spinnin' all the way out to 6south

By Emery Azure

Author's note: Long time, no see, right? It's been almost a year and a lot has happened. I've been away and experiencing life outside of the weird expectation of social media and blogs and writing. Just been taking life as it comes. But something pretty monumental happened in my life last month and I wanted to give you a little tour and update of what I've been facing. Hope you are well and that you're staying healthy through all the pandemonium going on right now.

broken glass from a beer bottle featuring my blood.

Something was wrong. Way too wrong for me to ever try and wrangle with what was happening to me. Being in therapy for a year and a half, I thought I had a firm grasp on my illnesses because I had reached goals that I never thought were possible. I was experiencing a sense of becoming that I could only dream about before and I was supposed to be over the moon. Sometimes I genuinely was over the moon, skyrocketing through the roof kind of giddy glee but there was another becoming slowly leaking through. The leak had been there for years and shoddy patchwork had caused more, increasingly rapid damage to explosively seep through.

Therapy is designed to help keep these sorts of abrasive shifts at bay and it had worked better than I’d ever experienced before. I had been to therapy before, when I was in my early twenties when things were spinning out in directions that even I had no idea they were headed towards. My unhealthy relationship to therapy before was that if I didn’t come with some sort of fiery new symptoms to report then why was I in therapy at all? But the therapy I was receiving now was the polar opposite of that experience. I found that I much preferred my therapist to be sighing in relief when I had a good week and smiling along with me instead of staring at me in some sort of sick expectation of the worst from my mental illness.

Even with this breath of fresh air sort of therapy I was receiving, stability was something I was sorely lacking. Every two weeks or a week, I would show back up at the doorstep of therapy in an entirely different mental landscape than I had been in only a short week before. There were times when there were no words to describe the ungodly speed of which my mind was running and so communicating what I was experiencing was about as good as stopping to ask for directions in a foreign country who’s language you don’t share. I was walking in an alien before my therapist every week and begging her to dissect my chemistry without any of the tools to do so.

Truth of the matter was that I had long been like a spider weaving circles around my head and stomach, I had long forgotten how to trace any of them back through the web I was spinning. The jungle of my mind would drop into my chest and then into my stomach where I’d continue spindling and sewing myself into knots without ever knowing it. The anxiety clogging up my chest and the depression ever present in my gut with a crippling restlessness that would tighten and release through my veins a sort of rush of impulses that I had no control over.

These impulses shooting through my body and setting my mind alight, sending it into overdrive. It was do or die, never any other option so I bowed at the alter of these relentless needs. Weaving webs and boring loops of crop circles into my mind. Impulses were also fed with alcohol. I remember I had started to compulsively drink around the age of 19 or 20, at parties and social gatherings much like anyone in their early twenties but I was desperately seeking something to pull me out of my own self, to pull me out of the depressive hole that would only be dug deeper with the alcohol.

As my twenties wore on, life had led to a steady business that meant parties and get togethers were less frequent, but the consumption didn’t stop. I then used alcohol in the completely opposite manner, not to pull me out any longer, I used it to rain down and flood the hole, to put me to sleep. To slow down any incessant motion that was being fed by my restless impulses. The irony is that I used alcohol to stop what I had initially used it for. I didn’t use it to keep going as much as to stop everything from moving altogether.

But the impulses remained, spinning and looping like listening to Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking” on repeat but infuriatingly not being able to know where the sound originated from. Like a thousand tabs open in the browser of my mind, just constantly cycling through them and never being able to soak in any useful information from any of them. I could hyper fixate on some information but never getting the right source of any of it. I wish I could speak from and through my illness enough to not have to result to the old clichés but sometimes there’s truth to them and that’s why they repeat themselves.

I was either a dull knife trying to cut through and quick to tire or I was a jackhammer trying relentless to break through the steel, tremors shooting through me like millions of tiny needles stabbing into my skin or ants crawling all over me. Depressed. Manic. Rinse, recycle, repeat. One feeding the other like some sick kind of broken life cycle.

