The ending of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe bothered me as a kid. After becoming monarchs, growing up, and ruling Narnia for many years, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are transported back through the magical wardrobe to England, where they become children again, as if only minutes had passed. I bet they were never the same after that. I doubt any of them said, “Well, that was fun. What’s for dinner?” And who would have believed them? Most likely they would have been dismissed as having wild imaginations and told to grow up and set childish things aside. The oldest sister Susan did just that and never returned to Narnia. In a 1955 letter, C.S. Lewis revealed his decision to have Susan lose her way in the final Narnia book, The Last Battle. “Peter gets back to Narnia in it,” he wrote “I am afraid Susan does not. Haven’t you noticed that she is rather fond of being too grown up? I am sorry to say that (the adult) side of her got stronger and she forgot about Narnia.”
Northern Ireland’s coast and the Mountains of Mourne were C. S. Lewis’s inspiration for The Chronicles of Narnia, and while there, I felt closer to the wonder of childhood and far away from the mundanity of middle age. The books had been a safe place to escape from the bullies on the school bus and my father’s never-ending litany of “you can do better.” In Narnia, the humans were scarce and didn’t talk loudly or ramble on incessantly about themselves. When I was nine, I stood before an antique wardrobe in a consignment shop and couldn't muster the courage to open it. In school, I drew intricate, colorful maps and sketched talking animals in my notebook when history and multiplication tables bored me. Like Susan, though, my adult side grew stronger, and after high school I set childish things aside and left Narnia behind, although it was always just a few feet away on my bookshelf.
Ireland opened the door to that magical world again after thirty-five years, and after coming home, I longed for it like a lost lover. In the Mountains of Mourne, lush green fields were strewn with boulders the locals stacked into walls to protect their sheep. The sounds of man were few and far between the sounds of birds, goats, and rocky streams. The food in the town of Kilkeel was as good as any in France, without the pretentiousness. Children made eye contact and smiled, and elderly couples walked down the street holding hands and whistling like they did when they were young sweethearts. On a sidewalk runway in front of a gay bar that had once been a shoe factory in the 19th century, gorgeous drag queens performed Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” while yards away conservative white men of the Orange Order marched with drums, sashes, and disapproving faces.
Trinity College Library in Dublin reminded me of the Great Hall in Hogwarts. The air smelled of ancient parchment with row upon row of books tall and wide like leather-bound castle walls. I paid homage to marble busts of Socrates and Mary Wollenscraft Shelley, and touched the bust of Shakespeare on the nose with a “Boop!” when no one was watching. I stumbled arm in arm at three a.m. with four new friends past St. Patrick’s Cathedral singing “Dancing Queen” like a hymn, all of us past fifty, all of us having fallen in love over the span of an hour.
I arrived home feeling sad and resentful toward the man who would have to return to work on Monday, greeted by a calendar full of clients with real world concerns, hitting the ground running as if nothing major had happened other than a vacation. I couldn’t focus. My spirit was pulled elsewhere, and I felt a loss of meaning in the profession that held so much of it for me. Friends, colleagues, and clients asked me if I’d had fun, and I said, “Of course I had fun. It was Ireland.”
With a wistful reply they’d say, “I’ve always wanted to visit there. Maybe I will someday.”
“You should,” I’d say, looking just beyond them. “You really should.”
There’s a German word for this complicated feeling–Sehnsucht–the inexplicable longing for something unnameable. Buddhism has dukkha, which means the feeling of not being at home. C. S. Lewis described it as “exile from that far off country that we haven’t seen but know exists.” It’s not just longing to return to a place and time. It’s longing to return to the Self we left there.
Travel can be challenging for people who, like me, live with bipolar disorder. Practicing a daily routine helps me regulate mood cycles when I’m feeling off-balance. Traveling through time zones upsets my rhythm more than it might for other people. Whenever I arrive, it takes a while for the rest of me to get there. Emotional time is different from real time. Frantic airports, navigating new cities and customs, long layovers, overnight flights and red-eyes bring out a tendency towards impulsive behavior. When mania has taken over as a tour guide, I’ve found myself in sketchy situations and taken actions I regretted when I came back down, and I have difficulty readjusting to a calendar, and the clockwork world of daily life has caused me to plummet in the past.
