I have Bipolar Disorder. And I'm also a spiritual leader.
“There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.”
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I am a woman of fire. I live by passion and the spark is what keeps me going. That fire is what has led me to the wonderful things in my life. It’s led to my path as a spiritual teacher and author.
But sometimes I burn too hot. And sometimes my fire goes out. Because I also have bipolar disorder.
The times when I am most creative and most public would be considered my normal to hypomanic phases. These are the times when I am tending my fire with care. I am feeding it and watching it closely so it doesn’t burn out or burn out of control. It keeps me inspired and driven, and in a matter of weeks, I can accomplish the same amount of work that a normal person may take a year to complete. It’s really quite impressive, even to myself. This is what I consider my ideal baseline, because I personally believe the best gifts from bipolar are from this state. But there’s a balance to it, because when I fall into a depressive episode or shoot into a manic episode, I may do nothing “productive” for months. Hypomania is when I appear most inspiring to your eyes because it is when I feel most inspired to share my thoughts while staying grounded. It’s where I can reach the gods with the tips of my fingers while keeping my toes in the sand. I go to great lengths to achieve or maintain a normal state tinged by hypomania like this - supplements, a careful diet, plenty of movement and sleep, meditation, creative expression. But being as sensitive to the world as I am, sometimes there’s nothing I can do, and the hypomania builds into mania or falls away into depression.
In mania, my fire burns too hot and too high.
I am a lightbulb with far too much wattage running through me. I take on wave after wave of information. I wake up in the middle of the night and my feet are on fire. I have to walk on cold tile to cool myself enough to sleep. The messages are coming quicker and quicker and I can no longer accommodate them. There isn’t the time nor the focus to use them creatively anymore. They simply turn into too many voices in my head, all screaming at once, and it all becomes irritability and anxiety. The same energy that gave me brilliant insight into the world, into others, into myself, now threatens to destroy me and take away my safety. That speed of energy coursing through my brain turns into impulsiveness. I want to be reckless, I want to do reckless things, I want to push myself over the edge because self-destruction is imminent anyways. (And boy does it sound fun.) One of the primary ways my spirit tries to deal with mania is the hypersexuality it causes. I fully understand that hypersexuality can be dangerous, and I’ve seen myself get into bad situations or throw around my energy around carelessly, but my spiritual practice has also taught me that sexuality is one of the clearest and most direct ways our body tries to make peace with our psychology. I cannot tell you how much I have learned about myself, about others, about relationships and sex, about trauma, and about God, all because my fire burns hottest in between my legs. (And I’m working on figuring out how to tell you about those things too.) But it is a fine line to walk, and I know this. Because being this close to the fire also makes me feel the chaotic desire to be ravaged entirely by it. I can feel the “other side” so subtly hidden by our world and I want to go there. I want to become the brilliant dying star and explode into the universe. And that desire to be ravaged by spirit threatens to consume me on a regular basis.
In depression, my fire goes out.
People with bipolar disorder know that fire isn’t hell. Fire is life. Too much life, too much fire, can certainly mean destruction. Can certainly mean death. But hell is what comes after the fire too…hell is cold. Hell is the lack of fire. My hands and feet go cold. All of the passions that I live by, though I remember their names and their functions better than my own name, seem meaningless. All of the fuel that I require to participate in this weird experience/experiment known as human existence is just…gone. It’s not that I don’t understand what is happening - I do. I understand that I’m now in a depressive episode. I understand that this too shall pass and that eventually I’ll feel the fire again and contribute to the world. But none of that knowledge matters when you’re living, no, surviving, in this space. No amount of mindset work or preventative tools can shake this sense that everything is heavy and there is no purpose to any of it. In these phases, I want my creativity but don’t see the point. I know that I help other people with my work, but I don’t care. Because here I am in the cold and the dark all by myself and my helping those other people did not help me prevent this, nor can it pull me out of it before it’s had its way with me. Those people who said their lives were changed by me cannot change this episode. I would welcome any emotion, even rage, because rage is powerful fire and can launch me into purpose, but even anger alludes me here. There is no fire and there is too much earth and water. The gravity pushes me into the dirt where I will stay. I cry for days, weeks. I light so many candles and stare at the flames, longing to come alive again, and I watch those go out too. They don’t burn long enough or strong enough to bring me back to life. It is here that I have learned the randomness and apathy of the universe, and the smokescreens of society fade away from disinterest as I return to the bare bones of survival. Eat something. Sleep. Drink water. Keep sheltered. Everything always comes back to survival here. There is nothing else.
