by Terri Cheney
As I fingered them in the motion so familiar to me from counting the rosary, I repeated my new vows silently to myself:
1. I will not try to be the best.
2. I will not compete.
3. I will not join in.
4. I will never again listen to the Black Beast.
The plane started to lift, and the g-force pressed me back against the seat. I looked out the window and watched the congestion of Los Angeles gradually disappear. As we banked over the ocean, all I could see, as far as forever, was the pure, serene blue of sea and sky. It was starting, the next chapter, the one I’d been waiting for all of my life. Everything would be different from here on in. Everything.
Inside me, the Black Beast smiled.
Epilogue
As anyone who has read Manic already knows, the Black Beast didn’t stay behind in Ontario. He came with me to Vassar, then to UCLA Law School, and on into the wilds of my professional career as an entertainment litigator. But at Vassar, there was a qualitative difference to my life. While I broke almost every one of my vows the very first week I was there, I remained steadfastly faithful to one: I didn’t join in. The years of me belonging to every organization, running every club, aspiring to every top clique, were over—never to return again.
In place of a normal social life, I discovered men. Whatever had been wrong with me at Chaffey High—out of place, undesirable, too much of or too little—was magically fixed the instant I stepped foot on the East Coast (where, to my shock and delight, pale skin and flaming hair were considered a fascinating, not flawed, combination). I was asked out by the very first boy I met on campus, then another, and another. Tamped down for so long, the Black Beast’s sexuality exploded into being, quickly followed by the exquisite imbalance of love. I was out of my head, off my rocker, delirious: all very familiar places to me, and not so uncommon at Vassar. A carefully honed eccentricity was the norm there, and as I suspected, I fit right in.
But much as I adored my college in theory, I noticed a troubling change in my moods. I didn’t think it was possible, but the lows got even lower, the highs even higher. Part of the problem was New York City, a mere two hours away by train. Whatever mood I found myself in, the city trebled it. If I was blue, the city was indigo; I saw evidence of despair and desolation everywhere I looked. But if I was exuberant, the city was one big, glorious skyscraper. I gorged on art, I feasted, I feted, until even the Black Beast’s enormous appetites were satisfied. It was impossible to live a nonchalant life surrounded by such a maelstrom.
Although I was reluctant to leave the East Coast, my parents divorced when I was at Vassar, and I felt it best to be closer to my mother, who was having a difficult time. I quickly learned that altruism is no guarantee of happiness. UCLA Law School was the biggest mistake I ever made. The Black Beast took one whiff of the place and plunged into a depression so severe and prolonged that I don’t know how I survived it. For the very first time in my life, I embraced mediocrity, showing up at classes only to take the exams. My grades were abysmal, my attitude worse, and my life was a series of such extreme ups and downs, I felt perpetually seasick.
The nausea continued when I entered the law. The Black Beast loathed the professional straitjacket he was forced to wear, even though it was invisible and lined with gold and silver. I didn’t care whether I lived or died, and so I lived with such recklessness that I shocked even myself.
You can’t get better until you hit bottom, or so the wise men say. But my life was like a magician’s cabinet, full of many false bottoms: several unsuccessful suicide attempts, followed by several ineffective hospitalizations. Yet I don’t think I hit my personal nadir until my father died when I was thirty-seven. By then I had finally been diagnosed—first with major depression; then at last, properly, with bipolar disorder. But my father’s long and brutal struggle with lung cancer made a mockery out of my own inveterate skirmish with moods. I remember looking at him in his hospital bed: withered, gray, emaciated; tubes sticking out of every orifice; his lovely silver hair all but gone from the chemo. “Top that,” I said to the Black Beast, and he slunk away in shame.
But oh, did he come roaring back after my father died. As I chronicled in Manic, I sincerely tried to end my life on a trip to Santa Fe by taking of all of Daddy’s leftover pain meds, plus my own stockpile of pills, plus as much tequila as my body could hold down. It was a valiant effort, to no avail. I lived to face yet another hospitalization, this time back at UCLA.
