My Struggle With Bipolar Depression and Dream to Go to Law School

I’ve struggled to write this blog, just like I’ve struggled to do most things for what amounts to a very long time now-so long that it feels like a lifetime and what came before only fragments of a not well remembered dream.  In actual temporal time, it’s only a few years of melancholy and moderately severe major depression. But in the life of the mind, there is an unbridgeable chasm between the person I am now, who I once was, and who I want to become.  I am so lost in my isolation that my only refuge is in turning inward; a strategy which offers no solace at all-only shame and regret.

I feel so isolated. I suppose that is one of the hallmarks of mental illness – detachment – that it seems impossible to relate to anyone.  Furthermore, I’m not an attorney, just someone who has lived the hells and wonderful peaks of manic depression.  My exposure to the law is through my father, my uncles, my cousins, and Dan Lukasik.  I hope to go to law school one day, but I need to retake the LSAT first.  So why write a blog?  What good could it possibly do?  Hopefully, some of the sentiments I describe will resonate with you.  But hope is fickle; a thinly stitched veneer stretched tautly over an ever-widening mire of unfulfilled promise.  When I look back at what I hoped for, most of it has faded into the mists of time with barely even the trace of memory or, worse yet, has been completely buried beneath the scars of regret.

In the face of my futility, my stupidity, my selfishness, my demons, hope that I can one day return the love and support that has been given me has allowed me to trudge on, kept me from giving up.  Even if it flies in the face of all rational thinking, experience, and who you believe you are the sole advice I would deign to give is to no never give up hope that you can bring yourself to a better place and can make yourself into the person you wish to become.  Though there be no reason to believe, allow belief to inspire you all the same.

“I can only stand apart and sympathize/ For we are always what our situations hand us/ It’s either sadness or euphoria.”

The above is a stanza from Billy Joel’s song “Summer, Highland Falls” that has always resonated with me.  The song itself captures the sense of helplessness, at times even ironic apathy, I have felt towards a disease (or mental illness or whatever I should call it) that has allowed me to leap through the heights of “euphoria”, and to spiral down into the depths of suicidal depression, seemingly completely independent of any of the external aspects of my life.

I once told a friend that in the past three months I had had at least 45 “perfect days” (i.e., days that I could not imagine being any happier in), but that 45 was a conservative estimate and it was probably more.  I’ve also spent weeks on end consumed by vivid images of ways in which I could gruesomely kill myself.  And both of these emotions, which at the time feel so pervasive and all encompassing, occurred while living on the same college campus and surrounded by many of the same people.  So it’s hard not to “stand apart and sympathize” with the fact that regardless of daily accomplishments or minor setbacks, or even in the face of significant change, it doesn’t matter what you do.  That because of who you are, in a very intimate and fundamental sense, you are going to experience “either sadness or euphoria,” and you have little say in how intensely you are going to experience that emotion, or for how long (so let’s hope its euphoria, and it lasts forever).

This complete lack of control has always weighed on me as a moral failure because I’ve recognized what I consider the best version of myself-productive, engaged, intelligent, charming and yet, due to an inherent weakness, have been unable to maintain that persona consistently.

Instead I, and I would like to emphasize the contradiction and confusion surrounding a feeling at once of helplessness and simultaneously of complete responsibility for being who I am, have eventually always succumbed to periodic bouts of anxiety, negativity, and self-doubt.  These periods have always been characterized by an intense sense of isolation in which almost palpable barriers are restricting me from coming into touch with the people and events surrounding me while at the same time engaging/suppressing the most endearing aspects of who I would hope to be as a person.

There are two types of sadness which result from this frustration and alienation.

Painful Sadness

There is a horrible, painful sadness.  For me, this type of sadness is expressed through intense suicidal ideation-constant mental images meant to shock the senses into an acknowledgment of how base you are.  Brutal beatings, stabbings, gouging’s, hangings.  It consumes you until the idea is all there is and it takes every ounce of energy you have to beat it back.  And it breaks your heart to see someone you love not to be able to say that this is how you feel, and it’s not their fault, but you are worlds away and mired in a sadness/loathing that is impossible to understand for those who have not yet experienced it.  And they love you, so they are trying to understand, but, how could they?  And this breaks your heart even more.

Cleansing Sadness

And there is also a beautiful, cleansing sadness.  For me, this beautiful sadness feels more real than anything in the world.  When I have been at the height of mania-during the happiest times of my life, I have still felt intimately in tune with songs that deal with regret-juxtaposing the inadequacy of the self with the intrinsic sublimity of some other-which you have failed.

