To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To
deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life.
It is no less than a denial of the soul. - Oscar Wilde
In the mid 1980s, when my first depression occurred - I literally had no idea what was going on. Because of my mother's errant behavior, I believed she was strange, weird, embarrassing, all of the above - but no one had ever uttered the words nor explained to me what mental illness was.
In fact, the amount of pro-active and positive growth the field of mental health has undergone in the past 20 plus years is extraordinary.
My mother opted to live in her depression, to live in her dark world, to accept unhappiness as opposed to fighting it.
I on the other hand was very impatient with this new-found misery. In what may seem like a strange irony, I am an optimistic person. I believe in life, in love, in the light that surrounds us all. If I didn't believe in these things, I don't suppose I could go on. Honestly.
It is when the light in my life is compromised - because I am worn out and worn down, or because of particularly painful external circumstances, or just because that chemical battle in my brain takes a turn for the worse - it feels to me as if all light has been extinguished. I can put it into words now, but when it happens - I am speechless. It is a gruesome stumbling block, living without the hope of light.
So, let me share briefly - what my experience was, the first time that I was completely enveloped in the dark. To understand, we must remember that I have an anxiety disorder. Severe depression, for me, kicks my anxiety into high gear. I am not the depressed person who sleeps and eats all day. I am exactly the opposite. I stop tasting my food, lose my appetite, and stop eating all together. And sleeping is near impossible. Instead, I pace, I cry, I curl into a ball of exhaustion but no slumber waits around the corner to relieve me.
Herein, is my downfall. The eating is one thing, but it is the sleep that gets to me first. After a second or third day, I am stumbling around, unreasonable and incoherent. I am just, you know, really sad, and really f**cking exhausted.
I have been delusional in this state. It is not a far leap from sheer exhaustion to delusional thinking. When I was 17, my mother had remarried and moved away. (A story for a different post on a different day). I had latched on to my boyfriend's family for dear life. My boyfriend was nice enough, though young and obsessed with his muscle car. Typical teenage boy stuff. But his mother was this zaftig big beautiful bundle of warmth. Every time I walked into her house she was cooking something fragrant and warm. She lectured me lovingly on why I wasn't wearing warmer shoes or why I didn't have a good winter coat (because I had no adult in my life to notice that I needed these things). I cared about my boyfriend, about as much as a 17 year old can muster (not like my first love at 14. Nothing would compare to that, my heart simply could not expand in that way any more), but my real love in this relationship was with his mother.
I wanted her for my own. I wanted someone to notice that I was cold, and remedy that situation, simply because they cared for me. I wanted someone to be cooking at the stove because they were planning on nourishing a family. I wanted to be a part of that family. My boyfriend, he could come or go. I nearly didn't care - it was his home, his mother, that I so desperately wanted.
Relationships between teens rarely go well. His muscle car was more important to him that I was. I never wanted to go out, I wanted to hang out in his kitchen and watch his mother pour her love into whatever it was she was doing, in hopes that the love would spill over and land on me.
So we broke up. Ugly words and terrible behavior presented itself on both sides. Call it the Learning Curve. Let us hope, twenty years later, I would never even consider behaving in the manner he and I behaved toward each other so many years ago.
And, after a few days of this - it hit me. I was 17, living without parents, and the warmth of that kitchen, the present of this mother who I wanted so much for my own, was gone.
And the blackness descended. I drove around in my car (at the time, a huge rambling 1977 Chevy Malibu) at speeds far to fast. I wept and screamed while I drove. One day turned into two. I stopped only for gas, but had no direction. I drove in circles, mirroring the cyclical pain and fear within my head.
And then I decided that I personally was the Devil. I thought of everyone I had ever hurt, in any way. I was simply an evil person. Destined for pain, destined to cause pain.
Lest I be too forgiving of myself, I'll dare say this is where the delusion set in. I might also add that it was a bit narcissistic, this form of self delusion. As if the world revolved around me and the pain I felt, the pain I caused. But depression can be like that. It is not the most altruistic of diseases. Sigh.
Everything in me hurt. Every cell, every thought. I was hoarse from crying, and beyond desperately tired. Desperately. I was desperately desperate.
I wanted out.
