Tag: musings

Moving fast to slow down

With respect to many fellow bipolar bloggers who are weighed down with depression I am fighting a mixed hypomanic state. This is a more common concern for me and although I have only been fully manic twice in my life, I can run at a heightened level for years. Looking back now I probably was running high over the past few years while I took on increasing responsibilities at work in an increasingly unsupported and dysfunctional environment before landing in full manic mode this past June. I have had access to little psychiatric support since then so between my family doctor and a private psychologist I splurge to see once a month I am trying to stabilize my level of agitation. Hopefully before my disability benefits run out.

At the same time this time has allowed me to unpack a lot of baggage and make some critical reassessments at this point in mid-life. On that level I am making progress. But my brilliant experience volunteering at Wordfest last month, meeting and engaging with so many readers and authors was a high risk experiment with respect to my mood regulation efforts. I barely ate or slept for four days after the event ended.

For all the energy these past weeks have added to my creative efforts, I have trouble concentrating and tend to fall into periods of high energy thought processing without being able to channel the ideas productively. I have been making a point of getting out and spending a few hours writing or reading in coffee shops. Being in public spaces forces me to focus.

However, the word is that winter is truly rolling in tonight with snow and temperatures dropping to the minus double digits celsius. Since I haven’t gotten around to getting my winter tires mounted I am not likely to venture far for a few days. So I decided to spend the last temperate afternoon out, not hunched over a coffee cup but walking off some of my pent up energy.

Typically I walk with my camera and my ipod. It is a slow pace as I find myself regularly stopping to capture scenes or flora. However I hadn’t realized how that actually narrows my experience of some of the locations I regularly visit. When I was working such an activity was a great way to relax and unwind. Since I have been off ill, I have had little enthusiasm for photography and little motivation to visit my favourite natural haunts as if one required the other.

Today when I reached the riverside where I planned to walk I felt momentary regret that I had neither my camera nor my ipod with me. But as I set off on a brisk walk in the late afternoon light of this November day I was surprised to find how freeing and meditative the experience was. The movement helped me slow and focus my thoughts while, freed from the viewfinder of a camera, I was able to take in the fullness of the vista. I watched the changing colours of the slowly fading light reflected in the water and on the glass towers of downtown in the distance. I noted the shifting clouds and birds flying in to roost as the depth of darkness and shadow crept across the fir trees that cover the length of the high embankment across the river.

I returned refreshed, relaxed and calmed.

The path I walked today as it is likely to look in a month or so. Copyright JM Schreiber 2012
The path I walked today as it is likely to look in a month or so.
Copyright JM Schreiber 2012

Reflections on the Day of the Dead

For years a small sugar skull sat on one of the bookcases in our house. Eventually it had yellowed and aged to a point that its value as a keepsake was minimal. One day with a last glance I tossed it out. There were two originally so somewhere in the accumulated detritus of twenty years in this house, another little skull is probably decaying.

Inician la temporada de alfenŽiques2_0The skulls were mementos of a special Members-only preview of an exhibition which passed through our city in November of 2002. ¡Viva Mexico! featured a selection of the glorious huge colourful murals of Diego Rivera, striking photography of Day of the Dead celebrations by Graciela Iturbide and a display of shaft-tomb figures. As a family event, there was also a wide range of hands on creative activities for the kids.

I had been, at the time, a single parent for a year or so, my children would have been coming up on 10 and 13 years of age. It was an era of fundamental change and transition in my own life, but it was also a time when my kids were young enough to really enjoy this type of outing. I had a family pass and the museum was a common weekend destination.

However, until that day I had, somehow been unaware of the importance and spectacle of the Day of the Dead. Hallowe’en was fun of course, and a highly anticipated event for the children in their younger years. But the magic and energy of the the Day of the Dead celebrations captured in the photo gallery left a deep and lasting impression on me.

