DATE: Tuesday, October 14, 1997             TAG: 9710140034

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: Elizabeth Simpson 

                                            LENGTH:  114 lines

POET'S LIFE IS "PUSH & SHOVE"WOMAN'S DARKEST HOURS BATTLING MENTAL DEMONS HELP HER APPRECIATE SMALL MOMENTS OF LIFE

JANE SOBIE can describe a daffodil in a way that makes you feel you've never seen a flower before.

She can relay how it feels to breathe in the aroma of hot coffee while watching people walk through Ghent in a way that makes you want to run there, posthaste.

She can talk about getting herself out of bed, getting dressed and staying upright the entire day - in clothes rather than a nightgown - in a way that makes you want to celebrate every dawn.

There's a reason why.

For while Sobie is a writer, a teacher, a volunteer, a mother, she is also a 49-year-old woman who has struggled mightily with a mental illness called bipolar disorder.

The roller coaster ride of depression and mania has been debilitating, but there is one thing she says about the disorder that surprised me.

She is thankful she has it.

Even though it's left her hospitalized eight times. Forced her to quit a job teaching high school English and journalism. Limited what she can do and changed the way the world looks at her.

For all of that, the condition has also caused her to learn to live life, and appreciate moments in a way that people who rush by her every day may never know.

``There's something in the Alcoholics Anonymous creed about living one day at a time,'' she muses, sitting in a well-lit living room of a spacious home in Virginia Beach. ``If you're manic depressive, you live one minute at a time. When you do that, you get a lot out of time.''

I went to visit Sobie one afternoon last week because I had read some poetry she had written, including this one entitled ``Overload.''

My thoughts

r-a-c-e

at infinite

s-p-e-e-d

I would like

to listen

to them

individually.

But they

push and shove

like

bargain basement shoppers.

She wrote the poem - and a hundred others - during a five-year period in the early 1990s. It was a time when she seesawed between being uproariously happy and darkly despondent, sometimes in the same instant.

During that time she couldn't write, even though she'd been a free-lance writer for 12 years. She couldn't teach, although she'd done that at First Colonial High School for six years. And she had a hard time, frankly, just getting out of bed.

``Your bed,'' she says, ``is your worst enemy and your best friend. I felt like there was velcro on the sheets and my nightgown. I couldn't get up.''

Other times, she was so up she would call the Oprah Winfrey show, asking, no, demanding that Oprah be put on the phone, because Sobie had ideas to share. Her twin sons, now 26, would come home some days and find her marching in the living room to the tune of John Phillip Sousa, and other days find her curled up in a ball in bed.

Those were years when even a part-time job was out of the question.

However, she could write poetry. Even though she'd never written any before.

So she did.

Tons of it. On the backs of envelopes. On scraps of paper left on the car seat. On yellow legal pads.

She wrote about being on the psych ward and the field trip she and others made one day to Pizza Hut. How she was enjoying the taste of pizza, laughing with the others, when suddenly she started crying. ``What if someone I know comes in here and sees me at 2:30 in the afternoon having a good time,'' she whispered to a counselor.

Looking back, she laughs a little at her fear.

``I felt I should be out saving the world,'' she says.

Not realizing, of course, that she was out saving hers. In that instance, and so many more like it, she learned how to enjoy the moment, the slice of pizza, the laughs with friends and strangers on the psych ward, the act of getting up in the morning, and staying up.

She would accept those small things of life as worth living for. Resign herself to all the things she couldn't do anymore, like working full time.

But that acceptance would be a journey, going back and forth between self-blame and resignation, as she endured the cycles that define her life.

When the right mix of medication trimmed the tops and bottoms off her moods, her creativity waned, and she put her poems away. Didn't look at them. Didn't share them. Didn't even think about them.

It took a trip through Amish country recently and, more specifically, a quilt there to make her think about them again. The quilt was made of light and dark squares, called Sunshine and Shadows.

``I'll take it,'' Sobie said. ``That's my life.''

Soon afterward, she got out that box of poems and decided that maybe if she shared them with others, it would help them.

Not just those who suffered with bipolar disorder but also those who didn't.

Maybe the poetry would show manic-depression not as a weakness but as chemical imbalance. A disorder that can be monitored and controlled and dealt with. Maybe the poems would help ease the stigma of mental illness.

And maybe they would show that while, yes, there are many things she can't do because of the illness, there are also many things she can do better.

Like enjoy the sight of a daffodil.

It was one she saw in spring, by the way, when she was coming out of a depression that had left her seeing only blacks and grays, unable to feel, taste, smell.

Funny, but she didn't even remember planting the daffodil bulb in the fall.

Yet there it was, in all its splendor. The trumpet, so delicate. The shade, sun-yellow. The smell, softly inspiring.

``I'm getting better,'' she thought. ``I see yellow, there's hope.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Steve Earley

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