What I Have Been Doing: Writing About Being Bipolar

     When I first thought of an autobiographical project, I had in mind a book of amusing stories, just my best stories about interesting people I have been privileged to meet in my life and unusual things I have witnessed and done. Confronting my past was not really needed for that project, I had already been telling many of the stories in “classical versions.” Soon stories I had forgotten about started flooding into my consciousness too, and I began to draw some of them as little comics. But like many creative projects, this one has now turned into something else, a task which DOES involve digging into and facing my past.                    
      It started when, out of desperation at being unemployed for so long, I read a self-help book in which the author suggested that the key to your success might be the very thing you think is your problem. Ok, turn a negative into a positive, I know, but how? Market your apparent eccentricity, since you don’t seem to fit into any of the available slots? Ok, maybe.  Then the cliché hit me with an idea I didn’t see coming: “Write about being bipolar.” Instead of hiding or de-emphasizing it, actually use it to attract publishers. My Bipolar Disorder is not an entirely negative thing in my life, but it was causing problems long before I was diagnosed. On the positive side, I think the highs gave me confidence to do things I might not have done on a more even keel, and that I gained sensitivity and empathy from the lows. Medication and cognitive therapy have greatly improved my life, but I still have to monitor my moods and try to stay physically healthy to support treatment.Why I was NOT diagnosed for so long is not much of a mystery really, although the details might prove interesting. Here are some reasons why I was not diagnosed sooner:
1.      I am Bipolar II, which is harder to diagnose and was not even classified when it first started happening to me. If you watch Homeland, the character Clare Danes plays is Bipolar II, and it is the most sensitive and accurate portrayal I have seen. She has extremely productive manias and hides during her self-doubting depressions.

2.      I found things to do in my life that were adaptable to my mood swings. Creative people are often bipolar to some degree (yes there are degrees), and I think it goes both ways, i.e. I pursued creative artistic activities in response to the way my mind and emotions worked. Writing and drawing allowed me to hide during depressions, and the manic side gave me the confidence to do things I might not have done on a more even keel, like directing plays and playing jazz with people a lot better than me.
3.      I grew up in the 60’s and 70's in northern California. My first few hitch-hiking trips as a teenager and my cross-country pilgrimage to Walden Pond were not that unusual in restless counter-culture. However, I was clearly running hypomanic on some of those “run-away-from-home” scenarios. I was confident that someone would give me a ride and that I would be safe.
4.      Self-medication


5.      I and other people assumed that what they did see of my manias and depressions were either  (1)just part of my volatile creative personality (which they are, in many ways) or  (2) me just being habitually melancholy and often whiney (depression) or (3) somewhat egotistical, short-tempered and obsessed with whatever I was enthusiastic about (mania). I thought that it was normal for me to vacillate between over-confidence and crippling self-doubt. I thought the Attention Deficit-like symptoms of hypomania were just my lack of discipline or concentration. Luckily hypomania also gives you the (usually false) confidence that you can finish the multiple activities you start, working a little, then shifting to a completely different task for another relatively short period. Thus, I shifted between playing the piano, writing, doing research, drawing or other hobbies, etc. etc. including whatever I am really supposed to be doing, like writing a long paper or reading student papers or paying attention to someone for an entire lunch. I didn’t realize that this was a symptom, I just thought I was interested in too many things and couldn’t let go of any of them for long. I learned improvisation and wrote mostly poetry because those art forms both fit with the immediacy I needed to stay interested and keep coming back.
6.      I was born into a loving middle class family that supported me in my creative pursuits. My parents paid for me to take private acting lessons and music lessons (organ and guitar). By the time I started having cycles, I had multiple creative outlets to channel mania into and to generate better brain chemistry when I was depressed.
7.      Periods of relatively stable "normality."
            I have had a lot of therapy, but even I haven’t had enough to connect all the dots between my bi-polar swings and my pre-diagnosis behavior. The idea of writing about being bi-polar sounded not only emotionally torturous but tedious until I realized that I would have to fictionalize it. Because this is a subjective memoir and not an autobiographical history, I must fictionalize it in order to avoid liability for any possible misrepresentation of people, incidents or of “Bipolarness” itself. Unlike writing history, fictionalizing also gives me the freedom to use framing devices, avoid the tedious details and create “composite” people and incidents that will be easier to tame into story.