There is a powerlessness to this beautiful sadness, an inevitability.  It is real because it exists at the core of our most vulnerable selves, and therefore its expression comes out at a time when we are “most alive” and most in tune with our emotional intuition-when we are most ready to admit to and grasp on to that which we truly hope for and believe in.  This sadness is not manifested in horrifying suicidal ideations but rather in the awe-inspiring idea that we are not worthy of the wonderful phenomena we call life.  That we are ashamed of our ugliness amidst so much beauty and yet, in spite of our baseness, we have the opportunity to exist within as well as work towards some greater good.

Mania

In many senses, for me, the mania of bipolar has been synonymous with stripping away the debilitating fear and anxiety which were so constricting for so long, and a constant struggle has been not to glorify it.  My Mom is taking a wonderful self-help course entitled “Fearless Living” and those two words, again from my experience, imbibe what it means to be manic or hypo manic; imbued with amazing amounts of self-confidence and gratitude, it’s unbelievably easy to live a carefree, upbeat, happy-go-lucky lifestyle, all the while being extraordinarily productive.  Thus thinking in the binary can be dangerous-there is a natural tendency to see every aspect of the mania as better than every aspect of the depression.

However, beyond the fact that I have never been able to sustain mania, there is also a depth of feeling engendered by the sincere melancholy of depression that I have never encountered in the euphoric whirlwinds of mania.  And I think the small silver lining to what is a dark cloud is the depth of meaning such great sorrow can expose you to-in a way an almost redemptive suffering.  At the very least, though depression has taught me to hate myself many times over, it has also taught me to love life.  The sad beauty of such a self-effacing distinction, to hate your being while loving your existence, is something to be thankful for and, hopefully in time, something to build off of for the future.

I would like to close this blog with what have for me been some solid building blocks for sheltering myself from, coping with, and eventually recovering from depression.

Exercise

When there seems to be nowhere to turn and the prospect of getting through the day seems unbearable, working out and (especially) yoga exercises are blocks of time where you don’t have to interact with other people, can be totally in your head, and when you’re done you feel a little better physically, even if not mentally.  Really any small thing that you can do consistently and through which you can mark progress-I’m getting stronger, better endurance, or greater flexibility-is a wonderful way to establish extrinsic markers of success-I’m better at this than I was a few weeks ago, which, in turn, can catalyze good feelings about yourself as a person.

Think of something you’ve always wanted to do or be good at, and then identify manageable steps that you can take on a consistent basis that gradually takes you towards your goal.  Don’t say I need to be as good as someone else or make an arbitrary benchmark-rather say I want to get in better shape relative to how I am right now, so I’m going to run or go to yoga more often.  Or I’ve always wanted to know how to tie my flies, shuffle a deck of cards, play an instrument, or speak a foreign language, so I’m going to work on this task a few minutes each day as opposed to watching TV or surfing the web.

Taking little steps like these that are working towards longer goals, even if you are not aware of any specific professional or extrinsic benefits to achieving those goals, can be inherently rewarding in and of themselves.  If you’re better at an activity, any activity, then you were a few weeks ago, that can be one small thing that you feel good about, even as the rest of your world remains shrouded in darkness.  It can help motivate you to get through the day, can serve as a spring towards other “productive” behavior, and eventually be something you can hang your hat on.  However, it’s important not to beat yourself up after a day in which you failed to take your positive “step”-rather have a little self compassion and say tomorrow is a new day, and it’s not the end of the world, indeed its completely ok, that I wasn’t able to do anything “productive” today.

Finally, reading and writing can be extremely cathartic.  Reading great literature can give you an emotional connection to characters, ideas, and feelings during a time when you felt completely isolated and estranged from the outside world.  Fiction and non-fiction distract you from the constant stream of negative and self-critical thinking that can paralyze you.  And, in a way similar to the steps discussed above, finishing a book you’ve always wanted to read or one on a subject that you’ve wanted to know more about, can generate a (no matter how small) sense of accomplishment that, no matter how insidiously it attempts to, the depression cannot take away.

On the other hand, for me, writing is more of a risk.  I can be very critical of myself as a writer-a case in point is this blog which has been taxing at times-and sometimes end up feeling worse after sitting down to write.  At other times, writing has been akin to therapy in that it has helped me to sincerely articulate-in the best way I know how the complex matrix of emotions enmeshed within me.  Even if journaling or poetry don’t make sense to a single other person, the fact that they make sense to you can temporarily relieve part of the burden imposed by self-guilt and personal shame.  It can be an outlet for your anguish, space where you can be authentically yourself.  Sometimes, you can be so overwhelmed by your depressive thinking that you need some way to release that thinking-writing can be an effective way to do this.

