High On Equilibrium. The Article.

High on Equilibrium

One fine spring day, about ten years ago, I boarded a Greyhound bus and traveled south for two days, heading to Florida. I had an appointment to meet up with the New York Yankees at their spring training camp in Fort Lauderdale, where I would sign a multimillion-dollar contract as their new star pitcher.

Turns out, the Yankees had moved their spring training camp years earlier from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa, some 200 miles away. At any rate, I missed the stop for Fort Lauderdale, so I got off at a different stop and decided to walk to Miami, where a friend of mine lived.

I walked for five days straight, covering some 125 miles of highway. Finally, someone picked me up and drove me the last 30 miles to my friend Nosson in North Miami Beach.

When I showed up at Nosson’s doorstep, unannounced, he called my mother and told her that I had arrived. She was quite relieved to hear this, since she didn’t know that I was becoming the Yankees’ new star pitcher, and she was frantic that I had gone missing. Silly.

My mother told Nosson that I wasn’t well and I needed to be on medication. He took me to the hospital and got me some meds, but as soon as we got back to his house, I flushed the pills down the toilet. I should be on meds? Wait till he’d see me in the All-Star Game!

Somehow, Nosson figured out that I wasn’t taking the meds, and he showed me to the door and said, “Until you’re on meds, you can’t stay in my house.” He drove me to the airport and put me on a plane back home. Some friend.

