Hello Psychos!
Last week, I began to provide context for why I may have developed Bipolar 1 Disorder. I need to continue to flesh this out a bit. I explained that I was indoctrinated by my Latin teacher, Dr. Bond, to believe that, if I didn’t live my life in a certain way, I would burn in hell for eternity. I also explained that the first time I got high smoking weed was a disaster because my soccer team tied me up and threw me underneath a cold shower and poured soap in my eyes. To this day, I tend to believe that these two unfortunate situations set the stage, psychologically, for me to have a terrible acid trip at the New Year’s Eve Phish concert at Madison Square Garden. I further tend to believe that that terrible acid trip contributed to me developing a mood disorder that otherwise may or may not have remained dormant. I’ll never know for sure if I would have developed Bipolar 1 Disorder, regardless, but I do know that the LSD certainly didn’t help anything. Lol.
From my perspective, a worldview that includes a deep-seated fear of burning in hell forever is antithetical to having a pleasant experience on psychedelics. If LSD can have the effect of opening up doors of consciousness, let’s just say I was ripped and rammed through those doors, headfirst. I honestly was scared the whole time that the devil was trying to steal my soul. It certainly didn’t help that, while I was tripping, my “friends” were playing into my fears, taunting me as though they were demons, instead of trying to comfort me. I get it, though. We were all just a bunch of dumb kids in high school. I don’t hold it against them. I don’t harbor ill will toward them. Although, it certainly was a traumatic experience.
I actually don’t even hold ill will toward Dr. Bond anymore. Okay, that’s not true; I still kinda do. Lol. BUT he does have a saving grace in my eyes. He did teach me the meaning and implications of the word ‘Risibility.’ It means having the ability to laugh at something. Dr. Bond explained that risibility is a phenomenon unique to human beings; having the ability to see something as absurd and ridiculous relative to the cultural norms of a particular social compact and, thus, laugh at it. Seeing as I decided to become a comedian, I’ve thought about that pretentious, yet insightful, sentiment many times over the years.
So yeah, I think that my genetic predisposition toward mood disorders, coupled with ill-advised LSD experimentation in high school, while having been indoctrinated with a terrifying belief in eternal hellfire, contributed to me developing Bipolar 1 Disorder. Basically, I got unlucky. Also, I’m not really into Phish anymore. Lol.
Sadly, the immediate fallout of this acid trip was that I thought I lost my soul. I felt like there was a hollowness inside of me. It felt as though an essential piece of me was missing. I lived with this deep feeling of wayward loss for almost 3 years. It was horrible. Miraculously, though, after that experience in the center of campus, where I perceived that the contents of my unconscious mind were flooding into my consciousness, after that, I no longer felt the hollowness. I no longer believed that I lost my soul. I felt restored. As much as mania has taken away from me, for this I am grateful!
I do have to say that something I struggled with for many years and shed countless tears over was the belief that I caused my Bipolar 1 Disorder. That I did this to myself. That I broke my own brain and ruined my own life. It was a terrible and painful thing to believe, but, after all, I decided to take the LSD. I felt such relentless guilt about this. It, honestly, took me fifteen years to get over it. I finally forgave myself. I finally stopped blaming myself. I think I finally came to peace with it all through reasoning, the passage of time, and a sense of deserved redemption because of my efforts to destigmatize mental illness through comedy. Ultimately, I realized I was just a kid. A kid who, full disclosure, dropped acid three more times after that! WTF?! I white-knuckled my way through three more horror show trips, because I so desperately wanted to feel “normal” like the other kids who were tripping all the time and having fun. I just wanted to have a “normal” trip on Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, you guys. Haha. Was that too much to ask?
This week’s audio clip at the top is a stand up bit about how, when I’m manic, I have the recurrent belief that I’m the reincarnation of the Rastafarian Messiah, Jah, who Bob Marley would sing about all of the time. It’s wild. Enjoy!
Love,
JFOD
My First Manic Episode (Part Three)