Chapter 5
When hypomania runs into an irregular heartbeat
Everything was looking up moving into my senior year at Toccoa Falls College. The clouds had lifted, my health energy-levels were rising and my enthusiasm for basketball and life were invigorated. I stopped taking the Lexapro after about a month or two, convinced that my anxiety was actually due to an unidentified physical ailment. Something was wrong with my heart, but since doctors could find nothing I committed to getting in the best shape of my life. I was pursuing two converging loves: the Bible and basketball.
I was on a manic upswing (likely Lexapro induced) and I was riding the tidal wave of mild-mania into my senior season on the court and into the classroom. In my junior year I had led the NCCAA in rebounding and was selected as an All-American that year. With manic energy now pulsating through my veins I set my sights on leading our team to even higher heights.
My anxiety and my rapid cycling moods were the breeding grounds of dreams and dreads dwelling on the same street in bustling city of my unstable mind. The season was mixed with highs and lows, ups and downs. One particular road trip that season took us down to Florida where we played Southeastern and Clearwater Christian on back-to-back nights. I remember playing the best I had ever played in the first-half against Southeastern, the #1 team in the nation. I had 19-points and at halftime and I was overtaken by a panic attack, grandiose thoughts mixed with grave ones. “I’m amazing! I’m dying!” I reasoned in my mind that my heart was failing me again and I was thrust into a world of fear, but I told no one of the thought. I went back out in the second half and tried to pick up where I left off. My final stat line of 20 points was proof that I was unable to regain my composure scoring only 1 point in our losing effort.
Returning back to North Georgia we stayed that night in a Florida hotel as a team. It was there that my heart began racing uncontrollably and I went to my coaches fearing I was having a heart attack. My coaches took me to the ER that night, stood by my side when my mind took me places that my body wasn’t ready for me to travel to, and I was preparing for the worst.
I began telling them, “Tell my wife I love her. I’m scared coach…I’m not scared about the destination (only partially true in that moment), but I am scared of the departure. I don’t want to leave Lisa….please Coach, please Coach, tell her I loved her.” After a few hours of various tests they sent me home with the calming news that my heart was healthy. Their unofficial diagnosis: my first diagnosed anxiety attack.
The rest of the season was a blur as I found myself traveling through a season of rapid cycling emotions and thinking. The highs and lows of that year were capped off in the final game of the season when I couldn’t come to grips with my basketball career ending. Angered by my coach’s decisions to allow certain people to break rules and not punish them, and devastated by my dreams coming to a crashing end, I stormed off the end of the bench in an outburst of emotions. Despite leading the nation in rebounding and finishing in the Top Twenty in scoring I was not selected for All-Conference or All-American Awards because my coaches rightly chose to not nominate me.
More importantly, my hopes and dreams of playing professional basketball were over and my health was struggling. I was being told that I was fine but in the middle of the night I would wake up with my heart beating 180-200 beats a minute. I knew something wasn’t right but I pressed forward clinging to the verses in the Bible and the call on my life to prepare for ministry.
I was unclear about what God was calling me to, but I knew no matter the road I was going to travel I needed to have a deep understanding of the Bible. In both years at Toccoa Falls I was an exemplary student who sought to soak up all that the teachers were offering. The classes were insightful and enlightening and I was gaining a deeper appreciation for my faith. I learned early in my Biblical Studies pursuit that I had a gift for writing term papers. As a self-proclaimed procrastinator I would often wait until the night before a paper was due and sit down and type out a 8-10 page paper. Turn it in just in time for it to not be late. And more often than not I would get back the paper with an “A” on top of it and some note of commendation concerning my insights into the topic at hand.
This positive feedback was encouraging and in many ways eye-opening because prior to this point in my life I had always fancied myself a Science and Math guy. In high school those two subjects were taught by my favorite teachers and so I naturally gravitated toward pursuing Engineering as a freshman at Marshall. From there I shifted to Business, Secondary Education and Biology, on my road to finally settling on the Bible. The way I saw it looking back was I had an unquenchable desire to not be bored, and until I found the Bible everything else always failed to quiet the wrestlings of my heart. I see now that this was only part of the truth. The other part was I had a manic mind that found it difficult to stay committed to a consistent path.
In this season that saw my basketball career draw to a close and my college graduation play out I was faced with loads of regret. My “unbridled passion” led me to walk out on my coach at Warner Southern in “defense of my wife,” “to walk off the bench my final season in “defense of what was right.” I viewed these decisions as moments of integrity and honor, when in reality they were outbursts of my mind’s entropy, or gradual decline into disorder and unpredictability, something I explore below in this section of my Bipolar Processing.
BIPOLAR PROCESSING: Looking back on the early struggles of my mental health journey I am convinced that my propensity toward anxiety was heightened by more than just my family tree and childhood trauma, it was also multiplied by my personal battle with my heart health. When a doctor is assuring you that you are physically fine and yet you are waking up to irregular heartbeats and frantic thoughts it becomes difficult to understand what is real and what is not. In this time of uncertainty I believe I built upon my learned foundation of anxiety and fear and made those my “go-to” responses to the flip-flopping of my heart. Until 2004 depression or anxiety had always been a subconscious/default mode of moving through tough times. In 2004-2007 when my heart issues were so uncertain I began to become very skeptical of medical doctors and only used Lexapro and Paxil for a combined 8 weeks in the 4 years. Each time I used them they would send surges of energy into my system that I know now are potential dangers to a bipolar mind. Bipolar is a progressive illness that can worsen with age. With this in mind it is my intention to identify the “bipolar blips” as such, though at the time they were never identified as bipolar symptoms.
BIBLE PROCESSING: The most pivotal verse that I gleaned life from in this season is Philippians 4:6-7, “Be anxious for nothing but in everything, with prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your heart and mind in Christ Jesus.” My faith in this season was greatly tested and there were moments of depression where I didn’t find success, I just found ways to suppress my feelings. While I never turned to elicit drugs, pornography, or drinking, I did turn often to comfort food. I ate for fun, not for fuel, and I ignored the effects that food had on my mood. However, when I allowed God’s Word to be my outlet and my source of peace and hope I began to notice a huge swing in my feelings of hopelessness. While food brought very temporary relief, the Scriptures felt like a time-release capsule of hope and purpose. The physical body is by no means evil, for we do not wrestle with flesh and blood, but with principalities, powers and darkness. In the same way that God wants us to glorify Him in our physical bodies, the enemy wants us to deny God in our physical bodies. He wants us to disobey God’s orders upon our life and lead us away from righteous living. So now, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31)