Shifts in Light
By kvg

It happened suddenly, as all terrible and wondrous things do. From the edge of homelessness, I fell into an affordable Cambridge studio. It's a large windowed room on the top floor of a house. Light enters from all directions. There's a kitchenette. A bathroom with a glassed-in shower. An air conditioner that rattles chilly air over my futon. The studio isn't large enough for a couple, or a family, or even a person with a cat, but for me, a transient woman on perpetually unstable mental ground, I'm ready to call this home.

Today, my home seems to be spinning on a silver tray. Even in the hot, overcast weather, the windows spread a milky white glow over the pale walls. As I look around the room, I notice the things that give me joy: the brewed coffee; the book on Van Gogh; the bowl of bananas, grapes and mangoes; my notebooks; the plastic art box filled with bits of charcoal and gray rubber erasers; the soft shaggy wool carpets and colorful Moroccan rug; the lone plant I'm managing to nurse back from a terrible bout of neglect.

I'm trying to capture this perfectly because too soon it might evaporate. The silver-blue tint of the sky will reflect a different room. It will be a room where the pleasure of pooled sunlight falls away and in its place, emptiness begins to breathe. This emptiness has a presence, like a quality of light or a smell that touches wherever it dwells. Is it an emotion, this emptiness? If so, it's a frozen one, a species of feeling that doesn't pass through the body the way joy or excitement or even anger can burn along the veins and leap through the fingers. This emptiness is the psyche's displacement, a homelessness different, but no less disturbing.

Each person's life has rhythm. At this time, mine requires long stretches of sleep, such as the one I emerged from this morning. Sometimes the sleep takes on a pernicious power and I cannot stop sleeping. It will be days of excusing myself from work, of fitful dreaming and lumbering trips, alternating between the bathroom and fridge before I find the shower and rinse myself into a new state of mind. Sleep like I had yesterday, a full 36 hours, more exactly, began as a necessity and ended with a renewed appreciation for the morning cup of coffee. To another person this kind of sleep might be impossible. For me, it's essential. Without much forewarning, my emotions and thoughts will rampage away from reality. I find myself careening from a glacial emptiness to a fire-siren panic acute and debilitating. Even in this gift of a home, I cannot escape myself.

The studio begins to grow as luminous as the sky. Simple questions preoccupy me: Should I make more coffee or fix some lunch? At what time should I do my laundry? I can't help but note that these concerns, like the atmosphere in my studio, have unstable tones. What is possible today might not be so tomorrow. My ability to eat food, to wash my clothes, to make phone calls, to show up for my job, has an origin often times beyond my grasp. The most pragmatic way to define this situation is to say I have a sickness. A mental illness. It's an illness painted in colors of disjunction: chemical imbalances, emotional disturbances, mental discord; an illness of mis-calibration, disequilibrium, disquiet and disorder. Some of it can be traced to chemicals in the brain, but even then, it's an inexact science. Because it has a less concrete physical reality, the way a cancer or bacteria can be nailed down in a Petri dish, and because it finds expression in the same qualities that make us human (such as thoughts, feelings, instincts), the fact of mental illness is always in question-similar, in its way, to the unstable quality of my own life.

A few weeks ago I had an almost perfect week. Not since the last hospital have I found my life so regulated and serene. Each morning I woke up and wrote; then I went to the gym and ran the treadmill; then I went to my job as a receptionist and worked for seven hours. In the evening, I had dinner with D. or M, or I did small errands around Harvard Square. Before bed, I practiced yoga and read. What a fine attitude I had for those few days. My heart stayed calm. I moved without torpor. People's eyes didn't pierce me and I was unafraid of public places. I began to feel the rhythms of day and night again, which can enter the body like a lost melody. I forgot I was different and so I looked back at my life and was surprised to see how many people I'd left standing in mid-embrace and how many promises broke like rotten teeth in my mouth. Then I looked forward and imagined making all this right. I would make myself right.

