Madness (22 page)

‘Your theory, or that she didn't understand it?'

‘Both.'

‘The theory is weird,' says Zoë. ‘I don't understand it either.'

‘Sure?'

Zoë slides an arm around my shoulders. ‘Sorry dude.'

‘Damn. Fuck. Blast.'

‘Have you been buying stuff?' she asks, gesturing at the pile of new books on the windowsill.

I have to stop and think. ‘Possibly.'

‘A lot?'

There's an unopened bank statement on the kitchen bench. I open it. Damn.

‘It's okay. Do you want to give me your credit card?'

I throw my head back and hit the back of the couch. Groan.

‘What are you going to do?' Naava asks.

‘I'll go see Jenny next week.'

‘Tomorrow,' says Naava. ‘I'll come with you.'

‘Card please,' says Zoë, holding out her hand gently.

My mum rings later. We talk about their new native garden and about the lamentable state of politics and about the latest shows on TV. I resist the desire to ramble on without pausing and am careful to sound as normal as can be. We're about to hang up and I think I've done pretty well. Then my mum says, ‘Are you sure you're okay?'

I say, ‘Why?'

‘I think you're high. I can hear it in your voice. I've been feeling uneasy all week about you without knowing why.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I'm not asking you to be sorry. I just need to know if you're okay or not.'

I explain about going to see Jenny with Naava.

She sighs. ‘We worry so much when you don't tell us what's going on.'

‘I keep hoping I'll be back to normal before you have to find out.'

‘And then we get a call out of the blue from the hospital.'

Ah. This is clear and present truth.

‘You're right,' I say. ‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It's because it's a disease of thinking. I think I'm doing the right thing. But I'm not.'

Adequate sleep is essential for moderating mood. Insomnia is known to precipitate and worsen hypomania. Jenny and I decide to increase the seroquel by 100 mg at night and add a very low dose in the day to settle the racing thoughts and agitation. It's true that small dose increases early on (at night if possible to reduce side effects) can circumvent the later need for large dose increases. We talk about reframing odd thoughts and not catastrophising, or automatically assuming things will get worse.

‘Let's catch up in a few days,' Jenny says. ‘In the meantime, you know what to do.'

So here I am, a mentally ill patient participating in the management of my own illness. Given clear and honest information about treatments, I think most of us do want to have an active voice in decision-making (when we're able).

On the weekends I go walking in the Brisbane Ranges National Park for physical exercise, wilderness, trees, air, the vast expansion of sky and perspective. I take medication as directed. To manage the fleeting auditory hallucinations and the sudden erratic ideas, I reply (in thought) with ‘Does that make sense?' or ‘Is this the most likely explanation?' or ‘That's ridiculous,' or ‘Oh, piss off.'

At work I observe others' body language. If they're frowning or looking confused or bored, I try to rein in the train of thought and shut-up. If someone I trust says, ‘You're not making sense,' they're almost certainly right – I'm not making sense.

It takes a couple of weeks. It's hard walking along the precipice. Sometimes I waver. Then the sustained absence of symptoms brings relief, like the absence of physical pain after a period of suffering. The bank balance is battered, but otherwise I'm okay.

Martin's waiting room is dusky pink and somehow its physical presence and its pinkness are a visceral reminder of being unwell. I sit uneasily here and hold tight to my pile of books.

Martin comes out of his office as he always does – stiffly.

‘Hi Sarah,' he says.

I look to see if anyone else is in the room and then stand up.

‘Kate,' I say, tapping my sternum.

‘Oh,' he says.

We wade through the standard set of psychiatric questions to be found in any standard medical textbook. Neither of us is particularly interested in either the questions or the answers. The feel in the room is flat as concrete. After eight minutes he ushers me out and I pay the bill and walk down the stairs and take a tram to the beach. Solace is right here – sitting on a pier in the sun, listening to water suckling rocks near the shore.

Then I walk back towards the city and pass a hair salon. There is nothing special about this particular salon, except that I'm passing it in a brave mood. For years I've cut my hair with the kitchen scissors. I go inside to see what might happen.

The salon apprentice is about seventeen. Skinny. Tight-jeanned. His lips are pink with just the hint of gloss-shine. He asks me to lean right back in the chair in front of a basin and he scoops up my hair from the base of my skull and turns on the water. Little electric currents run across my head, down my arms and spine. He rubs shampoo through my hair. It smells like orange blossom. The electric currents find the tips of my toes. Now I can't feel my legs. I'm floating. His fingers are like warm water, like molasses, like . . . oh, the touch of another human being. I want to run away and I want to give in to it. He slows down and presses in, gently, and I give in to it.

