Chronicles

[Tim McMichael]

I'm thinking of writing a book of some kind. I just dashed this down today as a rough start. Any thoughts?





I felt the first hints that the end was near on the morning of the finals of the 1992 Olympic Trials. I had been suffering more and more from something that was breaking me down and from which I could not seem to recover. From time to time a crushing depression would fall on me. One day I would be fine and the next nothing was worth it anymore. I cannot explain it like it really was. I could be walking down the sidewalk feeling the cool fall breeze on my face and watching the leaves fall like God's own glory and then it would change like something got dropped somewhere; a shadow would fall between the world and me. Colors faded, sounds muted, my head hurt, and nothing would ever, ever, be okay again. This could last for weeks and then it would leave as suddenly as it came, but I was not the same. I learned to live in fear of that sudden shift in the world.

That summer day in New Orleans I had everything to look forward to. I was in the finals of the biggest track meet in the country with the chance to make it to the greatest competition on earth. I had worked every day for a decade with that one goal in mind. I had gotten up every morning in the hope that a day of grueling workouts, self denial, and discipline would leave me just a little closer to my dream by the time I went to bed. And now, on the threshold of the validation of my sacrifice and the brightest future my imagination could hold, I woke up without a reason to live.

I had never heard the word "bipolar' except in passing. It was just some obscure tragedy that happened to other people, like getting hit by a train or falling down a broken elevator shaft. I remember seeing a video on mental illness in my Introduction to psychology class and thinking how horrible it must be to have your mind turn against you like that. It bothered me for days, and I wondered what I would ever do if something like that happened to me or to someone I loved. Why couldn't the lady in the film just be okay? Maybe if her husband could have just explained things a little better to her, that nothing was really wrong, that her children loved and missed her, that she had everything to live for. But no, she just turned ever more silent and isolated under the increasing weight of some strange, invisible pain till one day she stopped washing the dishes, broke the kitchen window and tried to slash her wrists on the shards. The film ended with her in an institution and the voice-over explaining that science really did not know how to help people in her condition. I came away from that class with a haunting sense of how unfair the world can be, and I comforted myself with the thought that at least I was okay. I did not know that my friends were already beginning to wonder what was wrong with me.

We mostly live inside our own heads and I suppose there is some truth to the old saying that people who are going crazy don't really know that they are. It happens over time, and since you have no idea how anybody else really feels or sees the world, there is nothing to measure your own experience against. But this only a partial truth; the reality is that circumstances can suddenly impose themselves with such force that the dissonance between the inner and outer worlds becomes apparent. Self-referencing clarity breaks through, and you know with absolute certainty that something is terribly, terribly wrong with you.

That morning in New Orleans I knew.

Prior to this there was always something I could point to as a reason for why I felt so bad. There was always some fear or guilt or negative experience to explain the sudden depression. This time I had nothing at all. There was no possible reason to explain what was happening to me. The day before I had been on the top of the world. I had made the finals with an easy clearance of 18' and had every reason to hope that I could be that dark horse that somehow seems to make it onto the team every year. My family and friends had made the long trip to see the big day. Everybody was filled with pride and expectation and excitement, and all I could do was stare numbly out the window on the long ride across the Ponchatrain and watch the featureless waters go by. It made no difference to me at all if we ever made it to the other side.

