On and Off the Learning Curve: Notes by a Bipolar Student

(Talk Given at the University of Toronto, March 11 2009)Seven weeks ago, I, along with millions of others suffering a long-termmalaise, was given a strong antidepressant. The treatment includedwatching chopper blades lift George Bush out of sight, and watchingand hearing Barack Obama sworn in as the U.S. president. Many of you will remember this vividly, I’m sure, especially if you were a fellowsufferer. Like all treatments, though, this one had its unwanted sideeffects, one of which was exposure to potentially toxic levels of rhetoric. That same day, I heard a commentator gush: “It’s a brandnew country!” Immediately, this was contradicted by a colleague’smore sour view: “It’s the same old place.” Which was true? Iwondered. And I decided they both could be. It’s the same old, brandnew place.And within a few days, influenced no doubt by the ceremony to thesouth, I wrote the following, applied to a person instead of a country. Icall it “The Continuity Clause: Amendment to the Constitution of theUnited States of Self”:

“I” shall still be considered “I” in spite of lapses orcontradictions in the behaviour of myself or the partial orcomplete disappearance of myself for whatever duration andfor whatever reason.

So help me...anyone.

What does this have to do with a book on mental illness called

The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis

?Everything, really. A core theme running through the book–sometimesaddressed explicitly, more often implicitly–is the existential conundrumof how to maintain a self and a life, when that self and life are subjectto regular and radical disruption. How does chaos become continuity?Before I try to suggest an answer to that, and say why I think it has aspecial relevance to education, let me briefly summarize my memoir.

The Lily Pond

consists of four sections, which I imaginesometimes as the ripples that would result if a stone fell, or a frog jumped, into a still pond. The innermost circle, the book’s first section,describes my first psychosis and hospitalization, a very protracted andalmost-fatal eighteen months. From that first episode, as it’ssometimes called, the circles spread outward, in time and in society: to

childhood and family, considered over decades, in the second section;to work as a writer, and as a participant in psychotherapy, in the third.And then there is a fourth section, but I didn’t know that at first. AfterI’d written what is now the third section of the book, I thought themanuscript was done. I showed it to a few friends...cautiously,tentatively. Their reactions were encouraging, but I had a naggingsense that the matters I’d been writing about were still hangingoverhead, left undone, developing. Why? I kept asking. What’s next?What’s coming? Part of what was coming, as my doctor pointed out,was simply more life, living with it. Something doesn’t end becauseyou write about it. But what also turned out to be developing–and I tellthis with her permission, as she generously and courageously gave meher permission to write about it–was my wife Heather’s deepeningmental health crisis, which spiralled into an acute episode and her owndiagnosis of bipolar disorder. Along with all the emotions anyonewould feel–worry, fear, sadness, exhaustion–I wondered: Had I learnedanything from my own experience that could help her? Or, even moresimply, could we find a way to be sick together...to perform the oftenawkward, but sometimes strangely graceful, dance of helping andbeing helped? You’ll hear more about Heather at times today. I’mgrateful to her, as always, for allowing me to tell parts of her story asparts of my own.

The Lily Pond

’s four rings, then, move gradually outward fromisolation and passivity–lying motionless on a hospital bed–to a lifeshared with others, including shared illness. They chronicle the journey (as the book’s back cover says) “from the darkness of unconscious suffering to the daylight of mindful recovery.” What Imean by mindful recovery is not a cure–nothing so final or triumphant-sounding. It is more like tugging recurrent problems into better light sothey can be worked on, coped with, managed. This is a long, indeedendless process. Ongoing active awareness is what I mean.I also think of these concentric rings in another way: as myparticular story of mental illness, inside the larger story of mentalhealth, which in turn fits inside the much larger story of existence andits challenges, for some of which we use the shorthand “mentalhealth.” The story in

The Lily Pond

spans four decades. There arementions in it of my stop-and-start university career, but that’s notdescribed in detail. I’d like to look at it a little more closely now.I got my Honours B.A. on the 13-year plan. I started in 1973 andgraduated in 1986. While I have nothing against gradualism, it’s not aschedule I would recommend to anyone. You see, I was never a part-time student, but rather a full-time student who kept being forced todrop out. Interruptions to my course of study included those eighteenmonths on a psychiatric ward, working (after my discharge) as adishwasher for two years, stints of unemployment and short-term jobs,

all of this in a series of rented rooms–a “tumbleweed life,” I called itonce–before I decided, at age 30, to complete the last year of mydegree which had stalled at the three-year mark.Why did it take me so long? And what, since I call theinterruptions “forced,” was forcing me? There’s more than one answer to that question. But the mainreason, I think, is one that eluded me for many years; in fact, it was notuntil fairly recently that I fully acknowledged it.Mental illness. Plunges into listless or agitated depressions,followed by equally destabilizing flights into rushing manias. And–farmore damaging than these swings themselves–my bewilderment aboutwhat was happening to me, which led me to ascribe my swings toother, misleading causes.Here is what kept happening. I’d start a school year with energyand enthusiasm–attending lectures, doing the readings, getting goodmarks...

learning

–and then at some point–usually in the late fall orspring, though it was not strictly seasonal–I would simply bottom out.Lose interest in the classes and the readings, start falling asleep overbooks, have trouble following a line of argument or even asentence...and I would think: Why am I here? I’m not interested in thisstuff. Or: I’m not smart enough, I can’t do this. (Forgetting–fordepression has its characteristic amnesia as well as other forms of inattention–that only weeks or days before I had been smart enough,interested enough.) My reading and attendance became spotty, mywork and marks trailed off...I dropped out. Usually vowing never toreturn.Looking back, I see that what I was mainly lacking, to pursue myeducation, was not intelligence or desire or diligence, but self-knowledge. I was not well enough acquainted with myself, and notforgiving or understanding enough of those parts with which I

was

acquainted, to succeed in school. I needed to educate myself aboutmyself before I could educate myself about anything else. Or at least–since the processes should occur in tandem–I needed to be learningabout myself

while

I was trying to learn about Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton.“Know thyself.” Everyone has heard the ancient Greek injunction,inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. For all itswisdom, though, I still think it could be improved. It presumes, in itssingular pronoun, a stable and consistent identity, when in fact identityis malleable and multiple, a condition of flux which must be constantlyupdated, even renegotiated. “Know thy selves,” I humbly suggest,would be a more humane and practical credo.Something I remained ignorant about for a long time, forexample, was the fact that my periodic inability to read–words, thesethings I loved, going dead and blank, their sequences fuzzy and