Victoria's Story

From Darkness To Light
From Turmoil To Serenity

For years, I retreated from the world by living within the deep recesses
of my
mind. I was like a frightened dog cowering in the darkness of a cave trying
to avoid
the sunlight because it was too searing. Now, I see the light in a different
way. It
appears warm and inviting, beckoning to me to come out of my cave in the forms
of people's hands reaching out to me. I emerge from the darkness into the
light.

For a long time, the world to me was like the wild sea. It was a
dangerous, threatening
place. The world rushed in like ocean waves washing onto the sand dunes of my
mind.
I was pulled in and dragged down to the bottom where creatures scuttled along
the
ocean floor. But, miraculously, I didn't die. Beneath the surface, I glided
along and
stillness engulfed me. Just then, I had a vision that the stillness was just
like deeply
felt serenity within one's soul. I sprang up from the sea and breathed in the
cool, salt
air; alive and renewed."

I have lived with a major mental illness for over half my life, since I was twenty years old. I consider myself a survivor of an inner battle that I waged for many years. The world to me was a threatening place, and I felt like a writhing snake with its skin torn off baking under a hot desert sun. Every time I faced a challenge in my life, it was so unbearably painful, I retreated within myself. But the inner world was not safe either. In fact, it was far more terrifying than the world outside me. Though I was tormented from the time of my childhood, I wasn't actually diagnosed with a severe mental illness until years later, when I was twenty five years old. I believe my father - an alcoholic, and still actively drinking - had been mentally ill for many years, but never diagnosed and treated for it. He medicated himself with booze. I believe he passed the illness on to me.

I was twenty years old when my life began unraveling and I found it increasingly difficult to function. I was a junior in college at the University of Vermont, a transfer student from a women's college in Boston. Stress plays a very important part in triggering off either a manic or depressed episode. Moving from place to place were stressors that intensified my illness. The stress of leaving my friends and starting over soon became unbearable. I had moved from place to place since I was a sophomore in high school when my mother divorced my father and moved the four of us children from California to Connecticut. A year later, we moved to a small town over the state border into New York where I began my third high school in three years.

After graduating, I attended the college in Boston for two years before transferring to UVM. I learned to run from pain. But, the pain caught up with me eventually. Depression was the dominant aspect of my disease, although mania was mixed with it. In school, I trudged through snow drifts five feet high to the library where I attempted to study for hours. I couldn't concentrate or process the information. My mind buzzed like angry bees. I experienced physical pains in my side and in the middle of the night went to the emergency room. But, the doctors found nothing wrong. Anxiety threaded through my very existence and I pulled all my eyebrow hairs out. In attempts to escape from the increasingly dark, heavy curtain of despair that engulfed me, I went to the nearby discotheque and danced, drank and slept with strangers. Before long, I had suicidal thoughts and felt an inner war wage inside me between wanting to live and graduate from college or die as a final solution to the blackness.

I was experiencing the psychosis of thought and mood disorders, though at the time I didn't know it. I slipped in and out of the punishing world within my mind; a world of self-hatred and distorted thoughts; a technicolor world of visions while the world outside was grey, hazy, unreal. Emotions were like blazing fires that I could not put out. Thoughts weren't reasonable or rational; they were like the deafening sounds of a locomotive running through my head. Thoughts were noises, blasting music. Though rationality and reason were in the periphery of my mind like mountains in the distance, I managed to keep my eye on those mountains even when clouds obscured them.

Despite other crises that occurred the final two years of college, an abusive relationship, and living in Spain for four months as an exchange student with the psychosis intensifying to the point of terror, I managed to graduate from
college and moved back to Boston.

For two years, the loud music within my mind ceased. My psychosis went into remission. Like clothes once thrown haphazardly from bureau drawers after a devastating earthquake, they were now folded, put neatly back into the drawers and closed up. My once crazy emotions were tucked away and my rational thoughts dominated.

In my poem, I see the world as threatening like the wild sea or searing sunlight. But, the visions, sounds, delusions, despair and mania within my mind were far more terrifying. Eventually, I would have to turn to the world and to people to save me from the inner havoc my mind created.

In l986, at twenty five years old, the illness returned. I checked myself into a mental hospital in Florida which turned out to be a Hellish experience and was finally flown up to Connecticut to live with my mother and begin the long road to recovery. I could run no more. I had to face the demons within as well as learn to trust people who reached their hands out to me. I attended a Psychiatric Day Hospital, moved into a halfway house and began the long journey back to sanity. Beneath the surface of my mind, stillness began to engulf me like deeply felt serenity within one's soul. I put the pieces together. I needed the world and a support system of caring hands to stay well.

2001: Fifteen years have passed since I was first diagnosed with a major mental illness. I am not cured, but I have been out of a locked ward of a psych ward since l988. I am in recovery. I am happily married and have many friends. I am grateful for every day. I have returned from a long journey that took me away from the world for awhile; but ...

I am back.

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Victoria Molta

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