When you’re depressed, the well-worn path can offer little hope. What I couldn’t see from my dark vantage point was that I was finally on the road to home: at UCLA, on the cusp of the new century, I picked up my pen and began to write my story.
I won’t say that writing tamed the Black Beast. It soothed him, though, enough so that he agreed simply to occupy a corner of my mind. But I won’t soft-pedal it: recovery is hard, and for the first few years, there were more lapses than progress. It took a synchronicity of resources to finally get me on track: the right diagnosis, the right medications, the right psychopharmacologist, the right therapist, two weekly writing groups, several mental health support groups, years of AA meetings, and long-term, vigilant sobriety. Gradually, I redirected my focus and skills toward causes much closer to my own heart: writing and mental health advocacy.
My manic episodes became fewer and more manageable, the consequences less dire. My depressions were not so malleable, though. They continued to haunt me, sometimes arriving strictly out of the blue, sometimes in response to stress. But each time was shorter and less severe, until a familiar four-day pattern emerged. While suicide still felt like a viable option, it wasn’t a constant preoccupation.
By 2008, when Manic was published, I felt like I had found my rhythm at last. I was still bipolar, still clinically ill, still renting out space in my head to a beast. But I was doing what I loved best in life, and I felt more valuable as an author and advocate than I had ever felt as a lawyer. It mattered to me that I was alive.
In fact, with the unexpected success of my book, I felt so good at times that I even wondered, was I still bipolar? In my community work, I saw so many people who were much worse off than I was—deep in their disease in a way I no longer seemed to be. I knew that this often happens to manicdepressives: the brain forgets the ravages of the illness the way a woman forgets the pains of childbirth. You have to, to survive. But it’s always a dangerous place to be, because you inevitably start to question the need for medication, therapy, and all the other rigorous stopgaps of sanity so carefully put into place to prevent another episode.
It troubled me so much that I asked my psychopharmacologist, “Tell me the truth. Am I really bipolar?” He smiled his subtle smile and said, “Yes, Terri, you’re bipolar.” I trusted his answer, and yet . . . It had been months since I’d felt a flicker from the Black Beast. All the emails regarding my book kept telling me what a brave, courageous, and evolved soul I was. The reviews made me sound like the poster child for bipolar recovery, all my struggles described in the past tense. I started, God help me, to believe my own publicity.
And then I went back home again.
It was Thanksgiving Day 2009. My mother and I had just had a lovely lunch at a nearby cafe. In her mideighties, she’s still remarkably attractive, but frail; my escapades have worn her to a bit of a frazzle. With my father’s death, the jealousy and animosity that once raged so fiercely between us has passed. We are both a little too old and too tired to muster up the energy to fight. And so we talk on the phone at least once a day and do our lovely lunches every now and then.
I’d gone home not just to visit her but to find out if there were any old photographs lying around that I might include in this book. We were never a picture-taking family, and so I doubted I’d find much. “Try that bureau,” my mother said, pointing to an antique hutch in the living room. I hadn’t opened it in years—one still does not open my mother’s drawers without her express permission. Even then, one opens th
em at one’s peril: avalanches of odds and ends come pouring out and never fit back in. She hoards the past as if it’s gold, and she is God’s appointed miser.
I tugged at a cupboard, and sure enough, a flood of miscellany spilled out all over the floor: bits of string and bags of rubber bands and bunches of dead flowers, a loving cup, old vinyl records, empty boxes, broken bagatelles. But mostly there were papers. Pages and pages and pages of papers—yellowing, faded, creased but preserved in dozens of files and envelopes marked “Important! Do Not Throw Away!!”
Curious, I opened a few. No photographs—nothing in my life is ever so simple as a static image. But I immediately recognized what I saw: my own words, from as far back as I could remember, in loopy crayon and later in pen, and later still in my father’s neat typewriting. Hundreds of pages. I must have written every single day of my life. I must have written like a fiend. I must have howled like a beast.
