How I'm Learning to Manage Rage as a Bipolar Woman

I.

To be bipolar is to be hungry. By which I mean, to be bipolar is to deny your hunger.

But the same could be said about being a woman. From the beginning, all the stories warned me about the consequences of unchecked appetite, untamed desire. I swallowed their morals in one gulp. Eve and the apple. Persephone and the pomegranate. The Japanese legend of the woman from Mino and the village boys.

Of course, the woman from Mino has all but been forgotten by the world. Her lover forgot her first. After being abandoned by the man, this woman, filled with anger and despair, stopped eating. She waited for her family to notice her plight, but this happened during the New Year, and they were busy with the festivities. When she stopped getting out of bed, no one noticed that either.

Finally (as always, so much of the story happens in the gap before the finally), she found some old millet jelly and used it to brush her greasy hair into five tall knots at the crown of her head. When the jelly dried, the knots looked just like the horns of an oni, the ogre-demons of Japanese legend.

Dressed like an oni, she tracked down her ex-lover and killed him in a fit of rage. Here the story takes a turn, for then her horn-hair became actual horns. She developed a taste for child-flesh. She had transformed into a real oni.

I read these folktales in my childhood in the same way that I read psychological case studies now: with the hope that one of them will show me how to vanquish myself.

II.

As a child, I knew that I was sometimes the monster. At that age, I could not articulate the transformation my body underwent when my mind spiralled, or the lack of control I possessed during those times. I only understood that I was split in two: There was the part of me that looked and felt human, and the part of me that was wild.

To be bipolar is to be hungry . . . But the same could be said about being a woman.

At ten, I called the wild part Bad Jami; at twelve, my twin; at fifteen, my Hulk Self. At seventeen, I named this emotional and physiological state the Rage. Later, I learned what I experience at these times is technically called psychomotor agitation, a symptom commonly found in bipolar disorder. But the term lacks the teeth of the word ‘rage’—doesn’t encapsulate its heat. The Rage is an embodied state, and once it is in my body, I cannot easily get it out.

The Rage was the part that fantasized in my seventh-grade journal about murdering myself and others. It was the part of me that threw a book at my mother’s face, that scratched diatribes into my door frame with a knife, that required handfuls of sleeping pills to sublimate. It was the part of me that hungered for destruction, and the part that I kept tightly locked within the confines of my bedroom in the suburbs of Chicago.

My public-facing self, the Good Jami, was always shocked and terrified by these thoughts and behaviors. Afterwards, I would privately apologize in my journal over and over again—to myself, to my parents, to God. Why, I wrote over and over again: Why was I like this, why wouldn’t the Rage go away, why wouldn’t my body stop shaking? I did not know when or why a rage would strike; I only knew that it would happen again. The Rage was immutable.

Even as an adult it confounds me. I still have trouble articulating the duality between both my body and my mind, and between myself and the monstrous. When you tell me I am in control, I think: But who am I?

Thus, I have spent the past nineteen years as a scholar of my own brain. All my hobbies, interests, and occupations return to the psychologist’s quip: All research is me-search. I am self-obsessed not because I love myself but because I fear myself. To ensure that I am not slipping into an episode, I comb my days for portents. Is it normal for me to get this upset? Am I talking too quickly? Would a regular person also have this emotional reaction, or am I blowing things out of proportion? I watch for harbingers of doom.

III.

The only reason anyone remembered the woman from Mino again was because of her insatiable hunger. Decades after her disappearance, long after her own family had died, the local villagers discovered that some creature living inside an abandoned temple was capturing and eating their sons. They decided to set the temple on fire. As the flames rose, a bent, grotesque oni-baba (oni hag) ran out.

Wait! She cried out. Before they could kill her, she told her story: She was that woman who had disappeared long ago. Weeping, she explained how, after she killed her lover, her intense jealousy and rage transformed her into an actual oni. No matter how hard she tried, she was never able to suppress her appetite for humans. No matter how she tried, she was never able to change back into a human.

But the story does not explain what I want to know: how the transformation occurred. I wonder if it happened all at once (the way it often does in these tales), or if one day she woke up and looked at her reflection in the water and saw the hint of something she did not recognize.

My own rage sparks a more invisible transformation. My heart rate quickens, then my breathing becomes fast and shallow. If I can stop it there—if I can quell the Rage fast enough—often no one will notice. If not, a restlessness that feels like bees pulses through my limbs. My hands clench and unclench over and over. I scratch at my arms and legs. I twist fistfuls of hair. To the nearest target, usually my husband, I say: You—you—

How can I explain that, at these times, I feel the pull of violence like a siren call—my hands longing to destroy. I do not have the language. Even now, when many women speak about their therapy openly, when depression and anxiety are part of our conversational tableau, rage is seen as something else. Acceptable rage, for women, is the kind of righteous fury pointed at inequity. The other kind of rage—the kind that bucks against control, the kind that can lash as easily at friends as at enemies—is the domain of men.

The stories told to women are about how to escape their rage, mitigate it, avoid it, stop blaming yourself for it. We understand this kind of rage primarily within the context of violence and abuse. The problem is that I want you to understand how deeply I fear me without making you also fear me. This is an impossible tightrope.

IV.

