Steve Millard - A Bipolar Life: 50 Years of Battling Manic-Depressive Illness Did Not Stop Me From Building a 60 Million Dollar Business

Copyright 2011 Steve Millard. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-60037-816-4 (Paperback)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010930253

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my close friends who have helped me during the worst of times, Alan and Jean Yassky and Dave and Polly Henderson.

A very special thanks to Geoffrey Norman whose editorial skills made this book possible.

The pistol was a German Lugar, one of thousands that had made it back from Europe to the United States as a war souvenir. Id bought it from someone, probably thinking that it would be handy around the house for protection and because I had always been something of a collector. It had been an impulsive purchase and I was doing a lot of impulsive things during those days. This night, I had taken the pistol with me when I walked down to the edge of a little pond not far from the house where I lived. I was going to use the Lugar to kill myself.

I had been drinking heavily all evening but my decision was not something I had suddenly come to in a state of drunkenness. Suicide had been on my mind, almost constantly, for days and maybe for weeks. Ever since I had come down off a long, psychotic high when I had felt invulnerable, even immortal, and had taken to calling myself the Redeemer. That had gone on for months and during that time, I had been euphoric. I believed I could do anything. I seldom slept and when I did, it was never for more than three or four hours. During my waking hours, I was agitated, energized, and virtually consumed with ideas and schemes, most of them wildly impractical. I was arrogant and antagonistic to my co-workers. Impossible to my friends. I spent money recklessly and impulsively. I drank, not to medicate myself or to sooth the demons, but to fuel them.

Thenthe crash. High as I had been for those months, I was now that low and, perhaps, even lower. This was depression of a kind I had not known was possible; of a kind that I didnt believe it possible to endure. It was not the blues, or the blahs or the kind of melancholy that we all experience and learn to accept as part of life. This depression was not an emotional state but a physical condition. Every part of me suffered and cried out for some kind of relief. I was seldom able to sleep and when I did manage it for a few hours, I would wake up feeling beyond tired; feeling a sense of utter physical exhaustion. I had no appetite and when I did eat, there was no pleasure in it. I could barely taste the food. Alcohol brought no relief, only a temporary numbing of the pain which returned, and with more force, when the anesthesia wore off. The friends who had stood by during the wild, manic time tried to help but it seemed as though they existed somewhere out there, beyond my reach. I was alone and I was in pain.

So that night I tried, as I usually did, to numb the pain with alcohol but it didnt work. It almost never did. In the months before my crash, when Id been on an ebullient high, I would drink without getting drunk, feeling ever more confident, sure of myself, and invulnerable with each round. Now, each drink seemed to make the layer of gloom around me thicker and more oppressive. This night, the alcohol would not even push me, unwilling, into sleep. I was wide-awake and more in agony than ever.

I could not imagine that I would ever break out of this deep depression; that the pain would ever stop. Depression, by definition, strips you of hope and the only thing to hope for, in my condition, was relief. I couldnt imagine that I would get better; that my torment would end. The only means I could see to end it was by killing myself.

So I took the Lugar and stepped out of the little house where I lived and into the night. It was after midnight but the pond was only fifty yards off and I knew the way. When I reached the bank, I sat down, held the pistol in front of my face, and jacked a round into the chamber. It would, I thought, be so easy and so quick. And it would be an end to the depression I believed would never end any other way. One pull of the trigger and I would be free of this agony. I wasnt anxious or afraid. Only a bit relieved. It was going to be all over.

I put the muzzle of the pistol to my right temple. Then I hesitated. And I thought, suddenly, Im too tough to do this.

I do not know, to this day, if it was a lack of courage or an inner strength that made me decidefirmly and conclusivelynot to pull that trigger. Ill never know, I suppose, and in the end, maybe it was some of both.

In any case, I stood up and took a deep breath. I felt like I had been suffocating.

Then, I released the magazine from the pistol and ejected the shell from the chamber. I threw all the bullets in the pond but held on to the Lugar. Too cheap, I guess, to let it go after Id paid good money for it. And a sign, maybe, that I hadnt given up entirely on the future.

The next day I took the Lugar to an auto-body shop and paid the man there to disable the pistol with a weld in the barrel. I still have that Lugar and I have looked at it many times as a reminder of how deep I had gone into darkness and how far, even on my worst day, I have come since then.