Life as A Kuiper Belt Object

Posted on December 19, 2008 in Bipolar Disorder Reflections

Scientists now believe that Pluto may be nothing more than a comet trapped in an especially broad orbit that gets no closer to the sun than inside the orbit of Neptune: hence no tail. Thus Clyde Tombaugh could not claim that he had discovered either the ninth planet or the first Kuiper Belt object. We’ve been noting Kuiper Belt objects in the form of comets for centuries.

My own revolutions have been much smaller than that of Pluto. I’ve been doing the round rounds for years. Every now and then, a little excitement comes into my life and I begin to glow a bit more than usual. I wouldn’t call these episodes of mania but exuberance. Mania is when I adopt a smaller, more frantic orbit. Exuberance is the understandable excitement of my mind that occurs naturally in a different kind of cycle.

I am a stranger comet when I am off meds. There’s a reasonable orbit of fertile and fallow which is sometimes substituted for by retreats into the darkest parts of my inner space where I can circle for months like Pluto or just stand still, not feeling pleasure in the least. Then, just as inexplicably, I go banzai, plunging perilously close to the sun, believing that I am the sun or near enough to it to be claimed as a solar flare — a kind of son of the loftiest of the local sky gods. Oh how great I feel!

It’s best to have a gentle wobble to one’s orbit than that of a comet, to be more like Pluto but at a closer distance to the star we call Sol. A suitably warm spot will do and it will help to be made of better stuff than the ice that floats in the reaches before the last of the gas giants.