Moreover, even before I began the microdose protocol, though I would generally fall asleep with little difficulty, I often popped awake at 4:00 a.m. Sometimes I think I should make regular 4:00 a.m. plans with my other perimenopausal friends. We could do something productive with our wakefulness, like play mah-jongg or renovate derelict apartments for homeless families, instead of tossing and turning on our sweat-soaked sheets, Googling the side effects of hormone patches and bio-identical hormone creams, and “accidentally” kicking our blissfully sleeping spouses.
Still, though I am staying up late and waking up early, I’m not feeling the effects of the resulting sleep deprivation as much as I would have expected. But even this concerns me. Needing less sleep can be a warning of the onset of hypomania. I should be tired, and if I’m not, that might itself be a problem. The prospect of the protocol’s causing either hypomania or a return to insomnia is really starting to worry me. And, of course, that worry is keeping me up at night.
* * *
*1 ?Erik J. Kaestner, John T. Wixted, and Sara C. Mednick, “Pharmacologically Increasing Sleep Spindles Enhances Recognition for Negative and High-Arousal Memories.”
*2 ?From World Health Organization Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (Twenty-eighth Report, 1993) definition of drug addiction. WHO Technical Report Series 836.
Day 12
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Fine.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Perfectly fine.
Work: Productive.
Pain: Minor.
Today I decided to risk repetitive stress injury and work at a café. The café had free Wi-Fi, but I was halfway through my morning before I realized that I had not once bothered to go online. How strange. Who am I?
I am usually so addicted to the Internet that I can’t be productive unless I turn off my laptop’s Wi-Fi, and even then I keep my phone at the ready just in case of emergency. If, for example, the barista swirls the face of Jesus into the foam of my cappuccino, I need to able to get the photo up on Instagram right away, so pilgrims can attend before the bubbles dissolve.
But today hours passed before I even remembered that I had close at hand a means of escaping the responsibilities of work. Can this be the microdose? If so, it’s an unanticipated outcome. I experienced a similar phenomenon when my psychopharmacologist prescribed Ritalin, but that class of drugs made me anxious and irritable. (By “irritable” I mean that they made me scream obscenities at my husband, blare my horn at cars that I felt were lingering at stop signs, and fling various objects across the room.) But though today I was focused, I was not at all irritable. I felt calm and composed. Almost unnervingly so.
My highest hope for this experiment is that it will result in my experiencing more days like this. I have always been excitable, impulsive, and easily agitated. There is no quality I admire so much and possess so little as equanimity.
Is equanimity a characteristic of intelligence, or does it seem so because we associate rationality with intellect? Certainly, that isn’t true of brilliance. The genius of fantasy is often mercurial and tumultuous. “We of the craft are all crazy,” Lord Byron said. “Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”
I came upon that quote years ago, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I read it in a book by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry and an expert on manic-depressive illness, who is a fellow traveler. Her memoir An Unquiet Mind provided me with the comfort of shared experience, but it was her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament that I loved. In that book I learned that my diagnosis didn’t doom me to a life of somnambulant, drug-induced torpor alternating with ill-tempered irritability. Or at least not necessarily. All I needed to do was figure out how to harness my “heightened imaginative powers, intensified emotional responses, and increased energy” and I might, like Jamison herself, join the ranks of genius. Like the poets Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, like Emile Zola and Virginia Woolf, like Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock, I might be “touched with fire.”
Except that all too often Jamison’s geniuses were consumed by the fires they set. Moreover, my work, though more “serious” now than it was when I was writing books with titles like A Playdate with Death, is no Café Terrace on the Place du Forum or “She Walks in Beauty.” My talent, such as it is, does not merit the emotional price paid either by me or by the people I love. I can’t simply dismiss my lack of equanimity as a necessary evil, the flip side of creativity. I must try instead to find it.
About an hour northwest of where I live, nestled in a little glen in the hills of Marin, is the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. I’ve driven by it dozens of times on my way to the coast. Every Sunday, the Zen Center hosts a public meditation and dharma talk, a lesson in Buddhism, followed by lunch. Their mission is “to awaken in ourselves and the many people who come here the bodhisattva spirit, the spirit of kindness and realistic helpfulness.” Equanimity is one of the four core practices of Buddhism, along with Loving-Kindness, Compassion, and Sympathetic Joy. Buddhism teaches that you can intentionally create equanimity in your body by relaxing and letting sensations wash through you. You can create equanimity in your mind by letting go of negative judgments and treating yourself and others with loving acceptance. You learn how to do all this through meditation. My favorite.
My first experience with meditation occurred when I was pregnant with my second child and frazzled from caring for his older sister. I was lured to that class (and have been lured since to yoga classes, meditation circles, TM mantras, and mindfulness iPhone apps) by the promise of increased happiness, decreased pain, improved memory and cognitive function, and a longer, more satisfying life. I sat in a middle-school classroom that smelled of pencils and feet and, at the behest of the instructor, practiced imagining a lotus blooming above my head, dropping its petals one by one. This was in the early era of the Internet, when it was not so easy to search out photographs of things we’d never seen before, and it was years before I realized that my “lotus” was actually a chrysanthemum. Lotuses have eight petals, chrysanthemums 1,327. This might explain why I got so bored.
I have been taught by a whole variety of experts how to meditate, but, rather than sit calmly, noticing my thoughts, I usually have an internal meditation monologue that goes something like this: You’re thinking again. You can’t even shut off your mind for five minutes. Now you’re thinking about thinking. Stop berating yourself for thinking! Why are you so full of self-loathing, so inept and incompetent, that all you can do is criticize yourself when you meditate? What the fuck is wrong with you? And on and on until the timer finally goes off.