the tangle of all my incommensurable pasts

The thing is, I am crazy. Healthy people do not think about these things. They do not worry over the war trauma suffered by their ancestors; they do not look for the patterns of that trauma as they weave through subsequent generations. Healthy people do not worry that everything had been ruined long before they had a chance to start. Healthy people do not generally accept the proposition that, because they will inevitably burn the toast, they should not buy the bread. During the worst period of my depression, a stretch that began around October 2019 but that had been plaguing me, on and off, with ever greater regularity, since at least January 2011, I became increasingly disinclined to leave the house. In Beirut, my flat was on the third floor of my building; my office was on the third floor of my building at the university. They were less than five city blocks apart, but many days I could not bear to make the trip; and, on either end, I could not abide the stairs. After the seizures began–the first one I can remember happened around July 2020–I was consumed by a near crippling sense of peril, the fear that I would pass out, or that the sense of vertigo I was increasingly prone to experience would translate into a slip, a fall, something broken, a new problem, a new opportunity for a punishingly long bout of something doctors call recovery. In the morning, I would get up from my bed, and would be overwhelmed by a lightheadedness so sudden and pronounced that I could not take the four steps across the hallway to the bathroom. Going as far as the kitchen was unheard of. From bed, I would order food. When it arrived, I would find it nearly impossible to answer the bell, much less wait by the front door. On at least two occasions, the delivery boy–in Beirut it was always a boy–would arrive to find me passed out on the floor, slightly bloodied, with a new gash on my face. All of this, of course, was exacerbated by Covid procedures, and the injunction to stay indoors lest one breath the wrong air, or pass on some pernicious viral agent. As time wore on, the symptoms of my depression became ever more somatized, routed through the network of nerves and joints and muscles, presenting themselves as random inflammation, headaches, joint pain. The traces of these remain with me, and have somehow become even worse even now that the worst of my depression has lifted. Plagued always by the awareness that my mental health is, at its best, unusually brittle, as well as the unavoidable truth that no one can wholly predict which directions illness might take, or how illness might manifest, I spend an inordinate amount of time examining affective states that may or may not be symptoms, or physical abnormalities that might signal the arrival of some unwanted arrivant. In itself, this is evidence of a slight mental irregularity, and it often leads to the dismissive, if not quite derisive, folk wisdom that responds to all evidence of mental dis-ease with the largely useless command that one should not “dwell on it.” If only you stopped thinking about these things, they would go away. So think about something else. Problem solved. Ipso facto done and dusted. How does one explain to those who do not suffer from manic depression or other, similar forms of mental distress, that, for many of us, “not thinking” is not really an option; that, for many of us, the thoughts come whether we want them to or not; that sometimes you cannot redirect your attention; that “thinking about something else” takes a considerable amount of energy and time, and that symptoms do not dissipate quite so quickly or easily? “Owing to suicidal ideation, retardation and stupor, food and drink refusal, or psychotic symptoms such as command hallucinations, people with severe depression are often at a very high risk of self-neglect or self-harm.” Only once or twice have I entertained an actively suicidal interest–in most cases my self-harm has been largely passive–but most of this lines up with the text of my experience, and it is extraordinarily difficult to convey just how unbearably real all this is, from moment to moment, in the moments when it has taken hold. In speaking with people who are not manic depressive about manic depression, this is really the trick. Many people believe they can understand clinical depression because, in general usage, in English, we use the words “depression” and “sadness” interchangeably, and most people–most healthy people–have at some time been sad. In these instances, it is difficult to explain differences of degree and duration, and the unbearable sense of depth, the unavoidable feeling that, to paraphrase Nietzsche, you are staring into an abyss that is staring back into you. “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.” But now is the time of monsters, and what if the monsters were waiting for you all along? No closet door is protection against the bogeyman just beyond the jamb; and there is no curtain that can save you from the gaze of the goat man. This is where the question of depression tips, for me, into the question of hypomania and mania, with the difference between the latter two states being, again, one of difference and degree. Depressive thoughts do not race as quickly as manic thoughts, but manic thoughts can–and often do–draw one ever closer to a depressive state. In most ways, it is far easier to explain chronic depression, even if certain lay understandings do not quite toggle faithfully with the truth of the condition. But if one is willing to understand the difference of degree between momentary sadness and existential annihilation, we have at least some ground upon which to approach the subject. But how, oh how, do you explain mania, especially when you cannot quite understand it yourself, or how to convey the difference between genuine enthusiasm or idle thought with the wild locomotion of manic episodes? How does one characterize the weird pleasure that accompanies a manic episode, a pleasure that is always tinged with a slight awareness that maybe things are going too far and you should probably take a step back and try to calm down but you cannot because you are just having far too much fun? How do you explain a screaming? How do you explain the curious prosody of pacing, of walking walking walking because the thoughts need somewhere to go and even though they will not tell you where they want to go, they have to go somewhere and they will let you know when they get there? In mania, there are so many things to do, and you need to do them all, and do them all at once. How do you explain walking on and on well after the point when one is no longer physically able to keep it up, especially when you probably haven’t eaten in hours if not days? The thoughts are coming so fast and they fold into each other and there are different languages and different words in different languages and isn’t it interesting that Arabic has no really good word for snow but at least three different letters for the sound that a ‘t’ or a ‘d’ might make and why isn’t the souffle rising and why did the motor on the hand mixer burn itself out before I was finished beating the egg whites and where oh where will I get it fixed and did I do something wrong? I probably did something wrong. I am usually doing something wrong but what was it? If only I could figure out what I did wrong I could probably fix it and what did I say to Phillip and why can’t I remember that one person’s name and why haven’t I showered yet? I should probably shower. But first, let me book my tickets to Egypt. I haven’t been there since I met Yussuf and it would be interesting to see if I got stopped at the border since as far as anyone knows he’s still wanted by someone somewhere for something. Also, if I cannot burn off this energy in Egypt, where else could I go? At least in Egypt there is koshary and that will slow me down. In France, leaving Beirut, going to America, the tangle of all my incommensurable pasts came up against the demand for some measure of legibility and I came undone. As at the port, something inside exploded; and, as with the port, the explosion was not purposeful but entirely a matter of negligence, a negligence abetted by a not inconsiderable dose of criminal liability. We are all telling ourselves lies about ourselves all the time. What happens when those lies become overtly malignant?'