My Dark Year
I have one year I consider my dark year: 2019. I went through a horrible, abandoning breakup, my dog died and I had a subsequent and sustained mental health breakdown. In this year, I discovered that I am bipolar. Which means the likelihood of me committing suicide are 20 times that of a normal person.
I remember being in the haze of depression: going to work, staring at my screen, smiling at the requisite things, pretending to be a human, then going home to a cavernous listlessness. I couldn’t watch TV, only read. I didn’t have the energy to wear anything but jeans and lost about 20 pounds I didn’t have to lose. It would take me 15 minutes to physically move myself from the car - I would get stuck, feel frozen, and have to put all of my energy into reversing the inertia of my mind and body. I always felt hollow, shaky, like living in a perpetual empty hangover where you’ve purged every piece of you from inside, like my body wouldn’t be able to sustain much more of the duress it was going through.
Whenever my friends and I talk about it, the exchange is the same: a wince, an allusion to “wow yeah that was really bad,” “you really made a comeback,” “we weren’t sure you’d make it.” Now I try to laugh it off and make light of it, but the darkness is always there, the allusion: my comeback wasn’t always certain. Here are some of the things I wrote about coming out of the dark year:
I kinda feel like I’m just waking up, like my mind is opening its groggy eyes and finally seeing the glimpse of sunlight breaking through the clouds.
My head is finally breaking the surface of the water and that cliched gasp for air is finally reaching my lungs.
The fog is starting to clear but I still can’t see fucking anything. How much time do I have before it gets dark again?
It’s interesting, the more cliches you live, the more you understand why they’re cliched: there are few other metaphors or allegories that can begin to cover the depth of what you’ve felt. And the weirdest thing is that you think you should be able to snap out of it, or control your emotions, but that’s the sneaky thing about bipolar and other mood disorders: they are a literal sickness in your brain. So you never thought you’d be the one screaming on the phone to your mother, but here you are.
It wasn’t all bad. Even though each day felt like an insurmountable, enormous challenge to get through, I ...did it. Some hard and really bad things happened, but also some decent things happened too. What is that quote about dark and lightness needing each other? Here are my lists from the year:
Really hard things that happened in my dark year:
I had numerous, full-blown mental health crises
I spent $9000 on mental health medical care and hospital bills
I watched my dad weep for the first and only time in my life, because he couldn’t bear to watch how much pain I was in
I had a panic attack every time I did a HIIT workout
I found every conceivable place to covertly cry in the office
I tried 10 different types of mood stabilizer medications
I took two leaves of absence from work
My sister took all the knives out of my house
Bright things that happened in my dark year:
I ran a marathon in Greece
I was in fucking dope shape from marathon and strength training and not eating anything
I got my dog, Ollie Bear
I made and deepened friendships and needed them like never before
I spent quality time in my Seattle apartment with my dad, then my mom, which is time we wouldn’t have spent together otherwise
I dreamed up Hales Ball
I read more books than I’ve ever read: 72
I wrote a shit ton of these thoughts in my Notes
I didn’t drink for a three-month period and it was really nice
Dark and light work together, live next door to each other. Albus Dumbledore turning on the light and all that. Here’s my final take: sometimes when you’re in the really really inky black darkness of hardship - grief, insanity, bipolar disorder, depression, rage - the lights are smaller than the pin pricks of the stars. You really don’t think you can see them at all, even if you squint. The dark seems to squeeze out all the light, but if you have the right people around you and you just keep going, the pin pricks will start to widen, little by little, ever so slightly until you can finally see who you are again.