I once passed a kidney stone in the middle of a meet in Los Angeles. The pain was so great that I instantly vomited and convulsed into a fetal position in the middle of the runway. I could not have been hurt worse if someone had hit me in the side with a jackhammer. They carried me down to the training area where for four hours I screamed and cried and clenched my fists around ice bags till they exploded while my agent begged me let him call an ambulance. After the pain faded and I could get my legs beneath me again I went back out to the arena floor to gather up my equipment and was surprised to see that the competition was still going on. I had not technically withdrawn from the meet, which meant I still had three jumps left. The story of what happened next comes back to me once in a great while, and it is never the same twice. It becomes more exaggerated and apocryphal each time I hear it. Once after lecturing a freshman about his lack of mental toughness, he told me in hushed tones the story of a guy he heard about who once won a meet and cleared 19' while passing a kidney stone between each attempt. I just nodded and smiled and let him have his version of the story, just so long as he didn't think it had anything to do with me. The truth is that I took three very wobbly and unsuccessful attempts at 18' 4" and spent most of my time between jumps doubled over in a cold sweat of agony. As painful as that experience was, New Orleans was worse. I don't know how else to say it. Given a choice between a kidney stone and the level of depression that hit me that day I would choose the kidney stone every time without hesitation. I know that sounds extreme, but ask anyone who has been at the bottom of a bipolar cycle, and they will probably tell you the same.

I once read that depression is not so much about feeling bad as it is about not feeling anything at all. It's as good a description as any, as far as it goes, especially since it helps convey the striking difference between what people think depression is and what it is like to actually experience it. People tend to imagine it as a kind of intense sadness, but this is because healthy people can only go by their own experience. The truth is that depression has a different quality from sadness altogether. For one thing sadness has an object. There is something to be sad about. Depression just is - relentlessly so. What the aforementioned description lacks is that it does not deal with the paradox of how painful it is to feel nothing. That vacant, emotionless exhaustion hurts, and unless you have experienced it, it is impossible to fully convey how much.

And then there are the thoughts. About those I will not go into too much detail. Sometimes there are things that are hard to say and sometimes there are things that should not be said at all. To say that I thought of suicide does not do it justice. I did not consciously "think" anything at all. It would be closer to the truth to say that suicide thought me. Every moment it was there. Each time I closed my eyes the images were waiting. The words repeated themselves over and over again endlessly. Not with the sudden violence that you see in some prime-time drama, but with the listless monotony of a concentration camp victim shuffling to pick up the next stone with which to build the walls of his own prison. I don't remember much about that competition in New Orleans. Somehow I cleared the opening height. I have a video of it somewhere, but I never watch it. One of my athletes found it one day going through a box of old tapes and they could not understand why I did not want to see it again, or why I wouldn't let them watch it either. How could I explain?

Now I'm not sharing this for pity or understanding or as an excuse for why I did not have a longer or more successful career. All of that means nothing in the world to me now. I have a story to tell, and some of it won't make much sense if you don't know this about me first. I have never really been okay. I have done the roller coaster of highs and lows for as long as I can remember. I have soared on the exhilaration of the vibrant, leaping high where everything is possible and the world is like the splash of color on an ancient Japanese print touched by the hand of a master who meditated for a lifetime before taking up his brushes. I have also sat alone in the dark for a long, long while and looked up at the circle of dim light impossibly high above that represented all the memory I ever had of a life worth living, and sometimes I did both in the same day.

[powerplant42]

I'd buy it.

[dougb]

A powerful wordsmith.
Write everything down and get a really good editor.

An amazing story is coming.

doug

PS. Are you going to make the PV Summit?

[Pogo Stick]

I'm thinking of writing a book of some kind. I just dashed this down today as a rough start. Any thoughts?

Tim, you are very brave man.

[Tim McMichael]

My childhood home was an abandoned two-story rock church that stood like a lonely castle in the midst of an expanse of windswept prairie at the foothills of the Wichita Mountains. A long dirt drive lead to a gravel road and a rusting sign which read “First Presbyterian Church of Indian Territory – Established 1885.” There was nothing else in all that featureless landscape apart from a few trees and the distant lines of winding thickets that straggled down from the limestone hills. Everywhere else the wind tossed endless oceans of prairie grass and wheat for as far as the eye could see.

