This document originally appeared as a series of posts on
Facebook in honor of Mental Illness Awareness Week. The posts remain unedited
to retain their honesty and sincerity.
My name is Lyman B. Feero Jr. and I have Bipolar II
Disorder. It is important that I start this series of posts that way. One, it
identifies who I am. Two, it identifies the mental illness I was diagnosed with
in November of 2000. Three, when you put them together it signifies ownership.
My name is who I am, my illness is uniquely mine.
The impact of my illness is not uniquely mine, however. My family, less so my boys because I got help when they were only infants, was deeply hurt by things I did while ill. That part of my story is their story too so before I shared certain aspects of my story I sat down with them to be sure their pain was ok to share. There were tears, mostly mine, and hugs and a general sense that if what I share helps just one person seek the help they need then there is nothing too personal to tell. I have decided to tell my story scars and all. There are aspects of my life of which I’m not proud. There is a considerable amount of shame wrapped up in some aspects of my illness. But for a long time, shame is what kept me from getting the help I needed. If I broke my silence anyone can.
If you’re reading this then you are most likely on my friend list or you know someone who is and they shared it. For those who don’t know me, I’m a forty five year old husband and father of two fromMaine .
I’m a writer and drama coach living a quiet life on a dead end gravel road in a
house I remodeled myself. My greatest joys are watching my teen sons grow into
intelligent and responsible young men and loving my wife of twenty three years.
A few that knew me from way back will tell you that even in high school, this
is the life for which I aspired. Father, husband, son. Those have and always
will be the roles that are most important to me.
Getting here wasn’t easy and I don’t wish to paint a pastoral nirvana. Being here isn’t always fun. Life is a stressful little bugger and my family isn’t free from its grip more than anyone else. There’s always money and relationship issues, the constant bustle of teenage boys and their schedules, pets to go to the vet, repairs to be made, stress to be stressed over. But I’m well and that makes a world of difference.
So what exactly is Bipolar II Disorder (BP2D)?
Well… clinically it’s a subset of Bipolar I Disorder, however, there are some mental health professionals that feel it is its own unique illness. BP2D presents itself as periods of depression followed by periods of elevated mood. In BP1D, these elevated moods may be marked by psychosis. In BP2D there is no psychotic component. It is referred to as hypomania (beneath mania). Many times when BP2D individuals are having a hypomanic episode, they can often seem like the "life of the party" -- making jokes, taking an intense interest in other people and activities. Their good mood is infectious. They have boundless energy and can go all night without a break. They can be super productive and if in the creative arts, super prolific. However, hypomania does have a down side. It can also lead to erratic and unhealthy behavior. People in hypomanic episodes might spend money they don't have, seek out sex with people they normally wouldn't, and engage in other impulsive or risky behaviors. When the “high” is over and the depression returns, the BP2D individual may face mountains of debt or the aftermath of infidelity creating and even steeper descent into the pit of depression.
These mood swings are called cycling. The periods between cycles can be weeks, months or even years. Often with BP2D individuals there are long stretches of normal mood where the illness is dormant. However, some individuals have rapid cycling where the moods swing every few days. Another class referred to as ultra-rapid cycling can have mood swings every few hours. In a nutshell my disorder took me from crushing despair to euphoric elation back to soul rending nothingness every few weeks.
Bipolar II Disorder has no cure. There are very effective and proven treatments to abate the symptoms. I am living symptom free through the use of Lithium and a mood stabilizer called Lamictal. This drug combination has freed me, but more on that later.
Briefly, that’s who I am and that’s the illness I had to overcome. In my next post I’ll start sharing the story of my journey up from utter destruction to where I am now.
Thank you for reading.
Remember October 6 to 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week.
The impact of my illness is not uniquely mine, however. My family, less so my boys because I got help when they were only infants, was deeply hurt by things I did while ill. That part of my story is their story too so before I shared certain aspects of my story I sat down with them to be sure their pain was ok to share. There were tears, mostly mine, and hugs and a general sense that if what I share helps just one person seek the help they need then there is nothing too personal to tell. I have decided to tell my story scars and all. There are aspects of my life of which I’m not proud. There is a considerable amount of shame wrapped up in some aspects of my illness. But for a long time, shame is what kept me from getting the help I needed. If I broke my silence anyone can.
If you’re reading this then you are most likely on my friend list or you know someone who is and they shared it. For those who don’t know me, I’m a forty five year old husband and father of two from
Getting here wasn’t easy and I don’t wish to paint a pastoral nirvana. Being here isn’t always fun. Life is a stressful little bugger and my family isn’t free from its grip more than anyone else. There’s always money and relationship issues, the constant bustle of teenage boys and their schedules, pets to go to the vet, repairs to be made, stress to be stressed over. But I’m well and that makes a world of difference.
So what exactly is Bipolar II Disorder (BP2D)?
Well… clinically it’s a subset of Bipolar I Disorder, however, there are some mental health professionals that feel it is its own unique illness. BP2D presents itself as periods of depression followed by periods of elevated mood. In BP1D, these elevated moods may be marked by psychosis. In BP2D there is no psychotic component. It is referred to as hypomania (beneath mania). Many times when BP2D individuals are having a hypomanic episode, they can often seem like the "life of the party" -- making jokes, taking an intense interest in other people and activities. Their good mood is infectious. They have boundless energy and can go all night without a break. They can be super productive and if in the creative arts, super prolific. However, hypomania does have a down side. It can also lead to erratic and unhealthy behavior. People in hypomanic episodes might spend money they don't have, seek out sex with people they normally wouldn't, and engage in other impulsive or risky behaviors. When the “high” is over and the depression returns, the BP2D individual may face mountains of debt or the aftermath of infidelity creating and even steeper descent into the pit of depression.
These mood swings are called cycling. The periods between cycles can be weeks, months or even years. Often with BP2D individuals there are long stretches of normal mood where the illness is dormant. However, some individuals have rapid cycling where the moods swing every few days. Another class referred to as ultra-rapid cycling can have mood swings every few hours. In a nutshell my disorder took me from crushing despair to euphoric elation back to soul rending nothingness every few weeks.
Bipolar II Disorder has no cure. There are very effective and proven treatments to abate the symptoms. I am living symptom free through the use of Lithium and a mood stabilizer called Lamictal. This drug combination has freed me, but more on that later.
Briefly, that’s who I am and that’s the illness I had to overcome. In my next post I’ll start sharing the story of my journey up from utter destruction to where I am now.
Thank you for reading.
Remember October 6 to 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week.