How can the self remedy the self? The philosopher Krishnamurti often used the example of a finger trying to point at itself in order to explain the futility of the mind solving its own problems. My mind can be that redundant, that incapable of seeing its way out of itself. I can shift from fully functional to incapacitated in less than a day's time. No other difficulty involves so many facets of life-the body suffers; the mind contorts; emotions and instincts and feelings fly loose from the predictable trajectory of social conventions; inner experiences stop corresponding to outer realities; time bends into itself in feedback loops of traumatic repetition or dissociative emptiness; sense of self fractures and dissolves. If the chemicals in my brain refuse correction I am fast reduced to a dependency on mental health professionals and social service organizations.

Last year, around this time, I was severely disabled by my illness. I'd lost two teaching jobs and with those went my health insurance. Once again on the cusp of homelessness, I applied for welfare (now formally called "Public Assistance") and Social Security disability benefits (a task that made my graduate school applications seem like breezy paperwork) and, with not a little luck, I found a $350 rented room. In what, I'm told, was record breaking efficiency, Social Security declared me sick enough to receive my maximum payment allotment of $658.00 a month. The math isn't hard on this one. With only a couple hundred dollars left over for food and living expenses (my new income overqualified me for food stamps) I settled into the one outstanding benefit of being a social service dependant-Medicaid.

For the first time in many years, I began to receive comprehensive treatment for my mental illness. Doctor's offices and psychiatric hospitals and counseling clinics opened their doors and stayed open long enough for me to sort through the available options and piece together a treatment team based out of one local hospital. There I received an integrated treatment approach which included a medication doctor (psychopharamacologist); a cognitive-behavioral therapist; a therapy group for emotional regulation; and a medical doctor.

I'd like to say it was hard work that's given me my current stability. I certainly seem like a success story. A year after my last hospitalization, I went off disability and have been holding a job as a receptionist. I'm living in a glorious and affordable studio in a manicured section of Cambridge, Massachusetts. So far I've been able to weather the shifts in light which turn my cozy, warm home into a tomb of brokenness. It's true I work hard on myself. My mental health upkeep involves four psychotropic medications, biweekly therapy, a weekly twelve-step meeting for addiction recovery and a boatload of hyper-vigilance. Some of my success is the result of dumb luck, like finding a great job and place to live. No matter how determined I am, however, a hairline fissure can split into a chasm. A bad social interaction can trigger an anxiety attack, which can escalate into panic and depression and uncontrollable crying and, in a day's time, I'm like a crippled dog, curled on the floor of my studio. Did I do this to myself? I wonder. Could I have prevented it?

There is nothing more despicable and seductive to the modern mentality than failure of self-determination. In the cases of financial mobility or physical improvement, the poor and overweight will always be slated for a kind of self-serving slovenliness that belies the real causes of impoverishment. The climate surrounding mental illness is the same: With a seemingly inexhaustible arsenal of helpmeets and fixes, from government aid to medical science, from self-help books to self-help groups, from solutions of divine nature to those of nutritional healing, how can a person still be sick? With all these possible ways of fixing oneself, failure to "recover" angers and confuses. Why isn't the medication working? Can't you fix that in therapy? You've been sober for over ten years; why are you still so troubled?

How shameful and isolating it is when I fall down, again. When the light shifts and the room darkens and the joys drain away and in their place I'm caught in the empty expanse of this illness. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the Doctor travels into the Arctic ice fields with the intention of slaying his monstrous self-creation. Sometimes I can engage with this Creature, as Dr. Frankenstein often tried, and at other times, I'm simply fodder for its ploys, the way the Creature executed each of the Doctor's loves, beginning with family members and culminating with his fiancée on the dreadful wedding night. Monster, demon, creature. Illness, chemical imbalance, disorder. Each holds a lens to this condition of having a self that is not always a sanctuary. At least I can retreat into my studio and protect myself with the blessed sleep. In my home, I observe the shifts in light. I'm learning to read the map of this space and to notice how my internal world colors the walls and steals the sweetness. When my shadow overtakes me, I cocoon into bed with the white down comforter and an arsenal of pillows. I close my eyes and curl around the hope of light.

kvg is a 35-year-old writer, artist, and educator with borderline personality disorder (BPD). She is the founder and director of Middle Path, a BPD consumer advocacy and education organization based out of Waltham, MA. She is also on the Board of Directors of the New England Personality Disorder Association. Previous to her current advocacy work, she taught a variety of subjects including art, English, creative writing, and drug and alcohol education.