And here's the thing - the method had already been modeled for me. My mother had jagged white lines cris-crossing her wrists, because, when my brother and I were two and three, she'd slit her wrists open with razor blades.
I can still remember walking into the drug store and asking for a package of straight razor blades. The clerk wanted to know something about what kind of razor they were for, and I was completely stymied. "Um, just plain razors." I managed to croak. With my matted hair and red eyes, he must have figured me for a coke fiend. A foreshadowing, yet to come. Somehow, he managed to produce a pack of razors, and I managed to pay for them with quarters and pennies scrounged from the floor of my car.
Let me take a break now, because the telling becomes hard, and painful.
I will read ashes for you if you ask me.
I will look in the fire and tell you from the gray lashes,
and out of the red and black tongues
I will tell how the fire comes,
and how fire runs as far as the sea.
- Carl Sandburg
Now, on four days without sleep, and an empty stomach, and a heart ripped to shreds, I had decisions to make. How, was already handled. My mother handed me that knowledge even before I could barely walk.
Where? This was of great concern. I didn't want anyone to find me. In minor, so that they couldn't stop me. In major, because I figured it would be disturbing, and I my soul was so tired of disturbing the universe, I couldn't even put it into words.
I drove to a desolate part of town. An industrial area in West Berkeley where old and many deserted warehouses were far from the sidewalk. I parked. I turned on the radio, as loud as I could. I don't remember the song. It was inconsequential. Some sort of pulsating house music, meant for a rave. No lyrics. There were no lyrics in the world to match my plan.
I opened the razor blade pack. There were ten of them perhaps. Shiny and new. I used 5, held together as one thick blade, and I cut. I cut again and and again. The blood meant nothing at first, and I felt, disturbingly, nothing. No pain. I cut and I cut.
And then, I hit a vein.
Miracles happen in the most miraculous of ways. A cliche, but true.
When I hit the vein, a pulse of blood began to push and pour down my hand, my fingers, blood squirting onto my shirt and pants.
It shocked me. And something deep inside recognized a correlation. The pulsing, the liquid. It was like the ocean, the pull of the tides.
I was like the ocean. I was both bigger and smaller than I had ever imagined.
Pulse Pulse Pulse. The ocean meant that the universe waited, and the pulse meant that I was alive.
I was alive.
And I was in trouble.
I started my car again, and managed to drive the half mile or so - running stop signs, daring someone, anyone, to pull me over - and found myself at the department store where I had been working for the past few months.
I parked my car in an illegal red spot next to the entrance. When I walked in I tossed my keys to a security guard stationed near the front registers. "My car is outside. Park it for me."
"What? I can't do that! I can't leave my post, park your own damn car!"
But I kept walking, pushed by the ocean, so near and yet so far. And then I began to feel faint. I walked into the closest department in the store. The maternity ward, a cosmic joke almost, and a fuzzy dizziness assaulted my senses. I thought -
Oh my God. I am dying.
"Help me." I mouthed to the nearest store clerk. And then I went down. My knees buckled, my head cracked against the cement floor, and the blood kept coming.
We know the end of this particular story, because here I am writing it. But I'll fill in the details on another day.
Without doing so now - if I could give one suggestion (not advice, I hate advice) to anyone out there reading this who has or will consider suicide - let it be this:
You are both greater and smaller than you can imagine, both at the same time. You are the universe and the ocean, and you are integral to both. Your gift will never leave you, until it is truly your time. So long as you recognize how extraordinary of a gift that it is- it is three simple words that encapsulate the complexity of everything. The greatest gift there is. You are alive.
Twenty years later, the scars are barely noticeable. But when I turn my wrist so and catch a glimpse, sometimes I catch my breat at the same time. My own personal scarlett letters, carved in there for all eternity. This child has tried to run.
A million stories and lives and loves will run through my head when this happens. This child has tried to run, but - a miracle once more - every time, she manages to find her way back home, yet again.
“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars" 
![National Institute for Mental Health](<a href="http://www.nimh.nih.gov/"><img src="http://i299.photobucket.com/albums/mm309/zneart/suicide20prevention-1.jpg"></a>){kind=link}
So this is my question. How does a parent display love to a bi-polar person/child/adult in a way that it can be felt and accepted as genuine?"