Mixed episodes are the most dangerous, because it combines the meaninglessness of a depressive episode with the motivation and self-destruction of mania. With the other episodes, I mostly still have my faculties and my ability to grasp, or at least question, the reality of things. But in mixed episodes, those faculties are hijacked and this is where there is an increased risk for suicide. (60% of those with bipolar disorder attempt to commit suicide and 19% of those succeed, which is a tragically high number.) Mixed episodes are much rarer, but these are the ones where I need intervention from loved ones (or oftentimes, from my ancestors or spirit guides) to keep me grounded until it passes.
Every time I survive an episode, whether it’s a manic one or a depressive one or a mixed one, I feel changed. I feel stronger. I feel wiser. I feel more seasoned as a warrior. Almost as if each episode is a spiritual battle that promises to kill me, and if I beat the odds, if I look into the belly of the beast and survive, if I can live in the darkness or chase the fire and fuck the devil, I level up in my own abilities and insight. Finally, I can participate in the world again in the ways that I want. Finally, I can come back to some consistency and stability, and offer up my gifts and my creativity to humanity. But how long will that last? I never know.
And every time I return, my magnetism increases just a little bit and people respond to me or my work more powerfully because of these initiations. I often create my best work after a very difficult episode. The thing I have always heard from people is that my work makes them feel seen. Here’s the hard truth: the only reason I make people feel like that is because of all the places my mental illness, my sensitivity, and my spirituality have taken me. I have helped others not because I appear healthy and stable and am “controlling” my mental illness - I have helped others because I am constantly on a train ride from heaven to hell and back again. I wouldn’t have those tools to give you if I hadn’t been in the position where I needed to create them to survive. (My book I Don’t Want To Be An Empath Anymore, is filled with tools that I originally created to help myself deal with my deeply empathic nature and my many emotions.) I’ve been thrust into so many energies, so many experiences, so much pain, so much pleasure, that now I can relate to many different people in many different situations. I can pull on the thread of a single emotion and unravel an entire universal energetic pattern in the collective. I can travel to the underworld to retrieve a piece of someone’s soul and succeed only because I know the terrain so well. It’s a second home to me now. My abilities, my creativity, isn’t due to me “overcoming” anything. It’s due to my consistently chaotic existence of ecstasy and madness and tears.
Many times, my episodes start or end at the same time of cosmic events like full moons and eclipses. Some spiritual people would say that that means I’m simply extra sensitive to cosmic energy and it’s not mental illness. Some would say I’m especially mentally ill for even thinking it’s connected to the stars. But the truth is that it’s both - I’m connected to the stars AND I have a mental illness. I don’t feel the need to cast one truth aside to make the other one more digestible for anyone.
The spiritual community is quick to tell me that mental illness isn’t real, which invalidates my daily lived experience and suffering, while the psychiatric community is quick to tell me my mystical experiences are just psychosis, which invalidates my sacred connection to my life and to God. Well, they’re both wrong. My mental illness is real. And so are my mystical experiences and the art I create from them. In fact, they’re inextricably linked and they inform one another. But there seems to be no space for me to be everything I am, no space for me to hold the tension between these contraries. They want me to choose. I’m either crazy or I’m a shaman, I can’t be both. And then someone else breaks me down even further and tells me that my creativity comes directly from my illness and that it’s my destiny to suffer. And then someone else says that the illness is a lie and everything created from it is harmful and not real creativity. The whole scene is just one big clusterfuck, really. But I choose to hold my ground because they’re all wrong. And they’re all right. Everything is true, and nothing is real. (And everything is real, and nothing is true.)