In any case, don’t immediately sit down and assume that because of your depth of feeling you’re going to write the next great American novel.  Rather start with a paragraph or a poem.  It might end up being useless junk that you never look at again, and that’s ok, because part of what depression is, is a needless anguish and self-doubt that is inhibiting you in your quest to live a full life and should be discarded as soon as possible.  But amidst the uselessness you may stumble upon small snippets of truth-a rhyming couplet here, a few sentences there-that satisfactorily express for you one of the tragic and meaningful aspects of your condition (or symbolically the human condition more generally).  These small snippets are worth holding onto as they reflect the deeper truths embedded within a malaise that so often brings us to our knees and which, on sublimely rare occasions, reveals insights that one (I believe) can only obtain through suffering.

Anonymous

Further reading:

Bipolar Disorder Overview

Writing Your Way Out of Depression

The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide: What You and Your Family Need to Know

Yoga for Depression: A Compassionate Guide to Relieve Suffering Through Yoga

The Bipolar II Disorder Workbook: Managing Recurring Depression, Hypomania, and Anxiety

Is Bipolar II Easier to Live With Than Bipolar I

 

On Depression, Hope, Hopelessness, and Freedom

Hope is a desire for something combined with an anticipation of it happening, it is the anticipation of something desired. To hope for something is to make a claim about something’s significance to us, and so to make a claim about ourselves.

One opposite of hope is fear, which is the desire for something not to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening. Inherent in every hope is a fear, and in every fear a hope. Other opposites of hope are hopelessness and despair, which is an agitated form of hopelessness.

Hope is often symbolized by harbingers of spring such as the swallow, and there is a saying that ‘there is no life without hope’. Hope is an expression of confidence in life, and the basis for more practical dispositions such as patience, determination, and courage. It provides us not only with aims but also with the motivation to attain those aims. As the theologian, Martin Luther said, ‘Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.’ Hope not only looks to the future but also makes present hardship easier to bear, sustaining us through our winters.

At a deeper level, hope links our present to our past and future, providing us with an overarching narrative that lends shape and meaning to our life. Our hopes are the strands that run through our life, defining our struggles, our successes and setbacks, our strengths and shortcomings, and in some sense ennobling them. Running with this idea, our hopes, though profoundly human—because only humans can project themselves into the distant future—also connect us with something much greater than ourselves, a cosmic life force that moves in us as it does in all of nature. Conversely, hopelessness is both a cause and a symptom of depression, and, in the context of depression, a strong predictor of suicide. “What do you hope for out of life?” is one of my most important questions as a psychiatrist, and if my patient replies “nothing” I have to take that very seriously.

Hope is pleasant in so far as the anticipation of a desire is pleasant. But hope is also painful, because the desired circumstance is not yet at hand, and, moreover, may never be at hand. Whereas realistic or reasonable hopes are more likely to lift us up and move us on, false hopes are more likely to prolong our torment, leading to inevitable frustration, disappointment, and resentment. The pain of harboring hopes, and the greater pain of having them dashed explains why most people tend to be modest in their hoping.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, the philosopher Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, a mythological king of Ephyra who was punished for his chronic deceitfulness by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. Camus concludes, ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognizing and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

Neel Burton, M.D., is a psychiatrist, philosopher, writer, and wine lover who lives and teaches in Oxford, England. He is a Fellow of Green-Templeton College, Oxford, and the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Richard Asher Prize, the British Medical Association’s Young Authors’ Award, the Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award, and a Best in the World Gourmand Award.He is author of Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the EmotionsHide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception, and other books.

 

 

 

10 Ways Our Thinking Can Fuel Depression and Anxiety

Psychologist Elvira Aletta writes, “Right now, you and I can see clearly how those thoughts are exaggerated, over-the-top, unreasonable. It’s not so easy to see when we are caught up in the moment. Luckily, to make this task easier for us, Dr David Burns did a lot of work categorizing ten basic ways we distort our thinking. Study these categories. Highlight the ones you tend to use. Think of your own real life examples”.  Read her Blog

What’s Up? Gratitude and Depression

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When first squashed by clinical depression years ago, some told me to think of all the things I had to be thankful for – as if this would cure my “blues.”

But I didn’t have the blues. I didn’t just feel “sad.”  I had an illness.  I had entered a long, dark tunnel.  I didn’t see a glimmer of light at the end of it.  I wandered in it for years before things got better.  At some point, I saw an end, of sorts, in sight.  I exited that tunnel and felt the warming sun of life reinvigorating my body. I knew I was going to be okay.

It was only after having exiting the tunnel that I was capable of even thinking about gratitude.  But now it’s an important part of my “Depression Toolkit”: things I do to keep what sufferer Winston Churchill called “the black dog” at bay.

Listen to the podcast of my interview with Rabbi Mark Gellman

Why Lawyers Shouldn’t Try Too Hard to Get Over Their Fears

Many of us attorneys suffer from fear. Our fears can get in the way of just about anything and everything. They can get in the way of our dreams and goals and big plans. They can also get in the way of our daily productivity and our basic tasks.

