An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [60]
I told him about my problems with the idea of taking lithium, but also that my life was dependent upon it. I told him that I had discussed with my psychiatrist the possibility of taking a lower dose in hopes of alleviating some of the more problematic side effects; I was eager to do this, but very frightened that I would have a recurrence of my mania. He argued that there would never be a safer or more protected period of time in my life in which to do it and that he would see me through. After discussing it with my psychiatrist in Los Angeles and my doctor in London, I did, very slowly, cut back on the amount of lithium I was taking. The effect was dramatic. It was as though I had taken bandages off my eyes after many years of partial blindness. A few days after lowering my dose, I was walking in Hyde Park, along the side of the Serpentine, when I realized that my steps were literally bouncier than they had been and that I was taking in sights and sounds that previously had been filtered through thick layers of gauze. The quacking of the ducks was more insistent, clearer, and more intense; the bumps on the sidewalk were far more noticeable; I felt more energetic and alive. Most significant, I could once again read without effort. It was, in short, remarkable.
That night, waiting for my moody, intense Englishman to appear—needlepointing, watching the snow fall, listening to Chopin and Elgar—I suddenly was aware of how clear and poignant the music seemed, how intensely, beautifully melancholic it was to watch the snow and wait for him. I was feeling more beauty, but more real sadness as well. When he arrived—elegant, just in from a formal dinner party, black tie, white silk evening scarf draped, askew, around his neck, a bottle of champagne in his hand—I put on Schubert’s posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its haunting, beautiful eroticism absolutely filled me with emotion and made me weep. I wept for the poignancy of all the intensity I had lost without knowing it, and I wept for the pleasure of experiencing it again. To this day, I cannot hear that piece of music without feeling surrounded by the beautiful sadness of that evening, the love I was privileged to know, and the recollection of the precarious balance that exists between sanity and a subtle, dreadful muffling of the senses.
Once, after several days completely to ourselves and with no contact at all with the outside world, he brought me an anthology of writings about love. He had tagged one short entry that captured the essence not only of those intense, glorious days but of the entire year as well:
Thank you for a lovely weekend.
They tell me it rained.
Love Watching Madness
I dreaded leaving England. My moods had held at a more even keel for longer than I could remember; my heart was newly alive; and my mind was in a glorious state, having loped, grazed, and mulled its less medicated self through Oxford and St. George’s. It was increasingly hard to imagine giving up the gentle pace of days I had set for myself in London, and harder still to think of losing the passion and close understanding that had filled my nights. England had laid to rest most of my incessant wondering about the what-ifs and whys and what-might-have-beens; it also had laid to rest, in a very different way, my relentless warrings with lithium, most of which had been nothing but a futile