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By Root 501 0

of security, food, and protection. Her formidable strength slowly eked its way into my depleted marrowbone. It, coupled with medicine for my brain and superb psychotherapy for my mind, pulled me through day after impossibly hard day. Without her I never could have survived. There were times when I would struggle to put together a lecture, and, having no idea whether it made sense or not, I would deliver it through the din and dreadful confusion that masqueraded as my mind. Often the only thing that would keep me going was the belief, instilled by my mother years before, that will and grit and responsibility are what ultimately make us supremely human in our existence. For each terrible storm that came my way, my mother—her love and her strong sense of values—provided me with powerful, and sustaining, countervailing winds.

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and—as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus—she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.

Both my manias and depressions had violent sides to them. Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease. Being wildly out of control—physically assaultive, screaming insanely at the top of one’s lungs, running frenetically with no purpose or limit, or impulsively trying to leap from cars—is frightening to others and unspeakably terrifying to oneself. In blind manic rages I have done all of these things, at one time or another, and some of them repeatedly; I remain acutely and painfully aware of how difficult it is to control or understand such behaviors, much less explain them to others. I have, in my psychotic, seizurelike attacks—my black, agitated manias—destroyed things I cherish, pushed to the utter edge people I love, and survived to think I could never recover from the shame. I have been physically restrained by terrible, brute force; kicked and pushed to the floor; thrown on my stomach with my hands pinned behind my back; and heavily medicated against my will.

I do not know how I have recovered from having done the things that necessitated such actions, any more than I know how and why my relationships with friends and lovers have survived the grinding wear and tear of such dark, fierce, and damaging energy. The aftermath of such violence, like the aftermath of a suicide attempt, is deeply bruising to all concerned. And, as with a suicide attempt, living with the knowledge that one has been violent forces a difficult reconciliation of totally divergent notions of oneself. After my suicide attempt, I had to reconcile my image of myself as a young girl who had been filled with enthusiasm, high hopes, great expectations, enormous energy, and dreams and love of life, with that of a dreary, crabbed, pained woman who desperately wished only for death and took a lethal dose of lithium in order to accomplish it. After each of my violent psychotic episodes, I had to try and reconcile my notion of myself as a reasonably quiet-spoken and highly disciplined person, one at least generally sensitive to the moods and feelings of others, with an enraged, utterly insane, and abusive woman who lost access to all control or reason.

These discrepancies between what one is, what one is brought up to believe is the right way of behaving toward others, and what actually happens during these awful black manias, or mixed states, are absolute and disturbing beyond description—particularly, I think, for a woman brought up in a highly conservative and traditional world. They seem a very long way from my mother’s grace and gentleness, and farther still from the quiet seasons of cotillions, taffetas and silks, and elegant gloves that slid up over the elbows and had pearl buttons at the wrist,