This is a diner in a mini mega-mall near my little village.
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There is no system of philosophy to spin out. There are no ethical truths; there are just clarifications of particular ethical problems. Take advantage of these clarifications and work out your own existence. You are mistaken to think that anyone ever had the answers. There are no answers. Be brave and face up to it.
Donald Kalish (1919-2000), American Philosopher
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I’d like to know / what this whole show / is all about / before it’s out
“I’d Like”, Piet Hein
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“…I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers…”
“Irresponsible Hate Anthem”, Marilyn Manson
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UmBiPMaD: Unmedicated BiPolar Manic Depressive Stories
It’s an acronym I came up with in 1992, back when I didn’t understand bipolar and manic depression meant the same thing. I spent at least eighteen years of my life having a disease which was untreated so I’m going to start writing a little more about this period in my life. Some of these will be funny, some won’t.
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I’m pretty sure I broke my foot last week. It wouldn’t surprise me, it’s been that kind of month. I’ve been depressed for a little more than a month and I still haven’t gotten around to learning about how to deal with my normal depressions, or how to deal with moving past the crap which gets me depressed.
I’m not a violent person and I hate conflict… I will go way out of my way to accommodate people. But I also can’t deal with the things that piss me off, or the things that get me depressed or weigh me down. If… okay… when I was a kid — from about nine-years old on — I spent most of my summers with my grandparents in Montreal or on their hobby farm in the Laurentian Mountains. My grandmother was a fucking lunatic and my grandfather never seemed comfortable around us, so my brother and I survived those summers. So one year my grandmother finally agreed to let me take drum lessons — this was something I had done while we still lived with my father, in between accordion lessons. So I was freaking ecstatic. I could not believe I was going to get to play the drums.
Then, the night before I was to have my first lesson, the teacher calls. And my grandmother calls me to the phone. And the teacher says: “Gabriel, I’ve overbooked the lesson. Now, you can come tomorrow and start your lessons. But there’s another boy who won’t be able to play. It’s up to you.” So I apologized — yes, apologized — to the teacher, and she called me a good kid and promised that next time I’d get to take drum lessons for sure. The drum thing isn’t what I want to talk about, I’m over the drum thing. The point is I wasn’t older than eleven and this thing where I accept a situation so as to not damage someone else or make them disappointed was already a pattern.
The drum thing probably isn’t a good example… when I was on the phone with the teacher I tried to let her know that I wasn’t crushed, but it was a lie. There. When I’m partnered with someone for a project and they fuck it up I’m always taking blame away from them, absolving them of guilt, by saying “hey, I probably fucked up somewhere as well”. So I take the loss, then I pile on crap that’s not really mine, then I can’t work it out because it might get back to Whomever that “hey, Gabriel actually thinks you did a fucking horrible thing”…
Okay, fuck the drum thing. Shit happens, instead of saying “why, yes, you really fucked that shit up” I react to said shit by taking shit on myself, then I get depressed because I don’t know how to work my own shit out. So what happens is I end up with a collection of 209 empty chocolate milk jugs because my mind freezes in place. Then I get frustrated, and a little more frustrated and then really fucking frustrated and then a forty pound wooden table gets in my way and I kick said forty pound table with my bare foot, and the table spins 300 degrees, and my foot has been tingling and numb and uncomfortable and cramping and a little swollen on top where the cut is for almost a week now.
My brain cramps. There’s a form, very important, I was supposed to have this form submitted last week. All I have to do is fill out a few stupid details and fax it off then sit back and my life changes for the better. That’s it. But I can’t do it, and everyday I don’t send it means months and months of my life being unchanged and shit filled. I think about it twice a day. Right before I go to bed, and when I mark my medication period on my calendar. But I can’t fucking fill it out. It’s like everything is jammed up because I can’t deal with the depressing shit that has happened recently, which always brings up depressing shit which has gone unsolved before this and before that and waaay before that…
I was fired, back in 1998, from my first “big city” reporting job. It was complete bullshit, but the new Managing Editor didn’t like me so I was out the door. I managed to get a pretty cool new job — starting up a cultural magazine — almost right away, but my brain had stopped. I hadn’t worked out the shit from the job I had been fired from, and that just brought back all of the unresolved stuff from “before.” So I stopped bringing my milk jugs back to the store for the deposit. I just threw them into the storage room off the kitchen. Eventually my roommates said “dude… what the fuck?”, so a few weeks later I spent a few hours picking them up and I brought them to the store… four garbage bags at a time. There were 209 1L jugs.
