For years, I retreated from the world living within the deep recesses of my mind. I was like a frightened dog cowering in the darkness of a cave trying to avoid the sunlight because it was too searing. Now, I see the light in a different way. It appears warm and inviting, in the forms of people’s hands reaching out to me, beckoning to me to come out of my cave. I emerge from the darkness into the light.

For a long time, the world to me was like the wild sea. It was a dangerous, threatening place. The world rushed in like ocean waves washing onto the sand dunes of my mind. I was pulled in and dragged down to the bottom where creatures scuttled along the ocean floor. Miraculously, I did not die. Beneath the surface, I glided along engulfed by stillness. Just then, I had a vision that the stillness was just like deeply felt serenity within one’s soul. I sprang up from the sea and breathed in the cool, salt air. I was alive and renewed.

*****

I have lived with a major mental illness for over half my life. I consider myself a survivor of an inner battle that I waged for many years. The world to me was a threatening place. I felt like a writhing snake with its skin torn off, baking under a hot desert sun. Each challenge in my life was so unbearably painful that I retreated within myself. But the inner world was not safe either. In fact, it was far more terrifying than the world outside me.

Though I was tormented from the time of my childhood, I wasn’t actually diagnosed with a severe mental illness until years later when I was twenty-five years old. I believe my father, an alcoholic and still actively drinking, had been mentally ill for many years, but never diagnosed and treated for it. He medicated himself with booze. I believe he passed the illness on to me.

Stress plays a very important part in triggering either a manic or depressed episode. Moving from place to place was a stressor that intensified my illness. I was twenty years old when my life began unraveling and I found it increasingly difficult to function. I was a junior in college at the University of Vermont, a transfer student from a women’s college in Boston. The stress of leaving my friends and starting over soon became unbearable. I had moved from place to place since I was a sophomore in high school. My mother divorced my father and moved the four of us children from California to Connecticut. A year later, we moved to small town over the state border into New York where I began my third high school in three years. After graduating, I attended the college in Boston for two years before transferring to the University of Vermont.

I learned to run from pain. But, the pain caught up with me eventually. Depression dominated my disease, although mania and thought disorders were mixed with it. In school, I trudged through snow drifts five feet high to the library where I attempted to study for hours. I couldn’t concentrate or process the information. My mind buzzed like angry bees. When I experienced physical pains in my side in the middle of the night, I went to the emergency room. The doctors found nothing wrong. In attempts to escape from the increasingly dark, heavy curtain of despair that consumed me, I went to the nearby disco and danced, drank and slept with strangers. Anxiety threaded through my very existence. I pulled all my eyebrow hairs out. Before long, I had suicidal thoughts and felt an inner war wage inside me wanting to live and graduate from college or die as a final solution to the madness. I was experiencing the psychosis of thought and mood disorders, though at the time I didn’t know it. I slipped in and out of the punishing world within my mind; a world of self-hatred and distorted thoughts; a technicolor world of visions, while the world outside was grey, hazy, unreal. Emotions were like blazing fires that I couldn’t put out. Thoughts weren’t reasonable or rational. They were like the deafening sounds of a locomotive running through my head. Thoughts were noise, blasting music. Though rationality and reason were in the periphery of my mind like mountains in the distance, I managed to keep my eye on those mountains even when clouds obscured them.

Despite other crises that occurred the final two years of college — an abusive relationship and living in Spain for four months as an exchange student with the psychosis intensifying to the point of terror, I managed to graduate from college and moved back to Boston.

For two years, the loud music within my mind ceased. My illness went into remission. Like clothes once thrown haphazardly from bureau drawers after a devastating earthquake, they were not folded and put neatly back into the drawers and closed up. My once crazy emotions were tucked away and my rational thoughts dominated.

In my poem, I see the world as threatening like the wild sea or searing sunlight. But, the visions, sounds, delusions, despair and mania within my mind were far more terrifying. Eventually, I would have to turn to the world and to people to save me from the inner havoc my mind created.

In 1986, at twenty five years old, the illness returned. I checked myself into a mental hospital in Florida which turned out to be a hellish experience, and was finally flown up to Connecticut to live with my mother and begin the long road to recovery.

I could run no more. I had to face the demons within as well as learn to trust people who reached their hands out to me. I attended a psychiatric day hospital, moved into a halfway house and began the long journey back to sanity. Beneath the surface of my mind, stillness began to engulf me like deeply felt serenity within my soul. I put the pieces together. I needed the world and a support system of caring hands to stay well.

****

2001 — Fifteen years have passed since I was first diagnosed with a major mental illness. I am not cured but I have been out of the locked psychiatric ward since 1988. I am happily married and have many friends. I am in recovery and grateful for every day. I have returned from a long journey that took me away from the world for a while; but, I am back.

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