A Blog for My Photos
Posted on March 20, 2015 in Photography Photos Site News
I’ve had the site for years and I’ve parceled out pieces to friends for their own blogs, but I have finally given it over to the purpose for which I intended it — as a blog for my own photos. You can check it out at http://gallery.pathsoflight.us. Please come by and leave compliments and other comments!
Bipolar in the Family
Posted on March 16, 2015 in Adolescence Disappointment Mean People Recent
My father had PTSD from being only one of three men in his company to survive the battle of San Pietro. My maternal grandmother suffered from depression so badly that she spent most of her life in bed. My mother, it seemed to me, was just mean. For this reason, I kept my diagnosis a secret from her but someone told her. One Thanksgiving she made a disparaging comment about people who “thought they were bipolar” and looked right down the table at me. The faces of the other family members turned to see how I would answer. In the days before I went on mood stabilizers, I would have risen with a fury and blasted her with a confused twirl of invective. But I sat calmly and mentioned how hard it was for psychiatrists to make a diagnosis, perhaps harder than for other medical specialties. Someone changed the subject. I got up to get more turkey.
This confrontation pretty much ended our relationship. Even though she lived only 50 miles away, I only visited her on Thanksgiving after that. We seldom if ever talked on the phone. When she was dying of a brain tumor — she had moved to Portland, Oregon to be closer to my brother — I waited to hear that she wanted to see me. The call never came.
Why We Shouldn’t Let Our Loved Ones Do the Talking about Stigma
Posted on March 14, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Courage & Activism Stigma
Glenn Close is a woman who I admire for her dedication to her sister and her resolve to upend stigma. When Jessie Close was 51 years old, Glenn drove her to McLean Hospital in Boston where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Their commercials questioning the labels applied to mentally ill family members and their relatives are known to millions. We have every reason to admire and respect her for her work. But recent research suggests that maybe family members aren’t the best ones to be talking about stigma.
The research has nothing to do with the political issues surrounding mental illness. A pair of researchers looking into the rise of a culture willing to accept same sex marriage outline a successful strategy that we who live with bipolar disorder and other organic brain dysfunctions can employ:
Michael LaCour, a UCLA doctoral candidate in political science, and Donald Green, a Columbia University political science professor, have demonstrated that a single conversation can go a long way toward building lasting support for a controversial social issue. In addition — nearly as surprisingly — the effect tends to spill over to friends and family members.
The key is putting voters in direct contact with individuals who are directly affected by the issue.
A Different Face of Bipolar Disorder
Posted on March 13, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Humility Reflections
To look at me, you wouldn’t think I was much of a bipolar success story. I can’t claim an impressive degree. I dress casually. You wouldn’t call me professional-looking which is the watch cry of our time. Bp Magazine won’t put me on its front page any time soon; I won’t be featured as a model of recovery. Many people will rush to judgement based on my sometimes slow demeanor that I am not very smart and in my low moods I am inclined to agree. I am a different face of bipolar disorder. My “fame” comes from industriously providing information and linking people living with the illness to one another. I do not seek to brand myself or put head shots out there as if I were an important personality who had beat the disease because I still live with it every day of my life. I have no secrets to impart, just my life experiences in which you might or might not recognize yourself.
Most people don’t. I am a bit of a freak.
This obscurity does bother me at times. When I read articles by bipolar pundits, they sound a lot like all the other bipolar pundits and I don’t want to be like that. Why don’t they look for people like me who bring a different perspective? I don’t know. I have trouble just getting people to read my blog because it isn’t like all the other bipolar blogs out there. And I am not one of the faces of recovery that the national organizations like you to see. I am not a self promoter. I don’t shave. Among some people in my region, I have a bad reputation due to a manic episode that I had a few years ago. The bad mouthing of certain people hectors me still. Those that know me intimately don’t believe the rumors, so I have few but good friends. I think it is more important to be there for individuals than to be famous, more important to work on creating something insightful than in presenting myself in the manner that we have come to expect of our spokespeople.
Mine is a face that disappears from the memory. People who have met me in person and known me online, forget what I look like. They see me in my casual dress and my hulking figure someone who shouldn’t be remembered at all, who doesn’t have a message that deserves to be shared. But I, too, live with bipolar disorder. I, too, have my stories. May I have the courage just to tell them without preaching at you.
