Tristimania (18 page)

These details: the losing, the panic, the finding, the titchy stitches of someone's minute doings – why am I describing them here? Because – and I know I'm not alone in this – when someone's psyche has gone awry, they ‘read' the world symbolically, particularly in its precise relation to their mind at that point. The world sucks intensity into it. Things do not seem accidental or incidental but loaded with meaning; the inner theatre is staged outside oneself.

The four-wheel drive would not make it up the steep path to my friends' house and the sky was heavy with an imminent fresh snowfall. Andy urgently needed to turn round and get home. I started walking. A hundred yards. Alone. I felt as if I were floundering in miles of Arctic ice, walking to the North Pole. As if two minutes were two months to a bipolar explorer. In moments like this, I can understand something of catatonia: the psyche staggers before the immensity of the moment, the freighted, frightening boulder of everything. Its import, heft and weight are overwhelming.

And then I saw one of my friends at the top of the track and he came down towards me and did the simplest and sweetest thing: he just took my hand in his, like a tug boat to a sinking vessel, and pulled me up through the snow to the house.

All through the day, I had phone calls from friends, widely scattered round the country but tightly connected to each other now. They all said the same thing in almost the same words. It seemed like an urgent council-meet had been called so that they would all be repeating to me the one wisest message: Take the medication or you will be hospitalized. If you're sectioned, you'll lose a lot of autonomy, you'll be out of your doctor's care and in the hands of strangers, and you'll be miles away from us all (though one friend
said if I was hospitalized, she would simply move in with me for the duration, at which point utter gratitude welled up in me). Hospital. I think I am already there, I said. The words ‘hospital' and ‘hospitality' are related, and my friends gave me both.

What did they do that was so healing? They gave me a room which was small and simple: this helped, because there was almost nothing in it that would speak itself or intrude. It was quiet and warm and I felt utterly safe, safe as an animal in its nest. They filled the room with thick, soft duvets and cats and pillows and hot-water bottles. I could sleep a little. They cooked for me and I could eat a tiny bit. Sometimes I wanted to talk endlessly, and they listened, and sometimes I couldn't speak and they didn't mind me, and sometimes I wanted to listen and they were sage and kind – and funny. And they gave me jobs to do, simple, physical jobs which I could do with someone else, like clearing snow off the path, washing up, cleaning the floors, and clearing more snow. I thought fondly of the pejorative term ‘basket-case', suddenly seeing how wise it is to give ill people a simple, repetitive physical task: weaving a basket would be something I could do. Anything physical, anything practical. Because seeing myself as useful (no matter in how small a way) was like a Way Back to my normality. Seeing myself creating something, even just a clean plate, was like seeing the chance of creating wellness. Clearing snow made me see the possibility of clearing my mind. It opened a path to my own future.

I concentrated on what my friends were saying, I listened and I took the pills. Three days later, one of my friends drove me home so I could get to an appointment with my doctor. As soon as I saw him, the weekend's whole sorry story fell out of my mouth: the snow, an avalanche to me, the cancelled appointment, my panic, getting drunk, skipping pills, getting suicidal, Andy, everything.

He was, he said, really sorry about the cancelled appointment. I hated what could feel like the narrative of manipulation: if an appointment is cancelled, I will want to kill myself. Nothing in all the degrees of my despair was intended manipulatively, but the narrative, the blunt cause-and-effect, would possibly make someone feel guilty. It would be stupid, unfair and horribly unjust.

Sometimes it is the simplest of phrases which express the truth the best, the monosyllables of deepest feeling.
I need you,
I said, choked, and I realized I had never in my life said those words to anyone. Ever. I needed him like nothing and no one in my life. I had no idea need could be like this. Craven, absolute, stricken need. I needed the force field of safety he created for me. I needed his kindness, the purest ingredient in medication; I needed the way he listened and let me reach him and, likewise, I needed the way he could speak across the gulf of madness towards where my psyche was, wherever it was.

