When I turned 33, it was as if someone pushed me from a cliff and sent me to hell. That’s the year my highly imaginative mind began producing florid and frightful delusions that placed me smack dab in the middle of a horror film. Think Inception meets Memento meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That was the last year I remember feeling that the world was a safe place. That was the year I lost every good thing I ever had.
This past week marked twenty-one years since that first break from reality. I know now that what happened was inevitable: postpartum hormones, genetics, environmental stressors, and systemic abuse wreaked havoc upon my already active neurotransmitters. There are many details I could include here that would convey how horrific life has been at times since then, but I will spare you the pain. Instead, I will offer cold hard data to illustrate the severity of what I have overcome: two arrests, nine in-patient hospitalizations, four partial hospitalization programs, three intensive outpatient programs, eight therapists, and twenty-one plus medications.
I’ve always been an I’ll do it myself kind of person. Fiercely independent, and not good at taking direction. Which might explain why old school doctors wrote so many “prescriptions” to keep me “quiet” for so many years. They might have thought they were doing the right thing, but I will never not resent them for the lost time. A huge portion of my life was sacrificed to the mental health conglomerate, whose “medicines” did not make the delusions go away but merely dampened the experience of reality. I missed the best years of my children’s lives and ruined my marriage in the struggle to keep my blunted thinking focused and my head above water while providing food and a clean home and clothes for everyone in the house. The years of my divorce and following, between 2005 and 2011, are a literal blur. Unmoored would be the best word to describe how I felt during that time of overmedicated single motherhood.
In 2011, seven years after first being diagnosed as bipolar, I was tossed a life preserver when I connected with a doctor from Johns Hopkins who recognized that, in addition to damaging my kidneys and keeping me in a state of lactation, the drugs robbed me of my ability to feel, think, or be creative. The therapy my new psychiatrist provided me was also effective, because she was warm and empathetic and would discuss medications with me rather than insisting I take whatever she prescribed.
I realize in retrospect that she was one of the very few PsyDs who advanced my mental wellness. The best the rest of them did was keep me in a holding pattern. The true providers for me throughout my struggles have always been those walking the walk with me. The ones I turned to during hospitalizations and in group therapy and support meetings.
I still remember Charles, who prayed with me in the dayroom at NY Presbyterian, when I was so scared I was being followed and filmed by “Hollywood Motherfuckers” that I slept on the bench outside the nurse’s station. Amy, who taught me to merengue in the hall outside her room, as we listened to Alicia Keys through the headphones on her ipod. Helen, who took daily walks with me in the hills outside our residential lodge, sharing with me stories of her ex that she told with the dry wit of Ellen Degeneres. Roseann, the group facilitator, and all the members at DBSA support meetings who saved me from the brink of suicide during the late days of Covid. The incredibly helpful and positive women I recently engaged with at a women’s IOP at Penn Medicine Princeton House. All of the above souls were suffering, but somehow they saved me, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. Would I be here today if they hadn’t been there with me then?
Indeed, the best treatments I ever had were those that were not medical. Two amazing IOPs taught me practices in meditation, art therapy, yoga, and DBT that proved one hundred times more effective than any drug I was ever prescribed. At a residential treatment center in the Smoky Mountains, I received animal-assisted therapy and went on group nature hikes while residing in a peaceful room with beautiful views of the mountains. While there, I found a keyboard in the recreation room and started playing piano again, which I hadn’t been able to do since I was fifteen.
My boldest “treatment measures” by far did not involve clinicians or doctors or insurance at all. In 2015, after a year of chronic hospitalizations and after being discharged from the residential facility in Tennessee, I decided to continue my animal-assisted therapy by taking a job as a stable hand at an equestrian center just outside Asheville, NC. I spent the summer there, mucking the stalls and feeding and watering the horses. The work, meditative and active and wholesome, helped me find my physical strength and courage to reenter a reality that had tossed me aside. At the end of 2023, after enduring a difficult time at a reporting job in upstate NY, I found peace and deepened my spirituality at an ashram in Buckingham, VA, where IÂ spent my days meditating, doing yoga, studying spiritual texts, and contributing to ashram life by working on the farm and in the kitchen. That winter, I went to India, where, not only did I become a certified yoga teacher but also received ayurvedic treatment. With the help of the ayurvedic practitioner, I was able to be weaned from all but one of my medications and learned how to manage my symptoms with nutrition, rest, exercise, and meditation.
It is still difficult to feel “safe” after all I have been through. My thinking patterns are still far from normal, and I haven’t been able to gain substantial earnings in years. I don’t go out much, and relationships remain a challenge, after experiencing being given up on or deemed “unstable” by most people I know. But at least I have found a life for myself. I have a job as a yoga instructor, and I’m closing on a new home this week. I’m in the process of revising a draft of my fourth novel, and I have an amazing Bernese Mountain Dog who worships the ground I walk on. I go to support meetings when I’m feeling brave or, conversely, when I know I really need the help. I’m hoping that, upon finishing this program, I can find a position in a mental health facility where I might provide peer support and teach yoga. It would be amazing if I could get my novel published.
It’s true that the traumas and brain injuries I have experienced can’t be undone, and I might never get those good things that I lost back, but I know I’ll figure out a way to endure and manage. I remain committed to working the trauma out of my body and creatively channeling the misfiring thoughts of my brain on a daily basis. I know that if I skip my daily “bottom up” therapies or ignore my creative impulses I will find myself slipping, so I always include in my day some kind of workout and some kind of writing, piano playing, drawing, or even whistling while I cook.
I have faith that the path I was put on, rocky and full of steep inclines with occasional downward spirals, is one that I was supposed to travel, if for nothing else than to learn the art of resilience in the face of cruel and stacked odds. Or maybe I’ve been given this life because of karma from a past life, when I was a person whose good fortune rested on a silver platter—somebody that had it really easy, but wasn’t grateful for what I had.
