Electing Stability

Posted on April 2, 2006 in Journals & Notebooks Mania Reflections

I expect the week to be lonely. Partly my own doing. This desire, this need to shelter myself from the cruel and the clueless who go off for no reason….I’m well loved, but alone. Never make the mistake that a kind person does not need help. We can be the loneliest of all.

When I fell up into mixed mania, I disabused people of the notion that I was kind. I could not possibly be a good person and depressed. Now I accept that I can be good and do not deny it. It was part of an obsession. I was obsessed with my own unworthiness and I had to show it. If the world could not see that I was base, then I had to act base….

Goodness is not entirely what you do but what you feel. But I believe in a secularist doctrine of works. I hold this in common with the Letter of James. You can tell a lot about abortion and antigay pickets. You can mark the hatefulness in these and other promoters of Christian jihad. Show me with your Faith without kindness and tolerance and I give you the many who love Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Agnostic that I am, I revere James the Smaller.

Your recovery from disease is best traced by your actions. I could not shake the notion that I was wicked and depraved, corrupted before my birth by the inexplicable will of God until I went on my meds. Then I became a person who could concentrate on a more sensible state of mind than continual condemnation. John Calvin might have rejected salvation in a pill, but I take that clump of medications in my hand, swallow them with a little water, and elect myself to stability, from which seat I can grasp thoughtful happiness.