Keeping the Faith With Bipolar Disorder: An Interview with Anna Gazmarian https://ift.tt/OduVzCg
Raised in a conservative religious community that sought healing through prayer instead of medicine, Anna Gazmarian found her faith at odds with science when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2011. In Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, she revisits the decade following her diagnosis, during which she struggled to reconcile the teachings of her childhood – and the religious trauma that accompanied them – with her dark, painful road to healing.
With a unique voice that artfully infuses humor with suffering and yields a message of hope, Gazmarian peels back the curtain of guilt and shame that too often suffocates those with mental illness, recounting the ways she created a life with meaning, joy, and purpose while defiantly rooting herself in the faith she holds dear.
Anna Gazmarian holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Guardian, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Sun, and Quarterly West. She works for The Sun magazine and lives in Durham, North Carolina. Devout: A Memoir of Doubt is her début.
We spoke in late February via FaceTime. This interview has been edited for length.
I can imagine there was nothing easy about writing this memoir. Was this a therapeutic revisit, or did it feel more like gouging out scar tissue?
I thought the process of writing the book would heal me, and I thought this will make my life meaningful and this will make all the pain worth it, and I found that really none of that was true. The book kind of broke me in many ways. Writing it revealed the extent of religious trauma, and it made me realize how deep that went. As I neared the end of my book, I got into an even deeper depression because I kept saying to myself, “I feel like a fraud, a hypocrite, because none of this is true for who I am right now.” The hardest thing about memoir is you have to capture the person in the place in life you are writing about – even if that’s different than the current reality. I had to reframe it as although this book did not heal me or make me feel better, I think it could help other people and for me that kind of makes it an offering for others.
The framework of this book felt like a nod to its theme – scripture woven into the story of your life in much the same way that your faith is threaded into your identity and purpose. What would you say your hope (or intention) is for readers as they move through it?
I decided I wanted to write a book when I was 18, and it was at the height of my mental illness because there just aren’t resources for other people moving through this. I had no framework for whether things were going to be okay. I wanted to write a book that dealt with evangelicalism but didn’t end in a complete denouncing of faith. I wanted to examine, for those who stayed, the pain of staying and the struggle of staying.
I struggle with the conclusion of why I stay, so I wanted to write for those people. I wanted to write from the mental state of an evangelical and help people feel less alone. I asked, “What would have helped if I had something like this younger?” Just because I have this diagnosis, it doesn’t mean it’s the center of my identity, and it doesn’t have to define my life. There is still hope. I want people to feel compelled to allow themselves to occupy emotions and thoughts that they would have otherwise felt are too scary or off-limits.
I’ve come to believe that the God of my upbringing was a delusion created by man to exert fear and control. And it’s not who God is. When I came to terms with who I believe God is, I think I’ve been able to let go of what I’ve experienced as manipulative and abusive. Yes, these things still affect me, but I also realize they’re not true.
There will undoubtedly be readers who grapple with whether or not to abandon their faith. What, at the core, has kept you holding onto your faith, and – this is a bit of a challenge – do you feel like the enduring trauma of the oppressive elements you were exposed to have preyed on your diagnosis, to keep you holding on?
If you’re biologically predisposed to something and a stressor happens then it can lead to onset of mental illness. I often grapple with if I had the tools back then that I have now, would I even be bipolar? That’s been hard for me to accept.
Since writing the book and having my daughter, having a girl in general, was very scary for me because I grew up very rich in purity culture and that still deeply affects me. I don’t understand the alternative because I still see sex as this sacred thing. I grapple with how can I teach my daughter about these things so she has agency? I have taken a break from church, and it just got to the point where it felt suffocating and writing the book made church harder and harder, and the Donald Trump presidency brought out a lot. And I’m at a point where I can’t be led toward God by men anymore. I found something really beautiful about living a quiet faith and a quiet life. I find God in my relationships and the people around me, regardless of what they believe. And for me I want this deep connection with God separate from what people are telling me to believe.
You write, “During my manic episodes, an unclear line existed between delusion and belief. But, in the unknowing – maybe this is where faith exists.” It’s almost like religion/faith fuels it?
