So yes. Intervention. It really was
swift this time: historically in times such as these I have form for
letting my highs fly and my lows fester, or for adopting the somewhat
flawed TRH (Trying Really Hard Not To Be Crazy, see downblog) method.
The point of hauling myself to J's offices back in October,
however, was precisely to break this cycle and to find a way of
living and working with my condition which did not involve the rug
being pulled from under my life every few months. In short, I wanted
to find a way not to shun my bipolar or to reject it, but to live and
work with it as I would with any other chronic condition, from
epilepsy to diabetes. As more and more awareness is generated of
what conditions like mine actually entail, such theoretical
comparisons have become commonplace in the debates surrounding
serious mental illness. This can only be a good thing; however, it
strikes me that we still have a long way to go before this theory can
be applied in practice, especially in public spheres such as places
of work and study. Clearly, as is widely discussed, there is much to
be done on the side of employers and institutions to address the
widespread stigma and ignorance around mental illness, but the
question that arose during my most recent episode was this: what can
we, the very people with first-hand experience of serious mental
illness, do to bring an end to our prejudicial treatment at work and
study? As the City wide-boys who trained me for my short-lived legal
recruitment role used to say 'communication is a two way street'.
(NB, they also used to bandy around the phrase '8 is late, 6 is safe'
to describe desirable starting hours, and favoured the use of
'onboard' as a verb, but ignore that. Also, if you're rightly
wondering how on God's green earth someone like me ended up selling
lies to lawyers for a living, I was hypo at the time so it was GREAT
for precisely 3 months and has provided a lifetime of anecdotes which
I imagine I will share in another post at some point). One thing I
have noticed, though, is that the culture of silence surrounding
conditions such as mine seems to ensure that many sufferers keep
schtum about their illnesses, calling in sick to work or lectures
with 'food poisoning' from time to time or simply walking out
whenever an episode hits. This perpetuates the vicious cycle of
employers/tutors believing sufferers are any manner of Bad Things
from 'flaky' to outright dangerous, and sufferers feeling guilty
about their conditions and believing that they are incapable of doing
a 'normal' job. As someone who has matched the above with startling
precision all my life, one of the most difficult things I found
myself doing during my most recent episode was breaking this cycle.
It was also possibly one of the best, and it went a little bit like
this:
Barring relatively minor fluctuations
in mood, this was the first really bad episode since the one last
Autumn which kick-started this whole blogging business. I spent a
merry Sunday mainly pacing the flat, intermittently cowering in
corners and bashing my head against the walls (I should also add that
I live above a pub, which on any given Sunday tends to resonate with
the inescapable sound of people being bloody happy and functional.
This Sunday, they were having a vintage music festival, upon which it
would appear the entire population of South East London had descended
for good, clean, loud fun. Any fellow depressive will, I am sure,
recognise the depths of self-loathing to which this will induce one
to sink). In a moment of clarity inbetween the waves of 'orrible, my
brain did shut up for long enough to let through the realisation that
I probably shouldn't attempt to teach the next day. I merrily called
in with 'food poisoning' the next morning and consoled myself that,
in a couple of days I would be fine. Fine! Fine.
By the time a couple of days later
rolled around and I had begun to hear everyone in the (silent zone of
the) library vying with the voices in my mind to provide reasons why
I should top myself at my earliest convenience, and suggesting a
variety of imaginative ways in which this could be achieved, I called
D. Still valiantly clinging to the notion that I could definitely
teach a class in two hours' time and that I was just being weak and
needed a bit of a pep talk, it came as something of a shock when he
informed me in no uncertain terms that this teaching lark was not
going to happen. Instead, he theorised, I needed to go and see my
tutor to explain the problem and take some time off. This proposal
was alien to me for two reasons:
1. Actually getting in there with an
explanation before hitting the peak of an episode was an entirely new
concept. There was a little bit of my racing mind which was already
two weeks down the line, at the bit where I break down whilst
teaching, run for the door and never come back, change vocational
direction at the first sign of a rise in mood and begin the whole
sorry cycle again. Surely this was the only way, no?
