Mental Health Awareness Month: Corridor in the Asylum

Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, who suffered the challenges of undiagnosed mental illnesses most of his life, has been posthumously diagnosed as most likely bipolar along with indicators for borderline personality disorder and epilepsy.

He was involuntarily hospitalized after he famously cut off part of his left ear in December 1888, and after he was released he eventually committed himself voluntarily to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in late 1889.

He painted Corridor in the Asylum in September 1889 to express to his brother Theo the hopelessness, fear and despair he felt in his confinement. The long, sharply receding corridor, monotonously repetitive arches and asymmetric vanishing point capture his profound loneliness and sense of isolation that existed in stark counterpoint to the cautious optimism that had led him to this hospitalization.

Characterized by bold colors, dramatic brushwork and heightened emotional intensity, the Post-Impressionist aesthetic gave van Gogh a dynamic visual vocabulary for expressing the clouds of conflicting feelings, emotions and struggles that plagued him, and it gave him a legacy that has continued to move modern viewers for well over a century.

Van Gogh was never able to overcome his struggles with mental illness, and he by suicide on July 29, 1890.

There Will Be Light

Next to Normal—a searing, brilliant, Pulitzer-winning rock opera examining the lives of a family whose mother is desperately struggling with bipolar depression—opened on Broadway 16 years ago today. The show beautifully captures the swings between the ridiculous highs and the soul-crushing lows the disease brings to those of us living in its fogs and terrors ... and to the selfless teams of people who care for us.

I’m fortunate enough to have seen the original production, very soon after I’d been diagnosed as bipolar and had found myself caught in a rather terrifying struggle to wrap my confused, exhausted brain around the fact that mental illness was no longer a mysterious entity in other people’s lives; it was MY life, and I had no idea how to manage it or what potential and very real horrors to expect from it.

The musical is rough to experience from any perspective, but seeing it for the first time tore me apart ... and then put me back together with its closing anthem, “Light,” which features an almost casually placed lyric that is at once devastating and hopeful and never fails to sneak up on me and emotionally gut me even though I know it’s coming: “The price of love is loss / but still we pay / we love anyway.”

Back when I saw the show on Broadway, selfies were new and weird and shameful—and for you young folks, it was the Middle Ages when our smartphones had cameras that faced only one way and didn’t let us see on our screens what our selfies would look like so we just had to hold our phones in the air and hope for the best—so I took this one-try selfie as quickly and discreetly as I could to ensure an entire city of complete strangers wouldn’t judge me. It turned out rather well, although I cut off the last letter of the sign. Which means as far as any of you know, I actually just saw a knockoff production called Next to Norma.

I've been invited to be the Bipolar Person in Residence and talk to the casts and audiences of Next to Normal productions at multiple theaters over the last decade. And while I hope it was helpful for the actors as they rehearsed and found their characters' realities, it was extremely helpful for me to have an opportunity to articulate the swings and uncertainties and terrors of living with a mental illness—both so I could explain any weirdness I've personally exhibited and to help the actors help their audiences better understand these realities.

While every bipolar mind is different and therefore every moment of Next to Normal doesn't exactly mirror my experiences, every note and every word of the show is brilliant and hits brilliantly close to home. And that closing anthem—sung by the characters not to each other but to the audience and to the present and to the future—encapsulates the struggles and hopes I live with every day in astute prose and powerful, emotional, wall-of-sound vocals:

Day after day,

We'll find the will to find our way.

Knowing that the darkest skies

Will someday see the sun.

When our long night is done,

There will be light.

Why is the waiting-room music at my psychiatrist’s office playing “Send in the Clowns”?

We love anyway

Next to Normal—a searing, brilliant, Pulitzer-winning rock opera examining the lives of a family whose mother is profoundly struggling with bipolar depression—opened on Broadway 11 years ago today. The show beautifully captures the swings between the ridiculous highs and the soul-crushing lows the disease brings to those of us living in its fogs and terrors ... and to the selfless teams of people who care for us.

I’m fortunate enough to have seen the original production, very soon after I’d been diagnosed as bipolar and had found myself caught in a rather terrifying struggle to wrap my confused, exhausted brain around the fact that mental illness was no longer a mysterious entity in other people’s lives; it was MY life, and I had no idea how to manage it or what potential and very real horrors to expect from it.

The musical is rough to experience from any perspective, but seeing it for the first time tore me apart ... and then put me back together with its closing anthem, “Light,” which features an almost casually placed lyric that is at once devastating and hopeful and never fails to sneak up on me and emotionally gut me even though I know it’s coming: “The price of love is loss / but still we pay / we love anyway.”

Back when I saw the show on Broadway, selfies were new and weird and shameful—and for you young folks, it was the Middle Ages when our smartphones had cameras that faced only one way and didn’t let us see on our screens what our selfies would look like so we just had to hold our phones in the air and hope for the best—so I took this one-try selfie as quickly and discreetly as I could to ensure an entire city of complete strangers wouldn’t judge me. It turned out rather well, although I cut off the last letter of the sign. Which means as far as any of you know, I actually just saw a knockoff production called Next to Norma.