When I landed, I rented a car and drove to a hotel. I had important business there, but the people at the desk called the police on me, and a cop showed up and wanted to arrest me for trespassing. “Stay out of my way,” I said brusquely. “I’m in middle of filming a movie.”
The cop rudely ignored me. “Give me a number of a family member,” he demanded.
I gave him my mother’s number, and he called her. “Don’t hurt my son,” she begged. “He’s manic depressive.”
The star pitcher turned movie producer was strapped unceremoniously into an ambulance and taken to the hospital, where he was forced to take his medicine. And he lived happily ever after.
***
For 16 years prior to my hospitalization, I had been suffering from bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression. My first major episode happened when I was 21. I was working for my uncle, who had a wholesale plastics business, and one of his suppliers was putting tremendous pressure on me to pay up the money we owed him. In response to the pressure, I would occasionally hold my breath for a minute at a time, which gave me a feeling of control.
Maybe it was the oxygen deprivation that did it, or maybe it was the stress, but I suddenly realized that all the bad things that were happening in America and Israel at the time – it was the time of the second intifada – were because of my sins. Unable to live with this guilt, I attempted suicide.
My parents took me to a psychiatrist, who prescribed lithium, but did not offer any diagnosis. Not knowing what was wrong with me, I thought I could get better without the medication, and I stayed home and relaxed for a few weeks, until I got back to myself.
I thought that episode was a weird one-time thing that happened to me, so I put it out of my mind and continued going about my life. A couple of years later, I started dating, and shortly afterward, I got engaged.
Several months after my wedding, I told my wife that I was going to be running for Congress, and I hung a huge map of our electoral district on the living room wall so that I could plan my campaign strategy. Embarrassed of the oversized map in our living room, my wife told visitors that I was studying politics.
My career in politics came to abrupt end when I realized that I was responsible for every problem in the district, the country, and the world, from rush hour traffic to malnutrition in Africa. Again I tried to hurt myself, and again my parents took me to the psychiatrist, who again prescribed lithium and again did not give a diagnosis.
It was a cousin of mine who actually clued me in. After hearing that my run for Congress had been aborted, he looked me in the eye and said, “Yitz, you’re manic depressive.”
 “Huh?” I asked. I had never heard those words before.
I walked into the local public library and picked up a book about manic depression. I felt as though I was reading my own biography. Now, I understood why, when I was in my late teens, I had done wacky things like training to be a pilot and volunteering for the local police force. I was experiencing hypomania, a less severe form of mania, which often develops into full-blown mania.
After that, I went back to the psychiatrist and said, “I’m manic depressive, right?”
He nodded.
“And you never bothered diagnosing me,” I said. “Well, sayonara.”
My wife and her parents were furious when they found out about the diagnosis, and even more furious that I had tricked them into the marriage by not telling them about my previous episode two years earlier. “I didn’t know what it was!” I protested. “I didn’t know there was anything to tell!” 
My in-laws urged my wife to get divorced, but she insisted that she did not want to end the marriage. I began seeing a different psychiatrist, who wrote me out another prescription.
This time, I filled the prescription and took the medication. For the next few years, I was did not have any symptoms of mania or depression. During that time, we had two children, I managed to hold down a job, and everyone was very proud of us.
I was not happy on the medication, however. It made me sleepy and lethargic, and caused me to gain 50 pounds. Hoping to get the creative juices flowing in my veins again, I started playing around with the dosage, taking a little less than the doctor had prescribed, and missing doses here and there.
Cutting back on the medication sure did give me a kick. Around that time, I was involved in organizing a Shabbaton that featured a famous kiruv personality who had influenced thousands of people to become baalei teshuvah. I was convinced that he was going to be Mashiach, and that I was going to be his right-hand man.
The Shabbaton was overbooked, and loads of guests were disgruntled, or worse. This logistical failure was in no way my fault – I had nothing to do with reservations – but I was convinced that my sins were the underlying cause of the fiasco. Mashiach’s right-hand man had let him down. That was enough to blow up anyone’s brain, and certainly mine.
How could I have thought of myself as such a holy person, when really I was so evil? Why did I believe that I was going to be instrumental in bringing the geulah, when really I was the one who was preventing the geulah from happening?
I collapsed into bed, curling up into a fetal position and shaking in fear. At that point, I had been off my medications for a week, and I was completely delusional, believing that I was a reincarnation of some of the most horrible people in history, and feeling afraid of my own shadow.
My wife decided then that she’d had enough. The marriage was over.
The ensuing years were filled with manic highs followed by major lows. When I was manic, I would seek ways to be famous and save the world or cure society’s ills. When I was depressed, I would review my entire life history and obsess over the mistakes that I made, believing that I was the worst person ever born. I was like a yoyo, either super happy or super sad. Not everyone with bipolar has such extreme mood swings, but I was a poster boy for the disorder.
Once, a close friend in Eretz Yisrael sent me an invitation to his son’s bar mitzvah. I called him to wish him mazel tov, and told him I couldn’t come because I couldn’t afford a ticket.
The week of the bar mitzvah, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to get on a plane and surprise my friend. Shabbos morning, I sat down on a bench near his house, and when I saw him emerge from his house, I yelled, “Mazel tov!”
He jumped. “Yitz, you’re crazy!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
That incident was relatively benign. But then there was the time when the rav of my shul was giving a Daf Yomi shiur, and I disagreed with his understanding of the sugya. I jumped to my feet and called out, “You don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ll tell you what’s pshat.”
I then went on to deliver what I thought was a brilliant pilpul, in front of the stunned rav and shiur attendees, until one of them finally dragged me out of the room.
Several days later, when the mania had passed, I felt the way Achashverosh must have felt after beheading Vashti. For days, I huddled in my bed, cowering in shame and remorse. I asked the rav to for mechilah, and he said he forgave me, but I could never forgive myself.
Still, the temptation to tamper with the medication dosages was irresistible. I hated the sluggish feeling of being medicated, and I craved the feeling of being Superman, so I didn’t always take my pills the way I was supposed to.
It was only after my ill-fated trip to Florida and my subsequent hospitalization that I resolved never to tamper with the medical regimen again. When I was in the psychiatric ward, several of my relatives and friends came to visit me, and the humiliation was overwhelming. Plus, the doctors refused to tell me when I’d be released. The feeling of being incarcerated in a hospital with no specified end date was so scary that I told myself I was never, ever coming back to this horrible place. I would take whatever medicines they gave me, just to earn my freedom and maintain it.
The dosage they gave me in the hospital was very high, however, and once again I felt sleepy and sluggish on the medication. I wanted to reduce the dosage, but I wasn’t going to take a chance at having another episode, so this time, I did it in a controlled way, gradually and with medical supervision.
After several months of fine-tuning, we got the dose exactly right – enough to prevent symptoms of mania or depression, but not enough to cause unpleasant side effects. For the first time, I had reached what’s known in psychiatric lingo as equilibrium. In layman’s terms, it’s called being normal.
The upside of bipolar is that it is extremely responsive to medication, and once you reach a point of equilibrium, you can literally forget that you have the condition, short of the one minute a day when you’re taking your pills. But medication, I discovered, was only half the cure.
In the short two decades since I was first diagnosed with bipolar, there has been a sea change in the way the disorder is treated. Until very recently, psychiatrists would simply write you out a prescription and tell you go to home and take your pills. Today, however, people with bipolar cannot receive psychiatric treatment unless they are committed to seeing a therapist concomitantly.
Even with a condition that is as medically treatable as bipolar, therapy is fifty percent of the recovery. It took me a long time to discover that, though, because back when I had my first episodes, no one even suggested that I see someone. Over the years, I did see a few different therapists, but I never really connected with any of them, and because I didn’t understand how critical therapy was, I didn’t pursue the process in a serious way.
I had to get divorced, and go through a major episode that ended in a hospitalization, before I found myself a good therapist and committed to making therapy an immutable part of my life, along with taking my daily meds.
With this combination in place, I was able to find gainful employment, and eventually to get married again. From day one, my wife accompanied me to my weekly therapy appointment, which gave us a forum for discussing any issues that arose. Neither of us needed to complain about the other to our parents, friends, siblings, or coworkers, because we had our designated time and place for working out any concerns or grievances, under the guidance of a skilled, compassionate professional.
When we got married, my wife didn’t think bipolar was a big deal. Seven years later, she still thinks it’s no big deal. I haven’t had an episode in close to a decade, and with Hashem’s help, I hope never to have one again.
Many years ago, when I was swinging back and forth between feeling grandiose and feeling worthless, my rebbi told me, “Yitz, you need to tell yourself that you’re not better than anyone, and you’re not worse than anyone.” Now that I’m at equilibrium, I actually believe that.
After experiencing the euphoria of manic highs, it takes time to develop a taste for the flavor of normalcy and equilibrium. At first, equilibrium seems, well, boring. You’ll never be the Yankees’ star pitcher or Mashiach’s deputy, nor do you have the energy of Superman.
But the beauty of equilibrium is that it allows you to be you. You don’t have to be someone famous or save the world in order to enjoy your life. You can just savor the blessing of sanity and the healthy relationships it fosters.  
If you’d meet me today, you’d never dream that I suffer from any mental illness. I may never pitch an All-Star Game or deliver a dazzling pilpul, but today I can say that I’ve found serenity after braving the turbulent storms of an unquiet mind. I’m no longer manic, I’m just high on equilibrium.