These are scans of my head.
A radioactive liquid was injected into my arm and then the path of the liquid was traced in detail through my brain.
IF YOU ARE BIPOLAR
THEN:
HELLO
and welcome to this unique club :)
of
course you feel like we are a special club of people that is cliqu-ey
and exclusive, because I think that we are. Don't forget, u forgotten
something (besides your intrinsic worth and to pay your phone bill and
straighten the cat)? - because you would be ONE OF US!
Yes, like Kiefer Sutherland offering the bottled vampire blood in the
lost boys so I offer you my hand in companionable oddness and stick my
pinky up so u can see how shiny it is. I feel the febrile diaphanous worms
of connection spreading betwixt myself and this panorama of weirdness
and genius, this cornucopia of closely corralled cliques...
Are you WORRIED? Are you LONELY? it is OK, precious (said with a sibilant hiss like golem) I am worried too, lonely as T.S.. Eliot at a football match, but your company accepts you here much much more oh sooo much more than in that rest of the world place where they have ENTIRE SUPERMARKETS DEDICATED TO SHAMPOO... and work in like offices and stuff, wouldn't know a maniac if he (or she in all fairness like a fairy princess) set fire to their toes.
I
give you cybernetic hugs and glints from the corner of my cybernetic eye,
I hoik my cybernetic pants at you in salute. Oh come and join those who
in the entire world know what it is that you feel, and how exquisite and
extraordinary your mayhem filled mind is. I accept you I embrace you welcome
to my little corner of the world and web.
And here is an excellent site to help you
cope:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~fractal1/fhello.htm
Doubt is not
a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.
-Voltaire.
Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the others figures in it
Merely projections.
-T.S. Eliot.
"When The Walls Turn Red." Oils on board. 64 x 25 cms. Unsold.
This is known as a SPECT scan though I have not troubled
to learn the acronymical elucidations.
The scan shows blood flow, which indicates neurological activity.
I have known for many years that I have a “sub arachnoid left temporal
lobe cyst.”
This is the size of an average apple. It has been dismissed
by the array of specialists I have sought. Until now. Cysts are sometimes
called tumours, but I as far as I can understand and gather this does
not represent cancer.
What these digital images show is how this cyst has exerted pressure on
my brain. Thus the large dark areas. In these there is not enough blood
flow for ANY brain activity. The red and green are areas of higher than
usual activity. What I am yet to discover is whether it is still adding
pressure and hence further dysfunction and damage to my brain. This would
require surgery.
I
am trying to find out.
The pressure has been so great from this cyst that my skull is uneven
and deformed at the back of my head.
I
HAVE A MENTAL ILLNESS. THIS IS WHY.
For anyone who sees this, who walks with me in illusion, delusion, in
terror and distortion: for you all, who have been degraded and insulted
by the millions of Australians who profess “not to believe”
in mental illness.
Show them these pictures. And perhaps have these scans performed on your
savagely strange, freakish and beautiful brain.
If nothing else… they may, they might, in colour oh such COLOUR;
maybe…they could prize open the viciously resolute minds
that will not accept who and what is before them.
In pain and in need.
(Paul
Robertson has chronic bipolar affective disorder.
15-20% of those diagnosed with bipolar die by suicide. This
site is dedicated to those who could not find the hope to make it through.)
My red shoes.
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE BIPOLAR:
QUICK DESCRIPTION:
Bipolar Disorder (also known as Manic Depression)is
a mood disorder characterized by episodes of mania and depression. The
person's mood swings from overly "high" and irritable to sad
and hopeless, then back again, with periods of normal mood in between.
Bipolar disorder (manic depression) is a brain disorder, a chemical deficiency
in the brain. This disorder causes shifts in a person's mood state, energy
level and performance ability. Suicide is a dangerous component of the
bipolar puzzle. 20 % OF ALL DIAGNOSED BIPOLAR PATIENTS WILL DIE BY SUICIDE.
This illness is long-term but treatable. A combination of drugs and psychotherapy
is widely prescribed and will return most patients to a productive life
(this, though partially true, is mostly bullshit. The medication is torture
and the illness is torture. There is no end to either. At least bipolar
also offers GIFTS...)
Major Depressive Episode
Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the
same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning; at
least one of the symptoms is either BLAH BLAH BLAH
Expiation, catharsis, oh hell yes, but what at its end? its TERMINATION???
Well exactly.
This mixed state has yes differing ingredients: though I am still high a deal of the time, or at least energetic alacritic veracious full of verve and nerve. The dread increases and now has pieces of real despair scattered around like petals at a wedding or confetti at a funeral.
I haven't been stable since I was 12 so hell how the hell do I know?
but self-analysis in this direction is, I believe, ultimately futile.
Everyone is influenced by the factors that change in their lives - even
to the point of how much sleep, what they have eaten, or what they r thinking
about and working on. I spent a lot of time earlier in my life trying
to work out this very thing. I read some books about personality stuff,
even self-help books. My god that was a mistake - works great if you want
your intelligence insulted.
We are determined by our environment as much as by our personality, simply
by being human. With bipolar, our environment has less impact or perhaps
MORE. Either way we react in extremis, or of course just ACT in extremis.
One thing that I do believe, and with conviction ("convictions are
more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies." Voltaire. I think
I am taking it out of context huh?")
We live out our lives with such pain and such elation. We live each moment
with INTENSITY. I believe that this is a power and a form of advantage
in itself.
There is a kind of greyness that infects the world; I see it everywhere
I look. I speak to a great deal of people through my work - and not normally
about art. For some reason the conversations that I have almost always
have a propensity to move towards questions of belief and ontology - life.
What dumbfounds me again and again is that most people do not think about
their lives; it is from one simple moment to the next. I think that I
hyper-analyse and tend to think in circles because I am always drawn to
the same conclusions. But within each predawn cyclic analysis I enforce
my own convictions.
