An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

For as long as I can remember I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods.

In order to contend with it, I first had to know it

Still, I always felt a bit like pieces of earth to my sister’s fire and flames.

But then as night inevitably goes after the day, my mood would crash, and my mind again would grind to a halt.

In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. And I miss Saturn very much.

Like everything else in my life, the grim was usually set off by the grand; the grand, in turn, would yet again be canceled out by the grim. It was a loopy but intense life: marvelous, ghastly, dreadful, indescribably difficult, gloriously and unexpectedly easy, complicated, great fun, and a no-exit nightmare.

But grief, fortunately, is very different from depression: it is sad, it is awful, but it is not without hope.

I had forgotten what it felt like to be that open to wind and rain and beauty, and I could feel life seeping back into crevices of my body and mind that I had completely written off as dead or dormant.

Do we risk making the world a blander, more homogenized place if we get rid of the genes for manic-depressive illness—an admittedly impossibly complicated scientific problem?

Never has the color and structure of science so completely captured the cold inward deadness of depression or the vibrant, active engagement of mania.

Without science, there would be no such hope. No hope at all.