Tristimania (2 page)

By November 27th my diary has a double wavy line and ‘Mercury Double Awry'. By the 29th, my note says ‘Mercury Triple Awry' and so it was to stay until January 5th. Months after I'd recovered, I read, with a sense of forceful recognition, the brilliant writer and psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison describing the three phases of mania, where stage one is low level, moving to stage two, and then to the third: full-on mania. This is something which may be caught in time – if the professional response is swift.

It wasn't. The psychiatrist's appointment failed to materialize. Instead, the mental health team took a week to respond to the request marked ‘urgent' (underlined twice; I saw my doctor's letter), and when they did contact me they offered me an appointment with a psychiatric social worker.
I don't fucking well need a fucking social
worker,
I managed not to say. I was ill. They were patronizing. I was furious.

They said they worked as a team. I hated the word ‘team' like I hate the word ‘family' when it is pronounced, smugly, two syllables,
fam
ly.

Each day was worse than the last.

And then I went mad.

I like the word ‘mad', though I prefer its predecessor,
wōd,
of which more later. But ‘mad' has its strengths. I like its bluntness; its forthrightness; its very shortness, which brooks no argument. It doesn't bother with sophistication or nuance. It doesn't seek out spectrums of subtlety or gradations of seriousness. Head cleaved open, madstruck.

The root of the word ‘mad', from Proto-Germanic, means ‘changed (for the worse), abnormal'. Quite. I was changed for the worse. ‘I wasn't myself', we say, in that canny phrase.

If there is one part of this episode for which I feel responsible, it was the way I had been seriously overworking and ignoring the warning signs. I'd been pressuring myself to meet difficult deadlines and the stress made my mind gasp in protest. Specifically, I was forcing myself to the gruelling, meticulous, tedious necessity of finishing the index, bibliography and endnotes for
Kith.
It was a carefully researched book, and I couldn't let it out of my hands till all the references and studies were checked. The argument it was presenting (including learning from indigenous cultures) might be unpopular with people who were right-wing or not very bright, but I thought that at least no one would be able to say that each point was not proven, study after study quoted, reference after reference given.

It was the worst kind of work to do when you're ill. Any work
would have been too much, but this particular job required conscientious care and neat, whispered referencing, when all the while the howling was in me.

My mind wanted freedom, time and openness; it wanted poetry, wondering-room, sleep, ease and unclocked hours. Instead, it was on a treadmill, no minute spare. The speed with which I was moving was necessary to complete what I'd promised to do before the book went to the printers, and yet that speed itself was contributing to my sense of urgency: the quicker I could finish everything, the sooner I'd have some time off, but the faster I went, the faster this impending crisis was coming, for it was feeding on my speed. I was trying to escape it, even as I was provoking it.

Bricked in, immured, fastened to facts, I felt breathless, panicked and claustrophobic. I was almost fantasizing about the moment when the last detail would be done, when the final footnote had its laces tied, when the last syllable of jot and tittle was bibbed and tuckered, each scruple's weight recorded.

I kept promising myself I'd take a break, a real break, as soon as it was done. But I was too late. The pressure I'd put on myself took its toll. Perhaps if I had followed my own needs and taken a few weeks off, I might have avoided this breakdown.

Instead, every incoming email made me want to scream. If anything was required of me, I felt my bowstring stretched tighter and tighter, bent out of shape, each day tauter. The worse the pressure was, the worse would be the result; I could feel it. When the bow was released, arrow after arrow after arrow would shoot out over my coming days and weeks, injuring and wounding.

I usually work at home but that became impossible. I usually work a full day, but that was suddenly beyond me. For a few days, I forced myself to spend about two hours a day in a shared office-space near
me where all the other desks were taken by friends because I thought it would be easier to cope with the screaming in my head. I was using all my willpower to hold the threads, rags and ribbons of my mind together.

I finished what I needed to do, n'er but just. I had to send a couple of emails to turn down offers of work and commissions, the sort of messages one can normally write without a second thought, but the task became a cliff face of impossible reach; it took me hours to gear myself up to do it. My fingers were trembling with the effort to write these excuses, by which I could be excused from my own life.