Many thanks to those who have commented both publicly and
privately on my last post. One thing I definitely need to clear up is that my
personal pain is pretty much over. I’ve been well since 2002 and I’m happy with
where and who I am. That’s why I feel it is important for me to tell my story
so that others can reach out and get the help they need for themselves or a loved
one. It can get better.
So back at it, eh?
To understand my story you first have to understand how Bipolar II Disorder influenced my moods. For every individual the symptoms of the depressive and hypomanic phases of the illness are different.
My depressions were deep vast pools of emptiness. Most people think of depression as feeling sad. Feeling is the last word I would use to describe it. In my periods of depression I was nothing more than an empty shell. I could muster no self-esteem, no self-worth, all that existed was an ache, an honest and sincere sense of a void that was bottomless running through the center of my chest. With years and years of training I was able to keep myself functioning allowing only a glimpse of “bad mood” to show on my public face. Sleeping became a blessing or video games or movies or novels anything that took me out of my head. Most of the time the complete lack of interest in anything made sleeping my first choice. I frantically tried to fill that emptiness… food, drugs, alcohol but there is no way to fill it and the more I tried the wider it grew. Eventually I stopped believing what those who loved me told me. I doubted their love because I was nothing. There was nothing but void. You can’t love a void. Three times in my life I tried to end the pain through suicide (obviously I suck at it) and once through running away… more on that later.
What is painful for me about BP2D is that some of my greatest accomplishments occurred during hypomanic episodes. But… some of the most destructive things I’ve done have come from those very same periods. What was hypomania for me? If you think of depression as a dead battery then hypomania is like being linked directly into the power grid. Creativity oozes out of your pores. Ideas whiz through your head. You feel strong, euphoric, wildly charming. You’re a Rock Star, a Sex Symbol, a Master of Life. Any idea you have is gold and anything you need to make magic is affordable. Debt is something irrelevant. People are your play toys. You are good, you are great, you can make no bad choices. You can’t understand why you were so depressed. You don’t need sleep. You don’t need food and it’s all justifiable in the end. Sounds fun but that level of delusion always ends up hurting someone.
Bipolar Disorder is about highs and lows, a duality of mood, but for me it was more than that. An additional specter hung over both my hypomanic and depressive moods. Irritability was a symptom common to both. It was a snarling beast which I was never very good at hiding. People knew when to swing clear. Family and friends walked on egg shells. (Erik, my apologies for the many mornings of mega-decibel MegaDeth.) What I couldn’t tell the one’s I loved back then was that the anger, the rage, was directed squarely at myself not them. There is a certain degree of self-loathing that accompanies BP2D. During my depressions it was mean and cold. During my hypomanias it was condescending and colder.
I guess I’ve beat around the bush long enough. The average onset of Bipolar II Disorder is before the age of 50. The majority of the time it occurs in a person’s twenties, and in rare cases onset can occur as early as elementary school. Some believe that onset may occur in infancy but there is no solid evidence to prove it. I don’t think my onset happened before middle school but there were certainly warning signs during my pre-adolescent years.
I can remember vividly my first depression. It was 7th grade. My elementary school years were spent in a two room school house. The town I grew up in a town that had a population of a little over 500 at the time. It only had that one school. Three grades in each room. There were five other kids in my sixth grade class. At the end of sixth grade, we were transferred to the next town over to go to middle school. I went from having six kids in my class to over 100. (Cut me some slack. I grew up in ruralMaine .
One hundred kids was an army to me.) Unfortunately, none of my classes were
with any of my classmates from my home town. I was alone and a stranger. Most
of these kids had grown up together. They had six years of bonding that glued
their friendships. I quickly became fodder. I was made fun of, beaten, spit on
and even had my hair lit on fire that first year. I developed stomach aches
that I know now were stress related. I still get them today if the pressure is
too great. I missed 42 days of school that year. I felt worthless and hollow. I
wanted to die. I contemplated on how to make it happen.
My story spans 35 years of my life so I’m not going to go through every up and down, but firsts are important. The depression lasted for another year, as did the abuse. 8th grade was an improvement with just one bully instead of four. I wasn’t as naïve. (See I had no older brother to teach me the ways of slang and I thought a beaver was an animal that ate tree bark. So when kids start quizzing you on such things it makes you a target of ridicule.) My body was betraying me still. I was 5’1” and weighed nearly 150. I was short and fat which made me a prime target. Two things changed the summer following that year. One, I had my first hypomanic episode. Two, my body decided it was going to grow as big as my mind felt.
I grew eight inches over the summer and it wasn’t tall skinny height. I grew a fair amount of muscle as well. I was now much bigger than my bullies. As if by magic the dark clouds lifted and I suddenly had the self confidence to do things I never had before. I convinced my parents to let me play football. I sucked at it but I stuck it out. The bullying went away. I talked to girls I never would have dreamed of talking to before. My grades were the best they had ever been. I had new friends. I was firing on all cylinders. Then in a pre-game warm-up in a tackling drill, I broke my back. Scared… yes… depressed… no. This is how I know I was hypomanic. The depression didn’t return. I still felt strong and charming and important. If anything the attention my injury brought was a buzz. The euphoria wouldn’t last.
There are life circumstances that can influence mental illnesses. They are called triggers. For me stress and health are two biggies. Even now that I’m well mild depressions can be set off if I’m sick or under the gun. I’ve often wondered but never asked if hypomanias have triggers but I think maybe they do and puberty was my first glimpse at future hypomanias.
We can skip over the next two years. I think I entered into a phase where my moods were stable even though I had witnessed my father having a stroke. I won’t say I was free from depression or that it didn't screw me up. That incident left an indelible impression on my mind but I don’t think I was clinically depressed.
Senior year. This confession will be the hardest so far. It is difficult for me to think that my life almost ended at seventeen. I don’t think anyone but my wife and my closest friend knows that I attempted to commit suicide that year. (Mom and Dad. There was nothing you could have done. This illness claims thousands every year and back then it was hardly on the radar. I survived that’s all that matters.) I got sick, really sick with mono. I was out of school for a long time. I was suffering from my first real heart-ache of my young adult life, my grades were shitty, I was arguing with my best friend at the time, I’d pulled away from my Dad because of his stroke and then mono hit. Remember the bit about triggers… like a switch baby. I’m not going to go into the specifics of how I tried to kill myself, they’re not important and I would never forgive myself if someone emulated them. I failed (Duh.) and had to spend what was already a difficult recovery from mono, hiding the injuries from my attempt.
