An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [79]
Many years of living with the cyclic upheavals of manic-depressive illness has made me more philosophical, better armed, and more able to handle the inevitable swings of mood and energy that I have opted for by taking a lower level of lithium. I agree absolutely with Eliot’s Ecclesiastian belief that there is a season for everything, a time for building, and “a time for the wind to break the loosened pane.” Therefore, I now move more easily with the fluctuating tides of energy, ideas, and enthusiasms that I remain so subject to. My mind still, now and again, becomes a carnival of lights, laughter, and sounds and possibilities. The laughter and exuberance and ease will, filling me, spill out and over and into others. These glinting, glorious moments will last for a while, a short season, and then move on. My high moods and hopes, having ridden briefly in the top car of the Ferris wheel will, as suddenly as they came, plummet into a black and gray and tired heap. Time will pass; these moods will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.
These comings and goings, this grace and godlessness, have become such a part of my life that the wild colors and sounds now have become less strange and less strong; and the blacks and grays that inevitably follow are, likewise, less dark and frightening. “Beneath those stars,” Melville once said, “is a universe of gliding monsters.” But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met. Although I continue to have emergences of my old summer manias, they have been gutted not only of most of their terror, but of most of their earlier indescribable beauty and glorious rush as well: sludged by time, tempered by a long string of jading experiences, and brought to their knees by medication, they now coalesce, each July, into brief, occasionally dangerous cracklings together of black moods and high passions. And then they, too, pass. One comes out of such experiences with a more surrounding sense of death, and of life. Having heard so often, and so believably, John Donne’s bell tolling softly that “Thou must die,” one turns more sharply to life, with an immediacy and appreciation that would not otherwise exist.
We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this—through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication—we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness. For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of a mental sea; I would, unquestionably, be dead or insane.
But love is, to me, the ultimately more extraordinary part of the breakwater wall: it helps to shut out the terror and awfulness, while, at the same time, allowing in life and beauty and vitality. When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I