It has taken me a week or more just to write this post. It took three weeks to write a post about George Bowering for my other blog. It’s like a physical wall in my mind that I have to break through, but I don’t understand or have the techniques available to me in order to break that wall through will… I have to wait until I can find a hole to crawl through. The wall is still there, I’ve just managed to get around it… I haven’t dealt with the issues which came up five weeks ago or so, I’ve just managed to find a way to ignore them along with all the others.
All I’ve managed to do is to break my foot (I think), and now my table wobbles. Oh, and the really expensive printer / copier / scanner that was on the table, the one not on warranty, that’s pretty fucked up as well. I was depressed before the Manic Depression kicked in, and I’m still depressed now that I’m Medicated and the Manic Depression is out of the way. I’ve never taken responsibility for my Clinical Depression… besides ignoring the things which have happened in my life to my life, my way of dealing with those Things has been to just change direction. I think… maybe… that I’ve been taking responsibility for other peoples faults because I’ve never taken responsibility for treating the faults done to me, or those I’ve done to others.
I mean, I’m pretty sure I have a fractured foot and yet I can’t get my ass to an X-Ray machine because part of me believes I deserve to be limping because of something someone else “did” five weeks ago… what the fuck is that?
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…since november fourteenth, 2006.
“You burn things when there’s no going back. How much of
yourself have you had to burn away to be
the person you are today? Because baby, my body
is ash and my mind is still smoking.”
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...salted lithium. 
Hi Bine.
I’m not entirely sure it was the intention of the drum person to ask me… I’m fairly sure that it was my grandmother who decided I should be The Decider on that one. She was
completelya little insane like that… I’ll get to her in a later post / book / anthology.The “block” thing happens fairly regularly on a short term basis for little stuff… like I’ll use my bar of soap until it’s a sliver before finally breaking through the block and just buying another freaking bar of soap… I’m not entirely sure what causes those short moments of tiny self destruction / self resistance. But then there are the ones that go on for a few weeks… or even a couple of months, where the Really Important Shit never gets done. They always happen when I’m depressed and it’s like I can’t function until either it’s proven to me that whatever I’m depressed about has a solution or I can just put enough time between me and the “event” so I can forget about what happened… that “time ‘heals’ all wounds” thing is bullshit, time doesn’t heal the wounds, it allows us to experience enough “other” events after the “event” that it seems as though we’re healed so we can return to somewhat normal everyday fucntions. Time didn’t “heal” you, it just faked you out.
There is a moment, right towards the point where I ‘wake up’ from the indecision and lack of focus and depression, where there is a moments of Zen and clarity and I can see that I will recover… but, you’re right, I even try to avoid that moment until it’s almost inevitable.
I’d probably go tonight but Game Four of the series is on, and getting an X-Ray done on a “probably” fractured foot would mean sitting in the waiting room for at least four hours. I’ve got a dentist appointment tomorrow morning so I’ll stop on the way back.
The more I read about this CBT thing the more I think I should be using it… I have an appointment this Friday so I’ll bring it up.
“So things have pissed you off and instead of addressing those things you’ve taken it out on a table…”
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say… it’s a nice table as well.
About “The Form”… if I still haven’t done it by bedtime tonight then I’ll know something is seriously wrong. I managed to open the notebook to the appropriate pages so now all I have to do is type and print and sign… of course I don’t have a printer now. I’m fairly sure it’s waaay too late and I may have to start an eight month process all over again. I may get that tea from you tomorrow.
i’m torn between laughing and crying … first thing, this drum lesson story is so absurd. how can a grown-up person pass that decision on to an eleven year old? if he had overbooked that lesson he would have had to explain to one of you that it was his fault and that he was sorry. he could have put up with one extra lesson each week because it was his fault. unbelievable.
then there is this milk bottle thing. okay, i didn’t manage to collect 209. if i had a storage room off my kitchen, i probably would. my mind blocks before the simplest of things, like making a bank transaction, mailing a letter or buying new toilet paper when i notice i’m on the last roll. the moment i notice it’s necessary to do it, that wall starts to rise. i know i’ll feel better once i’ve done the few inevitable steps, but i’ll try desperately to avoid it.
i feel sick.