Attempting suicide requires a fair amount of energy and conviction. After my failure I entered into something I affectionately call the Wallow. It’s a depression that goes below suicidal thoughts. It’s a place of such despair all energy is consumed by it. You cease to exist on some level. I’m sure there’s some id, ego, superego thing going on but basically you despise who you are so much you can’t even move. When life forces you to move? You become a ghost floating through life pretending to be anything other than what you are. I’m sure that to some of you who knew me back then, this revelation is a shock.
Which reminds me. I love masks. I collect them. I make them. Especially Italian Bauta masks. I’ve always been a mask maker. I have known for a very long time that there was something wrong with me. I knew that none of my friends were feeling the same way I was. I thought I was broken and I was deeply ashamed. I learned early on that putting on a public face was the easiest way to avoid questions and keep private that which no one but you should know. I wish now I hadn’t been a mask maker. I might have had more happy years.
But no matter how low depression mucked me through the mud, my good friend hypomania stepped in and kicked me in the ass. It would be only a couple months later hypomania would send me on a whirlwind relationship. I met a girl while on an upswing and she got to experience first hand the intensity that hypomania brings. I loved her, I hurt her (emotionally), I needed her, I hurt her more. I was obsessed with her and sex and danger. I was jealous and controlling. An asshole and a paramour. I was a nightmare and sadly at the time all I cared about was me. I wish I could give her back the months she put up with me.
I don’t know what I should include and what I shouldn’t but those were the worst instances of my illness in the early years. Certainly there are smaller incidents that happened in that time line but I’m just hoping to provide a series of snapshots and maybe by the end a coherent story will gel.
Next Post: The Fall (The events that led to me getting help)
Thanks for reading.
Remember October 6 – 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week
So back at it, eh?
To understand my story you first have to understand how Bipolar II Disorder influenced my moods. For every individual the symptoms of the depressive and hypomanic phases of the illness are different.
My depressions were deep vast pools of emptiness. Most people think of depression as feeling sad. Feeling is the last word I would use to describe it. In my periods of depression I was nothing more than an empty shell. I could muster no self-esteem, no self-worth, all that existed was an ache, an honest and sincere sense of a void that was bottomless running through the center of my chest. With years and years of training I was able to keep myself functioning allowing only a glimpse of “bad mood” to show on my public face. Sleeping became a blessing or video games or movies or novels anything that took me out of my head. Most of the time the complete lack of interest in anything made sleeping my first choice. I frantically tried to fill that emptiness… food, drugs, alcohol but there is no way to fill it and the more I tried the wider it grew. Eventually I stopped believing what those who loved me told me. I doubted their love because I was nothing. There was nothing but void. You can’t love a void. Three times in my life I tried to end the pain through suicide (obviously I suck at it) and once through running away… more on that later.
What is painful for me about BP2D is that some of my greatest accomplishments occurred during hypomanic episodes. But… some of the most destructive things I’ve done have come from those very same periods. What was hypomania for me? If you think of depression as a dead battery then hypomania is like being linked directly into the power grid. Creativity oozes out of your pores. Ideas whiz through your head. You feel strong, euphoric, wildly charming. You’re a Rock Star, a Sex Symbol, a Master of Life. Any idea you have is gold and anything you need to make magic is affordable. Debt is something irrelevant. People are your play toys. You are good, you are great, you can make no bad choices. You can’t understand why you were so depressed. You don’t need sleep. You don’t need food and it’s all justifiable in the end. Sounds fun but that level of delusion always ends up hurting someone.
Bipolar Disorder is about highs and lows, a duality of mood, but for me it was more than that. An additional specter hung over both my hypomanic and depressive moods. Irritability was a symptom common to both. It was a snarling beast which I was never very good at hiding. People knew when to swing clear. Family and friends walked on egg shells. (Erik, my apologies for the many mornings of mega-decibel MegaDeth.) What I couldn’t tell the one’s I loved back then was that the anger, the rage, was directed squarely at myself not them. There is a certain degree of self-loathing that accompanies BP2D. During my depressions it was mean and cold. During my hypomanias it was condescending and colder.
I guess I’ve beat around the bush long enough. The average onset of Bipolar II Disorder is before the age of 50. The majority of the time it occurs in a person’s twenties, and in rare cases onset can occur as early as elementary school. Some believe that onset may occur in infancy but there is no solid evidence to prove it. I don’t think my onset happened before middle school but there were certainly warning signs during my pre-adolescent years.
I can remember vividly my first depression. It was 7th grade. My elementary school years were spent in a two room school house. The town I grew up in a town that had a population of a little over 500 at the time. It only had that one school. Three grades in each room. There were five other kids in my sixth grade class. At the end of sixth grade, we were transferred to the next town over to go to middle school. I went from having six kids in my class to over 100. (Cut me some slack. I grew up in rural
My story spans 35 years of my life so I’m not going to go through every up and down, but firsts are important. The depression lasted for another year, as did the abuse. 8th grade was an improvement with just one bully instead of four. I wasn’t as naïve. (See I had no older brother to teach me the ways of slang and I thought a beaver was an animal that ate tree bark. So when kids start quizzing you on such things it makes you a target of ridicule.) My body was betraying me still. I was 5’1” and weighed nearly 150. I was short and fat which made me a prime target. Two things changed the summer following that year. One, I had my first hypomanic episode. Two, my body decided it was going to grow as big as my mind felt.
I grew eight inches over the summer and it wasn’t tall skinny height. I grew a fair amount of muscle as well. I was now much bigger than my bullies. As if by magic the dark clouds lifted and I suddenly had the self confidence to do things I never had before. I convinced my parents to let me play football. I sucked at it but I stuck it out. The bullying went away. I talked to girls I never would have dreamed of talking to before. My grades were the best they had ever been. I had new friends. I was firing on all cylinders. Then in a pre-game warm-up in a tackling drill, I broke my back. Scared… yes… depressed… no. This is how I know I was hypomanic. The depression didn’t return. I still felt strong and charming and important. If anything the attention my injury brought was a buzz. The euphoria wouldn’t last.
There are life circumstances that can influence mental illnesses. They are called triggers. For me stress and health are two biggies. Even now that I’m well mild depressions can be set off if I’m sick or under the gun. I’ve often wondered but never asked if hypomanias have triggers but I think maybe they do and puberty was my first glimpse at future hypomanias.
We can skip over the next two years. I think I entered into a phase where my moods were stable even though I had witnessed my father having a stroke. I won’t say I was free from depression or that it didn't screw me up. That incident left an indelible impression on my mind but I don’t think I was clinically depressed.