Many years later it all came back when tackled Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano. I read it with The Guardian Reading Group, a three or four week monthly on-line opportunity to tackle a book with fellow readers. It is a challenging work to fully appreciate and before the month was out I found myself reading the text on an e-reader with the paper copy open beside me on the sofa so I could readily flip back and forth to cross reference and the link open on my computer to a brilliant website, The Malcolm Lowry Project, which provides chapter by chapter guidance and assistance to the humble reader along the way. Simultaneously long conversations were unfolding on-line within the Reading Group.

Now I can no longer divorce the Day of the Dead from the tale of Gregory Firmin, the alcoholic British consul in a small Mexican town, and his slow, tragic unraveling and demise throughout the course of one November day. Impending celebrations lurk in the air, but his desperate mental waltz with the push and pull of liquor, the reasoning and rationalizations he plays with himself held my greatest fascination. I have been lucky that alcohol has never held a serious allure for me, and my tastes tend to be above my discretionary budget anyway. Dedicated alcoholics don’t care and my family history has known its share. Especially on the side through which the mood disorder runs.

By the time I sat down with Under the Volcano, my son had been a heavy drinker for several years, although there is a long time before he finds himself in a state of crawling across the lawn toward the vision of a half empty bottle like the poor consul. I should hope. The struggle is a delicate matter for us to balance. He is almost 25, gifted and anxious to an extreme and over the years he has been on his own, on the street and now for the past few years increasingly isolated at home. Over a month ago he had a break of honest self recognition and quit drinking. But for many and complex reasons, especially some particularly horrific experiences in what passes for an adolescent mental health system, he has a complete aversion to any counselling or support.

Today, on the Day of the Dead, he is working a couple of beers back into his routine and I am trying to maintain the boundaries. Our relationship as father and son is complicated, we are close, share many character traits and insecurities. With a history working in social services I am also acutely aware of the limitation of practical services out there. And the cost of living in this city currently precludes even his younger sister who has a profession from moving out. But I know I cannot own his issues.

So with this November 1, I will honour the Dead with hope and ambition for all of us trying to pull together and move forward with Life.

Myself included.

Want to write? Start with reading.

It has taken me over a week to come down after volunteering with and attending events at our recent word festival. I entered into the week slightly down and was spiraling up within a few days. If it was a test of my ability to return to regular work, this is clear evidence that my mixed state is still far from stable. But I would not have missed it for the world.

It was an absolute thrill to mingle with people who are passionate about books and listen to Canadian and international authors talk about their craft. Whenever an author was asked about his or her influences, a love of the magic of books and literature shone through in their responses. If asked about advice for want-to-be writers, the common answer was read, read, read… read widely and drink deep from the wealth that books have to offer.

The stash of books I bought at the event, not including the titles I purchased or read in advance. Volunteering in the bookstore can be expensive!
The stash of books I bought at the event, not including the titles I purchased or read in advance. Volunteering in the bookstore can be expensive!

And so there was this man I crossed paths with at various venues throughout the festival. He told me he was a writer. Patting the breast pocket of his jacket he indicated that he felt he was getting ready to pull together his work. He had a gold pass so I saw him a number of times but always alone, ordering a coffee or buying a glass of wine at the bar. He would acknowledge me and we would exchange a few words on whatever interview or panel we was waiting for. But I never witnessed him engaged in animated discussion with fellow attendees.

The solitary man at a venue where excited discussions about books were regularly erupting between strangers is an anomaly.

On Saturday afternoon I encountered him in the lobby. He was carrying a copy of Sweetland by Michael Crummey. I got the impression he was done with the festival regardless of the major authors still to come. He said, “I have decided, this is the one that impresses me. Let’s see if he writes as well as he talks.” I responded that I had recently obtained a copy of his previous work Galore, the novel Crummey described as the one he feels he was born to write and that I wanted to read that first. He looked at me with surprise and said, “You mean you have heard of him?”

