Love is Louder [Vol. 2]: What is This Thing?

Thursday, December 24, 2009

What is This Thing?

Bipolar type 2, said the psychiatrist, when she discussed her impressions with me. Not a surprise, really. Nonentheless, a welcome confirmation of my gut suspicions. We take comfort in diagnostic answers, don't we? They appeal to our drive to conquer the unknown. But, now I wonder. Has finding a name for this thing I experience answered any unknowns? What, exactly, do we mean when we say bipolar? Conceptually, I think of it as the mental/pyschiatric equivalent of diabetes. Regulation of blood sugar levels defines the focus of diabetes. Regulation of mood levels and intensity define the focus of bipolar.

I combed through google, in search of definitions for bipolar. None quite satisfied me. So, here's my own definition of bipolar disorder.

A psychiatric mood disorder in which the individual experiences vast and rapid mood fluctuations - from extreme euphoria to deep despair. Associated with an inherent inability to modulate emotion.

It's definitely a start.

Welcome to Insanity

Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door. I realize that every person, at some point, takes up residence in one or another of these rooms. But that realization provides no relief from said hell.

It seems to me the basic definition of mental illness: a persistent, painful inability to simply be with someone else. It might be lifelong, or it might descend like a sudden catastrophe, this blankness between ourselves and the rest of the world. The blankness might not even be obvious to others. But on our side of that severed connection, it's hell, a life lived behind glass.

Distilling Life

I sometimes like to lose myself in the thought that I am merely a culmination of various chemical reactions occuring at the cellular level of my body. What directs these chemical reactions? Is that where individuality resides? When I consider pharmaceuticals and their effect, it can make sense - chemical reactions fueling existence. Perhaps the Seroquel XR I'm taking bridges some cellular, chemical gap or deficiency. The perceived effect being an insular stabilizing of my mood. Does it all seem a bit too simple? Can we really distill life down to a few chemical reactions?
I wonder. Perhaps, then, divinity resides within those chemical reactions?

Words of Wisdom

"Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year."
~ David Eggers

"Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."
~ Rumi

"If we do not transform our pain we will surely transmit it."
~ Richard Rohr

"We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late."
~ Marie Beynon Ray

“Love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”
~ Leonard Cohen

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
~ Anais Nin

"All of us live in exile in a real way. As St. Paul puts it, we see as 'through a glass darkly,' through an enigma, separated always partially from God and each other."
~ Ron Rolheiser, OMI

"Truth is shattered into a thousand pieces when God throws it down to earth."
~Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

“The act of building is the physical tangible expression of promise.”
~ Unknown

'The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.'
~ Dorothea Lange

"Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.”
~ Thomas Merton, Journal: October 2, 1958

“The authentic self is the soul made visible.”
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

"A diamond only shines after it's been cut."
~ Danielle LaPorte

"Having a grievance is like drinking poison and thinking it will kill your enemy."
~ Nelson Mandela

“The absence of fear is not courage. The absence of fear is some kind of brain damage.”
~ M. Scott Peck

"Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life."
~ Picasso

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
~ Thomas Merton

"Worry is like a rocking chair--it gives you something to do but it doesn't get you anywhere."
~ Unknown

"A photograph is a painting made by the eye, using light as the paintbrush."
~ Roxanne Galpin

"The most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. They seem hedged about by secrecy. It is concussion, or the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum, which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be suddenly filled; as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood. Corn grows in the night."
~ Henry David Thoreau

“The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

~Virginia Woolf

Love is Louder [Vol. 2]

Thursday, December 24, 2009

What is This Thing?

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