My frame of reference was that suffering was given by God as a condition of sin. I needed to make answers, and I couldn’t get them from the medical community, so I think I was turning to faith to try and find answers, but the way in which I was trying to find them in the beginning was to try and find why something happened. But the reality is we don’t know why anything has happened. Faith is accepting what you don’t know, and I think my relationship with faith and illness has changed over time because I think a lot of people in the Bible were legitimately mentally ill. If prophets existed today, they would be alongside the mentally ill community. I think the mainstream society thought that Jesus was crazy for all the things he was saying. It’s not just the religious community that dismisses mentally ill people; the scientific and medical community also dismiss them. If we believe that everything is in the image of God, and there’s a divine nature in human beings, then it makes sense that we would try to see God in other people.
I’m in a place now where I think these things can coexist. I think God is involved in suffering and there’s something really beautiful in hope and joy coexisting. I think there’s something really beautiful about depression. I have a deep ability to understand people’s emotions and make people feel safe in a way that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise and it’s opened my eyes to the suffering that other people experience. I feel like my whole upbringing was avoiding pain and ignoring it, and now I allow that to coexist along with the hope and faith I feel now.
I appreciated the humor throughout. “As a small act of rebellion, I grabbed my [purity] ring and stuffed it in my jean pocket. I wasn’t like them.”
Humor was really important to me to incorporate into this book. Mental health memoirs are really hard for me to read, especially when they dwell so much in the suffering that you feel so entrenched in it, and for someone with a mental illness it can be triggering. It was really important for me to write the book from a distance, and I feel humor is a way for me to do that. If I’m able to laugh at something, then I’m able to have hope.
There are repeated examples throughout your story of people who were a salve for your suffering and those who exacerbated it with trite responses. It was interesting to me that when David shared his suicidal ideations with you, you “felt an urge to hold him or pray aloud for him,” even though these actions had been sandpaper on your wounds.
It was really important for me to include that in the book because I didn’t want it to come across that having mental illness automatically means you understand what the needs are around you. Mental illness has helped me to extend compassion and understanding toward others because I understand what it’s like to walk alongside someone.
The complicated thing about mental illness is it’s sometimes this dark hole that you can’t automatically lighten. Often, you don’t know what helps the person suffering or yourself. You have to give yourself grace. You’re going to fail. It’s not your job to make the pain go away; it’s enough to be present. The most meaningful things for me have been people treating me like a human and seeing value beyond my illness and not treating me as this one-dimensional being because I have a mental illness. Even in my darkest moments, it’s been so meaningful when friends call me and share their lives and what they’re going through. Something really beautiful to me is relationships where silence is okay, and I think silence is a sacred and beautiful thing to just sit with someone in their pain and know it’s okay to experience their pain and know that someone is there with you, and not rushing to solutions. We tend to think experiencing pain is a bad thing and we rush to try to fix it instead of allowing ourselves to feel it.
“Moments of grace can be hard to come by, and even when they do come, the feeling can be fleeting. This fact doesn’t make such moments any less real or less true.” What is your practice for finding these?
When I first got diagnosed, someone in my family gave me a gratitude journal and I got so angry because it felt like discounting my pain and what I was experiencing. I had a therapist tell me I can be thankful for this, I can have gratitude for that, but also acknowledge it’s really painful, and I’m really scared. These realities can coexist. I have started this practice of recording moments where I see God and moments where I see gratitude, but I also include in that list the suffering and the pain and how these things are coalescing and honoring both of these things.
I can feel your growth as the story progresses. Do you still ask questions like, Why me?
I think for me, it’s less why me and more anger. It’s this thought toward God that says if you have the power to stop this, why don’t you? And it’s not so much about my suffering, but the suffering of the world. Seeing the suffering and pain that everyone goes through, it would be a waste of time to compare my suffering to others. I recognize how bipolar has shaped me, and I don’t know if I would have gotten out of that community without it. Because I didn’t fit in that bubble, I was forced to leave that community. So I don’t want to go as far as say that it’s a blessing, because it’s created so much suffering. But I acknowledge that beauty and love have happened because of my diagnosis, and I wouldn’t take that back.
0 Commentaires