Suddenly it dawned on me that this man, the self-described writer, does not read at all. I suppose he thought he he would be able to absorb all the final inspiration and direction from this one book. If he did not know one of the best known Canadian contemporary authors and poets, even if he had never actually read one of his books, I could not help but wonder how he imagined himself ready to pull his accumulated scratchings into a final product.

With a full evening and day still ahead, he had selected his role model. I never saw him at the theatre again.

Even if it left me swinging up on my attempt to stablize this recovery from my recent manic episode, I was deeply inspired by the talks I attended, delighted by the company of fellow book lovers and especially grateful to a few authors who took a little extra time to encourage me as writer. I was regularly reminded that it is never too late to start.

And I am never lacking for books. In fact they seem to multiply in my life on their own as any truly avid reader knows.

What fresh yellow is this? (With apologies to Dorothy Parker)

Typically I love autumn – the crisper weather, the bright blue skies, the excuse to pull out sweaters. Normally this is the busiest time of the year as new programs and courses start and activities halted for the summer resume. More than New Year’s, this can be the season for resolutions, goal setting and looking forward.

Copyright JM Schreiber 2014
Copyright JM Schreiber 2014

Unless you are depressed.

Without the structure of work I feel lost. And unlike regular unemployment I am in a holding pattern, uncertain what type of work I may be able to return to when I do recover, if I recover, should I even recognize recovered if I meet it in myself.

I feel tired and agitated. Irritable and unfocused. I try to push myself out every day and have an exciting literary festival to look forward to in just over a week. Yet I am terrified that I have taken on more than I will be able to manage and I find myself fighting off regular amorphous panic attacks.

I feel like a wrung out dish towel. I miss having energy and enthusiasm but I have to guard against a reckless flood of these sensations lest they indicate trouble at the opposite end of the bipolar pendulum arc…

Copyright JM Schreiber 2014
Copyright JM Schreiber 2014

For now I am looking toward the brilliant yellows of the moment. Apparently yellow is the colour of the mind and the intellect, it lifts the spirit, stimulates creativity but can also heighten anxiety and emotional instability.

Sounds like a bipolar hue to me.

When even a sibling’s love is not enough – All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

The title and binding imagery that fuses the latest novel from Canadian author Miriam Toews comes from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to his friend, the poet Charles Lamb. Both men had their own struggles with mental illness but Lamb’s beloved sister Mary had an especially prolonged and devastating battle. Coleridge commiserates with his friend’s tireless care for his sister, reflecting that he, Coleridge had had a dear sister upon whom he “pour’d forth all his puny sorrows”. Elfreida (Elf) the suicidally depressed character at the centre of this novel drew her signature theme from this line , but it is her sister Yolandi (Yoli) who brings her to life and devotes herself to trying to keep her alive as she narrates this funny, heartbreaking tale. As such, All My Puny Sorrows is well named.

all my puny sorrowsColeridge was the first poet who caught my adolescent attention, much to the shock of my high school English teacher. However I confess it was the rugged adventure of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” that sparked my enthusiasm. The Romantic poets, so many of whom seem to have suffered from mental illnesses seemed kindred spirits ( although this would have been long before my own diagnosis). They loved passionately, often tragically, and became addicted to opiates. For the teenager falling well short of cool, the appeal is not hard to imagine.

SamuelTaylorColeridgeFor Elf and her sister growing up in the confines of a small Mennonite town, the arts were an acceptable outlet. Elfreida channels her energy into the piano eventually taking to concert stages around the world and winning the love of a man so patient he’s surely destined for sainthood. Yolandi opts for a less glamorous route, including a couple of failed marriages, children, meaningless affairs and a career pumping out rodeo themed YA novels.

I was attracted to this book when I heard Toews on the radio explaining that this novel began from a deeply personal space. Her father, a respected teacher despite a lifelong battle with depression, took his own life in 1998. Almost 12 years to the day later, her only sister followed suit in the same very way and location. Having already memorialized her father in non-fiction, Toews felt that fiction would free her up to address this very real and difficult subject more openly. But that is also where it falls apart for this reader.

