Guest Blog - Eternity in an Hour

Another profoundly moving piece from one of my favorite writers of all time, Elizabeth:

One of my favorite people in the world lives in poverty. She rents a tiny house down the street from me, and barely gets by with her social security. The house she lives in is set back from all the others, and was probably originally an out-building behind a main house that burnt down. She’s older and suffers from bad lungs, but she’s raising a four-year-old granddaughter who has more energy and will than I’ve ever seen in one human being. Watching this child on a playground, it’s as if she’s in technicolor and all the other kids are in black and white. As if she’s in fast-forward in a world of slow-motion. She is the issue of one of the children my friend adopted in her younger years, a girl who was severely damaged by her junky-prostitute biological mother, and who is presently, sadly, following a similar path.

This friend of mine is a natural nurturer and masterful gardener. She takes in strays, human and animal. She knows each squirrel and rabbit that frequents her yard, and worries about the fate of the birds as she revels in their beauty. She teaches me a lot. Like for instance, if you get a bee-sting, just smear some mud on it and the pain will disappear immediately. But more importantly, she teaches me to take to heart that old adage, “better to give than to receive.” She walks around with one breast, the other removed for cancer, and half a set of false teeth, the bottom teeth having broken. Medicare won’t replace them for another year. She wouldn’t survive without her oxygen tank and inhaler. Yet she is one of the most radiant people I’ve ever met.

I’m trying to recover from a depression that was so low and long that I can’t even begin to describe it. This friend helps me by just letting me watch her live. The other day, some kids brought her a newborn kitten that was somehow left abandoned by its mother and howling under their porch. It’s about the size of a mouse, it’s eyes still sealed. It has problems feeding from the bottle she got at the pet store, thrashing and yowling as it tries to latch onto the unyielding nipple. It could easily die if my friend wouldn’t persist, but of course she does, and that tiny kitten eventually grasps and drinks and drinks.

This tiny thing feels more essential to me than anything at the moment. It is just born and is being delivered from death by kindness and persistence. Yesterday I held it in my hand, petting it with my finger to simulate a cat-mother’s licking. It writhed and stretched and turned in my palm, and finally let out a long purr. And I thought, wow, this kitten is actually bringing me back to life, healing me. It can teach me so much, something like . . .

Something like this, a gift from William Blake called “Auguries of Innocence.” I’ll give you some of the more pertinent stanzas, although it’s so profound you might want to look it up and read the whole thing.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
. . . . .
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;
. . . . .
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

Guest Blog - A Day in the Life of a Bipolar Warrior

Another must-read from Elizabeth:

Three years ago I left a Ph.D program, and since then I’ve been working as an adjunct English instructor at local colleges. This turn in my life occurred for the same reason that most of my major upheavals have: I’m bipolar. I’d gone back to graduate school after a wild, Prozac-induced manic scotched the career I’d been working for a decade or so, ended my marriage, and threw me into a desperate three-and-a-half year custody battle to keep half-custody of my daughter. I persevered, but the experience involved me screaming at the walls many a late night and lots of pleading to a largely indifferent, uninformed justice system and a God Who was apparently busy elsewhere. My therapist couldn’t work with me because her notes were subpoenaed. My psychiatrist committed suicide. Friends abandoned me. Yet I endured somehow, and it was time to start over. I’d always wanted to be an English professor, and was accepted at a local Ph.D program toward that end.

For three semesters, things were going peachily, but then I had another major manic, then a year of severe depression, then another manic, then more severe depression, until I was sitting at my computer for five hours at a time every day in an attempt to write, and coming up with one ill-conceived sentence or two. My mind was so muddy and seeped in fear and guilt and suicidal ideations that I could barely hold a conversation, let alone write a dissertation. I found out that my dissertation adviser was cracking such hilarious jokes as “Elizabeth will be turning in her work. If she takes her meds.” What a punchline!

(Of course, most so-called normal people are led to assume that the psychiatric community has our disorders under control. For some of us, this is really true; for some, somewhat true. Not true at all for me and millions like me.)

After leaving the Ph.D program, I would have gone on disability if I could have, but as I’d been spending the previous ten years studying, working freelance so I could be there for my daughter, teaching part-time, and babysitting, that wasn’t a possibility. No disability for me. No health insurance. Life sucked. I despised myself for falling short and felt sorry for myself for the same reason. The world seemed like a nightmare, and I was terrified. Terrified by the people around me that thought my pain was a really amusing joke or a reason to villify me, or worse, dispense with me. But way more terrified that my mind kept generating horrific scenes of suicide, replaying the disastrous follies of my manics, berating me for the things I could not get myself to do. Terrified of my mind turning what used to be pleasant things—birdsong, tree branches swaying in the breeze—into demonstrations of shrieking, nefarious movements, nightmare.

