on 22 July at the Utah state capitol, carrying an AR-15 and a magazine of ammo. He is encouraging Insurgence USA protesters to purchase guns so they can protect themselves if there is violence.
“Basically, nobody in our group owns a gun except for me; nobody was planning on ever shooting anyone. So the fact that I bought a bulletproof vest and more magazines and our people are buying guns should say a lot. It shouldn’t be that way.”
Petit, who also organizes alongside BLM and Insurgence USA, has recruited ex-military to train and arm her protesters, because she feels the threat is real as long as Utah Citizens’ Alarm is showing up.
“The only way forward is to make sure we are prepared, because at this point the options the only options available to us are when things go crazy we lie down and die, or we fight back.
“And I’m sorry, I’m not lying down for anybody.”