Within God

I have to personally recommend a blog...The Klonopin Chronicles. 18,000 viewers and she still answered a cry for help from me yesterday...

It's amazing how the medications that seem so powerful otherwise, (weight gain, sex drive,etc.) lack any ability to touch my mental illness at times. I do put up with all the side effects hoping they will correct years of being undiagnosed. But, for some reason, they just turn into fat pills when I need them the most. And so I spent all day yesterday curled up around myself, although the kindly stepfather did get me out for a bit.

But talk therapy is the way to go, folks. I would spend everyday, all day, in a room with my therapist if I could. My dream is to marry a therapist, so I never have to leave their presence. Wouldn't that be a healthy relationship...

There is nothing to lift the clouds like spending time with an educated specialist who has a sense of humor. That feeling of being understood, and accepted, is a feeling of power. With my therapist, I am an artist through and through, nothing can stop me and my "normal" is normal. It's the rest of the world that is f**ked up.

And the scary bit is this: the rest of the world IS messed up. Anyone can look around and tell that. Nothing is "normal." Unless war is normal, starvation, rape, sickness and a host of other ills that have consistently afflicted humankind down through the ages. Being mentally 'ill' is more desirable to me. But there is nothing like being startled, or manic, or depressed, and being in a crowd. Any ideas that I am normal goes out the window, and I am apart and alone...once again.

Again, it does help to be an artist, and broadcast that fact to any and all who will listen. Bipolar people are more creative than is general, and people expect artists to be odd. To the ancient Greeks, we were touched by the gods. And that is an idea passed down through the ages. It's also an idea I encourage.

None of us like to feel alone in a crowd. Humans are social creatures, born to live in herds, and being separate from the herd is to feel a loneliness that surpasses all other feelings. It is against our nature. I read one time that babies are born with some innate fears, like the fear of falling. It isn't learned but something hardwired into us. I would add the fear of being alone. This is not to mention solitude, which is a different need.

And so I write to you every morning, and I write to others born like myself, and I write to my therapist. And I write to the dead and the living, to animals and to humans and to the earth. Even the most solitary hermit can feel the need to communicate, one of the most important ways to be part of the herd. And magically, you are here with me in the twilight, watching the stars and waiting for the zinnia to sing...

 "The Bedouin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God."

~T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)