Another Day of Feeling Bad
Posted on March 13, 2015 in Agitation Body Language Depression Weather
It’s the damn wind again, a Santa Ana blowing off the mountain and against my door. Combined with the heat, it gives me a headache and a stiff feeling all over my body. Plus I have been sneezing.
At first I mistook this for a depression. Friends counseled me to seek out some sunlight. As soon as I went out the door, though, pollen blew up my nose. This disabused me of my theory and I went inside to take some Tylenol for my headache.
Daylight Savings Time certainly doesn’t help.
Bipolar brings on the worry that I am seeing the signs of an imminent mood swing. A cold, the flu, or allergy attacks in their early stages cause me to worry that I am sinking. Then I get a clue as the symptoms worsen and I let go of my dread.
The dog feels the effects, too. He has been pacing nervously up and down the hall, his claws clicking on the wood laminate flooring. I get up from time to time to join him and he follows me. This is the madness of the foehn, the agitation that the drop in air pressure here in the valley brings from the mountains. I hate this part of March and wait impatiently for it to just go away.
The Disaster of Daylight Savings Time
Posted on March 8, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Body Language Daylight Savings Time Routine Whines
I was in the middle of an interesting if not entirely pleasant dream when the the alarm went off. I struggled into consciousness like one struggles to get to the surface when one has plunged too deep into a lake or the ocean, found the alarm, and turned it off. Sleepiness wrapped my head.
I was in this sorry state because the clocks had been set ahead. Eleven o’clock was actually ten o’clock. During the night, a thief mandated by Congress had stolen that hour. I felt terrible and cursed Benjamin Franklin because he was the one who invented Daylight Savings Time.
“It’s a good thing because we gain an hour of sunlight,” someone said to me. No, I pointed out, you have just as much sunlight in each day as you would have had if the clocks hadn’t been set ahead. The same number of hours and minutes were given to us regardless of where the sun was when it was noon. The only thing that had changed was when it would be noon.
Dream
Posted on March 8, 2015 in Dreams
My mother has invited me for dinner. I know the purpose is to marry me off to one of the daughters of friends who have come. I’m late, so everyone has eaten and my dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes without gravy have been set aside in a glass bowl in the kitchen. One of the women has been in a car accident recently and so she is swollen and unable to walk. She keeps her forearms hidden beneath the table so I suspect she has severe bruising and perhaps a compound fracture. I get up to fetch my dinner and go into the kitchen where I run into another young woman. This one tells me about the problems she has with her English major. I suggest that she look up a criticism technique called close reading. I have been separated from Lynn for some days, so when I sit down again, I pull out my cell phone and call her. When she doesn’t answer, we all go looking for her. We find her walking on the slope of a large drainage channel. She doesn’t talk to me but to one of the women and she starts talking about how important her work with the homeless is and how I need to realize just how poor they are. I am telling someone that she is turning into a girlfriend I had in the past when the alarm rings and I wake up.
Loser Who Thinks Too Much
Posted on March 7, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Disappointment Reflections
Both those terms have been used to describe me. An insult just doesn’t stab, it leaves a wound — not a scar, but a bleeding dripping lesion that comes to you in your worst depressions and sometimes — like now — when you are feeling just fine. I am a loser because I have not worked since I was 33 and do not have kids. I did not make a million in Silicon Valley and no one buys my photography or my writing (which I haven’t tried to sell in a long time.) Never mind that I have been married 27 years to the same woman, never hit or threatened to hit her or called her a vile name. I am a loser, a pariah.
The isolation of bipolar disorder is hell, but the isolation of my personality is worse. When I take tests such as the Myer’s Brigg, I keep scoring in the rarest categories. Less than 1% of people out there share my characteristics. We wander around, seldom meeting each other. The way we see the world, the things we strive for just aren’t appreciated or discerned by the rest of you out there. You come onto my blog, read my accounts of my illness or other aspects of my life and you don’t get me. I am a cipher, a shadow on the wall swept by the wind, a curiosity that cannot be. I, like others of my kind, feel alone. No wonder so many of us end up in monasteries or convents.
The InterNet Argument Addict
Posted on March 5, 2015 in Addictions Anger Frustration Mania Netiots
Difficult to end when I am feeling stable but energized and impossible when I am manic, InterNet disputes are a drug of choice for me. I just ended an exchange that went on for over an hour with someone on Facebook. She would not stop and neither would I. It seemed to me that no matter what I said to refute her, she kept repeating the same thing over and over. My ire was up: I had a defense to make and, equally important, someone to skewer. Then in the middle of it, I realized that I had become a Facebook Mr. Hyde, shared one last anecdote, and announced the end of my participation. Others have responded to the thread since then and I have not read what they said. Whether they indict me or stand up for me, I shall not involve myself anymore.
