So many things have happened, so much has changed. I plunged into mania and almost drowned in a sea of thoughts, ideas, and grandiose delusions. The inside of my head exploded into a series of at times magnificent, at times horrifying fireworks which had me reeling until I ended up in the hospital. I have new found respect for the power of the mind, a different understanding of reality, for what I perceived was not real, and yet I was convinced it was. The details of what occurred are imprinted in my mind, and it is hard not to be ashamed of my outrageous behavior, all in the name of art, and in the name of love. One could say I made quite a spectacle of myself, but in a case like this all one can do, is accept the experience into one's history as past and move on. And learn from it what can be learned. And I have learned many things. I have learned the meaning of true fear, being tied in full restraints while screaming for someone to help me, and then waking up in the closed ward two days later, not knowing where I was or what day it was, I have learned how much worse off many of my fellow "inmates" were, but how this scraggly community, thrown together randomly got along well, how the patients were kind to each other, and how one can feel a sense of joy and belonging even after just having been through hell. But more than that, I have learned how you are treated AFTER you get out. I have learned what the meaning of stigma is, why there are people walking in the streets talking to themselves who don't have a home. I have learned how harsh people's prejudice can really be, and how grossly misinformed some people are when it comes to issues of mental health. I understand the word heartless fully now. I am lucky, I have a good job with insurance benefits, and I can get treatment and medication, but many people who suffer from a mental illness, don't. Yes, of course there is public mental health, but unless you have family to help you through the system, you're likely to fall through the cracks, especially if you're current status is not stable...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiVug9yAZXo
ReplyDeleteIf you feel you've found what works for you, then this is probably not an advisable video, but this person claims to be bipolar and had a 'break' over a decade ago. He states in order to transcend the illness you must deconstruct the 'ego'. Transcending ego meaning accepting yourself and doing away with competitive and even predatory self destructive thoughts. That is to stop thinking of yourself and others as 'lessor then' and try to make yourself and others think in terms of 'greater then'. That is what we think of as 'normal' is generally a race towards overly competitive divisive conformative mediocrity that is often dictated to us by simple minded concepts which in its constraints causes us to feel we are inadequate, when in actuality it's society that is inadequate.
When I watched my father exhibit tremendous chronic rage most of what his anger was about was how he was being treated and how he was not achieving enough....he was thinking in predatory terms, in punitive terms. He wasn't accepting things and himself for what they are, nor finding a constructive way of alleviating the burden of his anger, only taking it out on others.
The 3 emotional poisons, per Buddhism: Anger, Desire and Ignorance. There's truth in that, being poisons. These are monks, that have almost nothing, that believe in this. They do not worry about societal norms nor instant gratification.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
ReplyDeleteBertrand Russell (1872-1970)