My Bipolar Event in High School - Author L. E. Henderson

Note: In writing about my bipolar disorder, I have always focused lopsidedly on the depression; it was easier that way. But I am inspired by bipolar bloggers like Dyane Harwood, who have more fully shared their fascinating stories. I decided it was time to share mine. Here it is.

Changing from a religiously restrictive private school to a public high school in the tenth grade jolted me from a nightmarish three-year depression.

Big changes were never easy for me, but this one was worth it.

Changing schools was new and exciting to me. I tried to reinvent myself that year. I had made such awful grades in grammar school, classmates made fun of me, but now I was discovering I could make an A in every subject.

Everything was going great for a while. My grades and self-esteem were soaring. There were few warnings of the ominous event that would strike during my senior year of high school in 1987.

But if there was any sign at all, it might have been the music.

I had always liked music, but this was different. Certain songs swept me up into stratospheric heights of euphoria where I had never been.

Whenever this happened, I lost all sense of there being a physical world around me. The room I was in blinked out as the world of my imagination swung wide open. Fantasies spilled out, many of them silly.

But sometimes I would write things in my head: humorous poems or passages of stories or essays. When the music stopped I would hurry to my notebook and write down my ideas.

If I found the right song, I would play it over and over again, like a lab mouse pressing a trigger for a food reward. My parents and brother wondered how I could replay the same song for over an hour.

My music addiction seemed to cause no problems in the tenth grade, but it seemed to be a great way to take a break from studying.

But in the spring of my junior year, something else happened. My family doctor prescribed me Premarin, a hormone. This was because, since I had transferred to a public high school, my period had stopped.

At first the doctor thought this was because of the stress of changing schools. But when over a year had passed and nothing changed, he prescribed the hormone, which force-restarted my cycle.

Shortly afterward, during that spring, my focus for listening to classroom lectures, never great, dissolved almost completely. Luckily almost all my teachers tested from the textbook, which meant I could go back and read whatever I missed. But even reading was harder than it was before.

I became moody, swinging back in forth between melancholy and music-induced bliss. And I came down with a crush. Emotionally, I pivoted from the calm optimism of the tenth grade. For the first time since I had changed schools, I felt lonely.

To comprehend anything I read, I had to fight myself, pushing away my feelings and coercing my mind into focusing. I did it, but by the end of my junior year, I was exhausted.

The summer before the fall of 1987 I called the main office of my high school and changed my schedule. I withdrew from A.P. English and Latin III and shrunk my course load to accommodate my shifting moods and faltering concentration.

I decided to just make it through my senior year; in college I could get a fresh start. But that fall, the boy I had admired from a distance ended up in one of my classes.

I could hear him behind me speaking to friends. I dreamed of speaking to him, but the idea terrified me. Crushes equaled pain, and I had taken pride in being self-contained, too interested in important things to care about anything as trivial as a boy.

I was embarrassed by how much I was thinking about him.

I tried various methods of getting my mind off him, scouring the library for books I wanted to read, and escaping into music.

I lost my appetite. Sometimes I felt too heavy to walk; then I was full of nervous – and sometimes euphoric – energy as my imagination dreamed up clever things to say to him.

Sleep became elusive. At first I was only getting four hours, but even they tapered off. And instead of feeling tired as I should have, I felt like I had binged on coffee.

I was clinging to my GPA by a thread, forcing my brain to perform despite its inclination to race off in all directions, but I knew if the mental trend continued, I would soon be unable to study at all.

Whenever I sat down with my textbooks, a wall of my own thoughts fell between me and what I read. By early November the thoughts themselves seemed different than before.

One reason I had always been better at writing than speaking was that my brain rarely presented to me only one way of saying something. My mind was a grab bag of fleeting verbal fragments, and as I struggled to choose the best in conversation, I seemed under-confident, which reinforced the impression of shyness.

But in November of 1987, each of my thoughts seemed to march out as a decisive, fully formed, grammatically solid whole. The multiple options of loose, uncertain fragments were gone. As a result, I felt super-articulate and clear.

My inhibitions unclamped, but I found a way to explain this to myself. I had started noticing the kids around me more and had the thought that most of them, no matter how talkative they were, were secretly as insecure as I was.

This new observation was how I explained to myself how I could suddenly feel so confident, and why I had become – for the first time in my life – extroverted. I went to school and began joking with my classmates, who smiled and laughed and seemed to like me.

Doubts kept whispering to me that something was wrong. Terribly wrong. I even asked myself the obvious question: Am I going crazy?

But going crazy wasn’t supposed to feel this good, and the way I seemed to be making friends convinced me that my life was getting better.

Except for the not sleeping and not eating part.

For about a week, everything I saw seemed profoundly meaningful. Colors seemed to brighten; edges to sharpen.

The night before my hospitalization, everything fell apart. My mind descended into a chaotic tangle. Images flashed. Memories gushed. Words clattered. I imagined I was having epiphanies – hundreds of them at once, like comets bombarding a moon. Every thought I had seemedto be an epiphany.

That is, every thought I had gave me that stunned feeling I got whenever I learned that the truth was the reverse of what I thought.

It was terrifying.

If I tried to explain my “epiphanies” now, they would make no sense. Not to me and not to anyone. But at the time I thought they were important, so I found a spiral notebook, tore out a page, and wrote them down.

Many months later I would look at that paper and see only meaningless, incoherent fragments. I had not written on the lines. The words were diagonal, both small and large, and they were everywhere.

I stayed up all night, bombarded with what I thought were earth-shattering revelations. And the next morning my mom drove me to school.

I was disoriented from the minute I stepped out of the car. My high school looked familiar and alien at once. The brick buildings, the sidewalks and everything else appeared to glow in a nimbus haze, and the walls I passed seemed to lean dangerously.

