Essay Beasts in the Depths

Bipolar disorder is something that mystifies me. One day you can wake up and feel like you’re on top of the world, everything has meaning, people are beautiful, and you yourself might even not be a piece of shit. The next day? Everything is refuse and you are the lowest organism in the food chain.

Back in the old days, before the advent of modern psychiatry, I imagine folks affected by schizophrenia, bipolar, mania, etc were considered either possessed by evil spirits, or perhaps mad. Either way, I’ve no doubt some of them ended up being burned at one stake or another, or perhaps hanged until dead. I’ve also no doubt some of them committed atrocious crimes and so the punishment was justified.

It’s kind of a terrifying thing, really. I grew up in a time where mental illness was taboo to us kids. Mental illness meant the funny farm. It meant that people would always look at you side eyed and you’d never have a job or a family or anything normal.

But that wasn’t true even when I was growing up. It’s the stigma, the stigma we were taught or we taught ourselves. Plenty of people suffer from depression. Many suffer in silence and are somehow able to keep it all together. Perhaps they learn coping mechanisms like music, art, or maybe, just maybe, they become writers. Some don’t.

Fast forward a couple of decades and there is still stigma, but it is not as bad as it used to be. The ignorance surrounding the disorders is less, but there’s still a lot of fundamentally bad information out there. A lot of it. And folks glom on to the terms they know without having a clue what they really mean.

How many family members or friends do you know that suffer from clinical depression, mania, anxiety, or another disorder? I’m betting the number is more than 1.

Has the medical community gotten that much better at diagnosing these problems? Have we as a society always been this fucked up with folks popping pills or hiding beneath their bed covers because they can’t face the world? Trapped within a cocoon of cycling thoughts and visions of things that aren’t there? Or did something happen? In other words, did mental illness suddenly become just another watch word for those that want to feel special?

I’ve heard that last argument before. I guess there are always some folks that take advantage of these “ephemeral” medical conditions. You can claim you suffer from any of a bazillion medical conditions that show no physical symptoms. You can use those as “get out of work” free cards. Or as an excuse to get more sleep after that night out. Because how would anyone know the difference?

I’ve heard that last argument too.

I don’t have an answer here, no proclamation either. Just an evolution in thinking.

The older you get, the more those around you, especially your parents and extended family, are likely to acquire conditions like lupus, cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and any number of other issues. Now that I’m nearing 50, there are more than I can count. Including myself.

I spend too much time remembering and that remembering is mostly spent on my mistakes. The stupid shit I did that hurt people emotionally. Or made light of their situation. Or the way I behaved. What I believed. Anything that I now find abhorrent.

How many of them am I remembering wrong? How many are scenes that I have invented and never happened? Is it all mere imagination?

For me, the past is nothing but layers of images and sounds that have been compressed by time and, most importantly, distance. One day, like coal, perhaps those layers will form a diamond.

It’s the ocean floor lying 5km beneath you. You know it’s there, and your can visualize it, but you can’t see it. That dark water teems with unseen beauty and horror. The past, even with its looping images and songs and words stuck on repeat, is less real with distance. The distance is time, and it marches ever forward. And we know this. We as human beings understand this. And yet I think we all have those moments where the creatures lying at the bottom of that ocean floor come to visit us. If only for a little while.

But they are imaginary, aren’t they?

The problem is when the beasts never leave. They hang around like unwelcome guests at a wake. They consume and consume and provide nothing in return. Well, sometimes they help create fiction, but that’s about all they’re good for. The hope is that writing them, creating works of art with them, or speaking their names and stories aloud will persuade them to depart.

Sometimes they do. But they’ll return.

Every conscious moment, we are tossing something else into that dark water. Some of those memories stay at the surface and stink like whale carcasses. Some immediately begin their descent to that fabled ocean floor. The only problem is it can take decades for them to hit bottom.

It’s taken me many decades to get to where I can look on this and understand the pathology and that it’s all just part of the way my brain works. I can understand it, I can talk about it, I can take meds for it, and it’s still something I can’t beat. But at least with some help, I can fight it.

I”ve been told, hell I think we all have, that creative people fight a lot of demons. I don’t know if that’s true or not. What I do know is that all of us, every single one of us, struggles or has struggled with them before. The struggles never stop. We’re human. It’s the curse of an evolved brain capable of self awareness. Unless you’re a narcissist. And then you have bigger problems.

We all share many of the same demons because they are endemic to civilization or the mere fact of living near humans that aren’t part of “our” tribe. The Mesopotamians and their offspring gave these demons names and blamed each for multiple ills. After all, it’s easier to blame Lamashtu for the death of your infant or a failed crop harvest than blame the simple chaos of the universe. Lamashtu, a thing that doesn’t exist, can hold all that blame and be held responsible. A universe of chaos cannot. Chaos, by definition, has no face.

Even today we are creating new Lamashtu like containers of ill. The only difference is that these containers are no longer ephemeral. Instead, we’ve made these containers out of people with different beliefs or ethnicity. Or we search for things that could possibly be to blame. Vaccines, for example. These are demons we can grapple with in the real world, as opposed to the ones that haunt us in our dreams. They help us make sense of the chaos.

Distraction, as the character in Breakers says, is keeping us from being free. Distraction keeps us from being fully realized human beings, makes us far too easy to manipulate and control. Distraction is an addiction that leads us to ignore the dire in favor of the expedient.

Unlike the character in Breakers, I think distraction may be the only thing keeping us sane. It’s difficult for those beasties in the depths of our past to visit when we give them no life, no space. We can lose ourselves and let all of that nasty shit go, if only for a little while.

When I lose myself in my work, there is no depression. A strange sort of mania occurs. I know that when I break out of the spell, my foot is tapping, my heart is thumping in my chest, and I either have a manic grin or an angry countenance because it can be intense. Is that distraction?

The hamster wheel is perhaps humanity’s greatest ironic invention. When I was a kid, I spent time watching my friend’s hamsters run on those contraptions. I always thought they were stupid for not realizing they weren’t getting anywhere. That there was no escape.

When you grow up and realize that you’re the hamster, the metaphor stops being amusing. At the same time, when you fall off the wheel, you suddenly see the confines of your cage. And how would that not ever be depressing?

As usual, I don’t have answers, only personal reflection and streams of thoughts.

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