I had to push that all aside as best I could. I had no choice but to keep going, keep working, and all I can say at this point is thank God. My work as an English instructor has saved me.

My work requires me to get up every morning and do the work. People are depending on me to teach them something worthwhile and to respond to their writing with sensitivity and good advice. I have to do what I can to make these students better writers and readers, and to do that I have to convince them that doing so will improve their chances and their lives. We have essays and short stories to discuss, which deal with the difficulties, complications, and joys of human experience. I have to motivate them to do exactly what I am having so much trouble doing in my own life: reading well, thinking carefully, and writing clearly.

I have a responsibility to these people. Some of them seem totally disaffected, just sitting there in a daze. Some have come from incredibly hard lives and dysfunctional schools. Some are trying to scratch their ways into a second career. It’s my job to try to encourage them to persevere, to spark their interest, to focus their attention. I need to get them to feel comfortable enough to ask questions and interested enough to want to join our discussions and do the work with integrity and hard work.

Something strange happens to me when I enter a classroom. I turn into someone else, or that person I am underneath the depression. For some reason, when I am with my students, my depression disappears, even if I’d been panicking on my drive to get to them, unable to recall what I’d planned to say and do. I manage to focus and come alive once I hit the classroom. If I’m still at a loss, I ask my students what they think and what they don’t understand. I listen carefully and try to respond the best way I know. I find myself having some answers. I find myself cracking jokes. The dire thoughts clear, and my mind regains some of its bounce and focus. Suddenly, I’m O.K.

I don’t know why that is, exactly. The showmanship of teaching can be quite heady, and my students don’t know that I’m coming to them from a life of confusion and despair. They do know, though, that I’m listening as much as talking, and that can mean the world to them. My students’ appreciation that I’m really trying to get concepts through is gratifying. When a young woman coming from a history of twenty ghetto foster homes says, “Wow, I had no idea people thought about things like this!”, I feel I’ve given her something. She certainly deserves it—it’s mind-boggling to me that she’s managed to even get to college, and it puts my life in perspective. Turning a classroom of people into a community is exciting. It’s an ego boost, to be sure. It’s fun. It’s communal. It’s everything I can’t manage without them.

Sometimes one of my students will disappear for a while and come back with a disability form. Bipolar. Depression. Panic attacks. I out myself to these people. I try to convince them to try, at least to continue the course and complete the work through an incomplete. I tell them about my first breakdown, when I was about their age. I say, “We aliens, we have to stick together.” And I hope that makes them feel less alone and better able to deal with it alll.

I’m not saying it’s been easy. For most of these past three years, I’ve gotten up at four or five in the morning so I’ll be over the worst of it—my daily intense three-hour anxiety-attack-mixed-in-with-panic-and-suicidal-ideations—by the time I hit the classroom. Adjunct college instructors (along with pre-school and substitute teachers) are the most poorly paid out there, with no job security and no benefits. But I can scrape together enough to keep a roof over my daughter’s and my own head. Resale shops are fun, and that’s where I get my clothes and even my art and various oddments. I don’t find them demeaning. I find them entertaining and surprising and useful. Whole grains and beans and seasonal vegetables are the best food for me, and they’re cheap. So far my 1999 model Beetle (dubbed “The Evil Clown Car”) is holding up, and when it fails, there’s always the bus.

John writes about tools for dealing with mentally illness that go way beyond the meds: sleeping well (if you can), eating well, talk therapy, support groups, exercise, meditation. My best tools are to force myself to communicate and to do things I believe in, and communicating and doing don’t come easy when I’m depressed. I’m lucky—I have a job where I actually get paid to do both, and a reality where I need to do that job.

Jobs that entail helping other people are out there. They are quite often underpaid, but they pay off handsomely in ways other than money. I don’t think I could have survived these last years if my work had been gauged by the amount of profit I made. I think office politics would have killed me, literally. But I also think that if I’d been able to get disability, that would have killed me also. I don’t think I’ve had it in me these last years to make a meaningful life without other people needing me to do so. Whatever the dynamics that make my job work for me, whether it’s more or less ego boost or more or less altruism (I could, after all, do a crappy, dispirited job and still look O.K. on paper), I do know that my attempts to help other people have been at least part of my saving grace.

Even if you cannot hold down a regular job, or if you need to keep a job that doesn’t exactly make you feel like you’re improving the lot of humanity, seek out ways to be of good use. Volunteer officially, or just listen carefully to other people’s problems and offer understanding and a hug. Help out when you can. If, say, your job is to ring up sales at a gas station, smile and be kind to everybody. Many of your customers will smille and be kind to you in turn. It’s infectious. If you practice empathy toward others, even in the littlest ways, you’ll find yourself stepping out of your own pain. You’ll find yourself feeling connected instead of alienated. All our great spiritual leaders have taught the essential truth that taking good care of others is the essential way to happiness. If you suffer from mental illness, doing for others might just save your life.

