By Ashley Y. McNamara

I always knew I was different; the world seemed to hit me so much harder and fill me so much fuller than anyone else I knew. Even as a little kid I was possessed by a need to write constantly, make tons of intricate drawings, and stay up all night reading or just thinking about how intoxicating and painful everything was. Slanted sunlight could make me dizzy with its beauty and witnessing unkindness made me feel physical pain. I was pretty sure I was "crazy" by the time I was 11, when the twisted black nights and the depressions came on, but I didn't have any words for it or anyone to tell. When I was 14 I got interested in words. I remember laying in bed one night, wide awake with the hallway light bulb buzzing under my skin as everyone else dreamed peacefully, wishing for some sleep after another exhausting few weeks of wild-eyed electricity and secret, hysterical sobbing. Nothing in particular had happened except that no one could understand all the rapture and rage in my head. I started wondering about this word I'd read: manic depression. It was used to describe some poet in an English book. It sounded drastic and terrifying and even though I didn't really know what it was I had an irrational hunch that it might describe me. But of course I didn't talk to talk to anyone about it. I just laid awake for a long time.

5 years later I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the latest term for manic depression, in a Virginia psych ward. The day before the nurses had found me swinging from curtains, screaming, after cutting up my arms to make sure I was still capable of feeling anything. I wasn't sure if I was real anymore; the depression seemed to saturate every inch of my soul. Three months before I'd been euphorically convinced for weeks that I possessed the one shining piece of knowledge that could end planetary injustice and liberate us all. Now I found myself in the proverbial padded room, being forced to swallow tranquilizers when all I wanted was music. The next day my doctor, an old white man with about as much compassion as a doornail and a distressing number of frown lines, entered my room with the comment "cutting yourself is a nasty little habit for good girls like you because it leaves scars." This man was supposed to heal me. He was supposed to be my hope. A vague old impulse in the back of my head wanted to kick his ass, but mostly I hated myself so much at the time that I just felt a creeping shame. And I wanted so badly to believe what he said; he was supposed to have the magic key that would fix this broken mess I'd become, and I wanted that key more than anything on the face of the earth. When he told me it seemed like I was probably Bipolar Type II and started listing off diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV that actually seemed to describe the patterns of my life, I was grateful. It was a relief, really, to think that there was a biological basis for all these behavior patterns that had been alternately fantastic and so incredibly difficult to live with, that had made most people in my life think I was this inspiring, creative, grab-life-by-the-horns kind of woman who had no idea how to handle herself and ended up being a total wreck as much as she was a superhero. It was a relief to think that all of this misery was not because I was just weak or difficult, which had been my family's take all along.

But what did these words mean when I went back out into the world? How would they change the way people saw me? What on earth would I do now? I had never known anyone diagnosed with a mental illness, or anyone who admitted to taking psych drugs. I remember staring out those psych ward windows that do not open and wondering bleakly if I would recognize myself once I started taking this handful of pink pills that was supposed to make me normal. I remember wondering if I was just giving up and selling my soul or if I was jumping on the boat to salvation. Mostly I remember wondering where the hell to go from there.

Because the map they gave me was terrifying. It was something like this: You will take psychiatric medication for the rest of your life. You will need to see a doctor constantly and always be on the lookout for side-effects. We will test your blood and your kidneys and your liver function every 3 months. You must have health insurance. You will need to live in one place. You must describe your disorder to all your friends and family, and they will watch over you, and you must trust all of our authority over your own, because you are not trustworthy. You will go to bed at a reasonable hour and get 8 hours of sleep every night and if you don't we will need to put you on more drugs. You should try to have a steady job, but you might not ever be able to, because this is a serious disability. And if you don't follow these instructions you will be totally out of control and it will just get worse and worse. People like you are dangerous if left untreated. Don't be one of the ones who has to be hospitalized over and over again. Trust me, I've read the studies and you haven't.

Once my head cleared enough to think again, I didn't trust the doctors further than I could throw them. It just seemed like they had no visceral knowledge of what I was experiencing. They could anatomize it with all the words they learned in books, the way you could anatomize the movement of bones and muscles that allows a bird to fly, but they had no idea what flight is all about.

And the moments when I'd been soaring with eyes full of horizon and a heart branded like a contour map with the outlines of rocky sunrises and the fractal branching of so many threads of understanding"¦ these seemed like the most important moments of my life. I didn't want to chalk them up to pathology, give them ugly labels like mania and delusion that seemed to invalidate them, make them less real. I didn't want to eradicate them all for the sake of "stability."

