a memoir worth mulling over

the dark side of innocence: growing up bipolar
by Terri Cheney

This is the book I read and have been mulling over this week. Having depression myself, some passages deeply resonated with me and some I just found worth sharing. Here are a few:

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"Was this the kind of friend I was? Unreliable? Untrustworthy? Would I always be at the mercy of the Black Beast, unable to show up as I'd promised unless he was in the right kind of mood? Most of the sorrow in my life had come from unreliability: my father's failure to live up to my ideals, my mother's unpredictable storms. Now here I was, as guilty as either one of them.

I looked ahead into my future and saw an endless string of failed relationships: friendships I would surely sabotage, love I couldn't commit to. What in God's name was wrong with me? It would be so easy just to blame it all on the Black Beast, but some speck of honor, some modicum of truth, wouldn't let me do that. I truly didn't know how much of it was him and how much was simply me--at tragic character flaw that kept me trapped in infidelity" (242)

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"In fact, with the unexpected success of my book, I felt so good at times that I even wondered, was I still bipolar? In my community work, I saw many people who were much worse off that I was--deep in their disease in a way I no longer seemed to be. I knew that this often happens to manic-depressives: the brain forgets the ravages of the illness the way a woman forgets the pains of childbirth. You have to, to survive. But it's always a dangerous place to be, because you inevitably start to question the need for medication, therapy, and all the other rigorous stopgaps of sanity so carefully put into place to prevent another episode." (265)

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"I wanted--what? Revenge? Retribution? No. I wanted my childhood back.

"Tears welled up, and I welcomed them. Over the course of these many years, I've learned an important lesson: melancholia has its value. Sadness is not depression. Tears can heal, or so I hoped as I wiped them off my cheeks, my chin. I was still able to think clearly, logically, as I picked the pieces out of the puzzle and tried to rearrange them into some semblance of order.

It wasn't my parents' fault--it was nobody's fault--that I was born with a chemical imbalance in my brain." (269)

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"...please, don't let the silence triumph. Listen and learn and read and discover and most of all, believe your child (or relative or friend). Name the Black Beast with the impunity if he dares to show his face. If there's one thing I can claim to know, it's this: naming a beast is always the first step toward taming him." (270)

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No matter what the illness (but particularly mental illnesses) there is a definite, and righteous, sense of loss. Those who suffer need the language of lamentation. Ironically, those of us with depression probably have the weakest grasp of lamenting; Oh we get despair, and I for one live into that far too often. But lament...to grasp the gravity and weight, to come to the doorstep of despair only to look up and see hope. Lament is acknowledging the complete brokenness which surrounds you, to mourn that loss in the light of hope.

Please know that mental illness is real. It is not something one wills, but it is real--it is sometimes more real than reality for it distorts all that we perceive, how we process, and how we react, and isn't input and output reality? It is a loss, a loss worth lamenting.