Guest Blog - The God Negotiations: Act I

This masterpiece from Elizabeth:

John McManamy wrote in his book that he has a feeling that he chose his fate before he was knit in the womb, so to speak. That he has a feeling that he was offered options and actually chose to be bipolar in a pre-womb, metaphysical state. This is an idea I’ve had about myself for many years. I told John that we with mental illness should create our own religion. I guess, though, he’s too busy providing people knowledge that could save their lives. Go figure.

So I’ve been thinking about this choosing-your-life idea for some time, and came up with my latest version of me picking my own bipolar life. Let it rip. Here’s the opening scenario:

Act I

Situation: It seems necessary that I have to be born into another planet-earth life once again, and God and I are discussing options. He takes out a file from his rather disorganized cabinet.

He pulls out a form from the file. He says, here’s one you might want to consider. It requires you to have many disorders that are pronounced incurable. Let’s see. Sexual abuse in your teens. Something termed chronic fatigue in your twenties. Then it says fibromyalgia in your thirties. Then a diagnosis of bipolar as you reach 40. Hmmm. Says it should have been diagnosed earlier on that one. Darn, I need a better editor. Need to get rid of that word “should.”

Doesn’t sound so bad, I say. That looks like a breeze. Remember that past life when I lived in a small agrarian New England town that ran a lottery that required us to stone to death one innocent person a year to make the crops grow better? Didn’t work. And those people I had to live with were so boring! Plus all those kids I gave birth to and loved who died in their infancy. Seven dead out of nine!

Look, He says, don’t get snarky. Just be quiet and let me continue. You people who think they can remember past lives are getting on my nerves. You all say you were Cleopatra or Atilla the Hun or some such. Wrong! As for you, you were not in a short story. Believe me, I’ve wiped your memory clean in an ECT contraption. You are getting too imaginative again, so watch it. Here, do this crossword puzzle till you calm down.

Then He leaves me in a cubicle for eight hours with nothing but this crossword puzzle, a pen that doesn’t work, a computer with many, many viruses, a razor blade, a raven feather, and a woman in the next cubicle who keeps blathering about the bras she’s about to order from Victoria’s Secret. I tell you, it seemed like an eternity.

When He comes back, He looks at the blank puzzle and says, what have you been doing all this time?

The pen you gave me was out of ink, I simper. And what’s a six letter word for stupid? Plus, You’re the Expert, so I must ask you. Should I show more or less cleavage?

He ignores this most urgent question, and dismisses my excuses for not completing His assignment. Don’t you know by now that blood is an excellent ink?, He asks. Are you totally out of it?

So let’s get on with it, He says, pulling at his snowy white beard and trying to be kinder. Try to focus. Keep on-point. He says to me. O.K. More on this potential life. Here’s the objective of the life I’m proposing for you. You spend most of your life trying to heal yourself. On this form it says that lots of people termed “assholes” get in your way. Gosh, I really need better editors. Told them many times not to use that word. They just don’t listen.

I say, O.K. God, or gosh if you’d rather be called that, what do you have in mind? All I have to do is cure myself of a few ailments and then I get a mansion in heaven? I hear there are many mansions, some with pool tables in the basement. Any still available? Do they include mineral baths and servants way wiser than I am but whom I can keep in near-poverty and at my service, attendant to my every emotional tizzy, like in the classic Hollywood movies?

He answers, the real estate market here in Heaven is a bit farked up at the present moment. However, I do have an opening for a basement efficiency in a district of Indian computer service providers.

O.K., I say, getting excited. That sounds fine, as long as I get fed decently.

Well, He says, pulling at his long snowy beard and showing deep wrinkles around his eyes—He should really see a plastic surgeon about that—let me review the form. Says here that you can get a junior bacon cheesburger, plus a small fry and a small drink consisting of caffeine, refined sugar, and many artificial ingredients for under $5. Is there anything else that can complete your order?

O.K., I say. Do you mind if I sleep on this decision? I’m feeling a bit woozy.

No problem, He replies. Being that it’s January in Cleveland and a bit chilly, just go downtown. There are some really nice grates on the sidewalks that blow hot air up from hell that you can sleep on. Pretty cozy. Lots of people who talk to me sleep there.

More to come ...

Guest Blog - Cellphones and Unintended Circumstances

Another gem from Elizabeth:

The word keeps coming out that cellphones are dangerous to use while driving, even if you are wearing that Bluetooth thing on your ear that make you look like a cyborg. People ask, why should that be any different than talking to someone in your car?

I suggest that electronic communication system devices make you not really there even though you’re there.

