Coffee & Cigarettes Saved My Life

This is for Bryan. I pray your soul is free and your mind finally at peace.

Bryan had a laugh that would burst forth, as though it was coming straight from his heart. Like there was so much joy inside of him that needed to get out, if he didn’t laugh it would bust right through his chest.
Unfortunately, Bryan’s brain did not share that same joy. It was a concept lost to his mind.

That’s what bipolar (manic depression) does, it creates a struggle, a conflict between the heart, soul, and mind. Pieces of us seem to always feel in conflict with each other.

In my early twenties I started therapy and medication, and a few months later Bryan and I met to start a bipolar support group.
For those unfamiliar, “Bipolar disorder is a treatable illness marked by extreme changes in mood, thought, energy, and behavior. Bipolar disorder is also known as manic depression because a person’s mood can alternate between the “poles” — mania (highs) and depression (lows). The change in mood can last for hours, days, weeks, or months.”
Every brain is different, so every person is obviously affected differently, but generally speaking, “Bipolar II disorder is characterized by one or more depressive episodes accompanied by at least one hypomanic episode.”

I had a therapist explain managing depression or bipolar this way: imagine when a person wakes up in the morning they have a glass full of water. That’s the energy they have for the day. At the end of the day the cup is empty, they sleep and fill it up again.
As someone living with mental illness, before you even get out of bed, you dump half of that glass on the floor, that’s the energy you have for the day. Now use most of that energy to fight your depression and what’s left over is for the every day things in life.

It was late one night and Bryan and I were at Morning Star, a coffee shop in Easttown, Grand Rapids. 11pm coffee and cigarette dates were not an uncommon thing for us. We sat on a sagging musty couch, looking up at a ceiling that had been yellowed from years of countless devoted smokers and late night coffee drinkers.

We laughed and cried and got angry and sat in shared feelings of apathy. We discussed books and movies and our hobbies. But mostly we talked about the rock bottom moments, how we got through them, and how we felt like we were constantly teetering on the edge. We shared about our therapy sessions and the revelations we were having. We dreamt of what life would be like free of this torment.

“In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.” ― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

But on that night, something came to life in me. For just a brief moment, it’s like someone flipped a switch and everything became clear. As though something that had been hidden from me, but was struggling to get out, finally had the strength and the courage to burst forth.

I distinctly remember looking up at the ceiling and out of the window and back at Bryan, thinking… Woah. This is SUCH a strange feeling.

For the first time since I was a child, I felt an overwhelming sense of happiness.

I said to Bryan, so many people don’t know what this really, truly feels like! I want everyone to experience this.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but part of that hopelessness lifted. It was one of those brief moments of relief. The pain and depression and struggle remained, but there was a welcome glimpse of what that “normal” brain felt like. It was one of many small moments that lasted for the blink of an eye, but those small moments of hope became clearer and more frequent for me as more time passed.

Last week, for the first time in over 8 years, I spoke with his dad. He’s a hardworking, loving man very similar to my father. Bryan’s parents loved him as much as mine loved me. They did everything they could for him. They drove up to Grand Rapids when he’d be spiraling out of control, they didn’t condemn, they didn’t judge, they loved, they encouraged him to stay in therapy, they made sure he was taking his meds, they knew his friends, they checked him in to mental health clinics, they moved him back to Chicago.
Bryan and I walked fairly similar paths, we both battled the same disease, we both went to therapy, we both took medication, we both had loving friends and family to help us through the lowest points.

But I made it, and he didn’t.

“Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality.”
“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.” ― William Styron

I still battle with my brain every day. But I won’t give up.
And I really don’t think Bryan “gave up.” I think he had just succumbed to the disease tearing him apart. It had finally convinced him that nothing could help him. It made him believe that all of the good things in his life weren’t good enough. He lost the battle, almost not by his own choosing. He just couldn’t take it any more.

I shared with his dad how much I miss Bryan’s curly hair, his goofy laugh, his wide smile, his obsession for everything Japanese, his Converse, his glasses, his perfectly worn in leather jacket. Most of all I miss those moments when everything would click. When we’d sit and smoke cigarettes and even though the journey was scary and painful, we were doing it.

After I got off the phone with his dad, my eyes welled up with tears, and I realized that I had never truly grieved. I felt like my chest might collapse in on itself and my heart struggled to beat. My shoulders hunched forward like someone was pressing in to my gut. My head felt 10 times heavier than it should. My jaw was clenched and I cried until there were no tears left and the headache had settled in.

I never mourned the loss of him in my life and in the world. For years I avoided those feelings. I carried on, piece by piece stuffing my past in to a deep pocket of my brain to collect dust, like it was a just a story I read once and sometimes recall.

This year I started clearing off the shelves, dusting things off, and allowing myself to relive those moments… to even grieve the loss of my former self.

This is the moment I was created for… and the next and the next and the next, until my time is up, not by my choosing.

I was created to do so many things, to share my story, to hold on tightly to that hope filled moment when coffee and cigarettes saved my life.

Bryan Graham (November 2, 1974 — June 1st, 2008)

If you or someone you know is suicidal, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is confidential and available 24/7, call 1–800–273–TALK(8255) or chat online here.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. — 43.4 million, or 17.9% — experiences mental illness in a given year.
So odds are pretty good that someone in your life is living with depression, bipolar, or another form of mental illness. Let’s eradicate the stigmasurrounding mental illness.
It only takes 5 minutes to be a little more informed:

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)
American Mental Health Foundation (AMHF)