Room with a view of pain

On March 30, it was declared an international community on the study of bipolar disorders (ISBD) during the day of bipolar disorder in order to draw attention to the difficulties that people face this diagnosis in our society.

Samizdat publishes an excerpt from the new book “Bipolaries” , which was written by Masha Pushkin, one of the creators of our text about Bar , translator of Kay Jamison’s book “The Restless Mind” and the curator of the Bipolar Association group. Masha gathered the stories of different people who once understood that they live on gigantic swing between mania and depression. In this book, people with bipolar disorder share their personal survival experience. They frankly talk about how they first realized that they were sick, at what point they decided to seek help and how they learned to live with the disease.

What is it like to be a “bipolar bear”, ride your own mood daily on an American hill and not know how you will wake up tomorrow - a superhero or an unfortunate ruin?

Not shame, not shame, not curse

Dmitry, thirty -nine years old, translator:

“Four or five years ago, it seemed to me that my life was over, there would never be nothing new and inspiring again, and ahead is a dull gray learning, chewing on time. But now everything is different: on these first warm days I wrote to my friend: "My life is inevitably changing for the better."

Late St. Petersburg, wet long -awaited spring, only now it began to bake, everything is fresh and washed from the fact that it was rain at night and there are already the first leaves. I walk along the garden, then with the alleys to the fountain, and each facade is so native that I want to hug with it, each curl on the facade - the holiday itself, from the sky that has been spilled in the water, is breathtaking, it sings everything, rejoices, glows with happiness. I am in love - at least I'm sure of this. I am in a hurry, it seems to me that there are no restrictions for me, I can do everything and everything is obedient. Jim Morrison in the headphones: “I am a King of Lizard! I can do easier“ - this is about me. I feel like a newborn who first smiles happily to the sun.

Nobody told me then that it would take only a year and six months, and with an icy dank October, in the same St. Petersburg, among the monuments of architectural totalitarianism terrifying in their harmony in Moscow Square, I will slowly crawl along the wall in a telephone booth, because I will no longer have the strength to stand on my feet.

My muscles will refuse, the joints will lose the ability to keep the body, I will wallow in this closet, exhausting from shame that passers -by will understand that I feel bad. I will not have the strength to go to work on which they are waiting for me, or home, where they are not waiting for me. It would not occur to me to go to the doctor: I did not believe them, and I was ashamed, and I did not know where to get such a doctor who can tell something about yourself, and what to say-I did not know either. It seemed to me that they would not help, but would criticize, shame and find fault, say that I pretend that I am so young and healthy, and I would make myself weak and unhappy.

When I crawled to the floor in this telephone booth on the Moscow Square, then a little lower than my chest, in the very sunny plexus, that stake, that ulcer, that stinging nail, which throughout my life was awakened, arranged for me for several days, or years, or months, and then again hibed until the next seizure. No one told me then that all my life I was doomed to live again and again to live the changes in the periods of euphoria to black, all overshadowing pain. I learned about this much later - only after almost ten years I learned to understand what was happening to me, that this pain, it is a sting in the very center of all of me - this is not shame, not shame, not a curse and not punishment from above, but a disease that can be controlled, which can be treated. Years later, I tried to recall when this Black Morok inside me first made itself felt.

I am very little years old - we just moved to our apartment, in which my parents will live thirty -six years, which means I am not less than seven, but at the same time no more than ten. I am sitting on the subject of furniture, which was called in the “ottomat” house in the tiny hallway of our cramped dark apartment - my mother does not like when straight light beats in the window, so there is almost no sun from November to February. I am sitting in the criminal on this “ottoman” and suffering, and I am sure that I have been to blame for my suffering, and arranged everything for myself - too. This is the very first time that I clearly remember this pain in the solar plexus. For a long time I tried to recall how and why the first calls of the horror that completely took me from the age of seventeen and with rare breaks dominated me up to about twenty to twenty-seven. Even now, it’s hard for me not to cry when I try to find into oblivion and collect, to lay out in front of me everything that preceded the first attack, or at least one of the first.