Senior year. This confession will be the hardest so far. It is difficult for me to think that my life almost ended at seventeen. I don’t think anyone but my wife and my closest friend knows that I attempted to commit suicide that year. (Mom and Dad. There was nothing you could have done. This illness claims thousands every year and back then it was hardly on the radar. I survived that’s all that matters.) I got sick, really sick with mono. I was out of school for a long time. I was suffering from my first real heart-ache of my young adult life, my grades were shitty, I was arguing with my best friend at the time, I’d pulled away from my Dad because of his stroke and then mono hit. Remember the bit about triggers… like a switch baby. I’m not going to go into the specifics of how I tried to kill myself, they’re not important and I would never forgive myself if someone emulated them. I failed (Duh.) and had to spend what was already a difficult recovery from mono, hiding the injuries from my attempt.
Attempting suicide requires a fair amount of energy and conviction. After my failure I entered into something I affectionately call the Wallow. It’s a depression that goes below suicidal thoughts. It’s a place of such despair all energy is consumed by it. You cease to exist on some level. I’m sure there’s some id, ego, superego thing going on but basically you despise who you are so much you can’t even move. When life forces you to move? You become a ghost floating through life pretending to be anything other than what you are. I’m sure that to some of you who knew me back then, this revelation is a shock.
Which reminds me. I love masks. I collect them. I make them. Especially Italian Bauta masks. I’ve always been a mask maker. I have known for a very long time that there was something wrong with me. I knew that none of my friends were feeling the same way I was. I thought I was broken and I was deeply ashamed. I learned early on that putting on a public face was the easiest way to avoid questions and keep private that which no one but you should know. I wish now I hadn’t been a mask maker. I might have had more happy years.
But no matter how low depression mucked me through the mud, my good friend hypomania stepped in and kicked me in the ass. It would be only a couple months later hypomania would send me on a whirlwind relationship. I met a girl while on an upswing and she got to experience first hand the intensity that hypomania brings. I loved her, I hurt her (emotionally), I needed her, I hurt her more. I was obsessed with her and sex and danger. I was jealous and controlling. An asshole and a paramour. I was a nightmare and sadly at the time all I cared about was me. I wish I could give her back the months she put up with me.
I don’t know what I should include and what I shouldn’t but those were the worst instances of my illness in the early years. Certainly there are smaller incidents that happened in that time line but I’m just hoping to provide a series of snapshots and maybe by the end a coherent story will gel.
Next Post: The Fall (The events that led to me getting help)
Thanks for reading.
Remember October 6 – 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week
Lyman's Story Continued from October 8
People have asked why am I doing this as individual posts rather than one large installment. I don’t want to give myself the chance to edit. If I do this story as a series of posts I think I will be more honest. In the end, I’ll pull everything together and make it available as a unified document. Of course… as a writer… not editing can be embarrassing. I’ve seen some grand slam grammatical errors and some pretty sweet typos in my previous posts.
Yesterday was tough… it’s not easy to admit that you have intentionally tried to die. A theme emerged concerning the ways I tried. They were meant to look like accidents. Even in my darkest hours I didn’t want people to feel they could have stopped me in any way shape or manner. If I were to die, let them think fate took me on a whim. However, staging a death to look like an accident and have it succeed is not an easy thing to do. And as a dear friend reminded me… I have always had “something” looking out for me. I’m kind of like a cat that way I guess.
Before I get into the rest of the story, there are a few things I need to discuss to provide context. The next span of the story stretches over fourteen years. That’s a lot of ground to cover but thankfully it’s easily condensed.
When I was ill I was still me. That was the hardest concept for me to grasp in therapy. The core of my personality remained the same in times of depression or hypomania. My moral code (though bent and twisted sometimes) remained intact. It wasn’t a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
My illness was not severe enough to disable me. I was able to function even in the deepest despairs. Through both hypomanic and depressive states I finished my B.A. in English/Creative Writing and my M.A. in Theater. I got married and worked hard at maintaining that marriage. It was a constant battle fixing the little fires my illness created. I worked in academia, editing and writing. I lived, on the outside, what appeared to be a normal, successful life.
And there were normal stretches. I don’t think my marriage would have survived if there weren’t. It is good to know that even in the depths of my illness I was valued enough to keep my family and friends. I feel a need to punish myself even now for the lies and the foul moods and the selfishness with which my illness buffeted them. I thank whatever powers that be that their love was strong enough to forgive me. Forgiving me is a different story… that’s a road I still walk even after eleven years of being well.
Also, I have, and never will, consider myself to be an attractive man. Smashingly ordinary?... Maybe. I know this would appear to be a non sequitur, but bear with me.
1988 and 1989 saw suicide attempts that failed. Once again I am not the master planner when it comes to “accidental” deaths. I don’t mean to make light of this but because my attempts were meant to look like accidents no one recognized them as desperate cries for help either. The irony is, if I had tried in a more obvious manner, I would have succeeded.
Over the course of those two years I also started using something called Relay. It was absolutely amazing. Once upon a time, the internet was a small suckling babe. A school named Yale interconnected a bunch of other school’s computer and opened a chat server called relay. If you had a computer account, you could log in and chat with other users from a dozen or so other schools. (Ok… stop laughing… we didn’t even have personal cell phones smaller than toasters back then.)
It was a boon for someone like me. When I wasn’t hypomanic I envisioned myself as looking somewhat like a gorilla or Quasimodo so the ability to chat with girls was key to my self esteem. When I was hypomanic? I went and saw them. I dirty danced (litereally) in Portland, I slept (literally) on the floor with two girls in Farmington, shared a bathroom with a cow (literally) in upstate New York, had room service (euphemism) in Long Island and a few other things in a few other places. In the morning I was in English class, that evening I was inVermont licking maple syrup…
off a spoon (literally).
And that was about it. Suicidal depressions mixed with hours of driving to party with people I didn’t know. Side Note: Most confusing experience for a rural boy fromMaine ? A New
York City nightclub in the late 1980’s.
Then POW. Something very substantial happened in the middle of all this. I was two weeks out from having gone to see nightclub chick. There was chemistry there but we simply lived too far apart. I was feeling a little down so I went to the computer lab. For whatever reason, the usual relayers weren’t on. For the first time ever a stranger messaged me. It was summer and the girl was from a city only an hour’s drive away. We barely chatted before I offered to go meet her…
It is not possible to guess how deep a depression is going to go. Before I had what I called Anchors my depression seemed to head to the bottom every time. As you grow into an adult your parents become less and less the anchors that you need to survive. I found two great friends to serve as anchors during the years directly following high school. Even that wasn’t enough though to keep me from drifting off in the darkest of storms. I also found an anchor in my faculty mentor for my English degree. We were kindred spirits and the intellectual discussions we had about horror films still makes me smile. Yet again not enough. But it was a start.