Alcohol feeding my depression to the point that I couldn’t even wake to make it in to work, the constant thrum of the beating drum in my head led to one vehicle incident after another. Drinking and driving and narrowly escaping a DUI as I weaved between lanes recklessly on the interstate, walking away with a simple warning was only due to pure luck. Repeating retrospective regret weaving the seeds to sow a sadness that would lead to self-destruction, broken bottled glass to the skin where it met in a marriage with the razor’s wounds.

A sick cycle carousel of thoughts that would leave my eyes wide open until my brain would crash like a system malfunction for a short time before I’d wake up, bloodshot eyes burning ever brighter. So much shame that I could barely utter it to the people who loved me, knowing as all added up that I was undeserving of the love. But the cycle sped so fast and just spit out in a compulsive shot of guilt to the family I had unwittingly found. Begging and bartering and fault ate at me like a corrosive poison, a realization that I was no long handling or controlling anything as I so often attempted. The disease held me and there was no way to take it back except one.

Seized by the alcohol at 8 o’clock in the morning and negative cycled thoughts suffocated by some sort of love, prayers and other unknown forces, I voluntarily admitted myself to the care of anyone other than myself. I wasn’t to be trusted to take care of myself anymore as the evidence had added up, stacked against me like a criminal on trial.

I was admitted to a psychiatric center. Yes, a mental ward. Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Girl, Interrupted and any other film about the notorious psych ward. There I was diagnosed and ultimately treated for mixed Bipolar disorder and also shamefully, alcohol dependence.

There’s something to knowing and naming the illness you’re in constant battle with and God bless my therapist who was more than a little guilt-ridden that she hadn’t caught it earlier, before it had spun so far out of control. But there’s no naming anything until you are ready to claim it and own up to your feelings, emotions and ultimately the actions that led to the culmination of it all. I was running away for a long time from how deep my illness went and I was certainly not ready to accept the culpability to it all. I know I had no real control at all over what was happening to me but I still am trying to own up to all the things, people and situations that I negatively affected with the web that I had weaved.

Being in the hospital for a week and a half was certainly a humbling experience. You learn to give up the illusions of control that you have when you realize that you can’t go anywhere, not until you get better. A lot of people on the ward were there against their will and many were court ordered there so I witnessed so much bravado and stubborn wills to not accept the care they were ultimately receiving. I made a sort of pact with myself that got me through it. The pact essentially was in understanding that I already was dying, literally unable to live with the way I was and that I couldn’t deal with myself as I stood. I started to treat it as if it were a physical disease that threatened me. That there was no reason not to just say ‘fuck it, might as well’ because I knew that if I stood unwavering the way I was that I would eventually run straight into a wall that was gonna be the one that killed me. Like an infection ultimately running it's course through every vital organ until you are unresponsive. So, I gave in.

I’ve been out of the hospital for over a month now and it’s all been surreal (and not just because there’s a deadly pandemic on). Before I went in, I could’ve sworn that I was normal and that all the running I did was just the same as anyone else’s struggle to be productive and to keep going. The medicine I take has evened out the cells in my brain to a point that I can clearly see the madness that was circling to devour me. I can clearly see the unproductive and self-destructive nature that’s within myself and I’m also quick to recognize it in someone else now too.

The surrealness of normality, whatever that is and I’m still figuring out what that looks like for me, is not something I can honestly say I ever expected to feel or experience in my life. I am actually experiencing it now, without a lot of the crazy ups and downs and all arounds that came from the disease. Nothing, of course, is cured and it never will be and I will battle with myself until the end of my days but this is something I’ve reconciled with, maybe I’ve made a deal with the devil or something but for now, the agreement stands that I won’t let it be the thing that kills me. That I still check-in on those emotions, the restlessness and sadness and anger and that I’ll do my best to water and grow them so they can be healthy too, cause all these emotions are normal but only if you’re treating them and growing them to be expressed in a wellness that you can walk with, that you can take and unfold to be examined and fixed before it explodes into pieces all over the brick wall you find yourself running into.

Making peace with the emotions, yourself and aim them in healthy directions, know their source and don’t just run away. These are the things I’m cultivating now that I’m out of the hospital. I think I still have a ways to go before I can fully trust myself again, finding that confidence within myself will take time. I’m making friends with my demons but I’m not letting them at the wheel of my car so they can drive and I’m not listening to their backseat driving. I am simply having a discussion with them in the passenger seat on a very long and winding road trip.