On the Bottom

"It's not the fall that'll kill you. It's the sudden stop at the end." – Doug Adams

Where’s the Bottom?

I imagine you have heard the phrase before: rock bottom. If you are familiar with the phrase, I suspect it may cause you some discomfort. Maybe even outright pain.

For the concept of the rock bottom is a grim one. The idea that your life has collapsed completely, all hope has vanished, and only the thought of oblivion has any appeal.

For most people who experience it… rock bottom is hell.

And yet… we hang onto the idea of a rock bottom… perhaps because it carries the implication of an opposite state? A logical line of thought. For every action there is an opposite but equal reaction? The mind is so resourceful. It's easy to convince yourself that there is a kind of safety in the rock bottom, because, after all, it can't get any worse.

And therein lays the rub. That is why I'm writing this. The thought that it can't get any worse is highly problematic. First of all, there's no evidence to suggest things can't get any worse. In fact, if it's not your first rodeo, the evidence likely suggests that rock bottom is a moving target. No, the problem is… there's no such thing as rock bottom.

WTF?

What you talking about, unkillbilly?

It's in the dictionary. A dictionary definition describes rock bottom, simply, as the lowest point.

Unfortunately, that definition invokes one of my least favorite things—an absolute. I don't believe in absolutes. I don't think there are any true examples of an absolute in nature, perhaps that's why so much of what we say about nature is defined by something called the theory of relativity.

I personally have had dozens of rock bottoms. Most of those times, I said to myself, "No doubt about it, unkillbilly, this is the lowest point of your life." Only to experience, a bit downrange on my timeline, a point lower than any I'd been through before. I got comfortable on the bottom rock—and was unprepared, for all kinds of things, in the weeks and months and years that followed.

There's no rock. There's no bottom. There's no red line, a universal indication, that… you're done. I think that's dangerous. It drives an unnecessary vulnerability for people who fall.

But.

Now that I've gotten the TED talk out of the way…

Can I tell a couple of personal stories?

I suppose I can start with the first time I hit rock bottom. Nowadays, now that I understand a little bit more about my mental illness (I'm diagnosed bipolar I: With Psychotic Features), what happened makes perfect sense.

It's early summer, 1977. Life is beautiful! I'm nineteen, and I'm on a travel adventure to Sunset Crater National Monument. Just north and east of Flagstaff, it's a dormant volcano. I'd been there on a school field trip when I was much younger and had dreamed of going back.

Not so much for the volcano. Because the crater is no great shakes as an attraction. It is basically a cinder cone, several hundred feet high, no features of interest, not sure what's at the top, I've never been there—because Sunset Crater is one of those types of climbing situations where you take one step forward, and slide four feet back. Highly frustrating. All those cinders. Ever been hiking in really thick pine needles? Or heavy shale? Thick mud? It's not the kind of hike you take off on enthusiastically—it is definitely a death march.

No, I wanted to go back to Sunset Crater because of the ice caves! Oh baby. Even in the middle of an Arizona Summer, the temperature in those caves was freezing. So that summer, I decided it was time to go back to Sunset Crater, and I hitch hiked from Phoenix up through Flag and onto the entrance to the Crater.

I don't have terrific recall on how things… changed.

How things went from delight to… utter despair. That's a good word for the feeling that came over me. That goes with a bipolar mood swing. When it's just getting underway. That and anxiety, oh, lovely cascading showers of cortisol driven angst. And a medium sized raft of other symptoms ranging from an overwhelming sensation of being in some stranger's mind to believing I have an immutably dour expression stuck on my face.

No, not real clear about how things got rolling that particular time, but I'm certain of when the bottom fell out.

I was in the middle of a field of wildflowers. A beautiful scene, this giant meadow that lies between the San Francisco Peaks and Sunset Crater. I was glad to be there, because the hitch hiking trip had included a frightful stretch, right at the very end, when I accepted a lift from a very drunk Native American, a ride that left me shaken. Who knows, maybe it's that wild ride, where I saw my life pass before my eyes, like, fifty times! Maybe that's what triggered a mood swing. Some people believe in external triggers for mood disorders. I don't. I think it's all chemistry, and whatever code in my DNA that drives the chemistry.

So there I am, in the field of flowers, hiking along… and I can't get over how depressed I feel! All of a sudden, I'm truly astonished. I'm surrounded by one of the most beautiful spectacles of nature I have ever witnessed. And I'm devastated.

I make it through the field, after scouting a nice spot where I could camp later, and over to the crater, where I immediately launch into my climb up the side. I was trying to get back into shape. I'd gotten out of shape after a prolonged illness. I thought, climb this rock, that will be a good workout to get momentum going again on a physical conditioning program, maybe tune up the mental side at the same time.

I quit less than a quarter of the way up.

That's not good. Psychologically, quitting on a climb... may not sound like much to you, but for me, it was a big deal. To give up. Before the top.

I consoled myself with the fact that, really, the reason I'd come all this way was for the ice caves. Something about those caves had struck my fancy years ago, and now I was building up the expectations in my mind. That's the way my mind operates. Turbo powered fantasy! I've had "organic" Virtual Reality since I was three years old! I headed for the caves thinking that would pull restore my spirits.