She was tall and adorable and when she looked in my rear window of my car I couldn’t believe this was who I was meeting. She had catfished me of course by saying she looked like an East German weightlifter. We met. We talked. I lied. She laughed.
I lied. That’s an important sentence. My bipolar II disorder was filled with lies. There were so many I couldn’t keep them straight so I had to start lying about lying.
And by the end of that meeting I felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer and hit me square between the eyes. Over, done with, gone. We dated for a couple weeks before she left forEngland
on a prescheduled, nine month, student exchange. I stopped using relay. I
started drinking more. My depression returned and a suicide attempt occurred
sometime during her absence.
The day she returned from England she cried because she missed her friends. I cried because I thought it was over… who could expect nine months of only e-mails and a couple phone calls to hold together a relationship only three weeks old when we separated. That night she told me she loved me.
Let me pause here… I’m about to use a very unromantic image to express the third deepest emotion (and just so people don’t get pissed at me, One and Two were the emotions that I felt at the sight of my newborn sons.) I have ever felt in my life.
When I heard those words I honestly felt something break inside me and I was filled with a light that permeated every shred of my being. (See where I’m going with this.) I was a human glowstick of love! And at that same moment I knew that no matter how dark the darkest times were I would never attempt suicide again as long as I had her. She was the Uberanchor… and she always will be… She saved me from death and ultimately saved me from myself. Even in the tumult that was my disorder she agreed to marry me a year later.
When you love someone and you have their support nothing can stop you… unless you hurt them…then it’s a whole different ball game.
I’m going to stop here for today… I got to call a certain glowstick breaker and shaker and tell her I love her.
Remember, October 6-12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week
People have asked why am I doing this as individual posts rather than one large installment. I don’t want to give myself the chance to edit. If I do this story as a series of posts I think I will be more honest. In the end, I’ll pull everything together and make it available as a unified document. Of course… as a writer… not editing can be embarrassing. I’ve seen some grand slam grammatical errors and some pretty sweet typos in my previous posts.
Yesterday was tough… it’s not easy to admit that you have intentionally tried to die. A theme emerged concerning the ways I tried. They were meant to look like accidents. Even in my darkest hours I didn’t want people to feel they could have stopped me in any way shape or manner. If I were to die, let them think fate took me on a whim. However, staging a death to look like an accident and have it succeed is not an easy thing to do. And as a dear friend reminded me… I have always had “something” looking out for me. I’m kind of like a cat that way I guess.
Before I get into the rest of the story, there are a few things I need to discuss to provide context. The next span of the story stretches over fourteen years. That’s a lot of ground to cover but thankfully it’s easily condensed.
When I was ill I was still me. That was the hardest concept for me to grasp in therapy. The core of my personality remained the same in times of depression or hypomania. My moral code (though bent and twisted sometimes) remained intact. It wasn’t a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
My illness was not severe enough to disable me. I was able to function even in the deepest despairs. Through both hypomanic and depressive states I finished my B.A. in English/Creative Writing and my M.A. in Theater. I got married and worked hard at maintaining that marriage. It was a constant battle fixing the little fires my illness created. I worked in academia, editing and writing. I lived, on the outside, what appeared to be a normal, successful life.
And there were normal stretches. I don’t think my marriage would have survived if there weren’t. It is good to know that even in the depths of my illness I was valued enough to keep my family and friends. I feel a need to punish myself even now for the lies and the foul moods and the selfishness with which my illness buffeted them. I thank whatever powers that be that their love was strong enough to forgive me. Forgiving me is a different story… that’s a road I still walk even after eleven years of being well.
Also, I have, and never will, consider myself to be an attractive man. Smashingly ordinary?... Maybe. I know this would appear to be a non sequitur, but bear with me.
1988 and 1989 saw suicide attempts that failed. Once again I am not the master planner when it comes to “accidental” deaths. I don’t mean to make light of this but because my attempts were meant to look like accidents no one recognized them as desperate cries for help either. The irony is, if I had tried in a more obvious manner, I would have succeeded.
Over the course of those two years I also started using something called Relay. It was absolutely amazing. Once upon a time, the internet was a small suckling babe. A school named Yale interconnected a bunch of other school’s computer and opened a chat server called relay. If you had a computer account, you could log in and chat with other users from a dozen or so other schools. (Ok… stop laughing… we didn’t even have personal cell phones smaller than toasters back then.)
It was a boon for someone like me. When I wasn’t hypomanic I envisioned myself as looking somewhat like a gorilla or Quasimodo so the ability to chat with girls was key to my self esteem. When I was hypomanic? I went and saw them. I dirty danced (litereally) in Portland, I slept (literally) on the floor with two girls in Farmington, shared a bathroom with a cow (literally) in upstate New York, had room service (euphemism) in Long Island and a few other things in a few other places. In the morning I was in English class, that evening I was in
And that was about it. Suicidal depressions mixed with hours of driving to party with people I didn’t know. Side Note: Most confusing experience for a rural boy from
Then POW. Something very substantial happened in the middle of all this. I was two weeks out from having gone to see nightclub chick. There was chemistry there but we simply lived too far apart. I was feeling a little down so I went to the computer lab. For whatever reason, the usual relayers weren’t on. For the first time ever a stranger messaged me. It was summer and the girl was from a city only an hour’s drive away. We barely chatted before I offered to go meet her…
It is not possible to guess how deep a depression is going to go. Before I had what I called Anchors my depression seemed to head to the bottom every time. As you grow into an adult your parents become less and less the anchors that you need to survive. I found two great friends to serve as anchors during the years directly following high school. Even that wasn’t enough though to keep me from drifting off in the darkest of storms. I also found an anchor in my faculty mentor for my English degree. We were kindred spirits and the intellectual discussions we had about horror films still makes me smile. Yet again not enough. But it was a start.
She was tall and adorable and when she looked in my rear window of my car I couldn’t believe this was who I was meeting. She had catfished me of course by saying she looked like an East German weightlifter. We met. We talked. I lied. She laughed.
I lied. That’s an important sentence. My bipolar II disorder was filled with lies. There were so many I couldn’t keep them straight so I had to start lying about lying.
And by the end of that meeting I felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer and hit me square between the eyes. Over, done with, gone. We dated for a couple weeks before she left for
The day she returned from England she cried because she missed her friends. I cried because I thought it was over… who could expect nine months of only e-mails and a couple phone calls to hold together a relationship only three weeks old when we separated. That night she told me she loved me.