She is able to make some very astute observations about the failings of the mental health system and sadly demonstrates that, in the end, there is no way that anyone or any system can ever do more than delay the efforts of someone truly committed to stepping off this mortal coil. However I never felt that Elf was more than a tragic figure in a hospital bed. Yoli’s childhood memories and the accounts of her sister’s glorious career rang hollow. The real strength of this book for me lies in the the indomitable spirit of the characters who survive against all the odds and resist the despair that mounts around them.

And maybe that is the point. It is not for us – friends, family, observers or readers to judge. In a few weeks I will be able to see Miriam Toews take part in a panel exploring the ability – or limitations – in being able to make sense of the darkness in life through literature. I will be interested to hear what she has to say.

Some ghosts have rougher journeys than others

- Copyright JM Schreiber 2012
– Copyright JM Schreiber 2012

O! WHY was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like the rest of my race?
When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend;
Then I’m silent and passive, and lose every friend.

Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despised,
My person degrade, and my temper chastise;
And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame;
All my talents I bury, and dead is my fame.

I am either too low, or too highly priz’d;
When elate I’m envied; when meek I’m despis’d.
-William Blake, from a letter to his patron Thomas Butts, 1803

I first encountered these words in the months following my first manic breakdown in the late 1990s. With a diagnosis at hand I needed to understand its meaning so I read  the standard popular memoirs of the time. But I found myself drawn into the work of William Blake. Although many readers reject the notion that madness may have fueled his tireless creative energies, his hours conversing with angels and his periods of darkness – I found comfort in his artistic conviction even if he was destined to die without ever receiving the recognition of understanding he deserved.

For every person who successfully rises above the challenges of mental illness and negotiates the pitfalls of drugs and alcohol, there are those who spend their lives living rough. And others who lose the battle altogether. But Blake drew inspiration from his angels and demons with his loving wife by his side until the end.

Today is my birthday, and having found myself back trying to figure out what I am supposed to learn from this second mania and unexpected fall from grace, Blake’s lament has a special resonance once again.

But this time I am reflecting on a very different face than that which I confronted 17 years ago. From the time I was very young I could not make sense of the face with which I was born. The eyes that looked out from within that visage threatened to give me away. The body I struggled to feel at home in never felt like mine. The girls I befriended seemed like aliens and, with no other explanation for my discomfort I assumed that I had never learned the tricks, never tried hard enough.

The idea that gender or identity could be misaligned never occurred to me when I was growing up. At least not in the context I needed to hear. And when It did start to seep into my awareness I was already well into marriage and motherhood. It was a complicated comfort to realize that there was an explanation for my feelings. It was even more terrifying to know what to do with this information.

I know well that my mood disorder runs back through my family, that it has a genetic basis somewhere. I have no idea what course it might have followed without this added sense of being out of step with rest of humanity. But my hospital psychiatrists were certain that my apparent gender dysphoria was simply a psychotic symptom that would resolve itself with the right dose of lithium.

They were wrong of course. Now, 17 years later, the average looking middle aged man who confronts me from the mirror is not special, but he is one I feel at home with. For many years I thought that was enough, as if I had found the magic bullet, the key to moving forward on all fronts. My family have been supportive, I recreated my identity and built a new career.

But I still found that the manic-depressive monster has followed me all along. Making sense of recovery this time around, I find myself doubly invisible. Behind a face that accurately reflects my sense of self identity, is a whole life I cannot fully share. Talking about being bipolar has been the easy part.

But moving forward from this birthday, I want to find a way to be whole.

Inhale deeply : Reflections on Breath by Tim Winton

Take a deep breath and hold it as long as you can… I imagine there are few children who have not engaged in some variation of that form of super hero training. I am aware that some push it to an extreme, driving for the physiological high induced by oxygen deprivation, but in my day it was an exercise in imagining oneself capable of surviving one of the daring challenges we set up for ourselves. Where I grew up that generally involved challenging one another to crawl through one of the long corrugated metal culverts under the rural road ways. I never heard of any unfortunate incidents resulting from such an activity but my overactive childhood imagination manufactured many. Either way, being able to hold one’s breath for at least 60 seconds seemed to be skill worth developing.

