So you think you know what bipolar disorder is

Have a look at this.

Note that bipolar is a dangerous illness, so painful that 30% of us kill ourselves before getting a correct diagnosis and treatment.  This can be hard to believe when someone is manic.  Mania is disturbing, and can read as arrogance and deliberate recklessness.  Families and friends often judge and discard us.

Note that our depression is not like yours. If you are a normie, you've known depression.  You probably managed to function and get through it. Ours is in a different category. Our relatives read it as not trying, whining, laziness. No one wants to be around it. Parker Palmer writes about a friend who came by every day and massaged his feet in silence.  Do you have a friend like that?  I certainly don't.

Note that something is missing here, and that's okay, a fact sheet can't do everything.  What's missing is that it's very difficult to find a comfortable treatment; side effects can be a bitch, like a lot of weight gain, or a sense of removal from life. Almost never does treatment work to restore a person to a mood-free state.  We are treading water all the time.  Worst, treatment can stifle the wonderful creativity that often accompanies bipolar.

Van Gogh is my favorite fellow sufferer.  His religiosity (seen today as "a symptom") gave him a restless drive to paint the essence in nature.  His family found him a trial and a disappointment.  Thank God he had a good brother who kept him supplied with paint and canvas.  Many of us don't have that relative. It's a difficult life.  Note that.



Bipolar Disorder Infographic — Healthline

What Moves You?

[If the above video doesn't open for you, it is Alison Kraus singing "Down in the River to Pray," from the film Oh Brother, and is available on YouTube.]

This morning I heard from a friend who has struggled for many years to reconcile reason and spiritual experience.  Or maybe the problem was that he wanted to reconcile reason and faith - what people believe about that which cannot be captured in a laboratory (which is most of everything).  He wrote about being tremendously moved by music sung in a foreign language.

I feel that too, but also thought of how I have been moved sometimes by the captured/expressed energy of visual art.  The scene above is a lovely marriage of visual art and music, the ethereal chorus moving slowly and in harmony toward baptism.  The river, a symbol that is universal wherever people have rivers.  I was also thinking of the time I walked around a corner in The Museum of Modern Art and found myself face to face with a small painting, "The Starry Night."  Layers and layers of paint.  It hit me in the solar plexus.  It is the most famous of van Gogh's many attempts to capture "It," the divine essence in everything. If you like, you can go here and scroll down for a brief experience of it.

Daniel Terragno once said to me mildly, "Zen is not for everyone."  In fact, Zen claims that the essence, reality, the sacred is everywhere in everything.  Where is it for you?  Is that in your life?

The Koan of My Life

I may have just realized the koan of my life - at least, my life just now:

Can you be depressed without blaming yourself? 

I know, this is not the major conundrum of the average life, though severe depression can hit anyone.  But it is for those of us who are bipolar or chronically depressed, or subject to the lows of illness, such as migraines or chronic pain- so as I think about it, a lot of us have this problem.

There could be other approaches for me, such as really thinking about the classic koan, "What was your original face before your mother and father were born?"  That points me to the highly hereditary nature of the kind of brain I have, which is called an illness or disorder.  Dis-order seems to fit pretty well.

If you start thinking how your parents were made by their culture and the events of their lives, you get insight into how they made you.  If I really sink into all that, and understand that this is how I was made before I had anything to say about it, that can solve the riddle above.  It is not my fault that I experience long periodic depressions.  I don't choose to feel like that.

And actually, that kind of penetration into the issue suggests to me that my habit of self-blame was also conditioned into me.  Therefore -

It doesn't make sense to blame yourself for your self-blame. 

But it is perfectly logical that you do that.  Of course you do.  You were conditioned to blame yourself.  So don't blame yourself for blaming yourself.  But obviously you have to blame yourself, because it is perfectly logical that, given your heredity and conditioning, you will do that. 

You have to love it.

There is something profound here that I won't attempt to explain any further.  But on a lighter note, it reminds me of the value of lightening up.  Though I don't know if you can do that by force of will . . . 

