The Smartest Girl in the World
Writings on Mental Illness, Mental Health, and Alaska
Remorse after a bipolar episode can cause tremendous pain, but when everybody else says “don’t look back,” I say: “look.”
I once read a book about tracking animals, and when I lived for several months on the edge of the enormous Chugach State Park in Alaska, I tracked a snowshoe hare in the alder thickets along the side of a popular hiking trail.
Read more of my blog article at bphope.com https://www.bphope.com/blog/self-tracking-moving-forward-after-a-bipolar-episode/
Creativity can offer relief from bipolar depression, and it can help your hope soar as you realize your potential to help others through self-expression. Read and share my first article for bp Magazine:
https://www.bphope.com/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-taking-wing-out-of-bipolar-depression/
Parents cannot fix a bipolar disorder diagnosis. This leads to guilt and frustration, but once they accept it as a brain-based disorder, they can learn how to help.
“I never want to leave you,” I whispered from the air mattress on the floor of our family cabin. I tried not to look under the bed, a worried eight-year old listening to the coyotes yip in the darkness and the beaver’s tail slapping the river’s surface.
Continue reading my most recent article here: https://www.bphope.com/kids-children-teens/parental-guilt-and-bipolar-disorder-learning-acceptance/
I have started a Facebook page so that you can learn more about me, mental illness, and Alaska– as well as follow all of my writings and musings. You can also follow me on Twitter.
I’ll post my thoughts and more photos through these channels as I continue to make my transition from “anonymous” to being fully “out there”! Help me share the story of bipolar disorder and mental illness– we, together, can help spread the word so that we can disseminate hope, knowledge, and the common thread between all of us!
Disappearance is easy in Alaska, but after decades of wanting to escape into the wilderness, I know now why I always come home.
He simply got up and walked into the wilderness. His name was Justin and he was teenager living with a mental health condition, an affliction that affects so many of us, so he walked into the Chugach Mountains, the vast front range that towers over Anchorage, Alaska. He was never seen again. I was 13, with my own budding manias and depressions, and thus began my first fantasies of disappearance.
Continue reading my article on bphope.com: https://www.bphope.com/blog/my-bipolar-fantasies-of-disappearance-and-why-i-always-return/
Years of rock-climbing wisdom told me not to try to climb down. The only way was up, but I was frozen with fear, my hands pressed against the granite slab, hips tight and straining against the cliff, my right foot holding all of my weight on a tiny foothold below me. I was high above a rocky valley we Alaskans call Hatcher’s Pass, and snowflakes were beginning to fall around me. If I fell now, my body would hit the wall’s face before the rope pulled taut.
Climbing down a cliff is nearly impossible. As you peer down its face, your body simply gets in the way. Climbing up is the only thing you can do. That day, I could not show the tough guy belaying me that I was afraid. And so I kept on climbing.
Later, many years later, when I was in my late thirties, after a divorce and while waiting to learn whether I had cancer or not, that same tough guy told me that my life had been “tragic.”
I could not disagree more. Yes, I have suffered—but we all have. I have struggled with my greatest challenge, bipolar disorder, throughout my life. I have experienced the sturm und drang of extreme moods that would alternate between euphoria and absolute despair. Yes, I have not yet achieved the lofty goals I once set for myself, because I have at times struggled to be able to even complete the basic activities of everyday survival.
Several years ago, I went through an extremely painful divorce, when my ex-husband told me that my bipolar disorder was a “mountain of darkness” that he could not recover from. Last year, after the discovery of three tumors in my body, I spent several months not knowing whether they were benign or malignant. (And, thank God, they were benign.)
But, my life has been blessed in so many ways. Since birth, I have always been surrounded by love. My parents and sister have never, even for a moment, let me doubt their warm, true-hearted love and support for me, even when we have all had occasional difficulties during the worst moments of my illness. My parents taught me many things, including how to write, how to fly-fish, and—simply—how to be a good person.
I am still lucky enough to be surrounded by love. I am blessed to have a family now, with a husband who rubs lavender oil on my back when I cycle, who supports and cares for me every single day, and who brought two boys into my life whom I love with all my heart.
Yes, I have struggled, and, at times, the pain of bipolar disorder has completely overwhelmed me, often for weeks or months at a time. I have, at times, lost all ability to function because of side effects or medication withdrawal. Yes, there have been times when I could not get out of bed, when I could not go to work, but I have had a successful career.
Mine has been a blessed life. That day when I was on the cliff in Hatcher’s Pass, I eventually unfroze and found that handhold to pull myself up. Although I often write about my illness, I also want to write about my wellness, about the wonderful pieces of my life- and all of the things that keep me climbing up.
Maybe if I can control it, I can use it to help humankind. –The Incredible Hulk
I stood at the base of a mountain, its peak hidden from view, as sleet crept under my collar. Giant, wet snowflakes hit my cheek. There was some semblance of clarity that morning, for the first time in days. The clarity engendered a sliver of hope. I began to hope that I may, again, stretch my hand up and into the sky.
The night before, as I lay on the bed on my back, I wrote it on the ceiling with my mind: “Try harder. Try harder and you will make it.” I have tried so hard that I have often crumpled under my own effort. I have tried so hard that, at times, I made myself even sicker. Over the years, I tried to not only break my illness as if it were a willful animal, but to somehow control it so that I could still ride the waves of my grandiose childhood dreams.
Before I had no control over the bipolar cycles, when I was in my teens, I used my capacity for trying hard, for working hard, to improve myself. I was like any child who wanted to be a superhero, except I wanted to save humankind with the written word. My words would someday change the world, I thought, if only I tried enough. And so, I trained. I read every classic piece of literature I could get my hands on. I wrote up to four times a day in my journal. I practiced, over and over again.
