Exercising My Demons

When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 38, the pastor of my mother’s church told her I was possessed by demons. There was no such thing as mental illness, he said. Only spiritual weakness on my part, which had allowed Satan to plague me with his evil torments. The solution was, of course, that I come back to church — back to Christ — and be healed.

I didn’t do that. My poor mother had to live with this idea in her head, this thought that I was demon-possessed, for I don’t know how long. She eventually let it go, and accepted that I had an illness. Not an illness, as one therapist insisted, “like diabetes” and just as stigma-free. But one that could all the same be addressed with medication and some changes in my lifestyle.

It took longer for me to accept it myself. I had to learn to live with the things my brain tried to do to me. With the fact that my version of reality maybe wasn’t, actually, all that real. Strangely, just at the point I began trying to do this, a Siberian tiger began following me around in my daily life. Shortly afterward, a giant eagle — the size of a small Cessna — appeared daily to rip my heart from my body and eat it.

These were not dreams. They took place in my waking life, but with a strange dreamlike, see-through quality that alerted me they were different from the everyday world. I can’t explain this except to say…