Madness

Marya Hohnbacher is bipolar, and her memoir of her life with it, Madness, is amazing. If you have an interest in mental health memoirs, which can be rare in terms of this kind of quality and attention to details, please read it.

There are so many passages when she describes what it feels like to be manic, or depressed, with such directness as to put me right there (squirming) with her. I'll share some of those.

But first, some of her more universal, process-oriented passages, which show her wisdom and whiz with words:

How do we know who we are or what we can become? We tell ourselves stories. The stories we tell are what we know of ourselves. We are a creation, a product of our own minds, a pastiche of memory, dream, fear, desire. My memory looks like a child's collage, or a ransom note, incomplete and full of holes. All I have is today, this moment, to work with. I am writing my story as I go. I am inventing myself one moment, one experience, at a time. 

And that's all right. It means I can choose who I become. It means I can write my future. I can create a person, write a story, full of hope.

Mental Health Memoir

In the last few months, I have found myself coaching four separate people working on memoirs about mental health struggles. The more I work with groups and individuals on these issues, the more it becomes clear to me how essential these stories are. How rarely they are told with accuracy, total honesty, and just how hard it is to express the experience of struggling with reality, or what you are told is reality, in a way that can be conveyed clearly.

I asked one student recently if she could explain more clearly, for instance, what is it like to lose time? She experienced a manic period a few years ago, and for a month or so she couldn't seem to track time. I asked her if this is considered normal - not because I needed to normalize her experience, but just to give some context. Yes, she said, but she didn't know that until later. She's reluctant - understandably - to explain what was going on since at the time she didn't know. It feels truer to her experience to just tell it like it was, which is to say that she not only lost time but wasn't particularly aware of it, much less losing it.