Because of these polarized versions of what someone with a mental illness looks like or does or acts like or simply is, daily life can become strange. Most of my life it’s been like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But honestly, my survival skills have always been strong and I play at being a round peg really well. I can use all of my tools and my skills to be a high functioning, even successful, person, both professionally and personally. Sometimes I’ll tell someone I have bipolar disorder, and their response is, “Wow, I had no idea.” As if “Wow, I had no idea.” Is a compliment. They don’t realize it but they’re basically complimenting me on my ability to hide myself and act normal enough to blend in so my psychological extra-ness doesn’t show. They don’t see the hours I’m in bed, in tears and unable to move, or the days my mind is on fire and I’m pacing the room trying to keep it from exploding into recklessness. They see me showing up with work responsibilities and being there for friends and being independent. For the most part, I can maintain a non-mentally ill facade. Short-term memory issues can be a common problem with bipolar disorder though and I do struggle with that at times. I make so much space for my emotions and moods to process in the healthiest way possible that I don’t often have a lot of extra room in my head for logistics, but most of the important people know that I’m a person who needs reminders for that kind of thing. (But once you remind me, I can remember the exact emotion I was feeling in its entirety when you first told me, and even what surrounding things were on my mind.) But for the most part, I get caught in this image of the pulled-together neurotypical person they see me as, and I cling to it. I strive for it. It’s easier to not be bipolar to them. Easier for them and easier for me. But…it’s only easier until it’s suddenly not. And then I realize I have no support to get me through the tough waves, the deep waves.
On the other side though, I also know what it is to be seen as the crazy girl with bipolar. I’ve had my emotions dismissed because of my mental illness. I’ve had my anger not taken seriously because sometimes it’s easier for others to incorrectly attribute my behavior to my mental illness rather than take accountability for their actions reflected by my razor-sharp emotional perception and ability to see psychological patterns in others. If you see me as mentally ill, you get a pass on doing some of your own work when I reflect things back to you. I’ve even had someone break up with me because I was “too mentally ill.” As if mental illness cancels out my basic human need to be loved and respected. Honestly though, my biggest fear with being seen on this end of the spectrum is that because I’m also spiritual and a witch, it would be incredibly easy for someone to dismiss my work and my writing as passing madness. I am always slightly terrified that mental illness stigma could bastardize the work that I have paid for dearly with my time and energy and sometimes sanity.
For a mentally ill person, there aren’t many other ways to be seen besides these two extremes. And it’s not even anyone’s fault. Our society is woefully ill-equipped to see, accept and integrate mentally ill folks into it. “Treatment” methods have always been to pluck the afflicted from mass population and “treat” them in isolation. Not because it’s better for the afflicted and their recovery (it’s not) but because it’s easier for the mass population to remove them from their way of life. (I dare you to google the history of psychiatry and mental illness management…) And because of this, there’s still this modern cultural programming that mental illness does not fit into society and the productivity of society, and whatever doesn’t fit must be plucked and isolated and eliminated. So of course people don’t know how to see and validate those with mental illness. And of course those who suffer from mental illness are still scared to talk about it openly. We don’t want to have to watch your face as you look at us and decide whether we’re normal-passing enough for you to be comfortable with us, or a high risk for insanity so you won’t take us seriously or respect us.