Aw mate.
If you haven’t already, please go get your foot checked out.
This is exactly the sort of stuff the CBT is meant to be helping me with.
You’re doing the hard bit. You’ve worked out places where you still stumble. Years of survival leave us all with patterns of behaviour that for whatever reason were useful to us in someway.
You taking the blame for your drumming teacher fucking up was a way of trying to protect yourself from disappointment and from having a confrontation. And hey, you were a kid, and it sounds like you were trying to be grown up about it.
But it sounds like part of you is saying you are still doing that, and that you aren’t happy about this? (if I’ve got this wrong shoot me)
So things have pissed you off and instead of addressing those things you’ve taken it out on a table (do I get my psychology 101 yet?)
Anyhoo…
1. Give yourself a big pat on the back. You’ve been feeling shit yet you’ve still been posting.
2. This form. You KNOW you’ll feel better when you’ve done it.
So…Pretend I’ve come round to see you and I notice you still haven’t filled in the form you’ve been whinging about. This is what I’d do.
Break it down into smaller bits?
I’ll help okay.
(and no…don’t get all embarrassed. There’s Bine up there saying she does the same thing. I’m the same too. So are loads of other folk who will now no doubt add comments saying “wow we thought we were the only ones)
Okay this is what we are going to do.
Find the form and get it in front of you.
….it’s okay I’ll wait…
got it?
right -go get a pen now…
dumdedum…
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. any other bits of paperwork you need? Go get them too.
when you have all that ping me and I’ll continue.
I’ll just go make us both a cup of tea just now.
x
That pop bottle thing is freaking brilliant… I go through about — at least — seven bottles between recycling days and they never fit in the blue-box along with the fifteen or sixteen newspapers and all the cans and other crap. So what I end up doing is stashing the newspapers away for some phantom paper-run the high school kids only did in Leave It To Beaver.
“I’ve called the benefits people…”
Me too… back in 2001 I was on Social Assistance and they cut me off due to their own mistake. All I had to do was get to their office and sign a piece of paper… I went a year with no “official” income. My family pitched in a hundred bucks a month and my brother let me live in his apartment for six months, then I did some off-the-books landscaping… all it would have taken is a ten minute bus ride and a pen and I’d at least have had a guaranteed income of some sort.
“a cog getting jammed in the mechanism”
That’s exactly how it feels. I can see what I’m supposed to be doing, it’s not like I forget… or, at least, not entirely forget or forget all the time. I’ll even scream at myself, a few times even out loud, to get The Fucking Thing Done. But something has just stopped. It’s the last connection between thought and action that can’t be bridged, so instead of going to the hospital or writing or Something, I’m spending four hours on the PlayStation or surfing for Crap or watching YouTubes of Japanese Game Shows. To be honest the internal / external screaming at myself seems to just drive me down even further… this really is something I should be trying to fix.
The brain cramps and the taking on of other peoples crap is something I’ve been doing for such a long time and I’m only just seeing it as symptoms of my Clinical Depression, the effects of which were buried by the manic depression…
My first guitar lesson was called off in similar circumstances. Today I’ve called the benefits people who are now threatening to reclaim the £500 they’ve already paid me, after they stopped them a month or so ago. All I had to do then was send two pieces of paper. I spent a year deciding every day that I really needed to do something about my finances, and failing.
Also, don’t ask me about hundreds of 2 litre cola bottles stacked in a wardrobe. (I may be one of the few people who’s ever had to work out that you can compress them into a single bag of rubbish by cutting both ends off, slitting the resulting tube end to end and layering them inside each other until you just have a huge cylinder of plastic. The reason I know this is that throwing them away gradually doesn’t work when you were moving out in a couple of days.)
This kind of stuff is like a cog getting jammed in the mechanism, then eventually whatever was sticking in there comes free. No amount of guilt or self-recrimination helps, but I haven’t worked out what does yet.
I knew things wern’t hunky dory with you when your posting slowed down.
You know, I think a lot of people feel shitty inside, but they simply give the shit back to the world. You are keeping it all inside you. Don’t. Please.
Get that foot checked coz you are punishing yourself for nothing.
Something always sets it off. I think so, becoz my uncle has this exact same problem. Bipolar. Basically what sets it off is a percieved rejection.
