Originally written in October, 2002. Since then I have been on and off psych meds several times. I'm currently working on treating my bipolar with homeopathy.

By the time I decided to make the radical changes in my lifestyle and diet necessary to get off the psych medicines, several years had passed in which I'd fallen in and out of love, regained enough mental balance to write poems and paint mountains, seen a bevy of doctors who'd put me on everything from Zyprexa to Depakote to Celexa to Haldol to keep me steady, and found myself sick, again, with my 4th bout of bronchitis in a year. The drugs seemed to work fairly well, but I felt a little dampened and hated going to see a psychiatrist all the time, being told to call if I couldn't sleep and then downing a bunch of anti-psychotics, and having my liver function checked every 3 months to see if Depakote was damaging me. And I discovered that if I missed a dose of Depakote"”even for one day"”I would start to go up immediately in a way I hadn't even done before my diagnosis. By the second day off medicine, when I laid down to sleep I would close my eyes and see crazy visions like an obese woman running down a hill followed by a cavalcade of freak-show characters, screaming, well into a sleepless night. By the third day off medicine I was a terrifying driver, ran around like a caffeine addict grinding my teeth and talking ten million miles a minute, and always ended up in my bed at the end of the day, shaking, downing my Depakote and praying it would bring me back. This happened quite a lot, because I couldn't take my medicine if I drank"”I would be violently ill the next day"”and since I liked to drink, I was skipping medicine all the time. The drug felt like my savior and my master all at once.

Two things happened in the fall of 2001 that made me seriously consider finding a way to go off medicine. For one thing, a friend asked me what I would do if I wanted to have kids one day. Depakote causes spinal birth defects; I would have to go off the medication immediately if I got pregnant. The idea of abruptly stopping something I relied on so heavily at a time when I'd probably be prone to intense mood-swings anyway sounded horrible. The second factor was the general state of my health. I've always had bad allergies, as many bipolar people do, and in the past several years had relied heavily on traditional medicine to counter endless sinus infections, bronchitis, and outbreaks of asthma with stints on Prednisone and increasingly potent antibiotics, and yet I still found myself sick, weak, and always on the verge of another infection or a debilitating headache. It was the headaches that did it; I tried going off the Depakote again and was immediately shot down by a migraine every day at 4:00, to the point that I had to go home and sit in a dark, silent room for the rest of the night. I couldn't live like that anymore, and I'd tried everything traditional medicine had to offer.

So I picked up my roommate's Healing with Whole Foods book. This was a huge step for me; I'd been the little hippie kid who lived in a vegetarian co-op but brought home steak "˜n cheese subs to piss off all the vegans when the nightly chickpea slop was especially inedible. I ate tofu when it was good, but my favorite foods were Roy Rogers fried chicken and blueberry donuts. And I had always liked to drink, a lot, and eat tons and tons of sugar. But once again I found myself desperate enough to consider doing something really, really difficult.

When I started looking up information about migraines and my other physical complaints, I discovered that all of my symptoms pointed towards the same cause: candidiasis, or an overgrowth of yeast in the system. And even more exceptional than the convergence of physical symptoms was the fact that extreme cases of candidiasis can cause manic-depression. I couldn't believe it. I had only been wondering about my headaches and my weak immune system. I had no idea this could all be connected. But there it was, printed in an authoritative-looking book after a list of other symptoms, all of which I had. These symptoms ranged from allergies, food sensitivities, frequent colds, a craving for sweets and yeasted products, sensitivity to tobacco smoke and chemical fumes, tiredness and low general immunity to severe headaches and manic-depression. People with candida problems, and Americans in particular, are likely to have grown up consuming large quantities of refined sugar, red meat, white flour, dairy, and alcohol, and have often used large and repeated doses of antibiotics, all of which had been true for me. So I decided to give it a shot. I figured I would follow my own variation of the strict diet recommended by the authors for 3 weeks, and see if things changed. I cut down my alcohol consumption to one or two glasses a week, stopped eating meat for the time being, cut out most wheat and dairy, started eating a simple regular breakfast of cream of rice and a lot more greens in general, and undertook the most difficult step"”cutting out refined sugar and yeasty, baked goods.

I have not been seriously sick since. I have been off my bipolar medication for over a year. I have not had a single cold, much less the debilitating bronchitis and sinusitis I always used to endure. I've lost 15 pounds and can hike 12 miles a day without a problem. I still get occasional headaches, but they tend to be very predictable, occurring around my period or after I've been eating more sugar, meat, or alcohol than usual. My moods still swing, and I definitely seem more intense than the average person (whatever that means), but I'm generally much more stable than I've ever been, including when I was on psych drugs. This is not easy; while I've relaxed my diet a bit since those first few weeks, I still take much better care of myself than most people I know. I try not to eat sugar except as a special treat; I almost never eat meat; I don't buy any packaged food, I very rarely drink, and I bring my own lunch with me wherever I go. I eat breakfast every single day. I have to watch myself, and my life is a little quieter than your average 20 something. I spend many more Friday nights home painting and cooking dinner with my housemates than out downing tequila and ripping up the dance floor. I'm pretty vigilant about my sleep. I'm planting a garden and making this website. Often, when I feel my brain starting to take off, I stay home and keep things quiet until it gets a little easier. I'm studying Buddhism and learning to meditate.

This is not a quick fix and it requires more investment than popping pills. But I don't rely on the Man. I don't have to worry that if I lose my health insurance, I'll lose my medicine and go nuts. I can have babies and not worry that they'll have crooked spines. And I am honestly healthier, more consistently happy, and creating more beautiful art and pieces of writing than I ever could before. I feel very intensely like my full self, not like something's missing or dampened by psych drugs and doctor's visits. I'm still full of crazy ideas and wacked-out plans, compiling journals full of the million things I wish I had time to make and the million places I want to go and the million books I want to read, but I can actually finish things. For the first time since I was in high school, I'm living in the same place for more than a year. I don't have to run away because I'm actually creating a life that I can stick around and live. And every now and then I do wonder if I'm losing my edge. I meet amazing maniacs and who are racing around creating revolutions and burning up like a candle lit at both ends, and I start to think about some of my life's crazier stories, the nights bumming around foreign cities until dawn meeting leprechauns and seeing visions of god in the vapors rising off puddles of gas in the street, crashing motorbikes while on acid or having fantastic sex in sketchy bathtubs, and I wonder if I would do that now. But then I also remember the days after when I wanted to jump off a cliff and couldn't get out of bed and always ran away, again, to start over in a different city or a cottage in a cow-field or an island in an ocean because this time it would be different, this time I would have found the place. And I remember all the people I put off along the way because I was too much, or on my way somewhere else, or deeply depressed, or constantly complaining about how fucked-up the scene was, or so high on my grand unifying theories of the universe that no one could keep up with me and I'd get angry or get kicked out or even worse, get watched with that semi-sympathetic, semi-terrified look of the person who's existing on a plane with the rest of the world and sees you taking off for somewhere else, convinced that you are absolutely right, and doesn't know if they should pull you down or turn their head. So you leave.

But now I'm staying. I'm eating my oatmeal and planning to be around for awhile. I have things to say and images to paint, people to love and help to give, and that's just not going to happen if I'm clawing the walls of a psych ward. So I'm learning to take care of myself and starting to develop what might be the most difficult virtue for a manic-depressive: patience.