I was sitting on my usual armchair facing my therapist, holding a large canvas against my lap.
“Should I show it to you now or after the session?”
“It’s up to you.”
“I’ll show you now, then.”
I turned the canvas around. He gasped.
“Oh, that’s gorgeous!”
I held it up between us so we could both admire it. A large pale yellow moon illuminated a swirling ocean of deep blue spirals. In the distance, the lights of a tiny house on the edge of the sea could be seen. I was proud of this painting. I had been thinking about painting it for him for so long that it was wonderful to finally give it to him and have him enjoy it.
“I wanted to thank you for all your help these last six years. I wrote something on the back.”
I handed him the canvas, and he turned it around.
To Matthew, October 11th, 2023
Thank you for helping me tame the waves and tides of my mind.
Li
—
I wrote my first real poem on the last day of the hospitalization that got me diagnosed with type one bipolar disorder. It was very loose and abstract. I was trying to capture the feeling of the transformation, the incoherent yet divine feeling of becoming ravingly intoxicated on my own faulty dopamine.
you write a saga of hope through the form-filling, the question-answering
you chronicle your story on the white walls
in purple crayon
no washcloth is brave enough to wipe it all down
no time is sufficient for everything on your to-do list; its four dimensions
Deep down in my heart and soul, during that first pivotal manic episode, I felt that I was radiating the energy of the all-powerful moon. But that was just a delusion, quickly melted away by an intense dose of antipsychotics.
I scribbled that poem in a hurry as it was time for me to start packing up my room. Dr. Teshima had announced earlier that day that they were discharging me, and I was so elated that I wrote down the news in my journal in giant, colourful letters. My mom brought me that journal on the day I was interned, when she realized that the staff could read anything I wrote down. Providing me with my nearly full notebook would not have been prudent.
During that stay, I spent my days painting because writing anything elaborate was too taxing for my brain, which was bruised and battered after the shock of a psychotic episode. The damage made words difficult to recall, and I wilted from exhaustion after only twenty minutes of supervised strolling on the hospital grounds. I remembered little of what had just happened to me. All I knew was that I had done something—turned into something—unspeakably horrible and that I had nothing to do all day but paint and sleep, paint and sleep. I had gotten quite lucky regarding the ward they put me in; the children’s section was much smaller and more peaceful than the chaotic adult ward. The “classroom” was filled with books and art supplies, so I painted progressively more coherent subjects as I got more lucid.
Although this new identity as a raving lunatic was certainly a surprise, I was never a very mentally healthy teenager. There’s a reason I’ve been in therapy for much longer than I’ve been manic-depressive. My mid-teens were spent making very precise cuts on my right forearm. I felt like I needed to fight for every inch of acceptance from the world when I realized I was nonbinary. Even as a skinny kid, I would starve myself out of hatred for my body and go weeks without feeling a single thing other than apathy.
I mapped this out a few months ago in psychoeducation. The nurse told me to map out my life as a wavy timeline. Peaks were mania and troughs depression. I drew out waves like a heartbeat or a temperamental ocean. I wondered at the utter randomness of the thing. Who could I blame? What did it all mean? This was the question at the heart of my diagnosis. With no one to point to, I often turned inward.
The dietician I was seeing a few months ago once told me that I don’t owe anyone my health. She believed it was completely up to me to care for myself how I saw fit. I told her I disagreed. I do owe the people I love my health. A few skipped medication doses and a few sleepless nights are all that is necessary for me to open up a black hole that devours everyone around me. When I get manic, I am not me. I become a creature of destruction. At first, it’s not so bad: I’m overly energetic and can’t shut up. But at my worst, I have religious delusions of grandeur about being a god. I will promptly empty my bank account, run into traffic, take drugs—anything goes. The last time it happened, I thought I needed to die to save the world.
In the months following my first mania, I battled the ensuing depression by writing down everything that had happened in an ever-expanding Google doc. Every day, I would sit in my pyjamas at my computer and type out my memories of the experience of psychiatric institutionalization. I remembered more of what had happened as time went on. The resulting sixteen-thousand-word mishmash was my first attempt at creative nonfiction. I’ve tried coming back to it a few times to try and make it more polished, but I always find myself unable to get back into the freshly traumatized headspace necessary to keep working on it. It’s like trying to read a depressing book when I’m in a good mood.
I have been fully stable for over a year now. As I’m writing this, it’s been a year, three months, two weeks, and two days since the last time I was in the hospital. I added a reverse countdown to my productivity app around the time of the one-year anniversary. Perhaps it’s unwise to keep track so precisely; I know that resetting the countdown will be soul-crushing if I ever get sick again. But these days, I let myself celebrate my well-being in whatever way I feel.
One of the ways I do this is by trying to absorb helpful media. Sometimes, it takes the form of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Other times, it involves reading insanely long Harry Potter fanfics (I’m talking at least three hundred thousand words). I recently got entirely absorbed into one about a werewolf. I found the descriptions of his transformations and their aftermaths deeply relatable. The lack of control, the inability to feel hopeful about the future, the agony of each full moon, the feeling like a creature, not a human—all of this resonated with me. But mainly, I related to the waking up. Feeling weak, drained, and foggy, and not having the slightest clue what I did in the last days. Needing to be nursed back to health, only for the whole cycle to happen again. Yeah, sometimes I feel like a moon-drunk monster. I guess the worst part for me is that I don’t even have the moon to blame for it. There is no regularity to my disorder. I can be a perfectly healthy young person for months on end, and then something stressful happens, and I’m back to being an invalid for the next six months.
My body has kept score. In the three years that I’ve been bipolar, I have gained over a hundred pounds. I have shed entire closets of clothes as they slowly stopped fitting me. At first, I was convinced that it was the meds, which have more of a weight-gain side effect the younger you are when they put you on them, but now I’m not so sure. My diagnosis coincided with a lot of other changes in my life. It took a lot of therapy to make me realize that there is no reason to blame myself if it’s all guesswork anyway. I look in the mirror and have a visual reminder that things will never be the same again. But I try to think of myself in terms of softness. I am easy to hold and easy to love. I deserve the stability I now have; I’ve earned it.
It took even more chiropractic appointments to undo the years of stress built up in my back, neck, and jaw. I used to be almost unable to concentrate on conversations with people because of how much the knot in my shoulder blade hurt. Now, I can handle all the hours of sitting with little to no pain. That’s another mark of my progress over the last year. The ocean has quieted, the tides are manageable, and the moon is having mercy.
Li Conde is a third-year social work student with a minor in English. Their work often explores themes of mental illness and healing. It has been published in Sumac, Bywords, and flo. and won second place in the George Johnston Poetry Prize.
