To claw one’s way out of a shame spiral
by Shannon Frost Greenstein
Photo by Adrien Olichon for Pexels
TW: Self harm, eating disorders, suicidality
When I finally learned I have Bipolar Disorder, it was the culmination of an extremely unpleasant chain of events, the downward spiral of a once-gifted straight-A perfectionist. When I finally learned I have Bipolar Disorder, it came after 28 years of undiagnosed mental illness, an eating disorder, and a suicide attempt. When I finally learned I have Bipolar Disorder, it felt like just another gut punch, additional evidence of my perpetual bad luck, yet another reason my mother would have to be disappointed in me.
My official diagnosis was just added indignity, proof on paper that I was damaged, it seemed to me at the time. Since college, I had been struggling with self-harm, compulsions, disordered eating, intrusive thoughts, and the depths of soul-crushing depression. It was dysfunction made incarnate, and it was a shocking foil to the way everyone had always expected my future to turn out. After two decades of accolades and accomplishments and progress and praise, the trajectory of my life had stalled in the muck of trauma and poor decisions, something for which I judged myself most harshly.
I was convinced I was just a fuck-up; I was convinced I was damaged beyond repair. It took only one appointment with an astronomically-expensive Psychopharmacologist to earn myself a diagnostic code, and that code only served to reinforce these convictions.
When I finally learned I have Bipolar Disorder, I hid the label from everyone I knew like a dirty secret.
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Shame is a spiral.
Once you have descended the slope, tumbling head over heels like a dizzy gymnast, it is extremely hard to hike yourself back to the surface.
Lost in the shame of mental illness, I could not see any way out. I could not envision a future where my primary identity was anything other than “crazy”; I could see no redemption in a lifelong chronic illness.
I did not truly know, back then, that none of it was my fault.
Back then, I understood intellectually I was not to blame for my condition. I recognized, quite logically, that Bipolar Disorder is no different than Diabetes or Cancer, that it strikes at random and infects indiscriminately. I acknowledged that my brain is just like a faulty pancreas, that mood stabilizers serve the same function as insulin. I could comprehend that physical and mental illness are exactly the same.
But I also knew the stigma.
Back then, I could see quite clearly how our society regards mental illness. Mental illness is memes of Britney Spears shaving her head and Margot Kidder hiding in a bush. It is the sanitariums of old and the stereotypical hysterics locked away tight. It is that old archetype about the crazy aunt stashed in the family attic to avoid public disgrace. To the neurotypical and sane, it always seems, mental illness is something to be avoided. It is a reason to lay blame. I saw all of that, and I internalized it.
That stigma prohibited me from accepting emotionally that I was not fundamentally flawed. It prevented me from scrabbling out of the abyss of embarrassment, the spiral of shame winding above me to the Heavens, too steep and slippery to even approach. To have Bipolar Disorder, the world told me, was to be broken, and thus I was convinced I would never be repaired.
That was back then.
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To claw one’s way out of a shame spiral is to do something Herculean.
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In the 14 years since I was diagnosed as Bipolar – since I was eventually diagnosed as a few other things as well, an alphabet soup of acronyms littering my medical history – I have come to regard things quite differently. This regard is the result of a decade of therapy; it is the result of advocacy and empowerment and writing with brutal honesty. It is because of two babies and maturity and a lifetime’s worth of growth, and I now feel whole in a way I never could have imagined in 2008.
This, to be clear, all took an unfathomable amount of work.
Weight restoration when I was dangerously underweight from an eating disorder was work. Processing the emotions from past trauma was work. Breaking cycles of intergenerational abuse was work. Learning Dialectical Behavior Therapy techniques was work. The entire thing was heartbreaking and exhausting and far from linear; it looked nothing like I expected “getting better” to look.
But you know what else was a lot of work?
Feeling miserable all of the time was work. Mania and depression were work. Starving myself was work. Feeling perpetual shame was work. Above all, convincing the world that I was fine – that I was not in pain, that I was not floundering, that I was not broken – was most definitely work.
Now, 14 years later, it is one job of which I am so relieved to be free.
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All of my life, I realized recently, has been effort.
It was effort to be an overachiever, a perfectionist with obsessions and compulsions and cortisol in the stratosphere. It was effort to destroy my body with Anorexia and alcohol and self-harm, the omnipresent voices in my head reminding me of my worthlessness. It was effort to rewire my brain during recovery, a miracle of neuroplasticity and sheer grit.
I do not, surprisingly, begrudge this. A lifetime of exerting prodigious energy prepared me well for my ascent back up the shame spiral, trudging like Sir Edmund Hilary towards a summit of radical acceptance. Fighting to destroy yourself feels an awful lot like fighting to save yourself, at the end of the day, and one of those scenarios has a far better outcome.
The urge to create is not so different from the urge to demolish, Freud would have us believe. In this sense, creation and destruction are dialectical. They are intrinsically connected; they are two sides of the same coin. In terms of self-destruction, then, it stands to reason that breaking oneself down and building oneself up are also dialectical. The effort it takes effort to destroy is the same energy it takes to construct, and the problem for anyone with mental illness is to turn one into the other.
For me, it’s all about sublimation.
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To sublimate is to transform; it is to take something ineffective and morph it into usefulness. Sublimation became my mantra as I fought my way out of depths of shame. In the beginning, I was continuously wracked with destructive impulses – to wallow in mania or depression, to give in to self-harm urges, to hide my mental health struggles. My only defense was to sublimate this energy, to expel it outward unto the world instead of turning it inward upon myself.
I could literally picture this process in my forebrain…the power of destruction a noxious black cloud above me, the light of creativity like sunbeams emanating from my center. And eventually I found – with enough work – I was able to sublimate the urge to detest myself into other outlets. I could convert this force into art; into kindness; into a force for creation.
Instead of buckling under the stigma of Bipolar Disorder, I channeled that shame – through therapy, through time, through pride and pure stubbornness – into motivation, and I used that motivation to rebuild my life. I constructed exactly when I wanted to destruct. I built up what I was tempted to damage. I did this relentlessly, and over time, the impulses slowly became less and less; over time, I slowly started to heal.
Since then, there has been marriage and book deals and an ever-rotating cast of cats. There has been joy and children and personal growth. There has been the entirety of my entire adult life, and somewhere along the way, I seem to have shaken off the shame.
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It was a lot of effort, like I said.
It is still a lot of effort.
But I have never once regretted the results.
Shannon Frost Greenstein
Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) is the author of “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things,” a poetry collection with Really Serious Literature, and “An Oral History of One Day in Guyana,” a fiction chapbook forthcoming from Bullsh*t Lit. Follow her on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre or at shannonfrostgreenstein.com.