Christmas was a silent experience.

Starting on Christmas Eve, I plunged into a real low. Try as hard as I might, I could not extricate myself. I was determined to be on good form for Christmas Day for the sake of my family. But when Christmas dawned, I was as low as I had been in quite a while. At one stage I simply burst into tears when my wife gave me a present.

I just sank into silence. The more I wanted to communicate, the more silent I became. I felt trapped within myself. It is a strange experience to ‘lose’ one’s voice when one is so desperate to talk.

But it’s more than being ‘unable’ to speak. It’s having nothing to say. It’s feeling utterly empty – devoid of anything worthwhile.

Sadly, this is not a new experience. It has been a recurrent and worsening feature of my bipolar lows. The feeling of emptiness is profound and disturbing. It’s as if there is no longer anything of substance to draw upon. All that I am seems to have evaporated. I am a pale shadow of my former self.

And I don’t know what to do about it. None of my CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) tools seem to help. My meds seemed to be helping but then my bipolar modulates again. I guess I need to relax into it rather than fretting, but that’s easier said than done. Meanwhile, my family and I need to learn to live with the silence.

A bizarre Christmas! But at least, trapped within my silence, I have had a lot of space for thinking – about the Christ-child providing a voice for the voiceless, filling the empty, and giving meaning amidst the meaningless. Happy Christmas!