Let me pause here… I’m about to use a very unromantic image to express the third deepest emotion (and just so people don’t get pissed at me, One and Two were the emotions that I felt at the sight of my newborn sons.) I have ever felt in my life.
When I heard those words I honestly felt something break inside me and I was filled with a light that permeated every shred of my being. (See where I’m going with this.) I was a human glowstick of love! And at that same moment I knew that no matter how dark the darkest times were I would never attempt suicide again as long as I had her. She was the Uberanchor… and she always will be… She saved me from death and ultimately saved me from myself. Even in the tumult that was my disorder she agreed to marry me a year later.
When you love someone and you have their support nothing can stop you… unless you hurt them…then it’s a whole different ball game.
I’m going to stop here for today… I got to call a certain glowstick breaker and shaker and tell her I love her.
Remember, October 6-12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week
Lyman’s Story (Conclusion)
If I thought the other day was hard….
So I found my Uberanchor and for quite a while the depressions stayed at bay and when I did get depressed it was for shorter durations than before. Great, right?
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. My hypomanic episodes became much more intense and lasted years. For the first part of my relationship with my wife the focus of those episodes were career and education. There were weeks we barely saw each other.
My hypomanic episodes have always fallen into two categories. One, paranoia and irritability mixed with hypersexuality or two, euphoria mixed with selfishness, hypersexuality and delusions of grandeur.
Category ones are chock full of anger and jealousy and I hurt my girlfriend in high school deeply because of it. I accused her of horrible things because my addled mind couldn’t separate fact from fiction. My wife has had the wonderful experience of witnessing these very same episodes. I count myself fortunate that I never drove her into the arms of another man with all of my paranoid delusions and accusations of infidelity over the years. I’ve never understood the paranoia… though mine seemed to be firmly seated where my self esteem lived.
Category twos marked where I spent most of my time when not depressed over the course of the 14 years. Like I wrote, for the first part of my marriage, these were focused on school and career. First came career. When I say career I mean mostly hair brained ideas on how to make money. But the first business I started was actually not too bad an idea. Oh there was always a warped kind of logic behind everything I did. The illness is tricky that way. It lets you formulate justifications that make what you’re doing seem ok. My first expenditure of money that we didn’t have was to start a magazine called “NightWorld” with two of my friends. I wish I had video of the day I pitched the magazine idea to them. I must have been talking a thousand words a minute in classic hypomanic fashion. I certainly remember feeling powerful and exceedingly capable of doing this project. So powerful I quit school and “worked” on it full time. It never made money… it did reach a national distributor but didn’t have enough orders to continue.
Other businesses I started and stopped?
A mini theater, a gaming center, small soapstone lucid dreaming idols (don’t ask), another magazine “The Funerary Journal” which was nominated for best editor/best new magazine by the Genre Writer’s Association, digital videograpy which actually ended up in two digital shorts “Insomnis Amor” and the post diagnosis “Dysphoria” which is still up on YouTube.com. I was going to build and compete with battlebots.
You might say everyone has little business ideas. These were more than that, They put us in debt and to be perfectly honest… to do any of those ideas well you need to have more than one person. Hypomania makes you superhuman or so I thought.
In all this I had the energy to pound out two degrees at UMaine. I wrote seven plays, thirty some odd short stories and a screen play while in school.
Here’s where I take a deep breath…
Second only to the paranoia, hypersexuality is an extremely damaging symptom of hypomania. Under its influence I could have sex four or five times a day and not be satisfied. When these needs went unmet I would sulk or get angry. The first time I hurt my wife was when the 1-900 #s showed up on the phone bill. I stopped and switched back to my relay days, I’d get online and “chat” and let’s just say certain mayoral candidates pale in comparison to my exploits. There were regulars I spent time with. Some wanted to spend “real” time together. Other’s wanted to call me. One somehow found my number and called me during the day. All the while I was lying to my wife that I was writing or chatting with a friend or playing a game. That part was true… it was a game for me. And so it went for years until I hit a patch of depression right after my first son was born.
We had just moved into a new home because my wife was expecting our second child. I was feeling very ill. I knew that some of the suicidal depression was on its way. (No matter what hypomania justifies, depression strips that justification away and beats you over the head with it.) I had a young boy, I knew my online exploits were wrong and my soul was starting to get pretty battered. I decided I needed help. You have to remember that I never recognized hypomanias when I was having them. Everything I did while under their influence seemed perfectly logical to me. I went to my GP and described my symptoms. He diagnosed me with depression and gave me a drug called Serzone. I thought maybe I was finally going to be rid of my depressions.
This is where we come to “the fall”. Serzone is a very effective drug for clinical depression. If the GP had conducted any type of mental illness assessment at all he would have discovered I was NOT unipolar depressed and would have given me a mood stabilizer with it. He didn’t.
I became unhinged. Remember when I talked about cycles? Remember when I mentioned a certain type of cycling called ultra-rapid? The Serzone completely destabilized me. I was going from crushing suicidal madness to elated delusions in the span of minutes. I felt ripped apart. Everything was right and everything was wrong at the same time. I withdrew… I hid hoping to get a handle on what was going on. You can’t stay hidden when you’re married. And then one afternoon the phone rang. It was the chat partner who found my phone laying claim to what she felt was hers. It utterly destroyed me. Somewhere in whatever tatters of my moral compass that was left I found the strength to confess everything to my wife. I watched her die inside. I watched her love for me slip away. I apologized and promptly locked myself in the walk-in closet took a tie and made a noose.
There is a merciful nature to bipolar II disorder. As with any deeply traumatic event I do not remember anything about the next few weeks. I know that my parents got me in to see a psychiatrist, an expert on bipolar disorder. It took a long time to even out… even longer for the cycling to slow down.
Everyone has been so kind with their words of encouragement, but I am not the brave or courageous one. It takes an amazing person to be strong enough to love someone with a mental illness, forgive the pain caused and remain an uberanchor. My wife could have cut my silly ship loose at any time. I honestly don’t know why she didn’t.
She claims that she never lost sight of the core, that the man she married was still in there and my commitment to getting better proved I was still there. She still tears up when we talk about this, my sense is she always will.
I have been well for eleven years now. The medications I’m on control the symptoms without any major side effects… well unless killing my thyroid is considered major. I have devoted myself to my family, wife and my professional pursuits and to being well. Since seeking help I finished my M.F.A in Popular Fiction. It was a life goal to have a terminal degree and a healthy use of my time.