For one awful moment, I felt the pure panic of an imminent emergency. And then I stopped. My mind staggered, jolted and was sundered. The screen of my mind froze. Time ceased to pass. One intense present moment. Nothing moved. Nothing could move. I could feel no motion in my psyche and all the usual easy fluency of thoughts streaming into each other, confluent and waterful, was slung into reverse. It was the silent onset of sheer dread. It was like the terrible sucking back of the oceans just before a tsunami crashes to the shore; the frightening in-breath before the storm-surge roars inland. The sky was going to fall through the sea, the clouds would smash on impact like glass, and the great pale sheet of a dead white sky, motionless, frozen and broken, would lie noiseless at the bottom of the ocean.

But the ocean was in the wrong place. So was the sky. And the shore. Nothing was speaking as it should. The horses were stampeding to higher ground. The gulls fled in fear; all the birds were in silent flight. The water was milling, a mob-anger moving it. The wave was crossing the oceans towards me. Later, I knew, would come the disaster, the broken houses and crushed cars, the lamp-posts bent in two. Now was only now, stark and brutal.

I was staring at the computer screen, and I think I said, ‘Fuck!' a couple of times, in a whimper of fear. One of my friends turned to me.

– Are you okay? she asked seriously, nervously almost.

– I've. Got. To. Go. Home.

I pulled these words out of memory, as if I were speaking a foreign language unused for years, each word needing utter concentration. And I fled home, like a terrified animal seeking the safest place it knows. I tried desperately not to meet anyone's eyes, wishing I could be invisible, finding the two hundred yards an almost unconquerable distance. I felt my terror must be visible on my face, as if my mind had stepped outside my skull, white and frozen.

My mind! I've broken it!
was all I could think. It was blank: deadly blank. After the fire, after the flood, after the bomb, after the tsunami. As I got to my front door, I tried to use logic:
This cannot be happening because it has never happened before.
Useless. My exclamation turned to pleading:
This must not happen.
The last clear thing I remember is being on all fours in my study, my hands hammering the floor, saying aloud to myself over and over again:
I am losing my mind. I am losing my mind. I am losing my mind.

For the next twelve hours I was in a kind of delirium. I was giggling one moment then crying; soaring then crashing. My moods were swinging within minutes, flinging me from the thrilling high-wire paradise of exuberance to the wrenching agony of a pain so gripping I could hardly breathe. It was a Wednesday, my maddest Wednesday,
mercredi
in French, the day of Mercury indeed.

I was hallucinating, and I could see spirals rising, each one spinning upwards faster and faster the more I watched it, like the tiny flecks you can see with your eyes shut which fall faster if you follow them with your gaze.

Some medical conditions can be called ‘florid' and it is a particularly apt term for mania, the sick psyche's self-flowering,
les fleurs du
very very mal. I could see unreal blooms – the idea of flowering without the actual flowers, wandering bloomings, the very blossom of the mind – a rose arose, blossomed and bloomed and was blown. Then my hallucinations turned to blood and silence. I lost my words. I could think only in images. In the small hours of the night, I sat by my woodstove and got the giggles because I found the woodstove so comical a companion. One of my cats crept near me, and I cried in pity for its languageless state. Even as I was myself.

‘Tristimania' is an old term for manic depression, precisely capturing that sense of grief and hilarity, of violent sadness and mad highs. I tried to go to bed, but my pillows made me laugh. Eventually, I fell asleep, but I woke within the hour to find my pillow soaked with tears, as I had been crying in my sleep. Tristimania in an hour.

Set free of all ties to Earth, sense and gravity, I achieved escape velocity. I woke, if that's the word, to a weird waking dream, a flight of fire towards whatever burns, burning on the inside, in an incandescence of the mind and mad – out – out – to somewhere so beyond Earth it felt like I was circling with the moons of Jupiter, for circles appeal to the cycling mind. Jupiter is jovial, Jove, bringer of jollity, and that thought made me gleeful, particularly because its moon is Puck, the Trickster of the skies, a fellow mad and manic moon who, when I began to fall, slipped away laughing.