One of the main ideas of my parents was that I can interfere with the surrounding my existence, so I should be as small as possible, quieter and inconspicuous. The second idea was that the world around us is extremely dangerous, so the contacts with it should be minimized, at least to the usual and harmless rituals.

I understood that my place was to hide under one of those carpets that our apartment was plentiful and, spreading there, peeping in the world in the Close, trying to not notice me, so that the threatening and deadly world did not notice me.

However, my parents are by nature-rebels and for a long time are not able to fulfill any rules, even their own, so sometimes they waved their hands on everything, offering me to participate in some dangerous enterprises. For example, to go to the cinema, or to visit (two times for all childhood), or somewhere in a new unknown forest, which we never went to, because it will be dangerous there, and always went to the same place that it is already known that there is no dangers and you can relax and even slightly stick out one leg from under the carpet. It was then that I had a clinch. One of my part terribly wanted this new unknown forbidden pleasure, and the other was sure that the previous parental ban on him had great power than a sudden waving hand for a ban. In the house, this was called “harmful and fooling around”, but I really could not force myself to move beyond the hallway, from this “pupil” on which I sat sobbing and swallowing tears. He cried at the same time because he had so attracted, and for the fact that this could not. I was angry with myself that I was not going for my parents - because it meant to believe them today and doubt their will, which I was not capable of, and also cried from it. And then this poisonous nail was pierced into the solar plexus for the first time: no matter what I did, it was bad and wrong, I was mutated with such a bifurcation of the world, and the nail stung for everything: believe my parents-get an injection, do not want to believe-here is another dump. In the end, they either dragged me by force, deception or persuasion, or my parents became infected with my blackness and the complete inability to want something, and no one went anywhere. I am sure that this pain in the fraud of my body was not between eleven to twelve and seventeen years. I would forget about her, but she did not forget about me. It seems to me that in early school age this pain appeared in two cases: either I refused what I really wanted - and spent a lot of effort, so as not to do it or not to get it, or vice versa - I did what was disgusting and disgusting. At least, the return of pain at seventeen I associate with these reasons.

I am twenty, the ice solar autumn, the stone of the facades of the middle avenue of Vasilievsky Island, frozen from the cold, in the passage yards near which I rent a narrow room stretched to a semicircular window. Under the roof window and raspberry brick walls, when it rains, the roof of the flogue, which, as if dissolving, can penetrate into it, close your eyes and dream that I have enough money for that book, and you can still buy raspberry jam and something else tasty. I am very poor, and at the university, where I study, at times it smells like food from the buffet that tears appear before my eyes, and the lips themselves begin to chew indifferent air. I still dream about something, and it seems to me that if I realize at least one dream, then my life will magically change, some kind of toggle switch will switch inside and this pressing gray longing will disappear, which today feels like a poison in blood and in whiskey, and tomorrow it stains with a nail lower than the heart. I see so many temptations around me, and each at its own price is equal to the price of my life, everyone, it seems to me, can save me: to finally read this book, seduce this inaccessible beauty, go to a promising concert, sign up for those courses, write a smart article for a university collection.

But all the temptations are deceiving: the next book is disappointed, the music that he was so eager to listen to was the same that he heard yesterday or a year ago, nothing was completed to the end.

I take a thick notebook and derive the heading of the article, and even make two or three sketches, I think about future turns of thought-in a word, I do everything that the main character of Daniil Harms did, but the matter does not go further. I am walking with the main beauty of the faculty, I go to the cinema with her and exchange with abstracts, but I find a complete absence of courage, I understand that nothing will change, this poison inside will not go anywhere and the nail cannot be pulled out by other people's teeth. And finally, when the spinning autumn was replaced by snowless and therefore even colder in winter, I write a letter to a distant Siberian friend that I see no reason to live at all, and that my life is probably over. In response, she writes that I should try to live at least for my neighbors, because if I do something with me, then for me it will be pampering, an attempt to solve my problems, the study of the possible, but for them-a monstrous drama. This argument amazes me, and once and for all I will part with the idea that I have the right to voluntarily die.