There it was, sprawled all around me: poetry from my earliest days, all about death and dying and suicide, with titles like “Calamity” and “A Grave of Water” and “The End” and “Judgment Day.” Poems so bleak and full of despair I couldn’t read them without aching for the child who knew such things at ten; who felt such things at twelve. The manic poems were in there too, drunk on sounds and associations and dripping with wordplay. It was all there, all of it: evidence that even my rigid lawyer’s brain had to admit as proof. I wasn’t making a whit of it up. The Black Beast lived, and still lives, inside me.
My mother came in and asked me why I looked so upset. I handed her a poem: “The Gloom Everlasting.” “Oh yes,” she said, scanning it quickly and putting it down. “You always wrote beautiful poetry. Your father wanted so much to get it published.” Then she went back into the kitchen to make me some chamomile tea.
As I continued to sort through the pages, my sorrow slowly disappeared, replaced by a mounting anxiety. It suddenly no longer felt safe to be there. I bundled up the poetry and told my mother I had to leave—I had an early appointment the next morning, or some other little white lie to hide the fact that the Black Beast was starting to scream inside me, the same old familiar seven words: “I have to get out of here.”
I’m not sure how I made it home, an hour’s drive away. I remember clutching the steering wheel so tightly that my fingers looked frostbitten. I didn’t turn on the radio; I drove in silence, with the window down, even though it was a bitter night. I drove so fast that I almost outran the rhymes and rhythms that were chasing me. Almost.
When I reached my little bungalow in Benedict Canyon, a light shone through the window. It was all I wanted: to be safe inside, out of the cold and the dark. But my key wouldn’t fit in the patio gate. (It was the wrong key, but I neither noticed nor cared.) Without a moment’s thought, I kicked in the gate, splintering the rotten wood around the lock.
The minute that I stepped inside, it hit me: a shock wave of anger. I’d spent my entire childhood and adolescence worrying that there was something wrong with me. But what, in God’s name, was wrong with them? All of them, starting with my beloved father and including all the adults who’d ever read and applauded my writing: my mother, the nuns, Father Tim, Professor Tremaine, all my teachers and mentors, that stadium full of people who had stood and cheered my bizarre graduation speech. All those relentless, fucking A-pluses, despite my prolonged absences from school and odd behavior. Had no one ever seen me?
I couldn’t stop shivering. What would have happened if one of them, just one adult, had recognized and acted on the obvious: that however articulate, however poised, however accomplished, this child wasn’t normal. My mother had come the closest, perhaps, but even she had never taken that last essential step and insisted I get help. Maybe that was why I was always the angriest with her—or maybe it was simply because she was so near to finding out and therefore presented the biggest threat.
The truth was, none of them had ever dared to look the Black Beast in the eye.
Still shaking, I peeled off my clothes, slipped into my thickest robe, and huddled in front of the heater. As the warmth slowly penetrated my body, the anger began to dissipate. It was succeeded by a deep regret, a big black lump of Christmas coal. In doing my research for this book, I’ve read over and over again about the importance of early intervention. Studies have repeatedly shown that it can really make a difference in early-onset bipolar disorder, significantly arresting the progress of the disease and reducing the number and severity of episodes.
I wanted—what? Revenge? Retribution? No. I wanted my childhood back.
Tears welled up, and I welcomed them. Over the course of these many years, I’ve learned an important lesson: melancholia has its value. Sadness is not depression. Tears can heal, or so I hoped as I wiped them off my cheeks, my chin. I was still able to think clearly, logically, as I picked the pieces out of the puzzle and tried to rearrange them into some semblance of order.
It wasn’t my parents’ fault—it was nobody’s fault—that I was born with a chemical imbalance in my brain. It was a different time, a different world, when I was growing up. Commercials about bipolar disorder and depression didn’t run nonstop on mainstream TV; there were no full-page ads in popular magazines; no best-selling memoirs. There was only shame—and silence.