I've been invited to be the Bipolar in Residence and talk to the casts of Next to Normal productions at a number of local theaters over the last few years. And while I hope it was helpful for the actors as they rehearsed and found their characters' realities, it was extremely helpful for me to have an opportunity to articulate the swings and uncertainties and terrors of living with a mental illness—both so I could explain any weirdness I've personally exhibited and to help the actors help their audiences better understand these realities.

While every bipolar mind is different and therefore every moment of Next to Normal doesn't exactly mirror my experiences, every note and every word of the show is brilliant. And that closing anthem—sung by the characters not to each other but to the audience and to the present and to the future—encapsulates the struggles and hopes I live with every day in astute prose and powerful, emotional, wall-of-sound vocals:

Day after day,
We'll find the will to find our way.
Knowing that the darkest skies
Will someday see the sun.
When our long night is done,
There will be light.

I probably shouldn’t have been so cavalier

about living my life effortlessly free and clear on my bipolar meds this morning, because by noon I was sliding into a depressive episode fast enough that I left work and came home to crash. But five hours of sleep and shovelfuls of leftover Christmas comfort food have brought me back from the brink. Seeing Kelly Clarkson sing “Fancy” in tribute to Reba McEntire on Kennedy Center Honors didn’t hurt either. I’m profoundly exhausted, but I think I dodged a bullet by canceling the rest of my day to sleep. Onward!

Fire and music

When you apparently mention being bipolar too much on social media and it cosmically triggers a depressive episode that lands you in bed for 18 hours when you get home from work and it’s bad enough that you call in sick the next day even though you’re hoarding all your PTO for all your summer vacations but it turns out to be the right decision because you sleep long and rough and alarmingly sweaty and you eventually start to punch your way out of the wet wool blanket and see the light through the fog and your mom gets out your favorite mattress-ticking sheet to put on the couch so you can convalesce in the living room by the radio that’s currently playing a Fauré harp sonata which isn’t totally your thing but you still have some lingering fog so you really have bigger fish to fry which is just an expression because you don’t really like seafood where was I oh yes I had a damn depressive episode yesterday that ended up being worse than I’d expected and I always feel guilty calling in sick but these episodes have gone from one a month to about three a year and it’s better it happened today instead of tomorrow when I’d have to fight my way out of a fog on stage in my show which I’ve done many times before but it’s not ideal and it usually alarms my castmates so WHEW! to that timing and now the radio is playing a Rossini overture that’s filled with fire and music just like Eve Harrington which is way more my style and I have my mattress-ticking sheet and a feisty-cherry-flavored whatever the hell that means Diet Coke and I managed to take a decent selfie not that I have a lot of practice or anything and if I time everything just right this manically run-on non-sentence will post just ... as ... the ... Rossini ... comes ... to ... its ... triumphant ... CONCLUSION.

Why is the hold music at my psychiatrist’s office playing “Send in the Clowns”?

 Making my entrance again with my usual flair ...

Don't cry for me

So I made it through two and a half Evita performances over the weekend without even a hint of the grunting and twitching and wincing and eye rubbing that have been my constant companions on my current cocktail of bipolar meds. But they started to flare up in the second act of our closing show on Saturday night, and by the time I got to my car after the show I was a full-throttle circus clown of grunting and twitching and wincing and face touching and eye rolling and invisible gum chomping. So I regretfully skipped our cast party and came home to hide under the covers. Today at work I was thankfully a few clowns short of a full circus, but I compensated with hand tremors and a pronounced loss of dexterity in my fingers when I tried to open and close shoe boxes so I could write about them or press the button on my key fob to lock and unlock my car. Plus my face is now chronically red and raw from involuntarily rubbing the fuck out of it whether I'm asleep or awake. Plus my left ear has the on-and-off sensation that I've successfully driven a railroad spike in it. I'm frustrated to the point of never leaving the house again, but there are shows I want to be in and people I want to meet and uncling I want to do and acres of shoes I want to wear and maybe another marathon I want to tackle and family happiness I want to enjoy. And thanks to an after-hours call with my psychiatrist tonight, I have a new med to get my hopes up over. So I'm heading to bed with a new psychotropic joining my existing army of four and wondering which Jake I'll be in the morning. Good night to all of you who managed to slog completely through this endless manifesto. And thank you to everyone who calls or texts to see how I am. I may not have a coherent answer every time but your friendships mean the world to me.

I'm thankful for family and friends who believe in me fiercely, even when I don't

I'm thankful for new opportunities to participate and stretch and thrive. I'm thankful for productive dance rehearsals and honest sweats and meds that seem to work better each day and 5 Hour Energy when they need a boost. I'm thankful my mom cries when I have a good day and my dad hugs me freely, which we never seemed to do enough in the past. I'm thankful I have a safety net in my family when so many others with illnesses like bipolar depression don't. And right now I'm this close to being thankful for a deep deep sleep after an awesome day.