DR SHELLSHOCK - or how I learned to love and not fear the madness.

On the sunlit morning of my Fathers 80^th birthday I watched my sisters tanned capable hands resting on the steering wheel of her BMW as she drove her fast car to an Asylum to have a battery of tests and psychological evaluations carried out on me.

An actual  Asylum.

I had come crashing back to earth after a period of being so high a therapist who tried to heal me with Bio-Energy  described me as not having my feet on the surface of the planet at all.

“You are off playing with the angels and higher consciousness, and you must imagine your feet and legs grounded, like trees. You need to inhabit the earth.” 

I am lying on her treatment table and trying to breathe without gasping or sobbing. I am trying to still my egoic monkey mind and quiet my thoughts, which are racing. Nothing is quick enough, I can’t type fast enough, the page does not load speedily enough. In the moment of doing one thing, I am planning 5 others. I will write a 4000 words, start knitting a hat, paint a wall, move the furniture, plant tulip pots, do a crossword, read 15 separate library books, cherry picking  chapter to chapter. I will decide to go for a walk, surf the internet, cook, or set up an easel and paint an homage to Beryl Cook, 3 naked obese women playing instruments, in a field.

 I will talk and laugh and engage and fire one liners back and fore like rice at a wedding. And when all the painting and singing Joni Mitchell in the attic – (#loudmuch )  and sewing bedspreads and trying to stitch a dress while making up a pattern, ends…… well, it ends badly. 
An empty sack won’t stand.

 After high comes low, as rain follows sun. 
 What goes up must come down and all that jazz. Which explains why I am pacing like a caged animal in a medical clinic trying to get a GP to see me and please diagnose, prescribe and assist  me. I have not slept in weeks, and lie red eyed staring into a vortex of spinning black into which I could so easily topple. I feel there is a whirling energy in the room, and the bed resembles the scene of a battle royale every morning, my fingers tangled in the sheets.
 There are scratches and unexplained bruises on my hands and legs.  

As a child, I was called Little Missus Up & Down because of the varying moods that could alternate from elation to despair in a matter of hours, or less. My Mother was often quoted as saying “That one’s tearbag is too near her eye”. As I aged, the bouts of depression multiplied, and the fall out worsened. I became prolific as regards ideas and output but the fizzing thoughts were spiraling, feeding from the pain body, growing stronger and more debilitating every time.

By the time I had what could be considered a minor/major breakdown in the summer of 2003  - (Again) -where I took to the bed, refusing to engage or do anything other than sleep, having my parents come to the door with hot meals as they had not got any phone response, shit got real.
 I did not even class it as such, and would enquire wistfully of people what a breakdown actually was.

 I quit my job, which had seen me work night shifts at sea in a small metal inboard cabin without a porthole for 4 years. I got on a plane to Spain and spent  many weeks sitting alone outside pavement cafes watching the locals promenade with their perfect progeny in their little lace suits and dresses, and drinking too much.

Me, not them.

Many people will swap one addiction for another and most people with depression or mental health issues will try to drink the pain away, at least initially.

They do this so they can find that small clear space inside where just for a brief window, things are actually ok.

 They do this so they can exhale in what Pink Floyd call a state that is Comfortably Numb.

They do this until the alcohol becomes more of a problem, usually on a physical level, and so will often end up  in The Rooms – sharing- and starting a 12 step programme.

I know.

 I did.

I did sobriety for 18 months but the only upside was freedom from the bastards of hangovers that  laid me  low, and as the crash of the alcoholic waves of sickness and shaking turned back out on the evening  tide - leaving  a trail of  flotsam and jetsam in their backwash -   fear and loathing floating in on the foam. 
I began to self sabotage, engaging in doomed smothering relationships with commitment- phobes, refusing to stay anywhere I was not comfortable, including and especially, employment. I would be off like a dirty shirt if the craic was not 90. I was the loudest, funniest, most outrageous girl, the one where the parties were at, the one who could manifest anything, the one whose ships cabin was nicknamed Lillies Bordello , who could source cases of cold  beer from closed off licences, drugs from passing strangers, favours, lifts  and comedy situations you couldn’t make up.
 I think Ryan Adams may have met me before he wrote Sylvia Plath.
I worked like this for 30 years.

