Addictions, Part Two

    One of the features of my mental illness — one of the ones that makes it difficult to properly name — is what is known, clinically, as the mixed episode. In a mixed episode, I am in a form of mental agony that cannot properly be called sadness or depression; my mind races, I am compelled to pace, I cannot concentrate on a single course of thought for more than a flashing moment, and yet I am often obsessively thinking, unproductively, about the same thing. I’m also prone to rages, paranoia, and delusional thinking, and I cannot sleep. Sometimes, trying to release my mind from its trap, I will claw at my own skin, pull strands of my hair and beard out, eject audible exclamations in the vein of shut up! or you’re an idiot! The reason this feature of my mental illness has made it difficult for my doctors to nail down a diagnosis is that it used to be that such episodes, lasting at least a week, were part of the differential diagnosis for bipolar I disorder — the most severe form of bipolar, the kind that plagued and ultimately took the life of my foster brother, Jesse. The problem was that, unlike Jesse, I’ve never been prone to the massive highs associated with bipolar; the fact is, you can’t be a manic depressive if you’ve never felt mania. These days, the DSM-V is perfectly willing to treat with the idea that mixed episodes can be a feature of unipolar depression, though it cautions strongly that, if you’ve had them, you’re probably bipolar, you just haven’t had your mania yet. But it’s just not that way for me. Like most artists, I’ve had fits of inspiration, and like most people I have days when I feel much better than others. But I’ve never lost track of reality when feeling good. It’s only when feeling bad that I’ve been truly, plainly out of my mind.

    The reason I’m describing this in a post called “Addictions” is that, not unlike a lot of the other problems in my life, one of the easiest cures for a mixed episode is a good stiff drink or three, and one of the easiest ways to bring one on is to abstain from alcohol for very long. It’s a bizarre and vicious state of affairs whereby my brain seeks refuge in poison, and that poisonous refuge wards off illness better than any talisman or vaccine. I’ll get into the early roots of my drinking at another time. This is about how it can end up feeling necessary.

    The last time I tried to quit drinking was last February, for Lent, in a possibly-ill-advised attempt to simply will myself out of my bad habits and become, magically, a healthier, happier person. It worked for about a week — not an easy week, mind you, not a fun week, but one during which the main symptom of sobriety was intense boredom. But then, one night, it all came flying apart, as my mind, untreated either by the medical arts or the distillative ones, turned inward and began to rip itself apart like an animal cursed to forever try to eat its own heart. I’ve described what happened on this blog before, but to make a long story short, I didn’t sleep for nearly two days and then became delusionally obsessed with my own loneliness and social isolation. Not to say that these things aren’t a problem for me — they are, one that booze both exacerbates and alleviates — but I’m not exactly in solitary confinement or locked inside a secret garden with no other children around. I just don’t call my friends very often, and I’m a little frustrated by my inability to sustain a relationship for more than a few weeks at a time, that’s all. In that mental state, though, pacing around my house, I came to see myself as the loneliest man in the world, completely adrift on the sea of my life, alone in the little raft that was my apartment. Strangely, my only real tether to reality was a series of comic pratfalls — a collapsing bed, a loony Facebook post — that I stumbled into over the course of a few days.

    By the next afternoon, I’d bought a bottle of wine, and though I knew I was doing the wrong thing, the thing I had been struggling not to do, once I had a couple of belts in me the madness was gone. It’s hard to explain, but the alcohol singing through my veins tamed the monster of my mind. The obsessions left, and behind them crackled the pleasant electricity of being a bit tipsy. Though the next day I would feel guilt and shame about drinking when I had sworn I wasn’t going to, at least I didn’t feel frankly, possibly dangerously, insane. It was the bottle or the mental hospital, and I didn’t have the strength to choose the latter.

    Not that these mixed episodes only come on as a result of abstinence; then they would be a clear symptom of withdrawal — and though I drink a lot, most of my life it has not been enough to cause physical dependence of that kind. The most prolonged episode like this came in early January of 2012, when, faced with the long Minnesota winter, a romantic disappointment that now seems minor but at the time felt shattering, the pressures of my first year in graduate school, and the roiling of my unmedicated brain chemistry, I lost touch with reality for more than a week and spent several days obsessively writing the worst short story I’ve ever written, a story so scattershot and nonsensical that I can’t bring myself even to look at it anymore — if anyone tells you that madness makes great art, I encourage you to squint hard at them and sneer. But the only way I could get to sleep in those days was to bundle myself in every scrap of clothing I could lay my hands on and tumble against the wind down to the liquor store, returning home with a four-pack of Surly IPA, which I would administer in quick succession. Then, and only then, would my attention wander from my story and the blaring, channel-skipping radio in my brain, and finally I could tumble into sleep on the couch. I believe it was after this incident that my drinking went from heavy to troubling, though it may have been before or after — that’s the problem with the addict’s memory; it can be unclear.

    And then there are the depressions, the numbing, soul-killing absences that have periodically washed over me, often for what seems like no reason at all. Drinking is good for that, too, though in a different way — instead of slowing my mind down, it speeds it up, slices through the anhedonia like a buzzsaw, makes it possible to laugh or have a conversation or read a book (at least until the swimmy vision sets in). Keep in mind that when I say drinking is “good” for this sort of thing, I don’t mean it in the sense that I recommend the use of alcohol for the treatment of whatever mental illness it is that I have, be it unipolar depression or bipolar disorder or something altogether different; I heartily recommend against it, because the toll it takes, as I suppose I’ll explore at a later date, can be drastic. But in the short-term, it does the trick, and I’m not the only crazy person to have noticed this — practically everybody I know has self-medicated with booze to one degree or another, and I’ve noticed that the more likely it is that someone drinks a lot, the more likely they are to show clear signs of a similar kind of mental illness to my own. The correlation isn’t one-to-one, but alcohol has the wonderful quality of being both numbing and activating, exciting and drowsing, social and solitary. Thus, it’s an easy treatment for a lot of symptoms. You can even, with practice, learn to like the taste.

    Look, I’m not trying to make excuses for myself here. I’m trying to lay out, as much for myself as anybody else, a story, about how it is that I came to be the person that I am in my late 30s. And I’m trying, for once in my life, not to be too hard on myself, because being hard on myself is a large part of how I got here in the first place. It’s become clearer and clearer to me over the last few years that one of the things that I am — a core part of my identity — is an addict; I’m trying to understand why, with it in mind that I might get better that way. I’ll keep writing these until . . . I don’t know, until I understand something I didn’t understand before.

    I’ve set a date for myself, by the way. I’m going clean by the day a certain orange-haired, red-faced pig-man is inaugurated President. I don’t think I can face the challenges that lie ahead if I don’t. So that’s why I’m doing this. I feel a little like I’m in rehearsal right now — I haven’t ingested anything stronger than coffee in a few days now — but the big show is still in the future. This writing is part of that preparation. It feels necessary. It also scares the ever-loving shit out of me. But making big changes requires taking big risks, sometimes.