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Manic-Depressive Wanderer by Rebecca Mitchell Merriman Published by Xlibris
Corporation
To everyone else, she was a captivating woman and successful educator with a happy marriage. She had an intriguing life as an author, popular motivational speaker, and bohemian world wanderer. Yet for two decades Rebecca Mitchell Merriman silently struggled through a raging roller coaster ride of hazardous highs and consuming depressions. This moving memoir of moods and madness follows the story of Merriman's long journey toward healing. Arranged as a collection of essays, which mix vivid vignettes from her past with deeply personal journal entries and present reflections on her battle with this crippling disease, it describes with unflinching honesty how the storms of mental illness almost swept her from the land of the living. Writing Out the Storm will bring hope to anyone tormented by the ravages of depression or bipolar illness. Rebecca Mitchell Merriman spends most of each summer on her Colorado land, where she writes, hikes, meditates and plans her next trip abroad. She spends the rest of the year in the Tennessee countryside with Karl, her husband of 19 years, and Sweepy, Happy and Squeaky, their three coddled cats. Rebecca Merriman writes
from the heart. She tells us that manic-depression is both an exhilarating
and frightening roller coaster ride type of mental illness. It affords its
sufferers with an oversized dose of happiness, confidence, and risk-taking
only to plunge them into the depths of darkness and despair. Merriman writes
with a "no holds barred" approach, opening the door to this mystifying disorder
from which so many people suffer. For anyone suffering
from manic depression or who knows someone touched by this disorder, this
book is an easy-to-read and enjoyable story of what can be a devastating,
and sometimes deadly, illness. It offers hope by showing, from first hand
experience, how the medications and counseling available today to manage
it can help people live healthy lives. ".....Writing
Out The Storm is a therapeutic journey and vivid account filled with
tears, laughter and hope. By sharing her healing, Merriman welcomes
readers by opening a painful door and inviting the healing of all who enter."
A memoir of her 20-year silent struggle with the illness. Endorsed by Pulitzer prize nominee and bestselling author of The Beast, Tracy Thompson: "Rebecca Mitchell Merriman's Writing Out The Storm is a terrifying and vivid first person account of what itis like to suffer bipolar illness--a witness from the eye of a hurricane. It is a valuable and eloquent addition to a growing genre: memoirs by those of us who have survived these life-disfiguring illnesses." "There came in gale force gusts a savage tempest ripping through my world for the first time when I was just coming into adulthood. It lasted for two decades. This book is a smattering of my emotional and spiritual wanderings through that storm of mental illness. And although it’s not only an account of my sickness, it is about my life, which has been profoundly affected by a chemical imbalance. You'll also find here the precious people and animals who've helped me weather the storm. Without them my life would surely have been cut short. No chronological story unfolds here because that is not how mental illness is experienced by those who suffer its ravages. It is remembered in waves, some completely lost in the last brutal thrashing. The upside of bipolar illness, mania, provides many moods of splendor, some of which are also recorded here. A daily journal, kept over a period of several years, has allowed me to document my jagged moods and collect my many musings. A few morsels have been gathered and expounded upon here in an effort to reach others who----themselves, or through a loved one----are both tormented and blessed by this curious condition called manic-depressive illness. It's also for anyone suffering from clinical depression, who suffers from only the dark side of this illness. And it's for the noble psychiatrists and mental health professionals who strive to understand the inner turmoils of their bipolar patients in an effort to better assist us with this deeply complicated disease. Like so many others before, I had lived with the shame of clinical depression for decades. I was too embarrassed to seek treatment because of my chosen profession as an educator, self-help author, and motivational speaker. Too embarrassed until the autumn of my 41st year. The report of news anchor Mike Wallace's treatment for depression had encouraged me earlier that year. But it was another serendipitous incident that finally convinced me to seek help. While traveling through Arkansas in early October, I happened to turn on my car radio and caught the very beginning of a 30-minute talk show featuring a mental health professional speaking about National Depression Screening Day. One-by-one she talked about the symptoms of clinical depression: Loss of interest in formerly joyful activities, lack of energy, change in appetite, feelings of guilt and worthlessness, disrupted sleeping patterns, hopelessness, thoughts of suicide.