Why did I share this? I almost didn’t. I’m very ashamed of the history of my illness. At the same time I know there are lessens to be had. Maybe by understanding what happened to me you can understand yourself or a loved one who is suffering.
I also hope to put a face to mental illness. I’m sure that many of you had no idea that I suffered from a mental illness or that you even knew someone with a mental illness. One in four people will suffer from a mental illness. It’s more common than we think.
I also hope that I can chip away at some of the stigma associated with mental illness. I lost a job because of stigma. A co-worker created such a hostile work environment that I was forced to leave, simply because she was “afraid” of me because she discovered I was seeking treatment for a mental illness.
This is the final post. I thank all of you who have taken this journey with me. I have a bit more to say but I’ll save that for the compiled story that I will be posting on a blog on Friday. I'll post the link on FB.
Remember October 6 – 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week.
If I thought the other day was hard….
So I found my Uberanchor and for quite a while the depressions stayed at bay and when I did get depressed it was for shorter durations than before. Great, right?
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. My hypomanic episodes became much more intense and lasted years. For the first part of my relationship with my wife the focus of those episodes were career and education. There were weeks we barely saw each other.
My hypomanic episodes have always fallen into two categories. One, paranoia and irritability mixed with hypersexuality or two, euphoria mixed with selfishness, hypersexuality and delusions of grandeur.
Category ones are chock full of anger and jealousy and I hurt my girlfriend in high school deeply because of it. I accused her of horrible things because my addled mind couldn’t separate fact from fiction. My wife has had the wonderful experience of witnessing these very same episodes. I count myself fortunate that I never drove her into the arms of another man with all of my paranoid delusions and accusations of infidelity over the years. I’ve never understood the paranoia… though mine seemed to be firmly seated where my self esteem lived.
Category twos marked where I spent most of my time when not depressed over the course of the 14 years. Like I wrote, for the first part of my marriage, these were focused on school and career. First came career. When I say career I mean mostly hair brained ideas on how to make money. But the first business I started was actually not too bad an idea. Oh there was always a warped kind of logic behind everything I did. The illness is tricky that way. It lets you formulate justifications that make what you’re doing seem ok. My first expenditure of money that we didn’t have was to start a magazine called “NightWorld” with two of my friends. I wish I had video of the day I pitched the magazine idea to them. I must have been talking a thousand words a minute in classic hypomanic fashion. I certainly remember feeling powerful and exceedingly capable of doing this project. So powerful I quit school and “worked” on it full time. It never made money… it did reach a national distributor but didn’t have enough orders to continue.
Other businesses I started and stopped?
A mini theater, a gaming center, small soapstone lucid dreaming idols (don’t ask), another magazine “The Funerary Journal” which was nominated for best editor/best new magazine by the Genre Writer’s Association, digital videograpy which actually ended up in two digital shorts “Insomnis Amor” and the post diagnosis “Dysphoria” which is still up on YouTube.com. I was going to build and compete with battlebots.
You might say everyone has little business ideas. These were more than that, They put us in debt and to be perfectly honest… to do any of those ideas well you need to have more than one person. Hypomania makes you superhuman or so I thought.
In all this I had the energy to pound out two degrees at UMaine. I wrote seven plays, thirty some odd short stories and a screen play while in school.
Here’s where I take a deep breath…
Second only to the paranoia, hypersexuality is an extremely damaging symptom of hypomania. Under its influence I could have sex four or five times a day and not be satisfied. When these needs went unmet I would sulk or get angry. The first time I hurt my wife was when the 1-900 #s showed up on the phone bill. I stopped and switched back to my relay days, I’d get online and “chat” and let’s just say certain mayoral candidates pale in comparison to my exploits. There were regulars I spent time with. Some wanted to spend “real” time together. Other’s wanted to call me. One somehow found my number and called me during the day. All the while I was lying to my wife that I was writing or chatting with a friend or playing a game. That part was true… it was a game for me. And so it went for years until I hit a patch of depression right after my first son was born.
We had just moved into a new home because my wife was expecting our second child. I was feeling very ill. I knew that some of the suicidal depression was on its way. (No matter what hypomania justifies, depression strips that justification away and beats you over the head with it.) I had a young boy, I knew my online exploits were wrong and my soul was starting to get pretty battered. I decided I needed help. You have to remember that I never recognized hypomanias when I was having them. Everything I did while under their influence seemed perfectly logical to me. I went to my GP and described my symptoms. He diagnosed me with depression and gave me a drug called Serzone. I thought maybe I was finally going to be rid of my depressions.
This is where we come to “the fall”. Serzone is a very effective drug for clinical depression. If the GP had conducted any type of mental illness assessment at all he would have discovered I was NOT unipolar depressed and would have given me a mood stabilizer with it. He didn’t.
I became unhinged. Remember when I talked about cycles? Remember when I mentioned a certain type of cycling called ultra-rapid? The Serzone completely destabilized me. I was going from crushing suicidal madness to elated delusions in the span of minutes. I felt ripped apart. Everything was right and everything was wrong at the same time. I withdrew… I hid hoping to get a handle on what was going on. You can’t stay hidden when you’re married. And then one afternoon the phone rang. It was the chat partner who found my phone laying claim to what she felt was hers. It utterly destroyed me. Somewhere in whatever tatters of my moral compass that was left I found the strength to confess everything to my wife. I watched her die inside. I watched her love for me slip away. I apologized and promptly locked myself in the walk-in closet took a tie and made a noose.
There is a merciful nature to bipolar II disorder. As with any deeply traumatic event I do not remember anything about the next few weeks. I know that my parents got me in to see a psychiatrist, an expert on bipolar disorder. It took a long time to even out… even longer for the cycling to slow down.
Everyone has been so kind with their words of encouragement, but I am not the brave or courageous one. It takes an amazing person to be strong enough to love someone with a mental illness, forgive the pain caused and remain an uberanchor. My wife could have cut my silly ship loose at any time. I honestly don’t know why she didn’t.
She claims that she never lost sight of the core, that the man she married was still in there and my commitment to getting better proved I was still there. She still tears up when we talk about this, my sense is she always will.
I have been well for eleven years now. The medications I’m on control the symptoms without any major side effects… well unless killing my thyroid is considered major. I have devoted myself to my family, wife and my professional pursuits and to being well. Since seeking help I finished my M.F.A in Popular Fiction. It was a life goal to have a terminal degree and a healthy use of my time.
Why did I share this? I almost didn’t. I’m very ashamed of the history of my illness. At the same time I know there are lessens to be had. Maybe by understanding what happened to me you can understand yourself or a loved one who is suffering.