It was exhausting.

When I stood behind the locum who was scanning my medical history onscreen that day in June, I was frantic and frazzled. My thought were spinning out of control, I was pacing and crying in the waiting room. I even lit a cigarette in the clinic and began to speed read the notices about counselors and Tai chi and support groups and wondered was he ringing an ambulance to have me sectioned.
 Ladies and Gentlemen, Paranoia has entered  the building.

A first.

He was only calling the Asylum to book me in. I almost fainted. I visualized myself in a padded cell restrained like Frances Farmer, I am nothing if not dramatic. He did not turn or face me once and typed my medical referral as I watched.

………………………….this 40 year old female presenting with significant depression on a regular basis, insomniac, please evaluate and get back soonest………………… #query Bi-Polar /Manic/ ADHD ??? …………………

He prescribed a mood elevator known as Efexor which morphed me into Randall P. McMurphy  post lobotomy, pupils dilated, unsteady walking, drooling attractively, and a sleeping tablet that cut me off mid sentence,dropping my head onto my chest, already snoring. 
I threw the Anti-D’s in the bin. 
Stilnocht became my boyfriend. 
Come on, it’s not rocket science.

My appointment came a week later and we pulled into the car park of the hulking building with the turrets and the clock tower looming ominously against the skyline. She waits for me in the car, taking the piss and asking will she get me some sucky sweets for when I am on the ward. I huff and blow. I have dressed with extreme care and have been up for hours preparing myself, my clothing, my accessories, and my flawless make up. I am mistaken for a medical rep and sent into the wrong room.

A temporary hiatus, and then  I am led through the locked wards where I stare from under my eyelashes at the groups of men and women in their fleece pyjamas and dressing gowns, some shaking, some morose, some catatonic, all chain smoking with their brown fingers curled in  at the white  plastic mesh where they are huddled at the screen door.  In the office I am left to sit while the shrink is sent for. An impossibly beautiful Indian girl about 16 comes in with a file under her arm. I thought she was a summer trainee, but this is SHE!

In her soft dialect I find it difficult to understand the pronounciation, and guessed a number of answers, and told downright lies to more. She talks about CBT, Talk Therapy, Counselling Sessions, and advises she will send me an appointment for same. It is 3 years and 2 months later and I have not heard a peep since.I could have gone over the Quayside. 

I fought back alone. 

 A Parapsychologist whom I had met in the 80’s had advised me about my abilities and the gift of healing hands. And now, I was to grab on with both of those hands and for the next 20 years school myself in an education of different alternative holistic spiritual ways.

St Therese is quoted as “If this be madness, bring it , Lord.”

I read “Thresholds of the Mind” by Bill Harris and lent it to a Muslim Taxi Driver after a party.

I read Oliver Sachs' book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" about the human brain.
I read "Women who love too much" and "50 Ways to let go and be happy".
I devoured philosophy, and re-incarnation and Karma.
I researched alternate religions and read avidly and voraciously anything that remotely resembled self help. 

I read Paul Mckenna as he explained the persistant thoughts being like a virus in a harddrive but which can be released.
 Remove and Replace. 
Uninstall and reinstall. 
Watch your thoughts. Watch the ones you are running sub consciously more as they are a deeper layer down. 

I learned and read and learned and practiced. I signed up for courses about awareness and the secret and the law of attraction and the power of now,  the magnetic elements of thought, quantum physics, and about the beneficial aspects of meditation, something I had been claiming to do for years, but was in fact always in my head, planning.

 I flirted with Buddhism , and became B.F.F.  with Eckhart Tolle , John Moriarty and John O Donohue using his beautiful poem Beannacht as a mantra. I learned how to cast Runes and read Tarot Cards,  read Anton Mesmer on Auto Suggestion, read people cold without cards, using auras and colour therapy, micro tells. I bought a course of Cd’s from Centerpoint  called Flotation, Immersion, and The Dive, that had a layer of embedded sounds under the white noise that tapped into the theta levels in the brain. You do each CD for 14 nights, and end with The Dive. 

Christ, it was hard.