Not being curious, and not wondering what it is that defines US seems
incredible to me; unfathomable and probably even just plain foolish.
But it is pandemic.
Shopenhauer (sp? hard one) advocated suicide as the ultimate existential
choice. I don't agree, but this man, this PHILOSOPHER (which, importantly
I think, breaks down from the Greek to lover of wisdom) took his analysis
and thought to its ultimate extreme. This is in and of itself, a powerful
thing.
Because we are bipolar, often the choices that regular sane people can
make is taken from us. I have thought about this too, particularly in
the choice we have to take meds or NOT TO. OK - one of the best examples
is Dostoevsky. A great deal of this great man's work is intensely dark
- he often used suffering to torture his characters, but his work is extraordinary
and powerful. Van Gogh is another really good example, as with Edvard
munch (the scream is his most famous work.)
There are many. Toulouse lautrec, BOSCH for god's sake.
Here is the MED QUANDARY...
If these people had had access to modern pharmacology, if Dostoevsky had been able to make it out of his room. If T.S. Eliot had gone to a lot more parties and got laid by beautiful young girls and gone boating and played a lot of cricket. Then we would not have these great works - they would never have been created because the illnesses that drove them (primarily depression, though historically it is very hard to tell) - would have, well, CHEERED THE BASTARDS UP!!
Poor old Dostoevsky might have said to himself - man, look at all this suffering in the world; in my country. But HEY I feel GREAT. Forget it, I am going to go out and build a snowman.
And his work may never have happened.
But these are all extraordinary people Not only that, but here is the central and inevitable point that keeps me taking my meds and trying to sleep while my head races around trying to deconstruct the world.
If modern pharmaceuticals save ONE LIFE, just one life, then all these things, these great works, really mean very little in comparison.
As to the real us, some of our personality triat will remain despite the vicissitudes of madness. If you are kind, you remain kind. You KNOW that about yourself, as I believe that I do. It is a constant. No matter how manic or depressed you become, even if you are unable to act on your impulses to help otters because of your illness, you will have that (among many otter things that you will KNOW centrally and in your heart's core about yourself) as a tenet that can brace you and hold you through your moments of despair and even through true madness.
The awful truth, or alternately, the wondrous truth, is that it does not matter. We live our lives and act as we do. We try and ameliorate our madness as we are able. It is these truths that make us valuable, that make us human and that make us in some ways, more than otters.
You are bipolar. You are human and kind. They are all you. This is not an evil thing - it is not good nor is it bad, but, here we go again - it just IS.
How else to live?
The criteria are met both for a Manic Episode and for a Major Depressive Episode (except for duration) nearly every day during at least a 1-week period.
The mood disturbance is sufficiently severe to cause marked impairment in occupational functioning or in usual social activities or relationships with others, or to necessitate hospitalization to prevent harm to self or others, or there are psychotic features.
The symptoms are not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication, or other treatment) or a general medical condition (e.g., hyperthyroidism).
I fool my mind, each day - distraction, a fine art if ever there was one. The AA philosophy (if not their philology and definitely not their theology.) Not just one day at a time, one moment, one breath, one more flick of an eyelid.
It is an immense act of faith, continual, repeated, and sacrosanct. You see, I need to believe each moment that the next will be easier than the last... which in and of itself requires WILL. I need to find the choice and make it ALL THE TIME, with deliberation and the weight of my mind. It's like something in my head need to be reset -switch, click whirr, I can do it I can I can I can.
It is one of the reasons that sleeping is so hard for me without drugs. Each need of the human body is met with an action - hunger, sex, thirst. But sleep, SLEEP, is an inaction - it requires no will but is something enigmatic that happens without conscious volition and I find it not just mysterious, but mystical. My constant analysis fails and flounders against it, all I know is that it is bizarre and necessary.
OK. So this leads me to memory. If I need to reset my emotions with reapplied
hope in a continuous barrage of specific emotion, then when I also REMEMBER,
when I consider and take apart the events of the day, then I am left with
rational conclusions. These take the form of hopelessness.
I need to delude myself throughout the day in order to get through the
day. I am still here (though presently I am stuck on death-delusions and
the possibility (probability?) that I did in fact die when I was 22),
so ipso facto I must succeed, a thousand times a day, a million times
a week.
When this is taken from the panicky need of daylight and applied to quietude,
alone, I am lost. I cannot sustain that tomorrow will be easier, that
the next moment before the sweet breath of sleep will require less from
me. One from another, I have been doing this for too long - I know that
this is not the case. In the clarity of singular darkness, the illusion
is stripped of its hue. I CANNOT believe it at that time.
This is my rationality, having strangled my illusions:
LIKE IT OR NOT... HERE I COME.
These are the most dangerous times for me. It is then that I am hopeless
and drowning. It is irrefutable, and I have been trying for so long, so
long. It is more than just the seeming of the ease of death versus life.
I know in my hearts core, in my heart of hearts, that it is true.
The inevitability of the next day fills me with dread. The scale of it;
the enourmity of the willpower that is necessary for a continuance
Of life for one more heartbeat. It is a horrifying prospect and no verisimilitude of peace will fool the crystal ease of logic.
So instead I fool my body with chemicals, and this is how I ascertain enough precious sleep to stay, well, alive.
I believe very strongly, - I know that this has been said and said by others more articulate than I - that the primary driving force of life is not sex. Freud was endemically incorrect.
It is fear.
"All the greatest things we know come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes them, nor above all, what it they have suffered to bestow their gifts upon us."
Marcel Proust.
Was he a loony as well?
Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
-Euripides.
Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. For there is no work, nor device, nor wisdom, in the grave, wither thou goest.
- Bible, Ecclesiastes