I’ve always struggled with the tidy arc of the typical mental illness memoir, the kind whose trajectory leads towards being “better.” The writers don’t pretend that they are fully healed, or that the illness will never go away, but there is a large dose of hope. This, perhaps, is because many mental illness memoirs focus on the writers’ Very Worst Experiences, so that there is nowhere to go but up.

In some ways, my path also looks like—and is—a tidy plot. My mental health deteriorated as I reached my late teens. My junior year, I withdrew from school and entered a partial hospitalization program. The rising action. The following fall, as a homeschooled senior, I overdosed and entered a psych ward. The climax. I was formally diagnosed with bipolar I disorder at eighteen, and the Rage finally quieted after I started taking an anticonvulsant originally formulated for seizure patients. The resolution.

And yet. After that, there is so much life that still has to be lived, so much that it boggles the mind. My experience of mental illness has been one of a sine wave. It undulates. It never goes away.

Since then, I’ve spent most of my time and energy learning to live alongside the Rage. Its fury has softened through medication and therapy and time. I still feel my body take over, a loss of control, but it manifests much smaller, and is usually always triggered in the same scenarios: when I’m tired, when I’m hungry, when the kitchen is messy.

In many ways, I have learned how to check it, and in many ways, it still gets the better of me. Sometimes my hands do their clutching and grabbing, and the words stream out at my husband, always the brunt of my wrath. I get stuck in a loop, as if the thirteenth repetition of the line I’m just really frustrated because will be the one that brings me calm. These days, I have left myself enough breadcrumbs to help me find my way back to stasis. Ten minutes later, I am apologies and grief and shame. He is inordinately patient and forgiving with me, sees it as a storm to be waited out. But I do not want that for him, for me.

If you were watching me, you’d probably think I was upset, stressed, but you probably would not think the word rage. Because you cannot see all the ways I strap it down so it can look like this. Because you have not seen it in its full glory.

V.

In stories of the female oni, the woman’s anger is always blamed for her transformation from human to oni. Her monstrous form is her rage made manifest. And the rage destroys not only others, but herself. In the case of the woman from Mino, after she told the villagers her tragic story, she expressed her deep regret and warned all the village women about the dangers of such strong emotion. Then she ran back into the temple—still ablaze from the villager’s fire—and died in the flames.

Are these the only two stories? The one, where you defeat your monster, and the other, where you succumb to it?

In the final summary of all-day psychological assessment I had at eighteen, the clinicians said that my prognosis was not good. It would be difficult for me to function normally, given the severity of my illness. I also remember they described me with the word self-pitying, because it stung me. (Although the woman was a frightening creature, the writer says of the woman from Mino, she is deserving of pity.) At the time, I only saw two paths before me: one, that my life would always look as it did then (the probable outcome) or two, that I would get entirely better (a nearly impossible outcome).

I want you to understand how deeply I fear me without making you also fear me.

Neither of those things came to pass in the way I imagined. Instead, I am still, this many years later, asking myself how much do I control my bipolar disorder, and how much does my bipolar disorder control me. What I want to know is: How much is my fault? Where does the fault line lie, and how do I escape its reverberations?

How do I speak of the Rage, I ask my therapist. She tells me about Internal Family Systems, a psychotherapy approach that maintains that our minds are composed of multiple parts (termed “subpersonalities”), each with a discrete viewpoint and quality. The goal is to integrate the disparate parts, to listen to and acknowledge the subpersonalities, even those that seem destructive.

I am skeptical. First, because it sounds somewhat—for a lack of a better term—whoo-whoo-y; and second, to listen to the Rage is to release the Rage.

What if you intentionally released the valve, in a controlled way? she asks.

I do not have a good answer, as I have never considered letting it go on purpose. The Rage always escapes and I always hunt it down, with varying degrees of success. I understand the concept of a controlled burn, but I have also traced the map of wildfires that spread because you cannot control the wind. Still, I can imagine it. To be able to again feel the immediate relief I had as a teenager when I, heart racing, snapped my phone in half and threw it out the window.

VI.

On my eighth or ninth re-reading, I realize that the moment of the woman from Mino’s transformation occurred not when she became angry, or when she shaped her hair into horns, but when she killed her ex-lover. After that, she says, no matter how much I tried, I could not regain my former physical self.

Yet before she jumps into the fire, she warns: Do not fail to tell [your wives and daughters] my story and forbid them to let feelings such as I had to arise in their hearts. The warning here—like in other stories and plays of oni women—is against emotion. But the transformation occurred because of her action. She chose to kill a man.

The day after the election, I test my therapist’s idea of a slow, measured release. I dig around in the garage and find our garden lopper, an enormous, ungainly type of pruning shears that my husband wields with ease and I with much effort and grunting. In the garden, I pace up and down the rows of shriveled gray plants. I behead my Taiwanese eggplants. I chop my Cherokee purple stalks into thirteen unnecessary pieces. I open the shears wide, and I close them with as much gumption as I can muster. I yank out all the dead things and pile them in a heap. To my regret, such lopping does not produce the immediate calming effect that snapping my phone in half did. But I have the hope that I can find something.

(The story of the woman from Mino is loosely adapted from Rajyashree Pandey’s translation of Kankyo no Tomo, except for her dialogue, which is copied exactly.)

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