… I knew it was no accident that my radio seek button had landed on that particular station. I had suffered from all of the above for 18 years---since age 24---when I was erroneously diagnosed with a "borderline thyroid problem". Borderline meant that there was no medical proof. It was just a small-town doctor's guess at what the symptoms could mean. For two decades I suffered, needlessly wandering in and out of despair. Most often my manias were just high enough to make me look like an effervescent over-achiever, although at times they left me at the mercy of whirling euphorias with no boundaries to reign me in. Still, it was the devastating depressions that tormented me most---often to the point of suicidal speculations. On other occasions the storm would simply darken my world with a debilitating gloom. Sometimes bordering on agoraphobic, I couldn't bear the thought of interacting with people. It wasn't that I didn't love people. I did. But with people came noise and confusion and unpredictability. To a frazzled mind these are scary entanglements to be avoided at all cost. Therefore, my last year as a high school teacher was spent mostly hiding---afraid that too much exposure might clue-in my students and fellow educators that something was dreadfully wrong with me. I would arrive nearly two hours early so I could get into the school building without being detected and then slink into the home-ec teacher's tiny cloak room to grade papers, record my misery in my journal, or simply huddle in awful apprehension of the coming schoolday. As my watch ticked toward 7:30, the indescribable angst would weigh so heavy on my chest that I could scarcely find the strength to rise from my safe closet-tomb to join the land of the living---a land I felt increasingly foreign to as the dark days fell into months. In spite of my sense of alienation, I had become adept---from decades of practice---at hiding my desperation behind a bright smile and manic flurry of busyness. Excessive involvement in extracurricular as well as academic activities won me the honor of being elected Teacher of the Year during my second year of teaching. Yet all the while my insides churned and jumped through ceaseless stressors and numbing noises that, to others, were apparently imperceptible. So, that agonizing last year in the classroom was characterized by smile-walls, shot-nerves and lots of days off. Since I had rarely taken off work the previous years, I took advantage of my accumulated leave that final year and appropriately called them "mental health days", of which my wonderful principal was very understanding. He seemed to sense the churning tempest beneath my cheery demeanor. So, why didn't I seek help earlier? I kept reading books and listening to tapes that assured me whatever my problems were, I could think my way out of them. Change your thinking and change your life. I believed, still do, that we have been given the power to shape our own destiny. I was sure that by focusing on my depression it would only get worse. Often I had seen proof of the old adage "what you focus on, you get more of." Therefore, rather than succumb to my obtrusive handicap, I continued to pretend it didn't exist. So, after resigning from the high school, I wrote a book about, of all things, happiness, and became a professional speaker and consultant on the illusive subject. It's as if making happiness my life's work would somehow magically entitle me to it. I didn't realize that it was my depression that I needed to change my thinking about. I thought of it as a personal flaw of character, a failure to change my thinking. If I could just think happy thoughts and focus on positive things, I should surely be able to lift that lead weight off my heart and simply snap out of it. I needed to change my thinking and understand that clinical depression is an illness, just like diabetes or heart disease, and it isn't something to be ashamed of. But that's not what I thought. So for nearly two decades I tried to think, read, focus, work and affirm my way out of depression. On only two occasions did I give in and temporarily seek medical help. Once from a local mental health facility that labeled me cyclothymic (characterized by rapid moderate mood swings) and immediately started me on Lithium. After just a few days I felt like a zombie, barely able to keep my eyes open. I stopped taking the pills and never went back. A few years later I went to an internist who prescribed Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that made me so jittery and irritable I didn't stay with it long enough to notice any relief. So the tempest raged on over the years. And I'm convinced that one of the only reasons I'm still among the living is because I found a sort of comfort and companionship writing out the storm in my journal. There was something soothing about candidly articulating my struggle. I kept weaving words into a raggedy safety net that somehow kept me from being completely obliterated by the mighty force of the storm. Good days and manic days and hell days and god-days were woven together to form a net that caught me again and again. I was blistered and battered but my word-weavings saved me from being utterly destroyed." |