Unfortunately… the caves turned out to be not much more than a notch in some of the lava flow. In my mind, I remembered the cave as a vast network! With passages branching off of a main cavern, disappearing into the depths of the lava field at the base of the volcano. Instead, it dropped down about twenty five feet, at a diagonal—and ended. There were some cracks from which cold air flowed, coming from the real ice caves worming their way through the lava field. I stood there at the bottom of a hole—literally and figuratively.

My little fantasy about getting out into nature, being footloose and fancy free, crumbled. Not the worse thing that could happen—at least now I had a reason to be depressed.

From there I trudged back to the meadow. I sat my gear down, drank a beer, and smoked a joint… and nothing. I got no pleasure at all from the beer or pot. I got no pleasure from the marvelous surroundings. And I had a head full of short term disappointments that made the music of the universe just that much sourer.

It wasn't noon yet. And I was done.

I didn't even set up camp. I hiked back to the highway—I was hitching back to Phoenix, immediately, didn't matter what time of night I got back into town.

I got a ride immediately—and before we'd gone a mile, we came across a horrible traffic accident—with fatalities. Coupled with my wild ride with the drunk earlier—I was freaked. I went into an emotional spiral. I had adverse brain chemistry driving a profound sense of sadness, circumstantial reasons to suffer—and I came crashing down, my first rock bottom.

It was much later in life that I came to realize that that was my first rock bottom. As it was the first time I would take the step that became the benchmark for my rock bottoms. When I got home from Sunset Crater, I went directly to the cabinet where my mom kept all her asthma medicine and consumed half the contents of everything.

My first suicide attempt. I'd say that qualifies as rock bottom.

The Mother of All Bottoms

Now? I'm sixty years old, and at this point I'm tempted to believe… my last rock bottom was my last rock bottom.

I know, I know, didn't I just claim that there's no such thing?

Here's the thing:

I've stayed out of the hospital now for five straight years. No binges, no attempts. One severe mood swing wrapped around the solstices (I know, WTF?), but manageable with meds. I'm starting to believe I did reach that red line, the absolute, the last time I'll ever have to measure the relativity of my lowness.

But.

The last time… I came very close. As close as you can come. And still be around.

I'd been on a binge. The binge started on Halloween two thousand twelve. And it was still going January twelfth, two thousand thirteen.

For this particular binge, the drugs of choice were alcohol, in the form of dose after sixteen ounce dose of Steel Reserve malt liquor. And a lot of spice, spice being a synthetic and dangerous form of marijuana.

The chemistry of those two substances alone is nothing short of deadly. It's certainly not healthy, physically or mentally.

And do that stuff—for 73 days? No food. No sleep. Just the booze and the smoke.

It got ugly. I became extremely ill. I spent hours in the bathroom, head hanging over the toilet, vomiting, until there was nothing left to throw up, and then it was on to the dry heaves. I knew one more gulp of booze would drive me to the toilet again, but if I didn't drink, my tolerance had reached the point where I'd begin to go into withdrawal—which is not only excruciating, it's life threatening.

I reached the point where I would lay in bed as long as possible, not moving, not thinking—then, get up, drink several large gulps of beer—then lie right back down again.

All day. All night. Only getting up to run to the toilet.

Around day fifty I reached the point where the alcohol in the malt liquor was insufficient to keep me from going into withdrawal. The immediate strategy was to augment the malt liquor with harder stuff. Vodka. That overcame the short term problems—kept me intoxicated, kept me from going into withdrawal. But as the days wore on, the hard liquor made things worse, and the perpetual nausea I felt was pushing me closer to the edge.

And the truly awful thing was—I wasn't symptomatic yet! The timing on the bad stuff is remarkably consistent—I hit the "dirty side" of Hurricane Bipolar every year right after Christmas. This time, when my mood did swing—I had nothing to protect myself with. I had exhausted all my behavioral health resources. I lived in a stupor, not a trick up my sleeve.

Things looked pretty hopeless.

I kept hearing that Nine Inch Nails song, "Hurt" (only the version done by Johnny Cash). I'd start crying, see all these scenes from books I'd read about down and outers, see the final scene from "Leaving Las Vegas" in my mind—and still, the bottle or can kept going to my lips.

Then… on August thirteenth, at midnight, I went to the kitchen and got a carpet knife out of the tool drawer. I went to the bathroom, took off my clothes, and sat down in the bath tub. I took the carpet knife and I put it to my throat and stuck the blade in and dragged it down the right side of my throat.

I know, it's tough to read and think about that. It hurt! A sharp knife through the epidermis will make you scream.

But.

Because I was in such bad shape, physically and mentally, my head was hanging, my chin was on my chest, and when I made the attempt to slice my jugular—I missed.

I knew immediately, though. That I'd missed. I knew I hadn't gotten the vital vascular vessel, because there wasn't enough blood. There was blood, but you get the jugular, that baby spurts.

Somehow… I got to the decision… I didn't want to die after all. I got up out of the bathtub. I put on some pants and a hoodie and my clogs. I walked a half mile to the ER at the VA. And I spent the next eight days in ICU, and two weeks on the psyche ward after that.

The good news is… that sudden stop at the end didn't kill me. Close! But I survived, and now… I'm learning to thrive. And I'm not convinced I would have made it to thrive time—if I hadn't made the trip a time or two to check out that mysterious thing we call… rock bottom.

I won't let you fall...