Leaving Ireland did that. Depression kept me from reaching out to the friends I’d made. I avoided calling my dear friend Karen for three months because I didn’t know what to say. I was supposed to feel an idyllic afterglow and I just didn’t. Why wasn’t I happy after such an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience? My moodiness didn’t exactly make me a joy to be around, either. Karen’s number sat on my desk mocking me until I finally surrendered and called her. She was delighted to hear from me. We talked about life post-retreat, fond memories of the trip, and as I circled the drain around the depression I didn’t want to unpack, she said, “I want to send you something. Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’m sending it more for me than for you, but I want you to have it.” She sent a poem called “Something” by the poet Karen Kaiser. The first stanza captured two polarized emotions: the fear of something uncertain coming and an unexplainable longing for it at the same time.
Something is coming . . .
I wish I could tell you
Exactly what it will look like
Or precisely when it will arrive…
When I feel a bipolar cycle coming, I try to journal through my feelings rather than being scared of or seduced by them. The North and South Poles of fear and longing can grow into mania and depression, leaving little space to sail the calmer waters in between. Writing is a compass that keeps me from getting lost at sea. My friend Gareth mused that a new narrative for bipolar disorder might be a different diagnosis altogether comprising mania, depression, and the ocean between them, a calmness and firmness of mind that is not easily elated or depressed, acknowledging impermanence and accepting that something is coming because something always does. Perhaps it’s good, perhaps bad, perhaps both. Maybe it’s a fill-in-the-blank with a pencil kind of something that can be erased and rewritten in crayon.
How I describe a bipolar cycle defies diagnostic language. A manic episode is a rapid flight of ideas that become a constant, repetitive shuffling of songs in my head, with incorrect lyrics that never reach a conclusion before another takes its place. In order to break the cycle, the lyrics must be spoken correctly and more rapidly than the speed of the song in my head in an attempt to beat my mind in a race toward an imaginary finish line. I’ll go down a rabbit hole finding out as much as I can about the musician, buy several of their albums, and return them when the episode is over.
Depression feels like desolation, as if there is something missing in me that renders me unworthy. It’s a frozen place of “always winter and never Christmas” from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where wolves were hunters of the innocent creatures the White Witch turned to stone. When I described my episodes to my psychiatrist in this narrative way, her face showed a combination of confusion and curiosity, which I suppose is another way of describing empathy.
In Ireland, I revisited the quiet the pandemic afforded me, with its lack of cars, planes, and voices. During eighteen hours of silent retreat, I sat on a rock in a stream lined with yew and ash trees hanging with vines. Something white stirred in the hollow of a tree, and I saw the pointy face of a baby possum, napping. Two chipmunks scurried through the ferns, an iridescent blue-green dragonfly hovered inches from my face, and my imagination picked me up and dropped me in Narnia again. I cried for the little boy who became a man and closed the wardrobe door behind him. I wept for the wild, creative boy I’d been, and for the essential magic that mental illness had stolen from me. I’d found it again sitting on a rock in a stream that wound its way to the sea in Northern Ireland.
“Why do I always have to leave?” I asked no one in particular.
“My dear boy,” said a voice from my childhood. “The question is, What will you take with you when you go?”
The napping possum, the braided vines in the trees, a leaf bouncing downstream as a dragonfly chased it, a choir of Irish birds. Ancient things, possible things, and stories. So many stories.
“Magic,” I said. “I’m still young enough for magic.”
C.S. Lewis wrote, “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
It’s time I dusted off The Chronicles of Narnia and did the same. I’m fifty-two and I don’t want to be very grown up anymore.
Kevin Varner is a North Carolina native and a therapist at a nonprofit counseling center in Raleigh NC. He's also a writer, actor, mental health advocate, and a firm believer in the healing and transformative power of storytelling.
