meditatio, exitium, liberatio

There is a quiet question that threads through the days of anyone living with mental illness: Is this it? Is this the permanent shape of my life — therapy appointments, medications, energy fluctuations, masking in social settings, carrying the weight of past episodes and past misunderstandings? For someone like me, living with bipolar disorder and non-severe autism, the idea of freedom often feels slippery. Not freedom from responsibility, or freedom to chase grand ambitions, but freedom in the deeper sense: freedom from the heavy grip of self-judgment, freedom to simply be, without all the noise inside.

Over years, I’ve learned to sit with this question without demanding an answer. At first, I tried to solve it the way I approached everything else: by doing more. More therapy, more medications, more reading, more effort at work, more perfection in relationships, more masking to fit into social rhythms. But the pursuit of fixing myself became its own kind of trap. There was no arrival point where I became a flawless or idealized version of myself. Instead, there was exhaustion. There was the unmistakable sense of circling back over the same internal territory again and again.

What I eventually realized was that the work isn’t about perfection or escape. It is about contemplation — meditatio — a kind of burdened reflection I return to because of the misunderstandings, the tensions, the internal struggles. It is not soothing; sometimes it edges close to rumination. Yet in this mental space, I sometimes catch a sharp insight, a clever connection, that can both wound and satisfy — like seeing too much and too clearly. Reflection, for me, carries weight. It is not a peaceful space; it is a necessary one, where I wrestle with the raw material of my own life.

But even with insights, there are moments when everything collapses. Exitium — the phase of breaking, ruin, the falling down of the structures I’ve built to hold myself together. When exhaustion or emotion topples the careful balance, there is no joy, no graceful fall. Yet here, too, is a kind of hardened pride — not a boastful victory, but the gritty survival pride I imagine in Henry the Fifth’s band of brothers. It is the pride of enduring, of knowing collapse does not erase me. I have seen myself falter, I have walked through ruin, and I have emerged. This knowledge is not light or triumphant; it is forged through fire.

For me, living with bipolar disorder and autism is not about finding a path out, or a final cure, but about discovering moments of liberatio — release, a kind of fierce liberation. These are not soft or floaty moments. They are more like the realization, after believing you’ve crashed to the ground, that there was no ground to begin with. That fleeting sense of release, almost shocking in its intensity, reminds me that I am more than the cycle of struggle. Even if brief, even if hard to explain, these flashes of freedom cut through the weight.

These moments don’t erase the daily work of therapy, medication, or management. But they remind me that under the scaffolding, there is still a living person — one capable of feeling alive, of knowing something beyond survival. Sitting quietly with Julie, creating something that absorbs me fully, or standing still and simply feeling breath move through my body — these are not victories over illness, but small declarations of existence beyond it.

One of the hardest parts of this life is facing the past: the relationships stretched thin, the opportunities lost, the times I pulled away or disappeared into my own head. These memories don’t vanish; they press against me like stones. But the work of release teaches me to look at them with a different gaze. Not as proof of weakness or failure, but as evidence of survival. Not as permanent marks of shame, but as signs of where I’ve been — and that I am still here.

It is the invitation to stop chasing some imagined version of myself who never falters, never struggles, never needs help. It is the call to live in this body, this mind, right now, with all its contradictions, its sharp edges, its unexpected moments of power. The insights, the fierce survivor’s pride, the flashes of release — they are not decorations on my experience; they are the terrain of it.

I don’t want to pretend this is a story of triumph or easy peace. There are hard days, lonely days, days when every effort feels hollow. But there is also something unbroken at the center: the stubborn, imperfect resilience that keeps me in conversation with myself, that keeps me asking, that keeps me standing even when everything feels like it’s crumbling.

In the end, meditatio, exitium, liberatio is not a formula or a sequence. It is the rhythm I move through again and again: burdened reflection, collapse, and the sudden, startling realization that even after the fall, there was no ground to begin with — just the fierce discovery that I am, somehow, still here. And within that rhythm, I have found something that feels, if not like freedom, then like breath: a way of living inside the life I have, no longer bracing against it, but inhabiting it fully.

If there is a lightness I carry, it isn’t the absence of struggle. It is the lightness that comes when I stop believing I have to conquer every flaw or outrun every shadow. It is the quiet, steady knowing that even here, in the middle of all of this, I am already enough.