[image: tree peonies as van Gogh might have seen them in his worst mood]

Dancing in the Hurricane

It is a lot harder to be bipolar than the rest of the world knows.  The excessive emotions.  The changes in moods and cognition from beatific calm to bleak despair that accompany them.  I've thought about it a lot, and I think the rules don't apply to us - I mean the spiritual rules, promises of religions - that if we live well and practice, we can be filled with joy and contentment day to day. We don't get to have that or a steady-state calm.  Our lives are different in kind from normal life.  It is somewhat like living in Haiti and being periodically swept by hurricanes.

The psychiatric establishment sees as its job to keep us so dulled with medication that we don't bother anyone.  Parents and siblings typically blame us, scapegoat us, abuse us, abandon us.  Spouses think we could do better if we'd try.  By the way, that's what Vincent van Gogh's parents thought.  (And, why did he have to waste so much paint?!)

You have no idea how hard we try.  You have no idea how much effort we exert to keep from expressing the anger that can gust in.  To pretend to enjoy a dull gathering.  You have no idea how hard it is to be together with other people and be overwhelmed by irritable depression, and have to get out of there.  It sounds autistic, doesn't it?  Maybe it is.  None of these categories are clear-cut.

I try to protect myself, but I got on Facebook a little while ago, and it wasn't my fault that I stumbled over a post by a usually lovely Buddhist friend.  It showed a poster that said, Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain.  Ah, life as a Gene Kelley movie.  So nice.  I loved that scene, myself.  Those musicals were the movies of my youth.  They were poor preparation for reality, but hey.

And since I once did have a more normal mind - my bipolar didn't come out to stay until I was in my early  thirties - I know how good life can be, how smooth.  I know that "normal" people who are not subject to the rapid or months-long extreme moods have to work on themselves, too. You have disappointments and losses too, you have illnesses (of course, so do we, on top of bipolar).  You cry and mope, you get fired, you have horrible bad hair days (me too).  Your family is dysfunctional, you assure me (but you should have seen mine!).  Nevertheless, you danced in that rain.  During the worst moments.  Pardon me while I grind my teeth.

But suppose that's the truth of your life; if it is, I can feel sympathetic joy, if not downright awe.  I am glad you have such fortune neurochemistry that you can feel basically happy in the face of life's ups and downs.  Of course, the scene above is about being in love and dancing in the steady, even rain of a soundstage.  Not about losing your job and having your roommate steal your laptop and your boyfriend.

Okay.  Here's my challenge, fortunate one:  Dance in a hurricane.  In 150 mph winds, when tin roofs and semi-trailers are gyrating through the air around you, driving straws into telephone poles like nails.  That's the dancing we are asked to do when someone who isn't comfortable around depression says, "Buck up!"

Do it.  And don't forget to videotape it.  It'll go viral for sure.

[Above: self-portrait of a profoundly spiritual and eccentric bipolar who couldn't hold a job, and was a grave disappointment to his parents all his life. From Wikipedia.]

Painting Like Van Gogh

Vincent's Room at Arles

You don't have to. That's what I realized last night. I don't have to paint like Van Gogh; I don't have to paint at all.

Now, for some time I have been interested in learning to paint with oils, and knew I needed to learn a lot about this difficult art, not just muddle around in it.  I can go to the local university, OSU, and sit in on classes free, but the huge campus is hard for me to navigate, parking is horrible, and so on.  Tom suggested I could look at course syllabi online and at least find what books are used.  So I did.

And that laid out for me just how hard it is to learn to paint in oils.  It looked daunting.  And - as you know - I am almost 70 and have limited energy and a small tremor.  And my right (dominant) arm still hurts every day because when I fell down last September I not only broke a bone, but damaged the rotator cuff.  I do know a painter can fit herself out with assistive devices, like Chuck Close.

However, I told Tom, "It looks hard."

He said, "You don't have to do that.  You could just do art appreciation."

