Step Up on Second Writers' Anthology

A Day in the Life of Manic Depression
By Daniel Concharty

Editors note: Earlier this year, Daniel Concharty wrote the first part of this article, a stark description of a typical day in his life. Since then he has made what he calls “miraculous progress.” Daniel has been a member of Step Up for ten months and credits its program and people with “saving my life.” He was recently elected President of the Membership Advisory Committee, a group that functions as a bridge between Step Up’s members and administration. In Part Two of this article, written four months later, he describes his progress, his perspective, and his hope for the future.

Part One – At Home

I’m adhering like an unglued band-aid to some basic routine to attain a semblance of normalcy. It’s difficult to comprehend that in sticking to something as fundamental as daily work, my biochemistry doesn’t comply.

Ten voices clamor in my head every morning. The eleventh is just too much to handle. It takes so very long—inordinate amounts of time—to screw my head on straight, and even then I fall apart.

I have these wild mood swings, rendering me incapable of doing almost anything, except dealing with the mood swings themselves. The circuitous route with many detours—the vicissitudes of the terrain I must navigate—overwhelm me.

It’s hard to imagine, and equally hard to explain, what my mind and body go through with each mood swing. As a manic-depressive, slash, dot, dot, dot (I don’t know and don’t want to know the other diagnoses), I often don’t know which end is up. The gyrations of the ascent and the crushing blows of the descent are all-consuming. I take a suicidal plunge into an empty bucket, a dip into death. To circumvent this ride before I backslide, I pump myself full of medication, which renders me “not me.” These gyrations monopolize the better part of a bitter day, leaving me bereft of any normal activities that one ought to enjoy on a daily basis.

The claptrap that traps my mind is the lexicon of lunacy—rage in a cage. The bullpen is a pushpin hanging bloody bulletins on my burdened back.

Suffice to say, beaten up beating myself, I need encouragement for 90% of all actions; otherwise, I’ll fritter away the time, desperately worrying about the need to embark on some errand outside my home. I’m anxious beyond coping at the prospect of leaving my home and engaging with others.

The picture prevails throughout the day and I quake with fear of even driving a car, driving myself mad, pacing, my devastating dialogue leaving me trapped, a prisoner of my own psychology and chemistry.

Paranoia peers through a living peephole. Imagine a life through my POV. I’m a POW at war with myself. Killing myself by degrees decrees no Purple Heart, just a heart that’s breaking.

Today I must forgo grocery shopping, my one activity, for fear of going out. I eat whatever morsels remain in the house. “Poor me,” Deep Thought writes down its voice, then drowns in a drunken daze, finishing another day’s sentence.

Hence, I stumble over my own life and wander from room to room and waste hour upon hour trying to decipher just who I am at each moment and what I need to do, but knowing all I can do is be at-one with my pillow, at-one with my dream, at-one with my voice.

Part 2 - Four Months Later

I’m caught between two worlds now: the people considered normal, the “normies,” and those who know and support me, the “for-mes.” I often feel hard-pressed to conform to the normies’ formed ideas of how I ought to be. My family recently paid me a visit and I paid dearly by once again becoming “the deficit,” the man with the problems. The normies beckon, but I simply can’t respond the way they want.

We visited the pier and I gazed at the rollercoaster and saw familiarity, an old friend vanquished, now derailed, by medication—the highs and lows often diminished. Full circle, I rode the Ferris wheel at the pier and saw many peers across the way at Step Up. I wonder who I am outside of Step Up, beyond the box, outside the circle, insanely searching to be “normal.”

The wheel rolls into the sea, drowning me no longer. I see a new horizon, with me a survivor and Step Up as my savior, sanitizing my mind and giving me a home.

Having been disenfranchised for so long, I am now shaking hands with the best. Where once I heard only cacophony, I now hear a chorus that sings My Song, sending me onto Cloud Nine. From the Ferris wheel, the view from bottom to top sustains my sight, just as Step Up cites a new life for me. The peephole, expanded and divine, is now a celestial telescope that scopes heavenly bodies, embodying the hope wrested from hopelessness. The normies and the for-mes still march to their own drummers, but increasingly I see them marching together, hands held in unison for my cause, and that makes all the difference.

My date with fate engenders challenges, but I’m better prepared to meet and see them eyes-to-eyes. And so goes my meteoric rise. In my new role as a leader at Step Up, I facilitate and mediate, now well aware from whence I came and where I can go. My peephole also looks back on the sideshow of yesterdays, which I sometimes recount to entertain my new circle of friends, the for-mes, who take the promising ride with me.

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