|
I never fit in real well in high school and began to experience some depression. This
worsened over my high school years. Years later I would be diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. If you are not aware of the symptoms
of Bipolar Disorder, it causes cycling in mood between manic highs and soul-crushing lows.
I was not aware that what I was suffering from was the depression cycle of bipolar or
what depression really entailed.
My depression symptoms worsened over the next couple years after high school. The next
several years would include bouts of severe depression (one suicide attempt that landed me in the hospital) and periods of
manic productivity and happiness.
During the worst times I began to draw as a mechanism of dealing with the darkness I
did not understand. These were not “pretty” or pleasant drawings. They were what I would later term “soul
dumps”. I never had any formal training so this art was pretty raw.
The next 20 years would include many severe mood swings that I did not understand. Often
they were not tied to any incidental stressors or external factors.
The up side is that during the manic phases I was very productive and very driven and
required very little sleep. I would work 50-90 hour weeks and I still managed to climb all 54 of Colorado’s peaks over
14,000’. I was actually featured on the Discovery Health Channel about mountaineering and weight loss. The opposite
was true of the depression cycles though. During these times I would require 8-12 hours of sleep a night and was not motivated
to do anything. It was a real chore just to go to work.
 
 
 Then in 2002 my life was turned upside down. I lost everything. I lost my wife, house,
church family, many friends, contact with many relatives, savings, credit, business, cars, and had limited contact with my
children. I then had a massive heart attack and got to take a lovely ride in an ambulance and spend a few days in ICU all
without health insurance (first time in my adult life that I did not have health insurance). Life as I knew it suddenly
came to an end. I had everything I could want and lost it all in a few months.
 
 
 I spent the next couple years mired in a pit of despair barely able to make it
through each day. I thought seriously about suicide several times every day and went over a myriad of scenarios of how to
do it. I climbed peaks over 12,000’ in winter alone and in blizzards praying that God would take me. I once again turned
to art. I started to paint and draw in several mediums in an attempt to express and perhaps grasp some meaning or purpose
from what had happened. I soon found that the art flowed out with ease even when I was completely unmotivated to do anything
else. The art I was creating was not pretty but most of it was very expressive and very difficult to ignore.
People began to notice. Some liked it and some did not like it at all but no one was
ambivalent. Through my art I was finally able to accept all that had happened and start to deal with it. Art continues to
be a valuable mechanism to express and understand what I am going through.
|