Sometimes it is very powerful when someone reminds you that you don't have to do something.  I felt my relief in my body.  I thought, I don't have to accomplish anything anymore.  I think this is realistic. And it was also true when I was fifty.  I wish I'd known.

It is realistic to remember that we are very small, and we don't have to be big, we don't have to be driven like poor Van Gogh, whose life was so hard that I have had to stop reading the biography right now.  We can just be ourselves.  We can be devoted to being.  We can just enjoy the acid green spring leaves against the French blue sky.  In our daily lives we always have opportunities to do simple acts of kindness, like listening, or bringing Grandma some chocolate (thank you again, Don), or answering an e-mail with care, or being patient with your very old neighbor when she is locked out of the house.  Things like that relieve the suffering we humans are prone to.

I do enjoy photography every day.  That doesn't mean I have to buy a really good camera.  Or even edit what I do.  I just came across the above.  I don't know what the shadow is, but I have figured out what it is a picture of.  Anyone?

Medicating Van Gogh

I am making my way slowly through the massive (900 page) new biography of Vincent Van Gogh, which begins with a chapter about his mother - who didn't like him from the beginning, it seems, and persisted in disapproving of him and his art long after he was dead and his paintings were critically acclaimed and wildly popular.  The biographers have framed this book with that relationship, in other words.  They see his life as being one of desperately trying to Be Someone his parents could approve of.  I see that.  I tend to frame it just a little differently, as a man desperately fighting himself, his true self and his vision.

He went through intensely religious periods in his life, and tried to study for the ministry, to be like his father, but just couldn't make it.  At the point where I am in the book, 200 pages in, he has been increasingly envisioning It:  the divine essence, which he could see in everything, including the starry night.  And shoes. Below is one of many pictures he painted of shoes, which are discussed in this article in Harper's, if you're interested. There you can also see this picture large enough to enjoy the brush strokes.

Van Gogh's mother was thirty when she married, and first gave birth to a stillborn son, who was named Vincent Van Gogh and buried with a headstone.  Exactly one year later she gave birth to Vincent - think about it - getting pregnant three months after the labor and death, and gave him the same name.  He was a scruffy looking child from the beginning, with rough red hair.  But there was much more to her dislike of him than that.  He was odd; he just didn't fit in anywhere, school or work.  Weird folk, take heart.

His father, a Protestant minister, didn't prize him either, but I gather there is evidence that it was his mother's love he so craved. She represented Home, the insular parsonage, in which he never felt at home, so he carried a great nostalgia for it.  I am now reading about his early twenties; he is abusing himself with fasting, not bathing because soap is a sinful luxury, and going barefoot in winter. He is drawing more.  And painting pictures in words, in his copious letters to his brother, Theo.

Here's the interesting thing I keep thinking about:  Vincent suffered greatly from this rejection, and his temperamental inability to fit in anywhere.  Wanting to be like his father he descended into fierce religious studies.  He washed out of school, and began to experience the divine, to see and paint it - which he called It - in everything in an absolutely unique (insane) style.

And he would not have been that person if his mother had loved him.  (There's a whole backstory about her sad life, by the way, and the important influence of Dutch culture and politics.)  It seems to be his suffering from that profound wound that motivated his art.  People love and live with prints of his paintings who know nothing about art. I think we feel or intuit that visionary mind, that saw the divine in a sunflower and a star, and a pair of shoes.

So was that good or bad, that miserable childhood?  Were those descents into hellish depression and mania  and psychosis necessary to produce this art that brings a drop of spiritual insight into many lives? 

Thinking about all this I was quite struck recently when a friend posted a bit of psych nurse humor that said, "You can't fix stupidity - but you can sedate it."  Of course, madness has nothing to do with stupidity.  But it spoke to me, as a bipolar who had long hospitalizions in the hands of psych nurses. Scrolling through Facebook I sometimes hit on a land mine like that.  I didn't comment, but I thought, Just make sure you're not sedating Van Gogh.