And that was when I saw his wings.

They were long and slender, slate-grey, folded like a swallow's wings, every feather tuned to the currents of the air, ready but waiting, patient, calm and thoughtful. I didn't tell him at the time; I thought he would find it disconcerting.

After that suicide night, I felt as if I was walking into the world again, myself the same and yet different. A subterranean transformation had occurred, as if I had been to my underworld and returned. I had gazed, hypnotized, at death and then bent my sights upwards to life, trying not to look back. In the absence of my own mind, wisdom, strength or wellness, my friends had given me theirs, as if we were all members of Friendly Societies of emotional assurance, each insuring each other against ruin. In this long episode, they had dug deep and found the golden coins. If mania contains a gift for
giving, depression needs to practise the gift of receiving, and I had to receive all that was gentle, kind and good which surrounded me.

But if madness can elicit extraordinary protection, it can also, worryingly, provoke a mad cousin. The day I got back home, a friend asked me to supper. She'd heard about my having been suicidal, but we didn't talk about it. She was angry with her partner, so angry that she was screaming and crying, but she was not directing it at him. Purple with rage, she screamed about him, but to me, inches from my face. I was as fragile as I've ever been in my life; fragile as the thinnest glass of an eighteenth-century casement; one breath would shatter it, the echo of one blackbird too close would crack it.

You're
suicidal? I want to slit my wrists every
day
,' was the last thing I remember her shouting in fury. I didn't doubt how much pain she was in: I felt sorry that she was so unhappy. But I felt mauled, as if suicidality were suddenly a contest, a rivalry of misery: competitive pain. I felt as if I'd stepped into a mad, dark fairy tale, gargoyles in the castle dungeons, all beak and wings, hunched and ugly, spouting rainwater, both of us imprisoned with sponges of purple fungus oozing in the corners, slugs sickened and self-eviscerating in the gutters.

I had been ill, now, for three months. Returning from the shock of that suicide night took another month. By about mid-February, I could feel shoots of recovery. I hadn't been able to read, because I could not concentrate and words on a page had been like camera images in an old-fashioned darkroom; they slid off the page in a swirl of black ink. Nothing spoke to me unless it precisely comprehended my state of mind, though, if that happened, it felt profoundly healing and I could pay attention. The first book I could read was
Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge, and my heart went out to Coleridge as if I knew him. If he wasn't writing, walking or with people, he said, ‘my feelings drive me almost to agony and madness.'

I could sleep more and eat more come springtime, but I was as weak as a kitten. I lived these weeks in the forest of the mind, at its best the Forest of Arden. All around me were daffodils. I was surrounded by yellowness, the open-hearted, arms-outstretched loveliness of them. And there was no reproach in them. The common life of everything struck me anew this spring, the glow at the heart of it all, the empathic capability of the mind to shapeshift through imagination and a kind of love into any living thing, everyone a Jaques transforming themselves into a stag.

But I was frightened of the depression which almost always follows mixed-state hypomania, depression as simple and horrible as turgid nothingness. I knew that spring can be a difficult time for the damaged mind, precisely because it sharpens the distinction between the lithe, flexing vitality of a rising sun in a young year with the pitiful dredge of the sinking psyche.

Edging out of madness, now, I felt shell-shocked. What
happened
to my
mind
? I remember asking my doctor once. It was like coming to, regaining consciousness in hospital after a serious accident and realizing that something terrible must have happened but having no continuous memory of it. Yes, I had scraps of memory, and those were intensely vivid. Yes, I had written notes to myself over the months, a guard-word of thoughts, to snatch these tatters of time. But I had the bewildering feeling that the last time I looked around me it was November and now it was spring, and every day in that period had been crazy firefighting, not to be mad, not to commit suicide.

This was when my gratitude to my doctor overwhelmed me. He had been doctor, psychiatrist and counsellor. I'm pretty sure he saved my sight. I am absolutely certain he saved my life. There is no gratitude like it.