But when I come to study at my faculty, suddenly longing and poisoning inside has never happened. Still, because there are people there at every step, with one appearance near me, plunging me into a state of euphoria, enthusiastic flight, joy. They force them to catch every word, I instantly tune in to their wave, I look at the world of their eyes and as if I were losing my own - insensitive and useless, not seeing, but interfering with seeing. Three teachers cause a special state of love and holiday. One of them is so magically read by Gumilyov, Blok and Annensky that I tremble for several hours later, with each cell, responding to every sound. The second speaks of literature things that seem incredibly brilliant to me, amazingly faithful, bordering on revelation. The third does nothing especially, but gives lectures on Russian literature of the 18th century so artistic, so pronounces names, names, so breathes, moves like that, so articulates and throws his head, which plunges me into a state of rainbow floating trance, and next to him I completely lose the ability to talk.

At the same time, through this festive immersion in a completely special, separately from the entire standing world, as the faculty seems to me, anyway, somewhere in the farthest plan, some nasty muck stuck and stings, recalling: you will get out of here soon, and still, everything will be in my opinion. So it is. As soon as I return to my room with a view of the roof-pain, insensibility, disgust emerge out of the depths, disperse the festive husk and, sitting down with the master's look right in the middle of me, again remind me of who I am: a lepest, punished, devoid of something that all people have, but in return for some kind of disease, no one will come out, no one can talk about, no one. They will twist a finger at the temple and send away. For some reason, it was precisely the shamefulness of this state that I experienced with special force, I felt like a tramp from whom it stinks and whom everyone is guying off. Even dogs bark after me because they feel that I can and I can even be welcomed to grind my teeth; Even the children, looking up from the game, laugh loudly only at me.

It is curious that at the same time I was sure that everyone has this insensibility and this nail under the heart, and, yes, everyone is seriously ill, but pretended, and are forced to hold the style so as not to disgrace - so it is open.

I am twenty -three or twenty -four. I have a rare day off. I wake up in joyful and strange bewilderment. I wipe my eyes and discover that the toads and vipers crawled, the hungry scattered, there was no nail in the womb. I feel the joy of birth. All day in some euphoria, despite the November rain and wind, I walk around the city, and everything seems so easy as if the heavens had stopped crushing, as if the body had lost weight, as if you’ve been pushing and flying, you just have to jump over the roof and that pipe over there. I go to bed with this feeling, exhausted by a walk, but this is a joyful healthy fatigue, and not exhaustion by a disease, which, alas, returns the next day with a stake in a sunny plexus, along with poison somewhere in the stomach and forehead, along with confidence in its providing. For about fourteen years of depression, such days were translated, everyone recalls as if you were sitting under the ice and count the remaining pharynx of air, and on top the bright sun, music, balloons and bright skirts of girls on skates.

I am a little over thirty, and my child is born. I look inside my body, as in the water into which a spoon of paint spilled, and its spray dissolves, blur in different directions, drown, disappear. This is how it happens with my pain, which seemed to suddenly captured by a powerful centrifuge, and its shreds dumps in the corners in parts, and the resulting wound quickly overgrowing a healthy flesh. This is not a metaphor, all this I felt physically. Somewhere inside it was frantically scratched so that I wanted to put my hand through the esophagus or the trachea deeply somewhere in itself. It was painfully born something new and the old was dumped-probably, animals at Link are experiencing something like that. The birth of a child has driven some powerful forces that scattered to the sides a dead flesh that was conveniently settled inside and replaced it alive.

The internal haze gradually leaves, reluctantly, sometimes it turns and returns.

Most of the days I fall asleep and wake up with a feeling of flight.

