Just came back from a trip to the Apple store to see what is going on there today. At the closest one to me – the 14th Street and 9th Avenue store – there were three news satellite trucks with attendant reporters, several dozen post-it notes on the doors (which I didn’t get close enough to read but can imagine had tributes written on them) and one dude camped out, waiting for the new iPhone to come out. I wonder how that super-fan felt yesterday when the news broke?

The store was a busy as usual, in other words packed in the middle of a work day, with people walking out carrying laptops and iPhones. I feel like I did the right thing, getting out of the house and visiting a site touched by the inventor who has influenced me so much.

There’s a metaphor many people use when talking about being on anti-depressants: the floor. The idea that a floor is raised when you take anti-depressants, up from a nearly bottomless chamber, to the light, where it stops just short of feeling normal, and rests. This recessed floor serves as the bottoming-out point for the patient from now on. They’ll say, “There was a floor past which I could no longer go down.” That’s why it’s called a floor – you can’t go down from there. And anti-depressants raise that floor for everyone I’ve heard from who took the drugs.

I think there must be something in the metaphor here, that “the floor” means something. Of course, it’s obvious that the floor is the bottom, what we tread upon, which is how the depressed person often feels: walked all over by life.

But is there something else to the “floor” metaphor? I think it’s about the return to feeling like other people. Walking around without a floor, the depressed person is lacking something that everyone else has, a bit of architecture. When the floor is raised, or created, by the drugs, the depressed person suddenly feels human again, a part of the collective, because they, too, now have a part of their house that’s so important.

This leads to a loss of that solitude that depression brought on. The depressed person begins to feel the inklings of connection with other people, an affinity, an understanding of one another. Hey, I’ve got a floor under me, too! I can live with the confidence that any little thing that might happen today will not destroy me, as it used to.

Having a floor brings us back from depression in two ways: by providing a baseline of mood that cannot be crossed, a new bottom that’s acceptably high enough to keep us out of trouble; and it gives us a metaphor for our intangible emotional disturbances, making them easier to visualize, to see finally that we’re back from the brink.

I imagine this is how other people feel all the time, but I know intellectually that this is not true. Too many speak of the pleasures of Zoloft, too many people are afflicted with anxiety, for this to be the case. But when I take clonazepam it’s like the world shifts and I want to re-embrace it.

I don’t know what I want to do first, read, write, talk to my wife, go see a movie, fuck around on the computer composing 2,000 word journal entries. Anything to keep my brain engaged and my feelings focused on the present moment. This is why reading’s out most of the time. I don’t want to escape this feeling, this relaxation of anxiety, don’t want to miss out on it while I inhabit someone else’s world. I want my own world, transformed by sheer lack of hard-driving fear and self-hatred. I can almost literally feel the hand that had been gripping my skull relaxing itself, and I wonder why so many people I encounter on the web have come out against milligrams of all kinds. I know that my life has improved dramatically through the introduction of a large amount of medications and I wouldn’t have it any other way now.

I may occasionally threaten myself with discontinuation for reasons I can never remember just a few days after I have the thought. So goes the bipolar mind — always thinking that everything’s either all right or permanently fucked and nothing in between. But clonazepam allows me a brief window into that time when things don’t have to be black or white, when there’s a nice grey zone of neither here nor there in terms of mood, a respite from the spikes I’m prone to. I feel less lonely on clonazepam, understanding that I can always get in touch with any friend I wish to at a moment’s notice. But I normally don’t, which is a topic for another post.

Someone left a comment asking that we talk more about shame, and so
I’ll keep going with that.

I don’t think the constant feeling of shame that he experiences is in
any way related to reality, or that it’s rooted in the events of his
childhood. It just persists, on and on and on, constantly misfiring.
Studies like this one show that shame is not just cultural, but part
of our physical makeup.

As members of an innately hierarchical, social species, then, this
trait is innate, just like fear and love; and just like the structures
that are responsible for fear and love, this can sometimes go amok.
As it has for him.

I say this partly because nothing about his childhood or background
accounts for his persistent, long-lasting anxiety and shame, which go
back to early adolescence, and appear to have grown stronger every
year. The events that he has told me about in no way warrant such a
strong reaction. There doesn’t seem to be any trauma, only these two
symptoms, which tells us that the source is biological rather than
external.

Also, I’ve been observing him closely for nearly eight years, and the
waxing and waning of his anxiety/shame experience appears to be
entirely organic. I prefer to use these words rather than the blanket
term “paranoia,” which is imprecise and has such negative
connotations. Sometimes one aspect is dominant, sometimes the other.

Though there are many treatments for anxiety and the related spectrum
of illnesses, as far as I know, persistent shame is not considered a
treatable illness in itself. My husband is treated for paranoia and
anxiety, not shame and anxiety; again, this seems like a broad target,
rather than a surgical strike. Maybe some grad student will someday
improve the lives of millions by coming up with an anti-shame pill.

So rather than rooting around in his past, which seems to be not just
pointless, but stupidly counterproductive, I’m working on coaching him
to observe the anxiety and shame and treat these signals from his
brain as part of his illness, thus to be ignored for the most part,
rather than believed and acted on. Very difficult, but in our
experience, the best way forward.

It’s a question I thought I’d answered for myself several times, but it keeps coming up. Because shining a light on it will make it all go away? Hardly. Partly because my current doctor is so disappointing. Mostly because I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve written about it. I write in order to think. These posts are tiny distillations of journal entries that run upwards of 1200 words, most of it more personal that I allow myself to get in here. But why tag myself and my time with the illness? Because it’s still new to me: I was diagnosed in June 2008, after many years of being labeled unipolar depressive. I didn’t blog back then, didn’t think I had anything to say. But this disease, and these drugs, have become so large a force in my life I can’t help but write my way through them toward some kind of understanding. Mostly, I discover questions that have been lurking just under the surface. And if you don’t know the question, then that nagging sense that something’s wrong will tug at you until it pulls you under. I blog about bipolar moods to keep my head above the water line.