What’s bipolar ever done for me?

For the past few days a blogpost by asher at my beautiful machine, a response from dyane at Birth of a New Brain and a followup by asher have got me thinking.

Why am I so positive about my bipolar?

It wasn’t always this way. When I was a teenager, before I had a name for it, my bipolar completely trashed the life course I and others had mapped out for me. As well as denying me what had seemed my destiny in higher education it left me isolated during what should have been the most intensely social phase of my life and introduced me to the suicidality that was to be such a regular and seductive caller over following decades.

But after leaving university I found a career and lifestyle that fitted with my sudden bursts of energy and creativity interspersed with periods in which I struggled to just feed and clean myself. I had a high income, a fulfilling social life and had learned how to use illegal drugs to sustain them both. For a while.

After the inevitable disaster I decided that my IT income (I no longer had my drug dealing income) would be better directed into travel than up my arm. The mysterious experiences my bipolar had contributed to gave me a destination.

India. If there was anywhere I could learn about what I’d found in the depths of my mind it was there.

The next fifteen years consisted of a series of brief IT contracts in Sydney interleaved with year long backpacking trips around Asia. I spent about half of that time in India, exploring, studying, experiencing and getting completely blown away by it all. Taking my bipolar on the road had its difficulties, sure. But I didn’t nearly kill myself too often and it was bipolar that showed me the road in the first place.

By the end of the 1990s the IT workplace had changed. Not only were ‘eccentricities’ like mine becoming less tolerated, creativity counted for little when the job became supporting some bullshit from head office instead of finding solutions to abstract technical problems. We all knew the Y2K bug was nonsense. But it kept a lot of people who’d  crawled out of the wreckage of the dot-com crash in work. So thousands of hours and millions of dollars went into combing legacy systems for problems we knew didn’t exist (Hey, we rolled the system clocks forward to December 31, 1999 and checked, right?). By then I was jack of the industry and it was jack of me.

My bipolar had long been a spur to my social conscience. Not only did its psychoses and depressions give me compassion for others who were tossed by the winds of existence but the times it had dumped me in the gutter or beneath the fists and boots of police had taught me how wretchedly unfair and unjust my society is. So as I withdrew from the computer industry I moved into social activism.

The group that attracted the bulk of my efforts was made up mostly of ex-prisoners, mentally ill people and a smattering of radical students, so my oddities and inconsistent work pattern were barely commented on. My science education and writing talent finally paid off, carving me a niche within Sydney activism, politics and academia that was to give me a high public profile and international recognition, albeit not much money. I designed my own Masters degree in a field that would be called ‘forensic science jurimetrics’ and gained the enthusiastic support of some influential academics. I was soon trying to balance study, paralegal research, media appearances, advocacy work for prisoners, writing papers, press releases, essays and articles, lobbying politicians, addressing conferences, lecturing students, appearing before parliamentary committees, speaking at demonstrations and more with the curses and blessings of my bipolar.

Then everyone died.

First it was a close friend, then my four year old nephew, then another friend, then my grandfather, a close colleague, a prisoner I was working with, my father, an aunt, a lifelong friend, another aunt, a fellow activist I had relied heavily on – all within about sixteen months. I faltered, staggered and stumbled on for about ten of those months. Then I fell. And shattered.

The next nine and a half years were the worst of my life. The hypomania, mania and psychoses all deserted me, leaving nothing but relentless unipolar depression with seemingly constant suicidal ideation. For much of that time the thread I hung onto was my identification with my bipolar, widowed grandmother. No-one else in my family even understands depression, much less the rest of it. I couldn’t abandon her to face both them and the fact that her first grandchild had killed himself, possibly due to something he’d inherited from her.

Those years didn’t go quickly. I lost my income, virtually all of my friends and abandoned my activism and study. My welfare payments couldn’t cover Sydney rents so I moved to Newcastle and cut ties with almost everyone I knew. It wasn’t the first time I’d restarted my life from scratch. But no matter how I tried I couldn’t start anything. I couldn’t get off the mat. The most persistent image of those lost years was that of my bedroom ceiling.

Except they weren’t really lost.

One of the few friends I maintained email contact with (I could rarely bring myself to talk on the phone) had been telling me all along I was undergoing a spiritual crisis. That was no consolation. The mystical worlds that had once opened to me were now firmly shut. I could no longer even meditate. It was obvious the spiritual path that had taken me from the slums of Sydney to ashrams in the Himalayas had been nothing but an extended dead end. Soon I would reach my own dead end and it would all be irrelevant. My grandmother was in her nineties and in failing health. It wouldn’t be long until I could slip a noose over my head and be finally free of myself.

Then a bit over two years ago my psychosis returned with a bang. Or my mysticism. They’re the same thing you see. I had the most spectacular psychotic break of my life. It was lots of breaks really, with brief manic or hypomanic intermissions. It lasted nearly four days. It was love and hatred and joy and anger and fear and triumph and despair and exaltation and dissociation and transcendence and everything, everything, everything …

It was pure bliss.

At the end of it all had changed. The crushing existential despair had lifted and has never been back. I went from completely anhedonic to rejoicing in the moment. Every moment. There’s really only one. I saw that not only my spiritual studies and practices, but everything in my life had led up to that one eternal instant of perfect clarity. I thought I could find what I so desperately wanted to know, but only when I’d finally realised the utter futility of my quest I realised its culmination. My bipolar, along with everything else about me and the universe I inhabit, had brought me the one perfect gift.

Since then my life from the outside has probably been more mundane than ever before. I struggle to get by on a disability pension. My social life is practically non-existent. I’m trying to address the many health problems I’ve accumulated over my chaotic life. I’m slowly rebuilding my ruined capacity to communicate and patching up my tattered relationships with family members. But my inner life has become richer than I could ever have imagined. There have been several more reality smashing experiences but it’s the exquisite perfection of every moment as the universe shines irrefutably through the blinkers of my individuation that has poured magic into everything there is.

It was asher who led me to understand why I love my bipolar so much. You see, like him, I’m lucky. My bipolar (or should I say ‘me bipolar’?) has filled my life with the sort of risk taking behaviour few neurotypicals would ever choose to contemplate. And the risks paid off. I lost my friends, I lost my loved ones, I lost my careers, I lost my reputation, I lost my health, I lost my mind, I damn near lost my life. I lost my self. And found … everything.