Chapter 5
When hypomania runs into an irregular heartbeat
Everything was starting to look up for Lisa and I 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, both for a brighter future for Lisa and I.
Lisa was beginning her first full year of teaching at a local Christian school. She had taken over the position midyear when the science teacher had committed suicide. This man’s death was a true wake-up call to me that depression can overtake you if you aren’t careful. I was committed to taking one day at a time and Lisa had an outlet for ministry with the students at the school. That was then. This was a new year, and I was looking through the lens of a new perspective. No longer wallowing in the depths of depression, I was moving forward with a renewed vigor and heightened expectations for the future.
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 the 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 at halftime, when I was overtaken by a panic attack, grandiose thoughts mixed with grave ones made my mind scattered and my breathing labored.
“I’m amazing! God, you want me to chase the NBA. I’m dying! God, my heart is going to beat out of my chest.” I concluded 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 these thoughts. 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 the second half.
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, as 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 medically observed 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 frustration. 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. I had abandoned my team based on my misplaced and misshaped convictions. I was so worried about how others were living their life that I was failing to live my own life.
The real reason I stormed off the bench was because 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 type of ministry 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 an 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 encouragement concerning my insights into the topic at hand.
This positive feedback was needed as I tended to be my own worst critic. Up until 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 my appetite for learning. 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 walking away with more than just a diploma, I also was carrying 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 I am able to look back now and identify them as “bipolar blips,” though at the time they were never identified as bipolar symptoms. I was still 16 years away from the greatest bipolar blip in my life, a blip that can only be properly identified as a mental breakdown. The events of college were minor in the grand scheme of my story and with the help of family and the Scriptures I was able to level out for my first full year of teaching.
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, but the flesh (/or sinful nature) can be pulled away from God and thrust into a world of troubled thinking. 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) is a verse that is vital for the mental health sufferer. They must realize that seeking medical help should be done for the glory of God. Eating food and drinking drinks should be for the glory of God. Getting off the couch and going for a walk should be for the glory of God. Picking up the phone and sharing your struggles with someone you trust should be for the glory of God. Over the first 5 years of my marriage the struggles were not as severe, nor was my support system as complex, comprehensive and companion-filled.
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