But doctors were not very interested in these arguments. The research made it very clear that I was supposed to comply with treatment. As I gradually regained my ability to read (paradoxically made possible, I have absolutely no doubt, by their drugs), I started to investigate the literature around bipolar disorder myself, and the more I read the more it seemed to me that doctors were trained to dissect people's lives into terms, classes, rules, cases, neurotransmitters, algorithms, atypical anti-psychotics, treatment-resistance, non-compliance"¦ which seemed like a ridiculous approach to understanding a human being. And simply taking pink pills seemed like an incredibly reductive approach to healing a problematic personality, or whatever this was that I had. Yet as much as I resisted their words, they were all I could find, and over and over again these incredibly limited, awkward words seemed like the barest blueprints to my soul. And they could be found in the public library or on the internet"¦ I hated the idea but also wondered, secretly, if there was some universality there. Obviously, if these words in big books in the library seemed to clumsily get at the flight patterns underlying my existence, there had to be other people with similar patterns.

Until I found them I worked in silence on my own map, which began with getting out of Virginia and out of my depressing day program full of washed up middle-aged men who'd spent most of their adulthood cycling in and out of various hospitals and abandoning all hope. My doctors protested furiously that I was not ready for independent life, but as soon as I felt like I could drive a hundred miles and maintain an occasional façade of functionality I finagled a job training horses and living by myself in a one room cottage in rural New Jersey. Endless group therapy and institutionalized relapse-prevention did not equate to healing for me; what soothed me was slowly drinking warm glasses of tea early in the morning by an east-facing window, watching the sunrise over my tiny, quiet house, and walking through the perfect frozen air to a warm barn full of waking horses and sensible smells like shit and wood. I refused therapy but took my drugs and let the narrative of my history and that huge question, what went wrong, unwind around me during the hours I spent cleaning stalls and feeding animals.

By the time I met Sascha years later I didn't talk much about being bipolar. I'd driven all my earthly possessions to California and gone off medication, struggling alone with the whole question of how to handle this fragile fire in my brain. My new friends had never seen me crazy, and I secretly hoped the whole thing had been a fluke. I'd spent the previous years moving from New Jersey to Greece to San Francisco, learning to paint and how to cook chard, never holding down that steady job or getting exactly the right amount of sleep, having weeks of brilliance and weeks of debilitating doubt, deciding to heal myself through food, or yoga, or mountains, all of this to the chagrin of various shrinks, who always insisted it was a dangerous idea for me to travel, or move, or take fewer drugs. I eventually abandoned them entirely. The map those doctors had drawn for me did a very effective job scaring me away from the whole mental health establishment and I had yet to meet anyone with flight patterns like mine who could give me a few clues.

And then Sascha published an article called "The Bipolar World" in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that I could relate to more than almost any piece of writing I've seen in my life. Once we met and started pouring out our life stories I realized that what I'd been trying to ignore, this way of being that gets labeled bipolar disorder, this framework of filters and illuminations through which I experience life, is actually more fundamental to how I exist in the world than I could ever have guessed. Because here was this stranger sitting on my bed and he could finish my sentences, could articulate the inner folds of my consciousness though we'd known each other for a few hours because there was something so similar about the way our minds worked. And I was absolutely fascinated to find out what kind of maps he'd followed through his life.

We began The Icarus Project as a way of creating a space for people to share their trajectories through this under-charted world of blackness and brilliance and the million shades of gray that the medical establishment has no idea how to describe. We hoped it would help people feel less alone and begin to understand the layers of who have they have been and who they can be. There are so many possibilities. Until I began this project, I was never sure I could get a handle on my sanity long enough to pull off one of the zillion visionary ideas in my head. In one of the ironies of this "illness," I probably never would have decided to take on the enormous task of learning to build a website from scratch while painting constantly, taking 5 classes, planting a garden, studying Buddhism, paying rent, etc. etc., without the adamant optimism and unfathomable energy of an unmedicated mania. But I probably wouldn't be here to continue the work if I hadn't gone back on medicine to tame the suicidal agitation I crashed into a month later. Patching together all these strange territories, my moods and my history, my lithium and my politics, my rent and my art, has been so confusing and painful at times that I have wanted to crawl out of my skin and disappear completely. It has required so much imagination. But it has also been penetrated throughout with a peculiar beauty, like grass busting up out of the sidewalk, and unimagined moments of grace, like last Valentine's Day, when I got an e-card from one of the Icarus Project folks. He called me a guardian angel. The doctors never charted moments like that on their maps.