I got married 19 years ago today.
In what follows I tell you about the hardest year of my life. Kind of. Nadia Bolz-Webber advises one to speak from your wounds, but not while they’re still bleeding. My psychiatrist tells me I’m still healing, so I’ll offer you a truncated version of my reality even as I remain committed to living vulnerably.
In April this year I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Some of the people who know and love me well were surprised, so let me offer this nuance. I had a mixed episode of mania and depression. I’ve pressed my care team on the specifics of the diagnosis wondering how this could be uncovered for the first time at age 41. I’ve learned a lot about mental health in these last few months, including its subjective nature. Whatever I am, and have, and have been my whole life, is now best treated with an antipsychotic. I’m not parsing this in defensiveness or because the stigma bothers me, but because truthfulness seems to have some utility for those closest to me.
I once reflected with a friend about excessive personal details that go into social media posts. We agreed that it can be cringy. I suppose I run that risk here, but I don’t know how to express the joy of what I’ve experienced without alluding to the harrowing soil this story grew up in. In March a series of events sent me spinning. One night of 2-4 hours of sleep turned into two. Then three. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all. Literally, not one minute of drifting off. Mania, I’ve discovered, will give you almost supernatural energy. I began excersizing obsessively. Lindsay would sometimes discover me doing push ups and sit ups in our living room at 2 A.M. My eating became erratic. My body tore through hydroxyzine, and then when that proved ineffective, ambien, which on a good night might yield me 5 hours of sleep. After 28 days I lost 23 pounds. And while my body was becoming a kind of antisacrament, which made fully visible the chaos of my choices, the graver concern was what was happening with my head. The trouble in recounting those details is that the mania ravaged my memory. Only weeks later would I be given clues from loved ones who conversed with me or stumble on one of my text threads to discover just how erratic my behavior had become.
All of this, and the details I left out are legion (see the first paragraph), landed me in a five day, four night stay at mental health care facility that, I don’t think is hyperbolic to observe, may have saved my life. I had a theology professor who once said he’d rather cut off his hand with a butter knife everyday for the rest of his life than lose a child. We were discussing hell. His point was that emotional pain can far outweigh physical pain in effect. I can attest to the truthfulness of that. What I experienced in my body was negligible compared to the torture that happened in my head.
The point of this post is not about me though. It’s about my wife. I don’t know what it’s like to be married to someone with bipolar disorder. I can only gather vicarious clues. As my cognitive faculties have slowly returned to me, so has my logic center though my ability to process emotions properly lingers. That is the challenge I’m working through right now. Said differently I can identify what is normal even if my body is incapable of feeling it. A particularly painful process I find myself in the middle of right now is reckoning with my behavior as a spouse while I was suffering. Days, sometimes weeks of emotional withdrawal. Flippant threats of divorce. Weaponizing affection. Disappearing for hours without explanation. I feel immense shame in even writing these things.
The collateral damage that folks who suffer from mental illness create can be immense. That’s a sobering reality for me to reckon with as I contemplate my ability to be a husband and father. One thing my therapist has helped me understand is how black and white bipolar people see the world and how when in the midst of an episode, there is no chance that I can see the world differently. That of course is not an attempt to escape culpability. Part of my healing comes with honestly accounting for my choices.
But can I tell you … that every time I descended into hell with my choices my wife came after me. Repeatedly. Over and over. Even sometimes as I was swinging at her on my way there.
As I navigated my illness I clung to images and messages that offered me hope. I covered the interior of my armoire with them creating a kind of shrine. One image is included here. Its a scene from the movie What Dreams May Come. Robin Williams is standing just behind Jessica Brooks Grant. She’s sent herself to hell through suicide. As he navigates his post-mortem existence he’s told that he can try and rescue her, but because she suffers from a kind of amnesia, she’s unlikely to be rescued, and what’s worse, if Robin spends too much time trying, he’ll be enveloped in hell with her permanently. Robin concluded that he’d rather suffer that consequence than live without her. Even as my story was unfolding I knew I was being pursued in a similar way.
In Psalm 139 the author writes, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.”
That of course is about God, but I have found repeatedly that the love of God shows up most poignantly and consistently in human flesh.
What does one do when they finally discover that they are loved so severely? So completely? That in your own story when you are the prodigal, you are smothered with prodigious love in return. I can only tell what I have concluded … to be loved by my wife must be a lot like being loved by God.
I have so badly wanted to be the hero of my own story my whole life, but this year I had to surrender to the reality that she is mine.
Let me say a word about my recovery. The current shape of my mental illness is that I have moved 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Lindsay has become, quite literally, clinically speaking, my obsession. This too is not sustainable, and as my therapists helps me narrate my story we acknowledge it for what it is, but the euphoria has its benefits. To quote saint Augustine, “love, loves, loving.” I have discovered a new joy in her and in myself.
I often think of that moment from The Family Man, when Tea Leoni and Nicholas Cage stare into each others eyes and she asks, “how can you do that? How can you look at me like you haven’t seen me everyday for the last thirteen years?” I do see Lindsay in a way I haven’t seen her before.
So most days are pleasant. Sometimes I spin again. The dark thoughts threaten to overwhelm me. I breathe. Lindsay breathes with me. She makes me talk about it. I exercise. I take anxiety medicine. Coping comes in all forms. Most of my efforts are about pulling my future oriented disposition back into the present, where possibility can’t threaten so sharply.
Retired Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas says we can’t possibly know what we mean when we say our vows. That’s true. All we can do is dare to undertake the task of making our lives match our confession. So I recognize that this year my post lacks romanticism, but it is full of resilience and fortitude. So today, we do all that we can do, which is to wander together without agenda into the heart of God, and that is our salvation.
Lindsay, I love you.
Pic 1: a snapshot of the joy I’ve described.
Pic 2: the photo described in this post.
Pic 3: a photo of me from my run this morning at Navy Pier. Because alcohol was such a substantial contributor to my malformation, my psychiatrist has prohibited it for the time being. I’m 17 weeks sober this last weekend. You can pray for me as I discern my future with alcohol. In its place, exercise has become a form mercy and there are few things I love more than the Great Lakes.