Despite almost fifteen years of illness, I still do not call my condition a disease and have no idea what is happening to me. I'm afraid to peer into myself. More recently, I suddenly decided with myself that if I did not recover literally in two or three years, then I will just quieterly cry out and die myself, I will cease to exist, because there will be no strength for this. These same two or three years passed, and the disease began to retreat. If earlier, for six months of darkness, they accounted for several days of bright joyful light life, now everything has changed places: I have a wave of a happy exaltation for months, which turns two or three times (but never more) days of pain, longing and insensibility several times a year. I really trusted this and decided that it would be so now.

But it was not so.

I underestimated the degree of danger of exaltation, enthusiasm and separation from the Earth. I decided that I fell in love and very happy, left my family and naturally, as they write in old bad novels, rushed to enjoy. I always imagined some sharp poisonous bottom in this notorious whirlpool of pleasure and delight. I closed my eyes on him. The pool turned out to be a puddle that was quickly dry, and I was naked among the salt desert under the scorching sun. It was then that a new depression fell on me-that, in a telephone booth, which is higher. Then there were years of recovery from depression, which seemed joyful, if not for several black days every about six months. Then another six months of depression. Then the attacks of irritability in broad daylight, anger and despair without a reason, which almost destroyed my finished love that finally came. Not a flight from the family in search of asylum from depression, as for the first time, not a manic jump above the sky, like in the second, but really love.

Then I began to suspect something.

After reading the article about depression-a couple of years ago they began to write a lot about this, I thought that, of course, now everything is fine with me, but someday I still need to go to the doctor, suddenly “this“ will happen again. Then the events accelerated, and one evening, feeling at the same time depression and exaltation, I realized that it should be accelerated with drug therapy. A terrible thing: you feel a knife in your chest and a complete stop of all feelings, and at the same time you have a fountain, Bengal fire, spraying sparks, and everything also rotates around you. Then I remembered that in my childhood I had such evenings when I could not fall asleep for a long time, lying around and everything around me was spinning. Мне и в голову не приходило, что это что-то не рядовое, на что нужно пожаловаться.

Врач, чудесная, очень старая психиатр, как-то с первого раза просекла, что это и есть биполярное расстройство. Она удивилась моей жизнеспособности: по её мнению, пережить пятнадцать лет депрессии и ещё лет семь качелей мне помог огромный запас жизненных сил, и не будь его — неизвестно, как бы ещё всё сложилось со мной. Теперь, по её мнению, мне необходима терапия на всю жизнь, если я, конечно, не хочу вновь оказаться на качелях. И хотя в маниакальной стадии со мной не было приключений вроде покупки трёх лимузинов, двух лошадей и тура на Мальдивы, но фонтан внутри и фейерверк перед глазами — это предметы для ментального интерьера малопригодные.

К моему счастью, препараты подействовали сразу. Наступило успокоение, расслабленность, ушла тревога и появилась радость. Тело как будто побывало в молодильной купели: куда-то делась усталость, которая обычно накрывала меня по вечерам, теперь на её месте была упругая энергичность. Мне повезло: мой случай всё-таки довольно лёгкий. Несмотря на то, что раз в три-четыре месяца меня всё же накрывает иногда сильная, но очень короткая депрессия, проходящая за несколько дней, в остальном я без преувеличений чувствую себя заново рождённым. И очень грустно думать, что такой же точно результат можно было бы получить и десять, и двадцать лет назад, и тогда не было бы выброшенных из жизни лет.

Но поверил бы я тогдашний себе нынешнему, смог бы довериться врачам и рассказать им о том, что мне казалось позором и проклятием — вот это для меня загадка».

Bipolar world: Life between Mania and Depression Katya Novikova , Masha Pushkin , Sonya Korshenboy , Niko Rogushina What is a bipolar affective disorder: how to cope with him, how to treat, how to live next to a bipolard and what to read on the topic