The White Dunes

Posted on June 20, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder PTSD Uncertainty

The writing problem of the last few months — except for a few bolts here and there — hasn’t been unexpressed passion but a white flour desert of passivity, bland as Wonder Bread or the cheap loaves they sell in supermarkets; a powder that sticks to the sleeves of the mind resulting in a lot not getting produced when the yeast has all been sifted out of the dry dough. Nothing rises from the feelings I have had recently. Ever since my dive of last August, I have lacked interest in writing or photography — the two arts that I swore would not be lost to me.

Reflection reveals that it wasn’t the medications that did it to me. The adventure of mental illness and new-won stability lost their luster. I don’t know what was responsible for the tarnish but it wasn’t the meds — the mood stabilizers at least — because I don’t feel doped up. Maybe it was the anti-psychotics which stopped phantoms from leaping into my path as I drove and knives from lacerating me while I hugged myself in bed.

No, I still could see and feel things when I was stable. Recent months have had their share of [[Dissociation (psychology)|dissociations]] that shoved me back into the present from the tarpits of memory. I have had visions but of a different kind, reactions that called upon me to drop imminents pleasures on account of a laden word or phrase or sentence. Images, photographs seldom prick me to shouts against horror which is why I like to pull out my books of [[Diane Arbus]], [[Edward Weston]] and the amazing Family of Man. This suggests to me that it is what is not immediately visible — the feeling of something behind me or under the desk or behind the written word that incites the horror, that initiates the welling up of powerful pushing off.

Survivors of abuse must know exactly what I am talking about. The little shouts that happen when you are alone, when you are ambushed by a recollection. You might call “Go away” or “Shit” or “You are no God” or something that makes no sense. I once heard an [[autism|autistic child]] meeting a therapist for the first time. He began crying “Don’t let the dog out! Don’t let the dog out!” I understood his outburst to be the jettisoning of fear.

Oh, how harsh the wind that covers these incidents into soft, featureless dunes and how, despite the occasional dust devils, how the powdery plain remains still, unsweetened and bland. I would give my life to have a life again and it is in such paradoxes that I find myself.

[tags]bipolar disorder,dissociation,PTSD,uncertainty[/tags]

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