The students all seemed to lumber instead of walk, and to move slowly. I was supposed to go homeroom but I was too confused to get there. I ended up in my math class instead and was shocked to see unfamiliar faces.

A couple of students laughed when they realized the mistake I had made. I got out quickly, adjusted my course, and headed toward my actual home room in another building. Somehow I managed to get there and to my other classes, too.

When the last bell rang before lunch, I headed toward the library where I volunteered and went inside. Like the outdoors, the library seemed unnaturally radiant. I thought I either must be dreaming or I had entered some alternate dimension.

Despite the ethereal lambency, I felt calm, maybe because my sleep-deprived body was too tired to feel anything else.

I accepted the unreal quality of light the way I accepted strange things when they happened in a dream. And in a way it was a dream: a dream dropped over my reality like a transparency in an anatomy textbook.

Having not slept in weeks, I felt my clenched muscles yield. A warm drowsy feeling settled over me like a soft quilt, along with the feeling that all my worries were an illusion and everything was going to be okay.

I was unable to focus on my normal library duties. I missed the fresh sunlit November air.

I stepped back out into the vibrant autumn afternoon, where a soft breeze swept through my hair. I went around the library and looked down from the top edge of a green hill that sloped steeply down and away from the campus.

I admired the broad, ruby and coffee-colored leaves scattered over the blanket of grass. The sky was a clear and radiant vault of blue overlooking an open landscape beyond, a world that seemed to have no boundaries.

I thought I was in heaven.

As I wandered downhill, the autumn afternoon unfolded around me. After I had reached the bottom, a lady who worked at the municipal swim center below saw me, greeted me and asked me some questions.

The more I talked, the more her face changed, and even through my dream haze I could tell she thought I was confused. This set off a sequence of events that finally led to my dad picking me up in his car and taking me to a doctor.

I had lost a lot of weight and I was running a temperature. The doctor recommended that I be admitted into the local hospital.

I was there for about three weeks. The time I spent there went by in a dream-like blur, and I have forgotten much of what happened there.

When I returned home, I was heavily sedated. The Haldol the doctor had given me made it hard to compose a complete thought, let alone piece together what had really happened.

I would have had to continue the drug, but while taking it, I developed a heart rhythm abnormality. My parents were told to monitor my pulse and that if the count fell below a certain level, they should withhold the medicine. This happened a lot, so they finally stopped dispensing it. After that, my mind cleared.

I was finally able to ask myself what, exactly, had happened to me.

I had always had sensible reasons for doing the things I did and could usually explain them. But the question of why I had wandered off my high school campus in mid-session was hard to explain even to myself.

The doctor gave me little to go on; his diagnosis was vague and he refused to speculate on the cause of my “nervous breakdown.”

Not so with my family. Theories abounded. My mom said I had “over-studied.” My great aunt believed I had put too much pressure on myself. In her get well card, she wrote: “There is more to life than trying to be the best at everything.” Then she went to my father and accused him of overprotecting me.

My father wondered if I had reacted adversely to a powerful disinfectant pine cleanser my family had been using to clean the house.

I was given a choice about whether to go back to school. My parents withheld the information that if I stayed home, I might not graduate that year, which certainly would have affected my decision.

Returning did appeal to me. I imagined going back to a normal life and pretending nothing had happened. But, in the end, I decided not to return.

What would I tell my classmates if they asked what had happened? Lying would make the event seem more shameful, like an admission I had done something wrong. But I had no memory of making any choice.

A tutor, a math teacher, came to my house several times a week and gave me my assignments. At the end of the year, my guidance counselor convened with the principal of my school to decide whether I could graduate.

They looked at my academic records. I had made an A in every subject since enrolling at my high school. My grades were the deciding factor; they spared me the humiliation of having to repeat a year. I was able to enroll in the college of my home town the following year on a full scholarship, as if nothing had ever happened.

I only told one friend, a girl from my private school, about my “breakdown.” After my confession, the phone line went silent for what seemed like 30 seconds. “Uh,” she said finally, “well…everyone makes mistakes.”

Her innocent misunderstanding of what had happened led to me keeping my secret for over a decade. I graduated college with honors and went many years without any more major “episodes.”

It was not until 2001, right after I had published my first novel, that history repeated itself. I recognized the symptoms early, but I was unable to stop the attack. Another doctor who knew I suffered from chronic depression finally made a diagnosis that made sense: bipolar disorder.

Sitting on the strip of paper lining the examination table, I was relieved to hear those words. Bipolar disorder. There was a word for what I had. Others had it. It was not an anomaly experienced by me alone.

My doctor prescribed Zyprexa, a mood stabilizer. Without making me drunk like Haldol, it sent me hurtling back to earth. The drug caused some creativity problems for a while, which I discuss in A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom, but I still take it, and I have had no “breakdowns” since 2001.

But bipolar disorder has no cure. Even on the medication, I still have mood crashes sometimes and at other times my mood soars. But those symptoms are less frequent and intense than before. The “episodes” seem to be a thing of the past.

Remembering when I faced depression for the first time at age 13, I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had never had a mood disorder. I suspect that I would be a completely different person.

Maybe this hypothetical other me would be a wiser, happier, better adapted person, but maybe not. Whoever she might have been, she is a stranger.

Much of how I see myself is based on how I have dealt with the turbulent events of my life and the insights I gained from them. If I could change the past, and take the bad away, it would mean turning in all the insights I have gathered from dealing with the bad.

But my bipolar episodes were hard on the people I love, and for that reason, I might be tempted to change the past if I could.

But I am glad not to have to make that decision. My memories, both good and bad, are part of me.

And I want to keep them.