At this end of life I no longer maintain this practice, but despite the fact that tests have assured me that I actually have very good lung capacity, panic and anxiety attacks can leave me struggling to fell like I am getting enough air. Breath deep, stay calm, focus on your breath.

1414720The arrival at the scene of an apparent suicide is the impetus for paramedic Bruce Pike, the narrator of Tim Winton’s novel Breath, to return on the pivotal events of a summer many years earlier and the struggle to relieve himself of the baggage he believed he carried on well into adulthood. What follows is a gripping coming of age tale featuring the young Pike (or Pikelet), a slightly bookish, awkward outsider, growing up in an unremarkable mill town on the edge of western Australia. His encounter and ensuing friendship with Ivan Loon (Loonie), the restless and reckless son of the local publican, leads him away from the safe an predictable confines of life with his reserved parents and into the aura of a former champion surfer who becomes their surfing coach, hero and guru.

Under Sando’s fickle attention the boys are introduced to the thrills of confronting nature in one of her most dangerous and unpredictable forums. Even if you have never fancied that you have an interest in surfing, Winton’s spare, confident writing pulls you right into the swell, creating vivid and heart stopping scenes that leave you gasping for air. Under the equally reckless attention of the aging surfer’s bitter and damaged young wife, our narrator is left with emotional scars that are even slower to heal than any physical beating inflicted by the surf.

This is my first encounter with the work of Tim Winton, chosen at the fine recommendation of whisperinggums as a suitable (i.e. shorter) introduction to his work in advance of his visit to Wordfest next month. It will definitely not be my last. I reveled in the exotic setting, a sharp contrast to my own landlocked prairie childhood, yet I fully related to the awe with which Pikelet and Loonie held their flawed hippie heroes. As a teenager in the 1970s myself I can remember clearly how the hippie movement of the 60s still held this magical allure that had not yet faded. On an even more personal level I was moved by the sadness and regret that drives the narrative on into the complications of adulthood. Pike’s adjustment is not easy. He has a breakdown, makes a mess of his life and has to find his own way to pull it together.

This wonderful book is more than a classic Bildungsroman. Youth and adolescence are never the full picture. When has anyone truly come of age? And by what measure of ordinariness are the true heroes assessed? Ask someone trying to live well with a mental illness.

Haunted by the unanswerable

Under the bipolar microscope, The who am I? question becomes Which me is me?

The depressed world weary me? The hyper productive hypomanic me? The over the edge manic me? Or that nebulous normal, somewhat sponged and effectively medicated me?

Or possibly all or none of the above.

I don’t remember exactly when I first started to swing between up and down, enthusiastic and anxious, outgoing and withdrawn. I suspect I didn’t really begin to articulate the patterns until my early 20s but I am sure the tendencies were there much earlier.

I was an awkward kid, lonely and odd. My brothers had friends in a our rural area but there was no one my age. I was frightfully shy and unpopular at school. I lived for books and music.

And it was music that offered a hint of another world gleaned through the Sunday edition of the New York Times that arrived each week, belated and a little worse for wear. Although I existed in a place where 70s rock bands dominated the radio and occasionally passed through, New York City was home to The Ramones, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and so much more.

For someone so miserably out of step with others, confused by questions of identity and smart when smart was not something to be, New York seemed like mecca. It was, after all, the city my mother came from and where my parents met even if we had ended up in another country some 2000 miles to the west. I was not the only isolated kid hunting out obscure copies of Velvet Underground albums back in the late 1970s, but in my hometown at the time I sure felt like it.

