Dispatches From Hell
This past summer, I started a series of Substack notes1 about my experience with Bipolar II. I thought I would collect the short series of notes in one place. These entries are brief, but they provide a window into the struggle. They have been lightly edited for clarity and punctuation.
August 10
For years, I’ve wanted to write an article about what it’s like to be persistently suicidal. But I have no idea how to start or even what the purpose would be.
When alcoholics have a stressful day, they get the overwhelming urge to drink. When I have a stressful day, I get the overwhelming urge to kill or hurt myself. It’s a bonkers overreaction that you just learn to live with. You choose not to follow through the same way the alcoholic chooses not to drink.
And in the same way the alcoholic always has a plan for getting alcohol, the suicidal person always has a plan for how he would kill himself. In the back of his mind, he always knows exactly how he would carry it out.
And, again, you just fucking deal with it and carry on. You learn coping skills. You learn your triggers. You learn to never get too angry, lonely, or tired. You learn to ask for help.
Weirdest of all is how people talk about suicidality as if it’s this horrible, nightmarish thing when it’s just the way life is for you, day after day. You get used to living on the brink.
August 24
During hypomania, you get an extraordinary high that makes you feel connected to the cosmos in ineffable ways. Everything is catastrophically beautiful. Entire paragraphs appear and tumble out of your head, fully formed, onto the page. Your brain is whirring, connecting ideas. You close your eyes and see explosive, wonderful imagery. You don’t sleep as much because you don’t need to.
But then you start to feel the delirium crack, and then flicker. In the darkness of that alternating flicker, there is a hell. You start to get impulses to hurt yourself, which are gone as soon as they arrive.
August 26
Hypomania feels like a hurricane you are constantly preparing for. The feel-good hurricane rips through your life, upends your habits that keep you sane, and disrupts your goals. Next thing you know you’re chasing carnal pleasures at 4 AM or writing furiously as paragraphs compose themselves like some deranged spirit board. You don’t want to sleep because you feel too good to sleep. Everything is too pleasurable, too interesting, and too much fun. However, stuff like sleep, exercise, and good boundaries are crucial to staying sane and not crashing into hell.
So, you’re constantly building dikes against these hurricanes to keep yourself from flying off the rails and howling at the moon. Sometimes, when the hurricane hits, the dikes hold, and you effectively channel that energy into being productive. Sometimes the dikes barely withstand the storm. Other times they collapse completely.
The dikes didn’t hold up very well last week. I’m at critical levels of poor sleep, which means that the scary shit might be coming soon. The best I can do is prepare and try to get my sleep and exercise in order so that I am more likely to weather the inevitable dip into hell.
September 1
The depression starts to stir from the deepest parts of your mind, beginning in dreams. The nightmares are pervaded with feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and darkness.
The despair invades waking life, and you want nothing more than to withdraw, be very still, and retreat into yourself.
September 6
Mood states feel like alien worlds when you aren’t in them. Not only can you not re-imagine the severity and intensity of the moods, but you also can’t reason how you found your way into them. They are strange, horrific worlds that you cannot access fully by memory or deliberation until you simply find yourself there again.
September 8
Exhaustion and lack of sleep is a danger zone. The ice is rotten, and you are closer to plunging into a mental health crisis. You start to feel overwhelming darkness, deep loneliness, and urges to hurt yourself. The only thing to do is lie down, be very still, and weather the storm. Better sleep usually pulls you back from the brink.
October 22
Extreme mental suffering has a way of completely resetting your priorities to a kind of radical, beautiful mediocrity.
When the pain finally releases you, it is enough to just not feel that way anymore. It’s enough to sit on the couch and play a video game and not feel incomprehensible levels of anguish. It makes the present moment, no matter how unambitious or mundane, incredibly sweet.
October 27
I’ve been watching a play-through of the Silent Hill 2 remake. In all those horror survival games, you find just enough bullets to survive, and you have to ration them carefully so you don’t get mauled by vomiting skin monsters.