Being spiritual only makes the dynamic more complex, especially in this new-age, life-coaching, positive hustle period. Being normal-passing and working (especially if you own your own businesses) can idealize this idea that a mentally ill person has “overcome” or “healed” their illness, since being able to produce content reliably in capitalist society is what often determines success. But 1.) this only serves to promote the stigma that a mental illness is something you have control over and can snap out of or fix. And 2.) these are standards of success created by the patriarchy and not necessarily the true standards for each individual, so demanding that a sensitive person with mental illness be reliably productive in society is actually repressing that person and forcing them to pretend they’re the round peg when they’re really the square peg. Repressing is not overcoming or healing. And let me be clear here - I don’t think these standards for success and productivity are healthy for anyone in general. But imagine applying these to sensitive or mentally ill people who can’t consistently stay grounded into reality.
These misaligned pillars of success and isolation create an untenable way of life for those who struggle with mental illness. When I was first diagnosed at 15, no one knew how to handle me. It was way above the comprehension of my friends, and open communication about that kind of thing didn’t exist within my family. No one ever asked me about it or talked about it. It was ignored. And honestly, now that I’m an adult and I can see the bigger picture, I don’t blame my family for not being a support system to me. At the time, not even my psychiatrists or psychologists were advocating education and communication in family systems or communities. Everything was kept hush hush, and I developed this subconscious belief that I was a burden on everyone because of my mental illness. And ironically, most of my independence and strength, and even my limited success so far in life, came from this wounded belief. So I have my gratitude for it. I have seen how strong I can be. I’ve played the capitalist game. I’ve watched myself rise from the ashes time and time again. I’ve constantly undressed myself and redressed myself to figure out how to make this whole thing work. But now, after 17 years of this, I am fucking exhausted. And for the most part, I’m alone. I know that I have a lot of people who love me and respect me, but because of that engrained isolation belief, I don’t let people in all the way, and I also pull away from people when they try to let me in all the way. Because I don’t want to be a burden. Because I have been trained to believe that mental illness, that psychological other-ness, deserves separation and isolation. Even when I fiercely advocate to my clients and readers that support is key, that same advocation tends to bounce off the mirror and miss me.
Even having this realization has started to open me up to deeper friendships and deeper intimate relationships with others. Talking about my mental illness with the people I care about is already paying off in spades. I currently have a handful of friends who support me and a romantic partner who thrives on holding these contraries with me and loving me more for it. I realize now that the less I talk about it, the more that people try to categorize and label me (for better or worse) for the specific parts of me and not the whole. Which is fair, because I haven’t stepped up to correct them. Some people who have seen my stable creative bursts think they understand me and praise me for it. Some people who have seen my dramatic expressions of negative feelings think they understand me and judge me for it. Bipolar people often feel sliced up by others, fractured, and only loved when certain conditions are met. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that people with bipolar disorder are masters at holding and understanding binaries and contraries in creative ways (it might not surprise you to learn that my spiritual foundation is based on Taoism), and this is something that should be honored and integrated into communities for the betterment of society. There’s a magic to mental illness. Society has often recognized and idealized that magic in the artistry of the isolated and suffering manic depressive, but most of the time this happens posthumously, once people have had the space to selfishly reflect on it, separated from the true source of it. But the true magic will happen when we bring them into the community rather than separate them and only consider accepting their gifts after they die, often from suicide.
Do I have the answers on how to do this? I don’t. I’m over here figuring it all out as I go. I have just as much wounding and conditioning to wade through as anyone else. But now that I know what I know, and I’ve seen what I’ve seen, advocacy for community support and acceptance feels incredibly important. I want to figure out ways to shift the conversation and the way people think about bipolar disorder and mental illness in general. I don’t want to continue playing on either side of the line, never being able to be fully “out” with either my mental illness or my spirituality. I want to figure out how to extend self-care into community care, and how to bridge the gap between spirituality and mental illness, without pushing away or degrading either side. I don’t want to have to hide and isolate this intricate dance I do with my fire on a daily basis. I want the world to recognize my fire as brilliant, as tragic, as beautiful, as unpredictable, as everything.
I have bipolar disorder. And I’m also a spiritual leader.