A journey through mental health takes this writer to the highlands of Chiapas, México
In 2005, just after my fifteenth birthday, I was diagnosed with co-occurring Bipolar and Borderline Personality Disorders. I had become very withdrawn and suspicious of everyone around me. I was obsessed with death, and wrote stories that shocked and alarmed my schoolteachers, repeatedly maintaining that I saw animals who were trying to speak to me outside of my windows at night. I remember feeling very small and powerless as—following my diagnosis—all of the adults in my life began to look at and treat me differently, tiptoeing around me like I was a walking suicide bomb. I did not feel heard or seen. In due time, I began to feel hateful towards them all.
One evening, I listened in on a phone conversation between my mother and one of my doctors. “It’s a shame,” he said. “Your daughter has an exceptionally high IQ for her age, but will be defined first and foremost by her tendencies towards manic depression, dissociation, and oppositional defiance.” I hung up and made a wholehearted promise to myself that I would never see that doctor again.
I search for people and places that can contain me, but I almost always return to the wild because nothing holds or supports me quite like earth.
Something had shattered inside of me. I refused to go to school. I tore beautiful paintings off of my parents’ walls and smashed them into the floor. One time, in the throes of a particularly maniacal fit of rage, I purposefully stepped in the glass aftermath and had to be rushed to the ER, where I remember feeling equal parts hysterical and numb as the medical team cut into my foot to remove the shards.
I used my parents’ credit cards and PayPal accounts to purchase designer handbags which I then promptly sold for cocaine money. I had violent outbursts; I was arrested for a physical attack and spent several nights in a juvenile detention center. I ran away with a man twice my age. I was vaguely and blatantly cruel to those I called my friends. I screamed in the morning and cried myself to sleep at night. I was unhinged, I was disappearing.
My parents sought further help and I was unresponsive, taking it upon myself to show them in the worst of ways that I thrilled in being out-of-control, that I even enjoyed wasting their efforts, time, and money on therapy. Feeling helpless and heartbroken, they finally had me escorted to a wilderness intervention program, where I stayed for 89 days before being transferred to a treatment center in the mountains of northern Utah.
I’d been taught from a very young age to respect the great mystery of the natural world–my dad is a botanist and my mom lived with primitive Amazonian tribes for years–but actually being immersed in the wilderness with seven other girls my age was something else. We sat in circle around fire and unknowingly created rituals to transform the weight of what we were carrying, we rubbed each others’ skin with leaves and flowers from the forest and coached each other through pain and heartbreak and trauma. I learned early on about the power and resilience of the female spirit, about the uniquely feminine strength that is to h o l d: emotion, energy, life itself. Being in such intimate proximity to the earth and surrounded by the courage and protection of those girls, I felt viscerally and wildly alive in a new, magnificent way. All that I had experienced and felt within myself, I saw reflected in stories shared under big skies, and in the grand symphony of the natural beauty around me. I was mirrored, and in my reflection, I felt whole.
I vowed to carry this feeling with me to my treatment center in Utah, where I successfully completed my program in record time and was therefore deemed stable and ready to re-enter the “real” world. I remained under control for several years, but when I went to college in Portland, it all came back: the euphoria, the despair, the extremes. The mania, the dissociation. The wanting to leave my body, the longing for erasure.
I felt more alone than ever, and instead of asking for help, I masked it all. My academic performance mirrored my mental and emotional fluctuations; I would surpass a professor’s expectations, or I would stop showing up for class entirely. My inability to hold myself in empathy rebounded outward. I took refuge in disconnect and numbness, and told myself a story in which everyone, including myself, was a character. I oscillated between pouring myself towards my studies, and feeling utterly incapable of anything.
Then, just before I was about to begin my thesis, I found yoga, a practice by which its own Sanskrit definition means to yoke, to unite; a practice with a non-dogmatic heart-philosophy that told me I was already whole. The rhythm of mindful movement and breath helped me clear and create space; I experienced lightness where before there had only been heaviness. I felt expansive, untethered, free. The physicality of the practice became another mirror; I learned in a tangible, concrete way how to call on all the parts of myself, how to move as an integrated being. I met the most brilliant and loving of teachers who took me under her wing, empowered me in my fullness, and even readily shared with me her visionary life’s work when I asked to be her apprentice. I witnessed her magic, her seemingly superpower-like ability to help people of all ages and from all walks of life heal–through injury, trauma, and pain. I observed in wonder and awe as she helped people the same way she had helped me: simply by seeing them, by supporting them as a reflection in their process of discovering their inner medicine.
If we want to move forward, if we want to stop seeing each other in superficially divisive ways, if we want to forgive, if we want to help one another, and if we want to heal, our pain is valuable