Everything in me reacted to the womp womp womp beat under the sound of lashing rain, and my eyes rolled back and I stripped my teeth from my gums, but I tangled my hands in the blanket above me and pulled myself back to my small centre and started again.  I ended up kneeling with my head on the floor sobbing and saying  -  “I give up “ – Ego hates to hear this, as it dies, and convinces you that you will do similar, which is complete tosh.

A homeopath up the country was brewing a remedy to treat like with like. She took my hand to do a pulse test and dropped it instantly like it was on fire. 

"My God, you're a sensitive, it's like you were born without a top layer of skin" she cried. 

The remedy gave me a violent migraine for a week but I kept drinking it from the metal jug with the metal spoon till it was gone, and so was the headache, and so was the stress. 

Just FYI, I had a malignant melanoma removed from my arm by a healer in my 20s, after the application of mustard powder, roots and herbs and a bread poultice. Pleasant it was NOT, but it worked so I am on it like a bonnet. .

 It was in this moment of surrender that a chink of peace came through, a spiders neck shaft  of clarity, a silence. Acceptance and Surrender are the two most functional qualities you can aspire to, IMHO. What you will actually be is totally awake and aware in the present, in the Now.   NOW, I  am so pleased with small things, the delight of meeting a human for coffee and cake and having an actual real conversation, not small talk.  I love the delight of seeing my Mother break through her late stage Alzheimers   and open her eyes for moments, I love the bowls  of fresh natural flowers on saucers in all the tiny poky rooms of this house, the smell of a giant stuffed chicken roasting with all the trimmings, for one alas, but  so worth it. I love the smell of the warm scented  laundry spinning in the tumbler, the hotch potch of projects started , the wordcount  stacking and piling  up on the new  screen, the gentle strains of Nick Drake singing Northern Sky grounding my feet in the sticky green shoots of  fens and marshes so that I am wet up to my knees.
Grounded at last. 
 The bricks of this sanctuary wrap their energy around me and have truly made this a haven as I have loved and dressed every room, albeit on a shoestring.

 When I don’t create, something, anything, even if is only a flower arrangement, a stop-go animation, a cartoon, a story, then I am pent up and frustrated and impossible to be around. When I am producing reams and organizing multi media productions, and changing the bed obsessively, including its actual position in the room to face the moon, I am aware that I am high but I have learned to balance the comedown.

1.       Every single thing you believe about anything is only a thought you had ONCE, that became installed.

2.       You can change the thought. Be the rider, not the horse.

3.       Most of the stuff you worry about will never happen. “A coward dies a hundred times, a brave man only once”

4.       There is no God floating on a cloud judging you.

5.       We are the energy that the Universe and the stars are made from, and something with a consciousness to create black holes is still connected to you on a daily basis. 

6.       When you are at the end of your tether and your head is demented, stop, take a deep breath and ask yourself – What is my next thought going to be? Wait. Watch. Notice what happens. Practice to extend the peace.

7.       When Stephen Fry was asked would he swap his Bi-Polar to be “normal “ he riposted – Not for a New York Minute.

I concur.
 I recognize the cyclical nature of the beast now, and detach and disengage when I am becoming ornery, maudlin, snappy, or running into exhaustion. Follow your bliss. Do what makes you happy. Lighten up on self criticism which is ego coming in the back door. If  your  self talk is all coming from your self, then who is listening?  I am drug free and feeling my way day by day, allowing a higher power to create through me. It loves to play. 
We are Eternal. You ARE  what you are praying to. Know thyself says the Oracle at Delphi.
 - Gnothi Seauton . 

My sister laughs in relief when she sees me coming out, tottering  over the stony car park in my high boots. I flop into the car and light a Marlboro, hanging out the window to blow the smoke away up at the locked windows.

Well – she says, looking over at me with a bemused expression – what have you got?                                Bi Polar/ Schizophrena/Psychotic –episodes/ or just delusions of grandeur?  She smiles.

“Hysteria, (I cough) ………………..she says I am hysterical.”

“Ah Michelle, I could have told you that myself” and she laughed and laughed out loud, and I joined her,  as we sped off in the hot sun to collect Little Thomasina  for his surprise party, which  he knew about. Of course

 Michelle Dooley Mahon is writing the Memoir called Little Missus Up & Down as you read.