Any behavior has multiple causes, even when we think we are in control and fully willing to do what we are doing.  That alone is enough to complicate “connecting the dots,” but there is also the subjectivity factor. Before diagnosis, before I knew I was bipolar, I completely identified with the emotions I felt, all the time. Now I know mania-from-depression-from-“normal”, but can I look objectively enough at my past to see when behavior I am ashamed of or embarrassed about was the result of being bi-polar? What if I was just young and an asshole in that instance? My mood swings would have explained a lot to me had I known what they were, but is it too late to sort the “normal” mistakes from bad judgment and grandiosity during mania or fear and insecurity during depression?       In addition to things I “heard all my life" that should have been clues, there was my own observation. I knew that “something was wrong.” In fact, that is the only way I could explain my first depression, which happened when I was about 14 years old, the summer before starting high school. Another story starts here, but for some reason I have a feeling that not only will I be able to finish this project, but that it will be publishable and sell. So you can read the fictionalized version later on. Now I have to shift my attention to more difficult things like actually confronting my past.

The Copying Experiment

     Today I am going to describe an experiment I did periodically with some of my college classes over the years. I did it enough times that I think I got a good sample, at least for my purposes. At any rate, I saw a lot of variation in how the students did the exercises.

     First, I drew a made-up symbol on a card, something scribbly, but not so complex that it couldn’t be remembered at all. I showed one student the card with this mark on it for three seconds, then I asked him to try to copy it from memory.  I then took the card the first student had drawn on to another and repeated the instructions.  When the symbol had been sufficiently mutated but was still recognizable I put the cards on the chalk ledge of the blackboard, but not in order. I asked someone not involved yet to try and place them in the order in which they were done.  Most of the time, the students were quickly accurate in their ordering of the series.

      The next part of the exercise is meant to make them realize something in connection with the first part. I drew a casual pentagram on the board and asked everyone to copy “Exactly what they saw” before I erased it. When they had all "copied" my star, I took several of the cards from a random selection of students and displayed them.  Everyone’s star was different, but they were all recognizable as stars. No one had tried to draw my star exactly, but instead they all relied on their previously installed memes for “how to make a pentagram.”  Except for one, who relied on her previously installed meme for drawing a Star of David. Very carefully, I asked the woman who drew it if she had thought consciously about drawing a six pointed star, or if she had even noticed that my star was five-pointed. She thought for a minute and said, “I just drew a star after I saw you had drawn one, just like everyone else. Mine just came out the way I always draw them.”

     This was the only time that happened, but of course this was not the only time that a Jewish student participated in the exercise.  Significant to the evaluation of this variation was the age of the woman, who was in her early fifties, in contrast with most of the undergraduates who were twenty-somethings. I think we could say that she had a different meme for “drawing a star” than anyone else in class. This inspired me to look closer at all the ways the kids “wrote” their pentagrams.  Another time I asked several students to go to the board and make a star without thinking about it. We watched for similarities and differences in the way they did it. Everyone started at the top and drew the first line down to the left, even the left-handers.  The stars all looked a bit different, but in the way that everyone’s cursive letters look a little different.  The “instructions for making a star” meme had become an unconscious motion for them, in the same way that we don’t have to think of each word as we speak, even though we had to “learn” each word at some point in the past.

     There are several points demonstrated in this exercise. Our ingrained cultural habits become unconscious and influence the way we see and remember. Shapes that we learned through “instructions” are more stable, and the resulting uniformity makes them easier to copy. Left-handers learn to do some things the right-handed way. The order in which slight variations appear between “generations” of copying can be reconstructed.

     Now, students, you tell me: What does all this have to do with the study of history?