To the Lighthouse, and the Far North

Last night in my dreams I fought for my sanity. It’s all fuzzy in my morning mind, putting in the laundry, making tea and oatmeal, feeding and then letting out the dog. But a part of me is still there, wherever there is, screaming at my apathetic mother. I just want to feel things! I just want to feel things! I’m not crazy and I’m not a lost cause.

Yesterday my psychiatrist reminded me that the diagnosis on my chart is bipolar II. That it partly explains the obsessions, the extreme emotions. I thought, yes, that Christian conviction in high school, and then the depression, the screaming and the raging that comes out when I have jobs that I hate, or feel lonely, or bothered by something about my partner. My ability to churn out a nearly book-length Master’s thesis, my xstory about mothers. And this notebook, almost full, with my ramblings about winter and water and this need to get to Maine while it is still caked in snow. 

Perhaps that’s all I am. Obsessed, not inspired, not called by something deep inside that smolders, or something outside that makes me justifiably want to be in the woods, or on some rocky shoreline. Maybe I just need to reel all of this in. Get a better job, and stay in Winston-Salem, and take the same walks and sit in the same coffee shops. Maybe I should just get control of myself.

I am thinking of my other, most enduring addiction. That I have had since I was maybe 6 years old, and I sat in my bedroom with a chapter book I could not read sounding out the story anyway. And my house, now, with six or seven overflowing bookcases. My inability to resist, the pull in my chest when I am doing anything else to sink, to sit with another world, or another way of seeing and being in my own. Virginia Woolf, who entranced me so much when I was 17 and read of the unhappy London housewife making her dogged way through the day, gives me writing with a taste of my own inclinations. She writes that when reading as a child, she “had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them” (“A Sketch of the Past,” 93). And the inkling of “foretell[ing] them as if they developed what one is already feeling” (93). There comes the circle, or spiral, that emerges when I give a minute to someone else’s sentences. Woolf goes on to write that she supposedly summed up the sensation to her sister by saying that “one seems to understand what it’s about” (93). I have a hint of understanding what Woolf is understanding. That to read is to get my hands on the world, or at least on my world, in a way that going through the tasks of the day or having a dull conversation does not do. I know the feeling, as I sit here by the window with rain pattering on the other side of the glass. The “queer feeling [she] had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true” (Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 93). What the author of this autobiography “[has] sometimes felt when [she] write[s],” that “the pen gets on the scent” (93). 

Could the scent of my reading and my writing be that a word like “bipolar” is not the box, or computer code, that makes me who I am, and how I live my days? That makes me void of power, and choice? Here is Woolf, who has been retrospectively considered to have lived with some version of bipolar or manic-depressive disorder. I know she raged at being treated like a woman who had lost her mind, confined to beds, made to drink excessive amounts of milk, and sent to out of the city for fresher air. Hermione Lee writes so thoughtfully of the “sane woman who had an illness” (Virginia Woolf, 171). And how her symptoms do indeed “[conform] to the profile of...manic-depressive illness, or bipolar affective disorder” (172). This might help us, me, make sense of the “episodes” that she so often wrote of, and her artistic ability to describe the experience of a tumultuous mind. But, writes Lee, “to name the illness is to begin a process of description which can demote her extraordinary personality to a collection of symptoms, or reduce her writing to an exercise in therapy” (172).

Why am I contending for my own personality in my dreams? Why do I feel when the doctor names the diagnosis that I don’t want that? I don’t want to need to take two different pills, and a medical reason for my own thinking, and something that I can’t get rid of that makes me feel somehow unreal? What if the very words on this page are the mere product of my raving. A substitute for smashing a glass or riding the Peloton too hard or spending money on a cabin in the far north that my even-keeled father would say is such a waste?

I keep thinking I’m too young to have anything to say to this world. That I need to be 46, not 26, before a stranger in another state clicks on my essay or picks up my book. I am a fool, and I should just follow the thin thread I have been told will make me happy, with all the right identities and sensible life decisions. Perhaps I should hush the call of the poets, and the woman who wrote on purple paper in the shed of her Sussex garden.

I cannot help but lunge toward the bookshelf and get this papery work of art in my hands. With the author’s last name that inspires images of sharp-toothed mouths, paws running in a wintery wood. And four lines down the first page, Woolf’s words, and somehow mine: “as if it were settled, the expedition bound to take place, ...the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years..., within touch” (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 3). I roll the words on my tongue. I understand them, and I feel them with the tips of my fingers. I am a little boy, too, aching to get to the lighthouse on the other side of the bay. The beacon I have always seen and been told that I can reach, one day, when the weather is right. Desire rumbles in my belly, and my stomping 6-year-old feet. 

I am an artist, and I am a writer. Visions and strings of words cling to me, like burs on fur. I must go out, to go in, to feel things, and seek my own oceanic sense of sanity.

Works Cited 

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Random House, 1996.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being, Harcourt Inc., 1985, pp. 61–159.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Vintage Classics, 2023.