My mother tried hard to provide me with extracurricular activities upon the advice of a guidance counsellor who had picked up on my round-peg-square-hole. I started with drama lessons and moved on to guitar lessons. Not a natural musician like my son, I needed all the lessons I could get. My teacher was patient, guiding me along from “Jingle Bells”, through a year or two of classical, but his heart was with blues. Not a good move. I was too self conscious to jam and too bored to play twelve bar blues runs ad infinitum. So one day he asked me to bring an album and play for him something I really wanted to learn.

I arrived the next week with The Velvet Underground and Nico under my arm and played my favourite tune, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. My teacher’s face fell.

That’s just discordant, he told me. I can’t do anything with that.

It was my last lesson.

The timelessness of that album and its influence on decades of musicians has amazed me. Both of my children even fell in love with it in their own time. And in honour of Lou Reed’s death an ensemble of Canadian artists from rock starts to opera singers and our own musical astronaut performed a tribute concert.

This most amazing cover of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” takes me back to a space before my mental health started its slow unraveling and reweaving of my self identity to bring me here. When I listen to this I feel like I am beginning to come full circle. Much older, much wiser but still figuring out who I am.

Enjoy.

The unbearable invisibility of being mentally ill

For years I worked with brain injury. Depending upon the cause, damage to the brain can mark the survivor with more or less obvious physical impairments. But frequently the greatest impact leaves no obvious trace on the outside. The injury takes its most significant toll on memory, behaviour and fatigue.

Not unlike mental illness.

Copyright JM Schreiber 2014
Copyright JM Schreiber 2014

For many who have never had direct experience of mental illness the tendency is to imagine the extreme – psychotic, eccentric, suicidal behaviour. But the reality is so much more complicated, so much more subtle and, on the outside it is often so apparently normal. Especially for those of us who live with anxiety and mood disorders.

We look like other people. We have lives, families, jobs when we are well enough. But sometimes those things are tenuous. And yet there is this inability to step away from the condition and observe it, no CAT scans or MRIs to chart the progress of the illness or mark remission.

Copyright JM Schreiber 2014
Copyright JM Schreiber 2014

Recovery is a slippery concept. It depends so much on how we feel.

And the deeper we look the harder it is to know exactly how we feel.

Aiming to see the bright side

For someone who recognizes the swings of bipolar disorder reaching back into late adolescence or early adulthood, I have had precious little acquaintance with depression. Unfortunately I remember it best as a stepping stone on the way to hypomania and, at worst, the door into a hallway leading up to eventual mania.

Now, on the heels of a drawn out period of manic and mixed state agitation I am settled into a pit of anxious depression. Bone weary I find it hard to sleep. With long days to fill I find it hard to focus. Plans and decisions loom on the horizon but I find it hard to concentrate. I make an effort to go out somewhere everyday but before long I feel nauseated and eager to get home.  And now my psychiatrist is unavailable so my faithful doctor has set about looking for someone else to help me assess the effectiveness of the medication I have relied on for so many years, just in case it is time for a change.

And the thought of a medication change is about as comforting as the thought of having the carpet pulled out from under me without warning.

Copyright JM Schreiber 2014 No sign of last week's storm
Copyright JM Schreiber 2014
No sign of last week’s storm

Today I made my own small effort to take back some control. It was a glorious warm September day, with only the piles of branches that litter the streets, sidewalks and parks giving testament to last week’s unexpected snowstorm. I made my way downtown to the offices of Wordfest, our annual literary festival, to see if they might still have a need for any volunteers.

One advantage of my current inability to work is that for the first time in years I am free to take part in this major festival. Typically it coincided with the busiest time of year at my former job, so volunteering or attending events was impossible. Now I am committed to helping out with two events on the 14th of October. I was cautious to warn them that my energy reserves are uncharacteristically  low at the moment but it is my sincere hope that in a month there will be a little more juice flowing. I can’t quite picture it getting worse.

In the meantime I have a plenty of reading to occupy my time in advance of the special visiting author events I hope to attend over the course of the festival. The support of my doctor and therapist is vital, I know, but Wordfest gives me a tangible goal to look forward to – an essential light at the end of the tunnel when everything else seems so uncertain.