This feels like the perfect metaphor for bipolar. The bullets are sleep. Sleep, for me, is the single most important factor in whether I fly off the rails or not. But sleep is constantly in danger of eluding me, and I’m never sure I will have enough of it tomorrow. If I get poor sleep, all my resources go into trying to get back on track as soon as possible. If I don’t, the chances of being in a dangerous situation rise swiftly.
Making sure I get enough of the right kind of sleep feels like a full-time job.
October 292
I slept well last night, and my mind is free of monsters. A candle is burning next to me on my desk, and one of my cats is weaving her body between my legs as I type this. My partner is lying on the couch, scrolling on his phone, just outside my office. I am mediocre, this moment is mediocre. But because it is free of pain, it is incredibly sweet.
I know that today is sweet because I am adhering to my Bipolar Monastic Rule. I’ve been consistent with my meds, therapy, sleep, meditation practice, running, and working out. I spent all day yesterday with my friend Caleb in the woods, enjoying the benefits of good company and beautiful trees.
So here I sit, not accomplishing anything grand, getting ready to go to my boring day job at a grocery store that I’ve had for over 10 years. When I reach this state — this state of simply being OK and unremarkable, it feels like the greatest achievement of my life. Who cares that I haven’t accomplished any of the things I hoped to by my age? Who cares that I’m not published, still working the same low-status job, and middling on the totem pole of life? Right now, I am free of pain, and that is truly the only thing that matters.
Ordinary contentedness is the most precious thing in the world. Perhaps this is the greatest gift of illness: it highlights the beauty of the ordinary, the remarkable gift of being free of pain.
October 31st
I started my series of notes on Bipolar with an admission that I am persistently suicidal for long periods at a time. I’m still able to function in my day-to-day despite going to bed wanting to die and knowing exactly how I would kill myself.
When I am in that space, I remember: suicide doesn’t make the pain stop, it merely transmutes it. By breaking this fragile vessel of my body, I would unleash the pain onto those I love most. I would pass it to my partner, my sisters, my parents, my friends, and my coworkers. I would leave them the anguish, and I would be gone.
This burden isn’t fair, and I wouldn’t wish this life on anyone, but I’ve come to see a sort of heroism in this. It’s my job to protect those I love from the poison in this vessel and to carry it my entire life until it cracks of natural causes. If I break the vessel, I unleash the demons onto those dearest to me. I can only hope that, in carrying this body and protecting those I love from the pain within it, I might transform that suffering into joy, or at the very least into some kind of meaning.
This is why a lonely man is a dangerous man. A man who has lost all sense of connection to others has no reason to protect the world from himself.
P.S. – I’m not suicidal right now. I’m just reflecting on this since I have the space to do so, and I know that it is only a matter of time before the feelings come for me again.
November 1st
Yes, I worry about the consequences of being so frank and honest about living with Bipolar on the internet. I worry about lost opportunities; I worry about future employers; I worry about being seen as dangerous or insane. I also worry about etiquette, oversharing, and maintaining privacy. I worry about being overly confessional, and how some measure of secrecy about one’s deepest wounds is appropriate and wise.
And yet, I’m not sure I care. It feels like there isn’t much to lose — not in the face of the blinding sun of this mental anguish. I write about mental illness because I don’t know how not to. Staying silent about this journey feels as absurd as living in a warzone and not writing about the war. The suffering of bipolar has so shaped and eclipsed my life for 20 years that I don’t know how not to tell the story. This is simply my life.
Some people tell me how honest and brave it is to be so frank about mental suffering, and this also doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel brave to describe the landscape I live in.
November 2nd
It’s been a bad 24 hours, especially last night. What does it feel like?
It feels like a malignant hurricane in my brain. The gale-force winds of my mind rip up trees and demolish homes. All I can do is lie down, curl up, and hold very still.
The storm feels like the inverse of a sublime mystical experience. Transcendent light has its opposite, and it is this.
The dark storm defies description. What is the pain about? What is it for? Nothing. Nothing at all. It is just pain without cause, shrieking mental agony with no wound it corresponds to. It is a phantom hurt with no root.
The storm is full of horrible feelings of self-loathing, wanting to disappear, wanting to hurt myself. It would provide temporary relief, and that’s all I want. But, after years of practice, I’ve learned to not act on these feelings and just feel them.