Ever been on an elevator with someone having an intense conversation on the cellphone? I have, many times, and the frequency is increasing. Shoulder to shoulder with people on an evelator and there’s someone with us hissing loudly on her cellphone that “you did too sleep with that bitch.” Or some guy yelling “don’t even tell me you care about me.” These people seem totally clueless to the fact that they are in a very small space among many strangers who are hearing their most personal business. This is really changing elevator etiquette.

I can’t help noticing how much technology is altering how we communicate, and how much—or rather little—we notice or care about the people in our immediate environment as a consequence.

I teach at a couple of college campuses. Campuses were once places where you met new people, and your education extended far beyond the classroom to talking about the material you’ve been exposed to with students you’ve met in those classrooms. Cellphones are really changing all that.

Why extend yourself to new people in your immediate environment when you can just call up the people you’re already comfortable with on your always-available cellphone?

I always smile and nod a hello to anybody who passes by me. But more and more, people just don’t seem to be present: they’re on their cellphones.

When the cellphone phenomenon first started to bloom, I’d think the person talking next me was talking to me. When that person failed to respond, I’d think, maybe this person needs a new med. But no. This person is on her cellphone. I really don’t exist for her.

A whole new layer of alienation, brought to us by a device that greatly extends our ability to connect.

Talk about your unintended consequences!

Guest Blog - Empathy or Rage: Your Choice

It is my pleasure to introduce Elizabeth as a contributor to "Knowledge is Necessity." This is the first in what promises to be a lot more. So, without further ado:

I’ve been thinking about the value of empathy a lot lately. We with mental illness hope that our loved ones will understand our lot. We know all too well that our symptoms show most glaringly through our words and actions, as much as we try to keep this from happening. We do our best, and wish for understanding and forgiveness when we do or say something stupid. But perhaps while we hope for that, we could meanwhile concentrate on developing our own empathy. This just might make the world better—for ourselves and those around us.

Every once in a while I read something that makes a big click in my brain. This happened when I first read James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” many years ago, and it happens every time I read it, or indeed any of Baldwin’s work. He was one of the great American thinkers concerning race relations, or any relations, writing in the 20th century, and in this essay he talks about his first voyage out into the world beyond Harlem. He was young, with a job in New Jersey that gave him his first real taste of a racist world. It was 1943.

The main problem for Baldwin (pictured here) was that he couldn’t get served in any restaurants around him. “We don’t serve blacks,” was the constant response, yet he kept on going into these restaurants because he was a pugnacious, indignant young man, and rather than bending to the insane racist rules around him, he answered to an overwhelming need to stand up to it.

He was the one black man around him that stood up. As a result, gangs of children took to following him as he walked down the street, taunting him. He was reaching an insanity brought on by outrage.

One evening he and a white friend decided to step into a restaurant for dinner. The usual thing happened: the waitress said, with apology in her face, that “we don’t serve blacks.” It was the last straw: Baldwin really lost it, and threw a half-empty water pitcher at her, thankfully missing. He managed to run—fast!—while his friend stayed at the restaurant long enough to misdirect the police.

Later that night in his room, in shock, Baldwin reflected on the incident:

I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.

What I think Baldwin means by “real life” is the life of the soul. We who have experienced searing mental pain have found ourselves on the edge of such epiphanies all too often, if only in our own little worlds. Mental illness compels us to experience moments when the clash of the insanity we feel within and see without comes to a head.

Is there any value to searing mental pain? Baldwin used his little restaurant breakdown to examine his heart, to examine the hatred within and without, and became one of the most remarkable people on the planet. He could well have lived his life in rage, and we would have lost a great voice. Coming from a white, racist world, I would not have been able to understand the racial strife around me, or root out the racist assumptions I grew up with. He has helped me to see a little more clearly.

In speaking of the racist white people all around him, he called them “innocent,” a choice of word that totally jarred me. Doesn’t he mean “ignorant”? But no, he chose that word carefully. A word akin to blameless, “free of guilt due to lack of knowledge of evil,” according to my handy-dandy on-line dictionary. Ignorant, on the other hand, just means lack of knowledge or education. Evil was what Baldwin was grappling with, both within and without.

We can’t cure race hatred through mere information any more than we can cure the damage of severe mental pain through mere information. What’s common to life-induced breakdowns like Baldwin’s and mental breakdowns brought on largely, or partially, by mental illness, is an insane clash, which we can respond to in one way or another. We can become angry and hateful and bitter and afraid, or use the experience to evolve ourselves as human beings. There needs to be a turning of the heart. All too often, these turnings are life-threatening experiences, not necessarily concerning the life of the body but the life of the soul.

When faced with the pain of injustice or a neurological crash, we can choose the automatic response of frustration and try to smash it all, or step back and decide to choose the path of empathy and try to refine our own damaged souls.

And when we mentally ill try to figure out how to deal with our own breakdowns, maybe it would be worthwhile to do what Baldwin did: consider it a gateway into more understanding of yourself, and more empathy for others.