There are galaxies within the human mind, and madness wants to risk everything for the daring flight, reckless and beautiful and crazed. Everyone knows Icarus fell. But I love him for the fact that he dared to fly. Mania unfurls the invitation to fly too high, too near the sun, which will melt the wax of the mind, and the fall will be terrible.

Then I saw my wings. They were of a piece with this mad reverie: they were like a field of stars in a midnight sky. It seemed obvious that I had wings, because we all do: wings of mind. The previous time I'd had an episode of hypomania, I had spent a lot of time with one particular friend. I always knew he was an angel, but I had suddenly seen his wings and they were white, plump, pillowy, deep with downy feathers, as pure and healing as sleep.

How real did I think they were, these wings? True, but not actual. Not literally, palpably present, but still a profound truth of the mind.

It is wise to be amphibious, to swim between the world of metaphor and of reality, but, increasingly, I was reality's orphan and the inhabited world was dead for me because I was alive only to dream, poetry, messengers and metaphors. Metaphor was a prism surrounding me: real light entered and irreal rainbows resulted. Poetry and reality had swapped densities: poetry mattered more, and had more intense mattering, than the unsure real.

In all those mad hours, I could only ‘see' one sane thing. In my hallucinations, I could see one little, thin silver thread – of lucidity – twirling like a lifeline from the moons of Jupiter through the terrifying spaces between the stars and down to the Earth, exactly to my doctor's surgery. As my psyche careered unsecured, veering and circling and boundless, this was the only time in twelve hours that I had access to words in my mind, to just one verbal thought: ‘I seem to have forgotten my parachute. I must ask Dr Leslie if he has one.'

Overall, if one feeling overrode all the others, it was terror. I am not often fearful, and I've also tried to do things even when they do scare me. Some years earlier, I had gone alone to West Papua, to
write about the ongoing genocide there. Writers and journalists are forbidden entry, and the invading Indonesians have shot people for reporting on the situation. I was decently frightened but I also felt distressed and angry about the way Indonesia seemed able to bully the world into silence. I had bought a plane ticket, put ‘tourist' in the box marked ‘reason for visit' and gone. It was frightening, for sure, but not as frightening as going mad.

Schumann wrote to his wife, Clara, of the night between 17th and 18th October 1833: ‘I was seized with the worst fear a man can have, the worst punishment Heaven can inflict – the fear of losing one's reason . . . Terror drove me from place to place. My breath failed me as I pictured my brain paralysed. Ah, Clara, no one knows the suffering, the sickness, the despair, except those so crushed.'

The horses of reason were being attacked by the tigers of madness, terror and shock the results. I was frightened partly because I did not know who could protect me if I couldn't protect myself, but, of itself, going mad is terrifying. To be more precise, it is intermittently terrifying and the fear hits you in the moments of lucidity when you glimpse yourself in the wayward mirror and see yourself in a shaft of real light.

‘Lucid': an anagram of ‘ludic'. In the free play of my ludic mind, the lucid moments were seriously sobering. The ludic times were an exuberant delight, mind on helium, ballooning skywards, bouncing in rubber clouds of unknowingness. I collected the moments of lucidity in which I realized I was going mad. Carefully, I wrote them down, ludicity recollected in lucidity. I clung to these fragments of self-knowing.

At about noon the following day, I had one such moment of lucidity. I tried to phone the doctors but my voice was cracking open and I was scared I would scream. Perhaps the intensity of a mad person's
speech is partly due to the effort it takes not to scream, or roar or groan or let out the unworded wound-noises of an animal in pain. The surgery is – luckily – close to my house, so I walked in. In the waiting room, I could feel the normalcy of others circulating like a common cold, and the sheer ordinariness was calming. I had been rehearsing my lines:

– Please can I make an appointment with Dr Leslie?

I was forcing myself to keep my voice level, and trying not to forget how to say this. It's incredible to me, looking back, quite how hard that was. Just nine words. A path over a precipice, with gulfs of screaming chaos on either side. Nine words to get me across.