My parents rented the crumbling building from a local farmer who had no use for it and was happy to make a little money off the place. Mom and Pop, for their part, traded middle class comfort for isolation and anonymity. It was the late 60’s; Vietnam was still raging overseas, and the counterculture was staging increasingly ragged and violent protests in response. Kennedy and King were gone and the convoluted nexus of martyrdom and murder and the official version of events that could not be trusted was a fresh wound on the collective consciousness. Nixon was in office and Hoover was running the FBI like a personal fiefdom. It was an atmosphere of fear and outrage and deep suspicion of institutionalized authority of any kind. The Black Panthers and the Weather Underground were gaining traction as the rest of the counterculture became increasingly disillusioned and burned out by their own excesses. The hippies had cooked up their own dream of an organic utopia in a bubble of swirling smoke and psychedelic colors, and like a nightmare from one of their own visions, it grew the legs of a monster and walked away with them inside it. Meanwhile the revolutionary types were stockpiling weapons and consoling themselves with dreams of who would be the first up against the wall.

My parents took a good hard look at all of this and decided to take the “drop out” part of Timothy Leary’s ultimatum at face value and dropped completely out of sight. At one point we did not officially exist on any database in the world. We received no mail, had no bank account, and did not own a radio or television. Books were the highest form of entertainment in our home and of these we had plenty. Entire walls were stacked to the ceiling with homemade bookcases sagging under the weight of volumes that ranged from the adventures of “Tarzan and the Golden Lion” to the “Odyssey” of Homer. Giants of philosophy and literature rubbed shoulders with a riot of pulp novelists and self-published poets on long shelves made of plywood and cinderblock. My brother and I collected a hoard of lurid comic books from the days when Batman was edgy and disturbing and the Green Lantern wrestled with metaphysics as much as with Solomon Grundy. Even before we could read for ourselves, Pop would read to us on the long winter evenings as we huddled around the wood-burning stove. I knew the entire plot of the “Lord of the Rings” by heart long before I was old enough to know that the whole thing was not literally true. Even now I credit the formation of my conscience more to Tolkien’s vision than anything else I ever learned of religion or philosophy. I owe my idea of good and evil and my sense of duty more to the last defense of the wall at Helm’s Deep than to anything I ever gleaned from the barren fields of “History of Ethics.”

During all this time, we only drove to town occasionally to get groceries and wash clothes. Most of our contact with the outside world was limited to the occasional visitor: counterculture vagabonds dropping by on their way to someplace else: round eyed Buddhists and revolutionaries and marijuana mystics who would crash on the couch or in their sleeping bags and then be gone in the morning.

And on another planet, a few miles away, Grandma and Grandpa lived on their small farm nestled against the hills. They belonged entirely to another era and idea, one that was fading away and taking them with it. My grandfather had once considered himself a successful man, not in terms of financial means, but in the more concrete terms of self-sufficiency. He was a working man who could literally dig his own livelihood out of the rich earth. He could put his own boots beneath his own table and eat his own food off it, and the ten-gauge in the broom closet was for snakes and varmints and anyone who wanted to argue the point. The farm was the source of his pride and dignity, the pulse of his life’s blood, but that way of life was fading from the face of the earth as corporate farming and government policies drove the small farmers to the brink of extinction. Now the farm was a ragged ghost of the memory of rural prosperity. The vibrant reds and silvers that once made barns and sheds stand out in bright relief from the landscape had faded to dry-rot and rust as the sun cracked the paint from the walls and the wind bent and warped the tin. Green like the memory of an ancestral island by the way of the sea gave way to brackish and dusky browns as weeds thrust up through the cracked concrete, choked the fence lines and encroached on the garden plots. Equipment that once was the very emblem of power and respectability, the sufficiency to wrest a comfortable living from the hard earth, became a line of broken hulks, skeletons of binders and tractors and combines - all antique - all insufficient - the newer ones feeding off the spare corpses of the older as they were progressively cannibalized to keep at least one of them running. And Grandpa went the way of the farm, and Grandma fought a losing battle against the encroaching decay.