I also hope to put a face to mental illness. I’m sure that many of you had no idea that I suffered from a mental illness or that you even knew someone with a mental illness. One in four people will suffer from a mental illness. It’s more common than we think.
I also hope that I can chip away at some of the stigma associated with mental illness. I lost a job because of stigma. A co-worker created such a hostile work environment that I was forced to leave, simply because she was “afraid” of me because she discovered I was seeking treatment for a mental illness.
This is the final post. I thank all of you who have taken this journey with me. I have a bit more to say but I’ll save that for the compiled story that I will be posting on a blog on Friday. I'll post the link on FB.
Remember October 6 – 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week.
Lyman's Story (The Really Real Conclusion)
Oops…. I was so tired when I posted last night that I forgot one of the most important parts of the story. Wellness.
What you need to remember is that not every waking minute of every day was illness. There were long stretches where my moods were normal. There were weeks, months even years of normalcy marked by episodes of depression or hypomanic behavior. Even then my illness wasn’t crippling. I held down jobs, got promotions, outwardly led a normal life. So getting well wasn’t a radical change… or was it.
When a majority of your life is marked by mental illness it takes a very long time to know what parts of you are real and what parts of you are illness. It takes an even longer time to trust that you are well. It takes even longer to forgive yourself, not for being ill but for not having sought to be well sooner.
The easy part of being well? Opening the cupboard in the morning and getting my two pink capsules and one blue tablet and then opening the cupboard again in the evening for three more pink capsules. I am meds compliant. There is no way in Hell I will miss my medication. Before my meds my life was like the reception off an old set of rabbit ears. The picture was grainy but watchable. Sometimes reception would be lost, sometimes it would come in clear. My meds are like a wad of tinfoil. They keep the reception crystal clear and that has made all the difference.
The best part of being well? I have not had a full blown depressive of hypomanic episode in eleven years. When I was first diagnosed I went through two years of adjusting to my meds. There were episodes as the cycling evened out. It was discouraging. I wanted to be better instantly but it doesn’t work that way. There are also hiccups still today. When I get really stressed out I’ll have a day or two of mild depression or hypomania but NOTHING like before I was well. Also, knowing that I got help before my sons were ever impacted by my illness means everything to me. They have grown up with a well dad and we are very close.
My biggest challenge since getting well has been trying to identify who I am. Three quarters of my life I had an untreated mood disorder. It influenced my decisions, my choices and my relationships. So if I’m well… who am I? It’s interesting that the NAMI “It’s Time” campaign compelled me to do this. I’ve been reevaluating every major decision I have ever made trying to determine which were my choices and which were illness choices. It’s kind of like being in dry dock… I’ve been scraping barnacles for years now. I think I’m finally done.
Not even my wife knows what I’m about to share because quite frankly I didn’t realize this until right now. I never told myself my own story. I have been experiencing the telling of it right along with you. Sure, I’ve faced parts of my story head on over the years. Sure, I lived it, but as I’ve sat here sharing this with you I’ve been forced to think about my illness in its totality. I have never done that. Something amazing has come from it.
Let me introduce you to Lyman B. Feero Jr. I just met him for the first time this week. He’s a husband, father, son , brother, friend and he lives with Bipolar II Disorder.
He’s Me, and THAT makes all the difference.
With that, I have a hull to paint and a ship to get in the water…
Thank you all again for your kind words and for reading my ramblings. Please, please, please. If you think that you or someone you love may be suffering from a mental illness. Seek help. Even in the darkest places light can shine. Tell your pastor, tell a doctor, tell a lover, tell a friend or even just tell yourself that you need help. Saying the words can be the start of hope.
Remember October 6-12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week.
Oops…. I was so tired when I posted last night that I forgot one of the most important parts of the story. Wellness.
What you need to remember is that not every waking minute of every day was illness. There were long stretches where my moods were normal. There were weeks, months even years of normalcy marked by episodes of depression or hypomanic behavior. Even then my illness wasn’t crippling. I held down jobs, got promotions, outwardly led a normal life. So getting well wasn’t a radical change… or was it.
When a majority of your life is marked by mental illness it takes a very long time to know what parts of you are real and what parts of you are illness. It takes an even longer time to trust that you are well. It takes even longer to forgive yourself, not for being ill but for not having sought to be well sooner.
The easy part of being well? Opening the cupboard in the morning and getting my two pink capsules and one blue tablet and then opening the cupboard again in the evening for three more pink capsules. I am meds compliant. There is no way in Hell I will miss my medication. Before my meds my life was like the reception off an old set of rabbit ears. The picture was grainy but watchable. Sometimes reception would be lost, sometimes it would come in clear. My meds are like a wad of tinfoil. They keep the reception crystal clear and that has made all the difference.
The best part of being well? I have not had a full blown depressive of hypomanic episode in eleven years. When I was first diagnosed I went through two years of adjusting to my meds. There were episodes as the cycling evened out. It was discouraging. I wanted to be better instantly but it doesn’t work that way. There are also hiccups still today. When I get really stressed out I’ll have a day or two of mild depression or hypomania but NOTHING like before I was well. Also, knowing that I got help before my sons were ever impacted by my illness means everything to me. They have grown up with a well dad and we are very close.
My biggest challenge since getting well has been trying to identify who I am. Three quarters of my life I had an untreated mood disorder. It influenced my decisions, my choices and my relationships. So if I’m well… who am I? It’s interesting that the NAMI “It’s Time” campaign compelled me to do this. I’ve been reevaluating every major decision I have ever made trying to determine which were my choices and which were illness choices. It’s kind of like being in dry dock… I’ve been scraping barnacles for years now. I think I’m finally done.
Not even my wife knows what I’m about to share because quite frankly I didn’t realize this until right now. I never told myself my own story. I have been experiencing the telling of it right along with you. Sure, I’ve faced parts of my story head on over the years. Sure, I lived it, but as I’ve sat here sharing this with you I’ve been forced to think about my illness in its totality. I have never done that. Something amazing has come from it.
Let me introduce you to Lyman B. Feero Jr. I just met him for the first time this week. He’s a husband, father, son , brother, friend and he lives with Bipolar II Disorder.
He’s Me, and THAT makes all the difference.
With that, I have a hull to paint and a ship to get in the water…
Thank you all again for your kind words and for reading my ramblings. Please, please, please. If you think that you or someone you love may be suffering from a mental illness. Seek help. Even in the darkest places light can shine. Tell your pastor, tell a doctor, tell a lover, tell a friend or even just tell yourself that you need help. Saying the words can be the start of hope.
Remember October 6-12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week.
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