For both attorneys looking to leave the law and do something else, and those lawyers who want stay in the law and improve their practice, our fears are often our greatest obstacle to moving forward and making progress.

There are many specific fears we can suffer from:

  • I’m afraid that I’m not reaching my own potential
  • I’m afraid of what I’ve become
  • I’m afraid I don’t have a life any more
  • I’m afraid I don’t see my family as much as I want to
  • I’m afraid of that pain in my chest, and that anxiety in my stomach
  • I’m afraid that I’m so unhappy
  • I’m afraid I’m a fraud and everyone will soon find out
  • I’m afraid that I don’t really know what I’m doing
  • I’m afraid to work another Friday night
  • I’m afraid that I will fail
  • I’m afraid I’ll be sued for malpractice
  • I’m afraid I’ll be disbarred
  • I’m afraid I’ll miss a very important deadline
  • I’m afraid I won’t make partner
  • I’m afraid to take a risk
  • I’m afraid everyone will laugh at me
  • I’m afraid I’ll get my bar license stripped away
  • I’m afraid to leave the law
  • I’m afraid that if I leave the law, I’ll be different than all of my attorney friends
  • I’m afraid I won’t be able to make as much money as I make now
  • I’m afraid that I cannot do anything different than the practice of law
  • I’m afraid I won’t be able to convince someone else to hire me
  • I’m afraid to update my resume
  • I’m afraid to tell my firm I want to leave
  • I’m afraid I won’t be able to say I’m really a lawyer anymore
  • I’m afraid I’ll have to find a new identity
  • I’m afraid it’ll takes a long time
  • I’m afraid I’ll have to face some difficult facts about myself
  • I’m afraid it won’t be easy
  • I’m afraid I will be ridiculed and doubted
  • I’m afraid I will make mistakes
  • I’m afraid to put myself out there
  • I’m afraid of approaching people and networking
  • I’m afraid of throwing my whole legal career away
  • I’m afraid if I keep doing what I’m doing

While many of us view fears as something to be overcome, a major element of success and personal development and growth is the realization that these fears never really go away. They are always with us. The secret is not in necessarily extinguishing them, but in mitigating them.

So how do we do this?

A Strategy: It can prove beneficial to not to try and get rid of our fears, but just to lessen their impact on us over time. We attorneys can spend too much time trying to eradicate our fears, but since these fears (and new fears) will always crop up, that can often be a losing battle. When we try to eradicate our fears, it means we sacrifice the time and energy we could be using to do something else productive: grow our practice, network, explore our personal strengths and skills, interview for other non-legal jobs, volunteer, start that side project. We get consumed or paralyzed from doing what we need to do to grow and prosper.

We have to learn and change and grow despite fear, not in its absence. We need to develop and become more confident and courageous in parallel with mitigating our worries.

A Tactic: Once we realize that success involves mitigating fears, and not necessarily eradicating them, then the next step is to plan how best to act in the face of worry and anxiety and dread.

Slowly. Try something, see some results, chip away at the fear, and then keep at it. And this means using Baby Steps.

The Baby Step is a simple, easy-to-do action or task one can take to begin this process. It takes time and isn’t very glamorous. But it makes the overwhelming less daunting.  It makes the scary less fearsome.  It lessens the paralysis.  It builds confidence and shows tangible results and grows courage.

In real life, this means anything. It can take the shape of volunteering somewhere that you feel passionate about it. It means starting a blog or a website about a topic you love. It means honing your public speaking skills so you can network and interact with people better. It means reaching out to someone you trust to discuss your feelings and thoughts.

As you embrace your fears and take baby step acts, you gain momentum. As you gain momentum, you weaken the hold fear has on you. As you weaken the hold fear has on you, you grow your confidence. As you grow your confidence, you increase the likelihood of doing something you excel at and enjoy. As you increase the likelihood of doing something you excel at and enjoy, you can come face to face with happiness and self-worth and purpose and contentment.

Casey Berman graduated Hastings in 1999 and after a few years in the legal field left law behind to create a number of different enterprises. The Hastings career services office asked him to speak about his professional experience in branching out from the law in July 2009 during its summer speaking series.  After speaking to a packed room of lawyers and law students, Casey hatched another business idea – Leave Law Behind.  Check out his insightful blog and the services he provides lawyers at

Casey holds a BA in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.  He is licensed by the State Bar of California and holds the Series 7 and 63 security licenses.

 

 

Anxious Idiot

From The New York Times, author/blogger Daniel Smith writes, “Anxiety, like the tide, is forever receding and returning, receding and returning.  I have been experiencing this pattern for 2o years now, so my anxiety has come to seem, at times, inevitable and unassailable — a fait accompli.  Read the Blog

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