Of course, these thoughts would later be labeled manic “delusions of grandeur” or grandiose delusions, GDs, for short. My GDs were gorgeous, floral, ethereal things and, like acid flashbacks, refuse to be erased. Most children grow out of their desire to be a superhero, because they realize it’s not possible. But for me, it still—at forty years old—seems possible. Just out of reach, yes, but possible.
In the past few months, and after decades of hiding my writing, I finally decided to share my words with the world. I want to use words to help people—people like me who simply want to survive yet another bipolar day, and those who also occasionally want to be a superhero in their own lives. I want to engender that sliver of hope in them, too, that during their times of clarity, they also can share, and, slowly, carefully reach for the sky.
Although I go to a job every day and take several psychiatric drugs so that I can function and to quiet my secret, seminal desires, I still am occasionally mesmerized by a mountain and the thought that perhaps, one day I could still become a superhero.
“I want to hold you in a warm Atlantic,
A sea of my own making, a meringue of lapis wine.”
It is bedtime, and I have swallowed my evening cocktail of bipolar drugs: 300 mg of Seroquel, the Lamictal, and, of course, the Clonazepam. The Seroquel silence is seeping in. I have about 20 minutes on this dead-end road. Soon, I will fall asleep, content and comfortable, a pleasant and sleeping “high-functioning bipolar,” but I will not get to think about what happens to that person in the warm waves of the Atlantic or find the rhythm that goes with my lapis wine.
Read the rest of my article at: https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/10/04/a-chemical-hiccup-medicated-oblivion-and-art/
On the rivers I used to float upon in western Alaska, I liked to just eat the peanut butter out of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. There was just too much chocolate in the whole thing for me. As I sat on the edge of the big rubber raft in my waders and wading jacket, I would fling each piece of extra chocolate into the ripples below. A velvety gift to whoever fancied it.
Read more at http://oc87recoverydiaries.com/bipolar/
During my depressive bipolar cycles, a river is what remains in my mind. Always. The sea, now that you can forget—the way the wind ruffles the surface or falls calm like a lake– but a river is what remains after my memory of it has seemingly passed, even after my imagination stops adorning it with riffles and dark wet holes and oxbow lakes. It lingers.
I am an Alaskan woman in love with a river. I love the muskeg along the banks of that river, the crooked black spruce that struggle for the sky but always fail, their bark wet with the effort, their limbs broken from the start by their own soggy roots. In Alaska, muskeg means a river is nearby. In the case of my very own river, the Delta Clearwater, it means it is flowing, slow and cold and spring-fed, somewhere beneath the tundra at my feet, and somewhere beneath where my grandparents built my family’s rickety old cabin.
Someday, during one of my times of extreme mental pain, I think that this river will give me my last chance. I will be sitting on the corner of my bed, staring into my closet, as I always do when I feel this way, and I will find myself overwhelmed by the thought that there is only one way to end my pain. And then I will check the impulse to end that pain, put the pills or the weapon aside, and I will pack a few things and start my truck. I will leave my family and drive the seven hours to my river, and I will watch it, as my mind tries (again) to kill me. I will let the river take its course, and maybe my course, as it either pulls me into it or, possibly, hopefully, pulls the suicidal thoughts from my mind.
If I was given only a day to live, if my own mind gave me only minutes to live, then I think I could force myself to make it a day, and I would drive to my river, the site of so many childhood memories, this source of natural beauty, this place that I go to in my mind when the nurses take my blood pressure, to the river I imagine myself floating upon as they take my pulse.
If, after all, I am going to die, then I am going to die by this river, somewhere back in that struggling muskeg, or perhaps in the cold water itself. If I am going to die, why not go to my favorite place one last time? That river, the source of so much childhood love, could convince me to change my course. Or it could give me my perfect last panorama, eyes wet but open, looking up at those crooked black spruce for the last time, my back stained red by the low-bush cranberries.
I am going to give this river my final chance, and it will give me mine. These bipolar episodes are so short that by the time I pass the Matanuska Glacier, as I drive north along the Glenn Highway, the logic will slowly start seeping back in again. And then, five hours later, by the time I reach the Rainbow Mountains, I will have forgotten why it was I wanted to take my own life in the first place. And then I will be at the river, into which my grandparents’ and my aunt’s ashes have been released. And to the place where my father taught me what it meant to “just watch a river go by,” how to write in a journal on the cabin’s sloping deck, and where my mother first taught me to fly-fish.
These depressive episodes are like the mist that forms upon my river on some evenings. It is a passing fog, like the way my family’s remains looked when my parents and I gently dropped them into our river, and it is like the underwater cloud I once saw as a child, swirling beneath the convergence of the wild, glacier-fed Tanana River and the soft, clear waters of the Delta Clearwater. It is a cloud, like this episode. I tell myself, in the words of my mother and my therapist: Carin, it will pass. It will pass. The fog in my mind will fade, as I flow, from the edges of the cloud underwater towards the shore, where I am clear again.
Every time my mind tries to kill me, I will think of my river. Perhaps I can measure the episode out in time on the Glenn Highway, as I drive north, following the bends in the road. After two hours, the great expanse of the glacier to my right, with its blue beauty, will remind me of one reason to live. After I have driven for several more hours, the Rainbow Mountains’ multi-colored scree slopes will make me realize that I am very much, and tentatively glad, to still be alive.
By the time I paddle the canoe across the river and arrive at my cabin—and make what was supposed to be my last cup of coffee—and as I sit calmly with my journal on the chair my parents crafted from spruce sticks when my sister was only 14 weeks old, and as I watch the river just go by, I will find a way to survive. By the time I again see the white pebbles on the bottom of that clear, cold river, I will decide that, if nothing else, the very beauty of a river—for me the ultimate natural wonder—is something, in itself, to live for.
The Smartest Girl in the World 