2. I hate Taking Time Off. Mainly
because I still associate it with failure, even though I know
logically that that's not remotely the case. This is probably why
I've always had to have Time Off forced upon me to date. For all
that I've espoused since my diagnosis, and for all that I've
documented here whilst mentally well, namely the importance of seeing
bipolar as a fundamental part of oneself, the importance of learning
to work with it, it being 'normal', all of it went immediately to pot
the moment I became ill again. There is nothing more humbling,
nothing more guaranteed to make you feel like an invalid than being
overwhelmed by the sort of madness that renders you unable to
recognise what is/is not real and forces you to be utterly reliant on
others to make this distinction for you. During this episode, my
bipolar definitely did not feel like it was a part of me. It was a
tornado of an exterior force, one that I was battling with tooth and
nail for control. Perhaps most painfully, there was a part of me
that recognised, at least some of the time, that the world I was
momentarily inhabiting wasn't real and that I really was quite ill.
Far from consoling me, my depressive state turned this into yet
another reason to despise my malfunctioning brain. The Czech have a
word, litost, which defines this feeling. It literally means 'a
state of torment at catching sight of one's own misery', though my
friend R describes it, in a much more British way, as 'feeling shit
about feeling shit'.
There was, however, a tiny, embryonic
Voice of Reason (possibly shoved into my wailing brain by the
ever-reasonable D) which managed to break through the cacophony long
enough to ask: 'well, mate, if you're not going to put your money
where your mouth is, treat this and – crucially – represent it to
others as a manageable long-term condition, then who is? Who else
is going to demonstrate the 'real face' of bipolar disorder if not
the real people who live with it? Stretch out the Delhi Belly for as
long as you like; walk out and turn off your phone if you want to,
but it will mean that you don't really believe any of this stuff you
write about; you'll just be perpetuating the very stereotype you
purport to fight.' So, never one to be trumped by a metaphorical
embryo, I dragged myself down the corridor to my tutor's office, sat
down and did it. And miraculously, it was fine. No scenes, no being
frog-marched off the premises, just practicalities and a
non-intrusive kind of concern. If anything, there are actually two
huge positives to come out of all of this. Namely:
For the first time ever, I actually
listened to myself and others and accepted, however grudgingly, that
I really wasn't well, and that cancelling life for a little while
would mean getting better more quickly and not enduring months of
self-abuse (not the fun kind).
I managed to take responsibility for
said cancellations rather than forcing myself to follow through with
commitments until I either fucked up so spectacularly that my I would
never be allowed back through the door, or walked out and stopped
taking their calls. Although it went completely against the grain,
it really was a step towards re-establishing some kind of self-esteem
and relieving some of the contingent anxiety of being ill again: no
matter how crap I felt, I actually managed not let anyone down or
(hopefully) to lose too much respect. They knew the score, and I had
a grace period of the dreaded Time Off in which to recover without
worrying about fulfilling unachievable commitments .
Of course, I could have just got really
lucky and hit upon one understanding tutor. It's also undoubtedly
the case that education is one of the most sympathetic sectors
(something tells me I would have got a slightly different reaction
from the denizens of Cannon Street). But I think and dare to hope
that it is not just that, and that my experience represents a small
step forward for sufferers of mental illness in employment and
education. And perhaps it has something to do with the one thing the
City did teach me (apart from how to keep a straight face when
someone shouts, with all sincerity, 'IF YOU WANT A FRIEND, GET A
DOG!!!' during your training) namely that whichever industry you are
in, in our commercialised, 21st century world, you are a commodity.
Whether you represent money-making value or
keeping-us-at-the-top-of-the-league-tables value, you are worth
something to the people at the top. This means that, alongside their
contractual duty of care, it is in the interests of whichever
organisation you are a part of to do whatever is necessary to help
you get better, back on track, and performing for them. Although it
can be a little dispiriting to think of things in this way, what it
means in practical terms is actually pretty good for us – by being
upfront about what we need and why, by talking openly about our needs
and the practicalities of recovery, we instantly dispel many of the
myths around serious mental illness simply by virtue of representing
them in the same way we would if we had epilepsy, or even the flu.
By demonstrating that our conditions are manageable and showing that
we take responsibility for them, we enable those who really need to,
to see first-hand that we are not the dangerous, undesireable flakes
that purveyors of stereotyping would have them believe. We also
become an active part of the goal we share: that of setting mental
illness on a par with long-term physical conditions. It is for this
reason that I believe the shift in the way that I think and
communicate with others about my condition may be one of the most
important steps on the road to living with it successfully.
