In the fall semester of my senior year of high school, my bipolar disorder manifested for the first time. It was far from subtle.

I would never have guessed it would have happened to me. I was a quiet straight A student who rarely did the unexpected.

My problems began only a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday. I remember that on my birthday, I was blue for no good reason, and soon afterward I underwent a succession of sleepless nights.

I lost weight. Music would send my mood to soaring heights. I would become swept up in a euphoric tide of my own thoughts, which were flowing differently than they normally did. Usually my thoughts came as a trickle of loose fragments, but – as the weeks progressed – they became more like a full-on faucet.

During the week of my first episode I saw myself as being especially creative and articulate. Normally I was painfully shy, but my inhibitions had shrugged off their leash. I saw humor in everything. I began talking and joking with the students around me and started to make friends.

Meanwhile, the way things looked had subtly changed. Shadows appeared to darken, and colors to brighten.

The visual changes added to a sense that the world was brimming with meaning and depth. I was unable to explain the changes to myself, and I fretted about my inability to concentrate on my academic subjects.

I asked myself if I was going crazy, but my mood was so elevated, I had trouble believing it. But, over the next few days, what began with a sense of hope and creativity and spontaneity unraveled into an inability to function, concentrate, or think coherently, though I believed at the time I was thinking more clearly than ever.

The night before my hospitalization, I stayed awake all night, having a kind of “thought storm.” Images, words, and memories struck like meteor showers, which I mistook for epiphanies. Everything I had experienced from childhood on seemed to coalesce into one great and beautiful pattern of meaning, every new thought seeming to crystalize into a new epiphany.

Maybe it was the dramatic shift of my thinking or the lambent haze – usually associated with heaven in artist renderings and movies – that made me think that my thought storm was sent by God. But I believe it had more to do with being in a kind of dream state while awake.

In a dream you can believe a ghost is chasing you without ever seeing the ghost. In a dream, whatever you believe is enough to make it seem real. A dreamer will believe most anything without asking for any evidence. That night, I did too.

Most of what I thought were epiphanies on that night makes no sense to me now. Bipolar disorder is called a disorder for a reason, but I am leaving out the messiest parts, because they would be tedious to read and torture to write.

But parts of my dream are easier to articulate than others. Before I describe them, I want to make it clear that something went wrong with my brain that night, and interesting things sometimes emerge from a mind that is under enormous stress. Everything that I saw or thought can be explained through non-supernatural causes.

On that sleepless night I thought that God was real and that love was the meaning of life. Though that sounds trite, at the time it seemed breathtakingly profound and new.

Another part of my “dream” was that God, rather than being offended by skepticism, encouraged it. I thought others had been wrong to believe God expected dull acceptance of what others had told them.

This particular delusion reflected my own point of view. I had been an agnostic since I was 15, the culmination of a severe depression interwoven with extreme fundamentalist doctrines thrust upon me by my strict Christian school, including the idea that on Judgment Day, God would replay the life of every human on a giant screen, projecting every thought to everyone who had ever lived.

The idea of anyone listening to my every thought had been too much to bear, and it resulted in a kind of mental Turrets Syndrome, in which my mind went into overdrive searching for forbidden thoughts to think. The unwanted thoughts fueled my depression and filled me with shame. Ultimately it caused me to analyze what I had been taught and brought down my belief system in a heap.

But my “epiphany” on the November night before my hospitalization seemed to confirm that it had always been fine for me to think, to wonder, to question, and to doubt God; more than fine



In fact, I thought that not to challenge the existence of God was to assume that the truth of him was fragile, and that an all powerful God could be toppled by scrutiny. Therefore, not to question or doubt his existence meant a lack of engagement.

My experience seemed to be a dramatic answer to the desperate guilt I had felt as an adolescent for having the wrong thoughts, and a confirmation that doubting had been a moral act and not an evil one.

The morning after my “thought storm” I was thoroughly exhausted. I had not slept or eaten in a long while. But my mom drove me to school, not suspecting that I had one foot in a dream and had lost the ability to navigate the real world.

I forgot what class I was supposed to go to first and ended up in the wrong one, and could only smile when other students laughed at my mistake. I went through my morning classes in a daze and, at lunch time, I wandered down to the library where I normally worked during the lunch period.

I got swept up in the drama of the autumn day, and the wind, and the scarlet leaves drifting from the trees, and before long I was wandering downhill from the campus, observing how a haze of gold appeared to glance off every object I saw.

The radiance and the expanse of blue sky triggered the perception that boundaries were an illusion. In my euphoric state I could not imagine I would get into any trouble for leaving campus, and I felt sure that no one saw me. I found out later that I was wrong about the last part. Reality has no obligation to conform to a dream.

My leaving campus set off a sequence of events that led to my father picking me up. A couple of hours later, I was admitted into the hospital, where I stayed for three weeks.

My insurance company balked at a stay that exceeded that three weeks. Despite protests from my doctor, I was pulled out of the hospital before I had fully recovered. Though, for the most part I was able to function by then, when I returned home, I was heavily sedated. I still thought I had had a religious experience. In my drug haze I was not mentally equipped to even question it. Any thought that approached clarity instantly evanesced. I finally had to be taken off the drug because it was causing dangerous heart irregularities.

As soon as I had my mind back, I had to rethink all my “epiphanies.” I was reluctant to let go of my belief in a God that urged people to doubt him, a God whose power rested not in his ability to force belief, but in a reality that could endure the most relentless scrutiny. To me, that was a beautiful idea.

But it was finally my belief in a skepticism-loving God that brought down my belief in him for a second time. Over a period of weeks, my questions chipped away at it until finally there was nothing of it left, just the knowledge that I had been very ill.

I reasoned that, if a deity had wanted to communicate with me, why would he do it in such a confusing way? Most of my “epiphanies” had proved demonstrably false. At one point I had even grieved because I thought my father and brother had died. Why mix truth with a jumble of nonsense? It would be like sending a letter to someone that was only partly true, and illegible. I thought an all-powerful being who could spin gas into stars could do better.

I am still agnostic, but what stayed with me was the thought that, if there were a God – perfect, omnipresent, and infinitely powerful – such a being could not possibly be threatened by the doubts and questions of the self-conscious, confused, and depressed 15 year old girl I had once been.

The God of my dream whose memory lives in my imagination is not the God I was taught to believe in. My imaginary God is someone wiser and less ego driven, not the kind of jealous and vengeful God who would create hell as punishment for non-belief.

As far as I know there are no sacred texts of about a God who encourages people to challenge his existence, but for the weeks in which I was ill, I created one.

I sometimes revisit this God in the memory of my dream. Imagining is not belief, but I like to imagine that if he did exist, he would understand my doubts and see them for what they really are: an impassioned and relentless quest for the truth.