And then my days began to stumble. They staggered. They fell. It was the awful, inexorable descent into depression. I couldn't write, could still barely read. I felt physically sick thinking about the looming publication of my book and its publicity demands. I had utterly lost confidence in my own wellness at any future time. I couldn't manage to be away from home and couldn't cope with seeing anyone except my phalanx-friends. I was frightened of not washing and becoming part of the stigmatic stench. The rules of self-care became an almost religious duty: to shower, to brush my hair, to wear clean clothes every day. I made to-do lists, and on one day I wrote out the things I was aiming for:

       
– Put bins out

       
– Do laundry

       
– Don't kill myself

       
– Buy cat food

I had to stop counting the long list of things I couldn't do and start instead with the short list of what I could. I offered myself as a general factotum to my friends.
Just give me a job, a simple job, a physical one.
So I weeded allotments, cleaned gutters, washed up, planted things. A ladder, a scoop and a blocked drainpipe, a wheelbarrow and a pile of earth to move. That kind of thing. Mainly, I tried to stay out of bed and not drink alcohol.

Days turned into weeks which turned into months of utter depression. If my mind had been over-connected and dendritic when I was
hypomanic, now it was disconnected from everything. I was back in the ‘real' world, out of the faerie world, the woods of midsummer dreams, and into the Court of Athens. And that real world was a painful place to be. I looked around me, aghast at the devastation of days behind me, each new day only an old desolation and nothing in the future but despair. Even God cannot give back the months the locusts took away. Time was a sewer, fetid and blocked underground. I spent a lot of time in the dreamless dirge which passes for sleep; an abnegation of life, a denial of dream, a swimless, flightless annulment. The nothing that will come of nothing.

My doctor gave me antidepressants at the highest dose I'd ever had, nearly five times anything I'd ever taken before. I felt as if my veins were running with water. I dreamt I was crying blood.

‘Depression', as a word, does not convey the experience, as William Styron wrote so furiously: ‘the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.' An intensity which Les Murray has called ‘shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain'. Yes.

Then came the publication of my book, and I was flooded with terrible adrenalin: I was on high alert, in danger. It was an accurate apprehension.

The whole publishing team gave me their utter protection. They stood by me, literally and figuratively, through the upcoming months, giving me support, strength and a sense of safety. Writers I dearly admire, including Philip Pullman, John Berger, Iain McGilchrist; Niall Griffiths and Theodore Zeldin, had loved my book and praised it publicly. It garnered beautiful reviews from people with a literary sensibility and was longlisted for a prestigious
literary award in Britain and shortlisted for one in the States. Many readers wrote appreciative letters to me about it.

None of these was enough protection for me in this state. It was the lies which were deadly. One academic used research from my book as if that were her own argument and then presented it as ‘evidence' of things my book supposedly lacked. Research references were ignored as if the pages upon pages of notes simply didn't exist. Ideas were misattributed. Metaphor taken literally. So profoundly was my work misrepresented in one newspaper that it had to publish a corrections letter, while its sister paper published such damaging and demonstrably false statements that I wrote to complain. The result? A curt note saying that my remark – challenging a national newspaper on its dishonesty – ‘could be taken as defamatory': a veiled threat of libel action – against me.

There is a peculiar, savage, screaming kind of pain in being publicly humiliated. Being lied about in public causes a sense of powerless outrage unlike any other emotion I know. Being bullied, in addition, was beyond my strength.

That was the point at which something in me broke. Utterly and terribly. I felt ‘sung', as Indigenous Australians say. Injured, wounded by malevolent, malicious words, poison-tipped to kill the spirit.

A tractate of the Talmud states that to humiliate someone in public is as bad as shedding the blood of another: ‘Whoever humiliates another in public is like one who sheds blood,' according to Bava Metzia 58b. In other words, it is one of the most serious sins one can commit, because psychological harm is quite as bad, and often worse, than physical harm.