‘There's a continuum,' Winsome says the following week, ‘for all of us in our adult lives, from emptiness to meaning. And meaning . . . meaning comes from family, relationships, spirituality, work . . . you know this stuff, it's not quantum mechanics.'

‘Yes,' I say. ‘We all want to be loved. We all want to feel connected. It doesn't have to be to someone – it could be to something.' I shuffle in the chair. ‘That's where I think mental illness really sucks. It makes it harder to feel loved and it can make it much harder to give love.'

‘There's another continuum: from chaos to control, in your living circumstances and relationships, finances and health. When you first came to see me–'

‘Chaos,' I say.

‘Yes. And now?'

‘I know what I need to do to stay well . . . as well as I can.'

‘And?'

‘I think . . . if I'm able to control this illness instead of it controlling me, then rather than lurching from one crisis to the next . . . I'm free to manage the present better. You know, to be able to plan stuff, even simple stuff like having friends over for dinner – that's a big thing. For so many years I couldn't do that because there was no guarantee of a sound mind from one week to the next.'

‘What else?'

‘Now there's the possibility of a future.'

‘Indeed. Just keep going,' Winsome says.

So I do. I do, I will. This isn't my second chance, this is my sixteenth chance. How many people are lucky enough to get a sixteenth chance?

So.

So what is the essence? What matters . . . what really, really matters . . . is it giving love? Is it procreation? Is it knowledge, is it finding truth? The struggle to overcome, relief from pain? Is it stillness? The scraps of nirvana? Perhaps it's connection. Visceral connection and part of the journey together and touching souls. We.

My last day on earth may be cloudy. Or the sun may blaze. At the moment of my last breath someone will be born. Someone will discover the poetry of W.H. Auden. Someone will see a bird in the sky for the very first time. Someone will forget milk for the morning coffee.

Nietzsche writes, ‘Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us.'

Yes.

He continues, ‘Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea—all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely.'

Oh no. No. Every time I go to a live gig and the background music finally sighs out and the lights dim there's that moment of blackness and silence in which I forget to breathe until the first guitar note of the first song when my heart rushes right out of my chest and gives itself, all of its red beating self, to the musicians and their music. And tonight, an ordinary Friday night, I'm sitting here on the couch that the cats use as a scratching post, alone with the precious things of the night. Music in the night. Bach's Suite for Solo Cello no. 2 in D Minor. One soul (the composer's) communing with another (the player's) communing with another (the listener's) – alighting together at the same place and point in the universe, an exact moment, thrilling and pure: some might call it divine.

In the same way people with severe allergies carry an EpiPen, I now carry a supply of low dose, emergency medication, and I take it whenever a vague sense of paranoia creeps up or when something ordinary takes on undue meaning. For a full 24 hours in every 12–14 days I learn to deliberately reduce all forms of stimulation and withdraw to one room for sleep, solitude and silence. Healing time. Regenerating time. Recalibrating time. It seems that in conjunction with medication, the brain requires a period of stillness in which to re-establish equilibrium. Any fleeting symptoms of illness dissipate. I re-enter the world a ‘relatively normal' person.

As often as possible I pack the tent and a bag of provisions. The road to Mt Buffalo at dawn is a theatre of mist, of ghosts rising and contorting and falling away. The mist clears near the plateau; up the steep track to Corral Peak is a lone granite tor, Sentinel, reaching right into the blue of the sky. Kookaburras note my slow approach – five of them at least – laughing in stereo to the north and south and east and west. All the hairs are up on my legs and arms and I shiver, then laugh, then cry.

Now the echo of crows on the cliff face.

The highest point of the National Park is called The Horn and from here I can see across to the Bogong High Plains and Mt Beauty. I walk down from the summit, off the track, in between the snow gums and unwittingly fall asleep on a soft mound which turns out to be an ants' nest and when I wake some hours later I'm covered in shiny red ants and the sun is cradled between two branches, one above one below, both in shadow, paying homage.

Day-smell is different from dusk-smell is different from night-smell. Day-smell is warmed eucalyptus oil and mountain tea-tree, candle heath and aromatic alpine baekea. Dusk-smell is thick with native grasses and boronia. Night-smell is the deep cool water of Lake Catani, where the other-side sun is reflecting onto the moon and the moon dribbles light over the still water of the lake and I open my body to it, skin white as the moon.

