Excerpt from "An Unquiet Mind" by Kay Redfield Jamison (revised)

"Both my manias and depressions had violent sides to them. Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease. Being wildly out of control – physically assaultive, screaming insanely at the top of one’s lungs, running frenetically with no purpose or limit, or impulsively trying to leap from cars – is frightening to others and unspeakably terrifying to oneself. In blind manic rages I have done all of these things, at one time or another and some of them repeatedly; I remain acutely and painfully aware of how difficult it is to control or understand such behaviors, much less explain them to others. I have, in my psychotic, seizure-like attacks – my black, agitated manias – destroyed things I cherish, pushed to the utter edge people I love, and survived to think I could never recover from the shame. I have been physically restrained by terrible, brute force; kicked and pushed to the floor; thrown on my stomach with my hands pinned behind my back; and heavily medicated against my will.I do not know how I have recovered from having done the things that necessitated such actions, any more than I know how and why my relationships with friends and lovers have survived the grinding wear and tear of such dark, fierce, and damaging energy. The aftermath of such violence, like the aftermath of a suicide attempt, is deeply bruising to all concerned. And, as with a suicide attempt, living with the knowledge that one has been violent forces a difficult reconciliation of totally divergent notions of oneself. After my suicide attempt, I had to reconcile my image of myself as a young girl who had been filled with enthusiasm, high hopes, great expectations, enormous energy, and dreams and love of life, with that of a dreary, crabbed, pained woman who desperately wished only for death and took a lethal dose of lithium in order to accomplish it. After each of my violent psychotic episodes, I had to try and reconcile my notion of myself as a reasonably quiet-spoken and highly disciplined person, one at least generally sensitive to the moods and feelings of others with an enraged, utterly insane, and abusive woman who lost access to all control or reason.These discrepancies between what one is...brought up to believe is the right way of behaving toward others, and what actually happens during these [episodes] are…disturbing beyond description."

“Uncontrollable anger and violence are dreadfully, irreconcilably, far from a civilized and predictable world.”

I must now find a way to reconcile these discrepancies in my own life. I am ashamed to admit that this account is almost identical to my own though I cannot yet say that i have "recovered" from anything. While i have lived "happily" with my disorder and even cheerfully shared with many of my "illness", I am only now, after 14 years of full-blown Bipolar, coming face-to-face with the enormity of its impact on my life, my soul, those i love and have loved, and the two people who I am. I have been denying the existence of one...carefully crafting the illusion of the other. I must look into the face of this thing and see if i can find peace with it, myself and the casualties it has left behind.

The Abyss Walkers

"...by that time I knew about the abyss.
I had no name for it then, but I already knew the awful hollowness under my feet that meant bottomless emptiness, and I knew the smell of it. It was like the cold wet air that coils up from a dead black well. I could smell the breath from my own private pit and I could even smell it about others. There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a conscious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from monsters. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingles. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss-people, will know us, too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like a miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can't name it. When that happens, you have met one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. As the old women in Kenmore say, it takes one to know one. Being able to feel it is not a good sign. The other half of the world, the solid golden half, the non-abyssers...they feel nothing under their feet but solidity.
…They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind."

Anne Rivers Siddons Outer Banks, pgs. 26-27