And here was the trickiest piece of all: I, who knew the most and was closest to the secret, did my overachieving best to preserve and protect that silence. I didn’t blame, I merely observed—I wasn’t always held hostage. There were good days too, when I might have slipped into my father’s lap and told him what was going on. He loved me, it’s possible he might have understood. But I was too afraid back then. And now I’ll never know.
It was a heartbreaking moment and yet, oddly enough, exhilarating too. I realized for perhaps the very first time that I was no longer that strangled child. I was no longer trapped in a cage of fear. Manic had liberated me, and now I had a voice that had reached across oceans. I grabbed my pen blindly through the tears and scribbled three words on a Post-it note: “Believe your child.”
I was back to the beginning, to that very first impulse that had made me want—no, need—to write this book. To all the parents I wrote it for, to all the parents who are wondering, worrying, lost in the dark: please, don’t let the silence triumph. Listen and learn and read and discover and most of all, believe your child. Name the Black Beast with impunity if he dares to show his face. If there’s one thing I can claim to know, it’s this: naming a beast is always the first step toward taming him.
Resources
A note regarding terminology: as recently as the mid-1990s, bipolar disorder was thought to be extremely rare in children, verging on nonexistent. The situation has been changing rapidly—and along with it, the language used to describe the illness. In order to properly research this subject, it helps to know that the illness is currently known by several different names: pediatric bipolar disorder, early-onset bipolar disorder, juvenile bipolar disorder, childhood and adolescent bipolar disorder.
In addition, a new diagnostic category—temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria (TDD)—has been proposed for the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-V, the psychiatric bible relied upon by doctors and insurance companies. This alternative diagnosis, the source of considerable debate, is intended to apply to children who have explosive anger outbursts in response to commonplace events. In between the outbursts, the child experiences a persistent negative mood—a chronic irritability, as opposed to the elevated or euphoric symptoms often found in classic bipolar mania.
The following books proved invaluable to my own research and are very accessible to laypersons. They also provide extensive compilations of resources:
• The Bipolar Child: The Definitive and Reassuring Guide to Childhood’s Most Misunderstood Disorder (3rd ed.) by Demitri Papolos, MD, and Janice Papolos (New York: Broadway Books), 2006.
• Is Your Child Bipolar? The Definitive Resource on How
to Identify, Treat, and Thrive with a Bipolar Child by Mary Ann McDonald, APRN, BC, and Janet Wozniak, MD, with Judy Fort Brenneman (New York: Bantam Dell), 2008.
• The Bipolar Teen: What You Can Do to Help Your Child and Your Family by David J. Miklowitz, PhD, and Elizabeth L. George, PhD (New York: Guilford Press), 2008.
• If Your Child Is Bipolar: The Parent-to-Parent Guide to Living with and Loving a Bipolar Child by Cindy Singer and Sheryl Gurrentz (Glendale, Calif.: Perspective Publishing), 2003.
• The Ups and Downs of Raising a Bipolar Child: A Survival Guide for Parents by Judith Lederman and Candida Fink, MD (New York: Fireside), 2003.
I can also recommend the following organizations and their websites:
• The Bipolar Child (www.BipolarChild.com)—website maintained by the authors of The Bipolar Child; includes a newsletter and a model IEP (Individual Education Plan) for students struggling with bipolar disorder
• Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (www.bpkids.org)—a parent-led organization for families with bipolar children
• International Bipolar Foundation (www.internationalbipolarfoundation.org)—publishes an excellent newsletter with cutting-edge research and information
• Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation (www.jbrf.org)—a charitable organization focusing on research; website includes a Childhood Bipolar Questionnaire, information about clinical studies, and professional Listservs
• National Alliance on Mental Health (www.nami.org)—a particularly good resource for families and friends of loved ones with all types of mental illness; conducts local support groups and training sessions