The Mustard Seed

About ten years ago, just before I turned forty, I had a manic episode that split my life in two.

I had been sober for seventeen years and relapsed. I didn’t know I was bipolar. As far as I knew, I’d never been manic before but depression had been a long companion. Looking back, there were cycles—debt and repayment, hyper-creativity, sexuality, bursts of energy that felt productive until they weren’t. I didn’t know those were symptoms.

But this episode was different.

I lost touch with reality. I became paranoid and suspicious. I experienced psychosis. I said horrible things to family members I don’t remember saying. It turns out bipolar blackouts are a thing. I detonated my career and damaged treasured friendships. I became deeply, frighteningly isolated.

The shame afterward was tidal.

Everything I believed about who I was—responsible, sober, dependable—imploded. I gained fifty pounds and stopped recognizing myself. My executive functioning evaporated. All I could do was replay the wreckage and narrate my worthlessness. The suicidal ideation was steady, like background noise that never turned off.

Six years ago, something shifted.

I had a spiritual experience that changed my understanding of my life and of God. The depression lifted. I wrote a book. I was hypomanic at the time and it doesn’t make much sense, but still, it’s a book. Writing it rearranged something in me. My understanding of God shifted.

It’s only recently though that I’ve come out of hibernation. I’m going to AA meetings regularly. I’m talking to people every day. I’m still fifty pounds heavier, but I recognize myself as human again. Not redeemed in some dramatic way. Just human. And worthy of love.

Meetings are healing in a way I couldn’t have engineered.

Sitting in a room while someone unpacks their shame. Listening to someone else describe the exact thought you believed proved you were uniquely defective. Hearing laughter after confession. Watching someone tell the truth and remain loved.

I am not alone.

It reminds me of this Buddhist parable:

A woman lost her son and carried his body door to door asking for help bringing him back to life. The Buddha told her he could help. She just needed to bring him a mustard seed from a house that had never known death. She knocked on every door but every house had known loss.

Eventually, she returned without a seed.

She no longer asked him to bring her son back and was able to lay him to rest. She had seen that her suffering, though unbearable, was not unique. Grief was not a punishment or a mistake. It was part of being human.

That’s what meetings do.

I walked in carrying the body of my own story—the manic episode, the relapse, the shame, the weight, the years lost. I was certain my collapse was singular. That I had fallen further than most. That my particular blend of addiction and bipolar disorder made me an outlier.

Then I started knocking on doors.

Every room had known loss. Relapse. Divorce. Jail. Debt. Betrayal. Depression. Even mania. God going silent. God returning differently.

No house was free of death.

The miracle wasn’t that my past disappeared. It’s that my isolation did. Sorrow spoken aloud changes temperature. Shame metabolizes in the presence of witnesses.

Twelve-step meetings are such a gift.

Shared experience is my church.