Long ago — on the abUSENET, I learned that it was a waste of time arguing against the trolls and cranks of the Net. If I spent a long time preparing an intelligent rebuttal to something they said, they’d dismiss it with a brute-force remark or lame witticism. Some even went so far as to create robots that would repeat the same argument every time certain key words appeared anywhere in the newsgroups. You could easily exhaust yourself fighting these. I gave it up for the Web because I realized that the newsgroups were a waste of time.
On Crippling Self-Indictment
Posted on March 3, 2015 in Anger Anxiety Avoidance Frustration Mean People
When someone assaults my mental health, I suffer gravely. Recently, I got called a loser, a control freak, and — worst of all! — a Liberal by someone who didn’t like that I contained his rant in a support group. The person in question had admitted to not taking one of his meds, so there is reason to forgive his crazed outburst, but I felt as if the whole group had jumped on me. Only this one person said anything.
I have to fight this variation of catastrophizing every time I find myself in a conflict. I find the slightest grain of truth in what is said about me and turn it into a crippling self-indictment. If this small piece is true, then am I a bad person? I ask. Should I leave the group? Do the others in the group want me gone for being a troublemaker (a question I ask even when I keep my temper and the other person is by any reasonable estimate the one wholly in the wrong). My anger should be placed outside my self in these situations and directed at its instigator. The onus is not on me.
Friends urge me to see it not as my problem, but as the other person’s. But how did I get into this situation?, I ask. Should I have kept my mouth shut?
I once had a therapist who would have made me feel miserable about this whole affair. In her eyes, it was my poor interactions with the world that led me to these crises. Someone else once said “It takes two to tango” when I was under siege by a borderline. I am thrall to this stupid, American insistence on balance, on not taking sides. And I give it my blessing.
The Medical Marijuana for Bipolar Disorder Lie
Posted on February 20, 2015 in Addictions Bipolar Disorder Lies Psycho-bunk
UPDATED
Everyone seems to have a friend who has been helped by medical marijuana. When my wife had chemotherapy, we had it as a backup in case the anti-nausea drugs did not work for her. Glaucoma is a disease with medical research backing the effectiveness of medical marijuana. But the medical marijuana industry goes beyond what is proven by science. It welcomes those who use it for many other diagnoses despite the absence of peer review studies. In other words, if you can get a doctor or a nurse practitioner to write you a script, you can get high legally for any disease you can name. And the worst of the lies medical marijuana prescribers and retailers let fly is the lie that marijuana helps the symptoms of bipolar disorder.
Here is my full disclosure: First, I do not oppose legalization of marijuana provided it is regulated at least as well as alcohol. There need to be laws governing its sale to minors, bans against driving under the influence, etc. But other than that, I have no problem with seeing it available as a leisure drug. There’s considerable evidence that the liquor industry does not want this, but alcohol is worse than cannibis in some regards. Second, I have smoked marijuana. Here is where my strong feelings about the subject come from. When I was in college, I was talked into toking by my peers. They did not force it down my throat, they did not blow smoke into my lungs, they did not deceive me in the sense that they told me things that they knew were not true. I started using the drug by my own choice.
The Fog
Posted on February 13, 2015 in Life as Metaphor Photos Reflections Weather
A week ago, I took a walk along the shore of the Newport Beach peninsula with two friends. It was a strange day — the fog did not lift until four o’clock in the afternoon. Our walk took us along the beach and then through a neighborhood with small but expensive houses that had Mercedes, BMWs, and Ferrarris parked in their garages. The thick mist reached in through streets that ran to the sea.
What a metaphor for existence! We moved in clear spaces but what was ahead was obscure to us, its nature only being revealed a little at a time. It reminded me of a short story where a tapestry predicting the future was uncovered only a few minutes before its events would unfold. Not all of us moved at the same speed — one fellow staggered well behind us so we stopped frequently to let him catch up. When the sun came out in the late afternoon, we had a taste of the clarity of our life journey to come that we craved. At the end of our walk we returned to our cars and fought the rush hour traffic to get home.