Looking for company feels useless. Instead, instinct kicks in. I retreat like a wounded wild animal to some secluded place and wait for the storm to stop.
Later that same day
As this hideous 24 hours comes to a close, I’m thinking about responsibility in the midst of suffering.
Because this demon that crawled into my skull when I was 16 years old is my responsibility. It is my responsibility to manage it when I’m lucid, and it’s my responsibility to pick up the pieces after I’ve tipped out of lucidity. It is my responsibility to not hurt others out of my pain, (and I have hurt many, many people because mental illness inevitably inflicts harm on those you love most.) It is my responsibility to practice courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom to the best of my ability, even when I am at the heights of mania or at the depths of despair. No one else can do it for me.
This might sound like too great a task when someone is curled up in bed sobbing because every thought hurts. Surely, when someone is trembling with anguish and wanting nothing more than to make the pain stop, responsibility is the last thing they need on their shoulders.
Maybe. There have certainly been times when I’ve been so far gone that the only answer is care from others. All I know is that responsibility, paradoxically, makes this burden lighter. It gives me an internal locus of control. It is far lighter than the alternative, which casts all autonomy and agency far away from me.
I’ve discovered (largely thanks to Stoic philosophy) that I find a direction through the pain when I ask, “Even now, what is wise? What is just? What is courageous? What is compassionate? What is temperate?”
It doesn’t make the pain stop. But it gives me a North Star on this strange, cold night.
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This entry is from my private writings and did not appear on Notes, but I thought it was on theme so I included it here.
I am very happy you shared this. It is insightful and avoids self pity. I too have only found direction through spirituality—Eastern Orthodox spirituality which incorporates stoic wisdom. It helped me reorient myself again to know in this pain and my limitations that “Even now,” I should ask,” what is wise? What is just? What is courageous? What is compassionate? What is temperate?” One other thing that’s helped me is to not have a self image. If I do the distance between who I feel I should be and what perceive myself to be like now (especially after losing control during an episode) feeds my toxic shame and suicidal thoughts. But if my focus is oriented toward what can I do now to be loving, just, prudent, and wise, it gives me motivation to go against the tide (kind of like act) and do what is necessary rather than what I feel I want and then I don’t end in crises at least as much I used to. I also noticed that me undertaking projects which I invest my self worth in trigger mania, especially when I project some future better self. Thus I try to not have a self image. This advice wasn’t mine but my spiritual fathers. He’s an abbot at a monastery.
The almost-paradoxical similarities and inversions of your condition vis-à-vis mine (persistent depressive disorder, AKA dysthymia) strike me in a way I can scarcely describe.
I picture a pair of waves with wildly divergent amplitudes that weave and intersect at a regular beat, passing one another at each point to gain another glimpse into the other world.
The irony is, I started off in a more bipolar-ish manner as a child, likely symptoms of ADHD and Asperger's coupled with anxiety from bullying, and then subsequently flattened by a daily regimen of SSRIs. Hence, to my hypothesis, significantly narrowing my mood amplitude to sacrifice joy in favor of preventing the most unimaginably anguished lows that you describe.
I imagine it's worth pondering, if you haven't already - if there was a drug or other plausible method of eradicating bipolar in exchange for a relatively persistent but generally dull mood...would you take it? Would you leave the devil that you know in hopes of a life that has a chance of at least proving more bearable and less chaotic overall? Or would rather stick with a life that offers the full force of human emotion in all directions, however painful it often is? This can stay rhetorical, if you'd rather.
I ask myself almost daily if I would want to switch toward something more like what you deal with, and I'm trying to recognize how foolish and how much a waste of everything it is to ruminate on that. Deal with the hand I'm dealt and focus on what I can control. The question I asked in my last paragraph arguably shouldn't be asked of anyone to begin with - especially since I have a tendency to cause offense whenever delving into these waters, and am even afraid of doing so right now.
I can see the appeal of stoicism at this point, for sure. I hope its lessons continue to guide you in a more agentic and enlightened direction. You are far from alone, including those of us dealing with very different if still-relatable conditions.