I roll over in bed and glance at the clock: 9 am. Good, I think, I don’t have to get up for a while. I shut my eyes and fall back asleep. I awake a little later, daring to look at the clock again: 9:30 am. I repeat the pattern again. Fall asleep. Wake up. Now it’s 10 and I force myself to sit up. As with other days recently, I dread waking up. But I’ve told myself I can’t sleep past 10. I’ve been experiencing depression and I wish I could stay in bed all day.

I’m no stranger to depression. In the last few years I’ve wrestled with periods of mild depression that generally last several months. I have low energy and find simple tasks difficult, like shopping and laundry. These depressed periods alternate with gentle up times. During the up times I’m productive, creative and energetic.

It took me a while to see this emerging pattern. A couple of years ago I began keeping “morning pages,” journaling my thoughts and experiences for an hour or so each morning. Thanks to this routine I began to track my moods and pretty soon could predict them, though not perfectly. During my times of depression I yearned for the day I would wake up and feel good. During my up times I’d dread the day I would fall into a depression again. Overall though I’ve felt that maybe what I’d like most is to feel even-keeled, neither high nor low. Was this shifting mood really how life would play out forever? I couldn’t accept this. I asked God for answers but heard nothing.

Then one day my Bible study read Hebrews 11. It is a well-known passage where the author recounts a litany of “heroes” including Moses, Abel, Noah, and Abraham who all walked “by faith.” They didn’t know the outcome of their circumstances but they trusted God. The author repeats the phrase “by faith” over and over again. “By faith Moses.., by faith Abraham…by faith Noah…I connected with that. Maybe God was asking me to live “by faith” and accept my circumstances, especially those months of depression. It reminded me of Paul’s writing too, to “live by faith, not by sight.” Maybe I was putting too much pressure on myself to be even-keeled. Maybe I just needed to accept the new normal.

***

Today I’m in an up mood. I woke up at 5 am and popped out of bed. I made coffee, did those morning pages, showered and dressed, tidied up the house, wrote a long to-do list and made a few online purchases. I have to be careful spending money. In these up times I tend to spend too much. I also have to be careful about burning the candle at both ends. Last night I didn’t get to sleep until midnight, but I have so much energy that it’s hard to sleep. I have to keep reminding myself that If I don’t get enough sleep I’m in danger of triggering a full-blown manic episode. Just one or two nights without enough sleep puts me in danger. I have had two full-blown episodes of hypomania and, though exhilarating, I did some things I regret. Also, hypomania always leads to depression.

In 2011 I had my first manic episode. At that time my psychiatrist did not label me at bipolar. He said I had the “Allison de Laveaga condition.” Nevertheless he prescribed a mood stabilizer. My mania lasted six months followed by seven months of depression. Then, amazingly, I was stable for a good ten years. No mood swings. A small dose of the mood stabilizer. A feeling that maybe my episode was a one-time experience, never to be repeated.

All that changed in the fall of 2020. My husband hinted he was thinking of leaving me (which he did a few months later) and I was wracked by anxiety and fear. This morphed into a manic episode. My psychiatrist prescribed a new mood stabilizer. The mania lasted about three months, again followed by depression. I have continued to have mild swings ever since then, thinking that one day I’d return to normalcy.

In the Hebrews passage the author considers that having faith makes one righteous, in other words, “right” before God. He says, “These (Abraham, Moses, etc.) all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” I too am a stranger on the earth and an exile. The Bible tells us that our earthly home is just temporary and someday we will dwell with God in heaven—free of tears.

I’ve often wondered if my mood swings were precipitated by events or if they were natural ebbs and flows of my body. I think the truth is a combination of those things. In 2011 and 2020 my manic episodes came during periods of great stress. Since 2020 my milder ups and downs don’t seem to have much rhyme or reason. What I believe now is that I’ve always had a predisposition to bipolar illness. For some reason it was latent until that first episode in midlife.

Sometimes I ask: Has anything good come of my mood struggles? I wish I could just make the struggles go away, but if I can’t maybe I can at least see something redemptive. Certainly I am more compassionate to others afflicted with mental illness or really any kind of struggle. I am working on being more compassionate to myself. There’s nothing more frustrating than the feeling of not being able to get out of bed, not being able to do chores (without a lot of effort) or creative endeavors (like this blog), of just barely making it through the day. I am too harsh with myself. I judge myself as incompetent or lazy when really I need to practice loving myself.

In the Sermon on the Mount the first beatitude is “Blessed are the poor in Spirt, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” I claim that beatitude. When I am poor in spirit, God gives me the Kingdom. He’s clear that the Kingdom starts here on earth. He partners with us to create his Kingdom here and now—we don’t have to wait until the afterlife to experience his Kingdom. I claim citizenship in that Kingdom, regardless of my mood, regardless of whether I accomplish much or little. There is room for everyone in that Kingdom, maybe especially those who struggle. I would guess that is most of us.