Flesh, air. A breathing silence.

Meaning. Illness. This thing called life.

Currawongs are the first sound of the morning, followed by flies around the entrance to my tent and the deeper sound of bees. I crawl outside to find a flame robin in a near-by eucalypt. He takes flight. I walk down to the lake for a swim, for the water like silk and the bottom-silt like silk. In front of me, as I glide along, are two wood ducks and the occasional plop! and ripple of a fish. Bright-eyed butterflies, brown and orange like a checkerboard, flicker together just above the surface. On the other side of the lake I look for frogs and cicadas in the alpine bog, but they grow faint and vow silence whenever I come close. So I sit and wait.

By my wet feet is a grass trigger plant with magenta flowers on a long single stalk that turn to slender blood-red seeds at the very top. Then a sudden, low flrrrr –birds' wings – quite close, I swing around . . . the wind is whispering the leaves and weathered silver branches of the mountain gums.

Back at my tent I eat some fruit and take the lithium and seroquel and venlafaxine with water and then I write for a while – playing around with words till they start to sing. I pack my backpack and walk – out towards the west edge of the plateau, walk till my calves and thighs are stretched and quietly sore. In the early evening I ease down into the grass and heath, disturbing some grasshoppers, rather ripe-looking and violent green.

In the sky are long streaks of cloud.

Why do I look at a group of yellowgold daisies and lose my breath? Is it that they remind me of the sun? Why do I know they are perfect? I'm not a bee or a bird; I can't pollinate them. Perhaps it's the symmetry or perhaps it's evolutionary. Perhaps it has something to do with Jung's collective unconscious or is it merely their contrast with the pale alpine grass? The daisies have soft yellow centres with an orange rim. Then the yellowgold petals – six of them, darkest gold at the base, brightest yellow nearest the floret. They couldn't possibly be more alive. When I sit up, my abdomen is mired with wombat shit. I wonder if wombats ever go mad or if insanity is peculiarly human.

I take off my boots and thick socks and feel the native grass under my feet. It is surprisingly soft. I take off my glasses and listen to the dusk. To my right a kookaburra, rrrlaaah hah hahhah haw, to my left tiny yellow-faced honeyeaters are settling in for the night. They are no bigger than my thumb. They zip from tree to tree, hee ee ee. Crimson rosHanas call to one another across the valley. How quickly I'm surrounded by the zing of fat march flies. Why do they bother with me? Is it the warmth of my body? Perhaps as I lie amongst the alpine grass and snow gums they are waiting for the softness of dead flesh in which to lay their larvae. Their wings flutter over my eyelids. I'm waiting for wombats to come up out of their holes into the dusk. I listen and wait. Ah, the moon behind a strand of eucalypts. Moths, dark and flittering against the paler sky.

Once the sun has dipped below the mountain range the march flies leave and the mosquitoes come and the moon rises behind a stand of eucalypts. The smell of dusk air. The moon is each minute brighter. The birds are all quiet now – just the sound of frogs and cicadas and forest bats overhead and the wind shhh through the tops of the trees. Then the kookaburra again rrlaah hah hah haw. Now the stars. First one, then another then another. Blinking, as they do. Then the frogs and cicadas stop, then no wind.

So quiet. Still. A million stars.

Mental illness happens to people who are living ordinary, good lives, just like my family and me when I first became ill. And for the families, friends and carers of people with mental illness it is particularly hard because the illness can take away our ability to know that we are loved, and we often find it hard to love back in conventional ways. For some of us, after a while we forget how to love.

For me, staying well is a daily job of monitoring mood and thinking and keeping regular rhythms of waking and sleeping. I take medication every morning and evening, and will do so for all of my life. At thirty-eight, I've been well for around four years but I'm not ‘cured'. Good health doesn't come with a guarantee for anyone, but for those of us managing a longterm illness, each day of wellness is, in its own small way, remarkable.

I'm grateful to be living in a country where medication and therapy are mostly available and affordable. However even in Australia, we are still not caring for the most vulnerable members of our communities. Those who, through no fault of their own, are not as lucky as I have been to respond to medication or to be able to afford to find the right kind of therapy. These people are of all ages and backgrounds, and we ignore their suffering because most of us don't understand their ways of seeing the world or we are afraid of their difference or embarrassed by their appearance and because we can't
see
their injuries.

Noone ever wakes up one morning and thinks,
today I'd like to go mad, lose my job and friends, and end up odd-looking and living on the streets
, anymore than they think,
today I'd like to get cancer.