It was the farm, however, that made our lifestyle possible. Most of our food came straight from the ground, and my brother and I grew up strong and wild on it. That, and the cash that Grandpa paid Pop each month for his work on the farm was enough to keep us supplied with necessities. It was on the farm that I made my first vault. I was at that age around five or six when a boy lives outside like a frog does in a puddle. Utterly filthy, completely in his own element, and content with that happiness that arises from a complete lack of self-awareness. I was trying to jump across puddles in the gravel drive, as delighted with my splashing, mud-soaked failures as I was with my occasional success. There was one puddle, wider and deeper than all the rest that I could not hope to clear, which of course, did not keep me from trying till, exhausted and frustrated, I noticed the broken branch of a catalpa tree laying beside the drive. I picked it up and splashed the end into the water and an idea began to form. By running and stabbing the end of the stick into the middle of the puddle and holding on I could easily jump across. I did this for a while, going farther and farther, lost in the sudden empowerment and the exhilaration of self powered flight till another idea began to take shape in my mind. I began to imagine that maybe, if I gripped a little higher, ran really fast and swung my feet up, I could possibly jump over something high, maybe as high as the hood of the truck or the garden fence. And that one spontaneous flash of insight has shaped the course of the rest of my life.

[powerplant42]

I did not read every bit of these posts, and I don't have to in order to know that I would much rather see these words published in a nice hardback...

GO for it!

[Tim McMichael]

Winning

There is darkness beneath the pain. The throbbing agony is still there, but it doesn’t touch me. Not where it matters. And the darkness seems infinite. I can go deeper, like a diver beneath a wreck. All that damage is on the surface, far away. And down here I still have my will, and my thoughts still have purpose and direction.

I am careful how I move. I can’t let the other competitors see how badly I’m hurt. Something inside is just…wrong. It’s a nauseating pain, a sense of things out of place, ruptured. And it’s deep, but I can still move, still get my pole and head back to my start mark, still stand and judge the wind that has gown colder and shifted to our faces. It’s the first step that decides it. If I flinch away from it, I’m lost. The only option is full bore, to face the white hot pain NOW! And dive deeper into the dark.

There was cheering. Something happened and people were happy about it. I rolled off the pit and fell to the ground on the far side, hidden for a few moments to gather myself. But I could not. The darkness was still there, my mind and will still heading back for another attempt. The diver beneath the wreck could not surface. The attempt kept replaying in my mind on an endless loop. I managed to stand and walk toward the crowd that had come onto the track. But a ghost body, the self my will had forged beneath that pain, was still competing, and I could not make him stop. I did not even flinch when my coach picked me up in an embrace and swung me around.

What is everyone celebrating?

Drug testing. The cup I hand to the suddenly white faced doctor is red, dark red, like old rust.
“We need to call an ambulance for you.”
“No.”
“You are bleeding internally. You need to be in a hospital…now. You should at least find out what is going on in there.”
“No.”
“You could die.”
"No."

3:00 AM. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed. I can’t lie down. Empty hotel room. Empty street. Nobody even awake I could call. Each time I close my eyes I’m back at the competition. Again. Again. Again. Again.

What have I done?
What have I done?
What have I done?
What have I done?

[willrieffer]

Great stuff. Keep on brother.

When I was 12 my mother committed suicide. Sports and pole vaulting carried me a long way. Then it all came crashing down on me as well. Life. Relationships. Depression.

Right now its spring and I'm out teaching some kids to pole vault. Things couldn't be better!

Will

[altius]

Just caught up with this Tim - like many I am dealing with my own troubles - cancer -this does not leave one with much time and space to deal with other stuff . I went to 11 different elementary schools during the war as we followed my father from one airforce base to the next - then when I went to secondary school I lived with my Gran in a fibre shack - no electricity or bath/shower and an outside toilet -wooden seat over a hole in the ground . Then when my family did come back to that town my mother died inside a year -i was 17. Fortunately -or otherwise - I was whipped into National service in the Navy and so didn't have time to deal with the things I should have sorted out at that time. Dealing with it ever since. We all have our stories and I hope I am around to read yours.