No one can reject you except yourself.
Have you read a book called Emotional Resilience by David Viscott? It helped me get rid of my past baggage. Its a wonderful book.
HI NITA!!!!
I haven’t read that book, but I will look for it. Over the past couple of years I’ve had a really hard time concentrating on reading any one topic or book for any period of time. I can barely make it through a section of a newspaper.
Have you written any posts on the medical system in India? I’d love to read them if you have… not just about the mental health either, but just the system in general. I’ve managed to find a ride to the hospital, so I’m going in around midnight tonight because that’s their slow period and the wait for an X-Ray won’t be too long.
Thanks for coming by…
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WOW..
This is my first time to your site, and at 46 I am no doubt a lot older than you, but this one sentence was just a slap in the face. That is EXACTLY what I do.
My husband hs decided after only 3 years, he has no desire for sex anymore. Celibacy has become my life and I had absolutely NO CHOICE in the matter. Rather than do what I would like to do, which is be alone, I stay in the psuedo-marriage to keep him from feeling bad.
I’ve done this my entire life but it took reading your one sentence today to “get it”.
Bine, ExChimp, Puddle and Nita: I’ve left responses to your responses, but I “timeshifted” them so they appear next to your originals… this is something I’m trying so that my “Recent Comments” area doesn’t fill up with my name… if you think it makes sense let me know.
Surgeon In My Dreams: I’m going to come over later to ask what sentence you meant, but until then I’m glad you found something here. I’ve never been a big fan of hanging around in relationships which become a burden and prevent me from taking control of my recovery… obviously I don’t know your situation, but I do know I was That Burden in someone’s life and I do know that I’ve carried That Burden to the detriment of my recovery.
Thanks for posting here…
I have written something on the medical system but its not a comprehensive look. I don’t know whether you will find that interesting (links given below).
I have been wanting to write about our medical system as a whole. Its basically meant for the rich. Everyone here pays for their treatment, mostly. The govt. hospitals have long lines, shortage of docs and in any case the medicines are not free.
Also docs in India here can get away with murder as courts are not effective!!
However, medical tourism is rising as we have really good docs.
The links to what I have already written:
http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/lack-of-post-operative-care-is-negligence/
and
http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/doctors-reactions-to-consumer-rulings/
–this thing where I accept a situation so as to not damage someone else or make them disappointed was already a pattern–
This was the sentence…sorry I didn’t get it in there when I tried the first time.
i have to admit i’m a little relieved that other people experience this “blocking” phenomenon too. i do realise that espescially those long term blocks are related to depression – it doesn’t happen with me much when i’m well-balanced, which i haven’t been for a while. my current income situation (which also affects my living situation) has been a strain. that’s when i start to block out things. which makes me feel useless, incapable, unfit to live. then the small scale stuff, like being unable to stock up necessary household stuff, adds to that feeling. which gets me more depressed. don’t really know how to break that circle yet. i’m not quite ready to admit i’m working myself deeper into a depression. i just have to get off my ass and find work that pays for a change. if just part of my brain wouldn’t prevent me from doing just that.
and then “the taking on of other peoples crap”. yup, one of my favorites.
oh, i wanted to ask: that quote, “if hell is so evil, why does it punish the wicked?”, is that yours? it’s fucking brilliant.
and one more thing, since i’ve be trying to connect comments to blogs – you’re feartheseeds, too? i read comments on thordoras and puddlejumpers pages, but never connected senators in six and feartheseeds since i don’t always follow links back to blogs.
and since i’m already babbling away too long – i didn’t even notice you timeshifted those responses. i understand that “recent comments” problem – it always bothers me too that when i want to reply to comments it looks like i’ve been talking mostly to myself. should try that backdating too, never thought of it.
good wishes to you. i’m happy you’ve been posting a little more lately.
Surgeon in my dreams: Thanks for coming back, I’ll fix it when I get back.
Bine: Thanks… yeah, that’s a question I asked a friend of mine who’s pretty deeply Catholic. We had an interesting conversation about it, but he didn’t have a direct answer. I’ve been meaning to ask his Priest about it but it’s hard enough for me to get up before noon on a weekday. Basically, what we figure is, “Hell” is still under the purview of God… he set out the parameters of how Hell would operate, then the project was subcontracted by Lucifer, so Lucifer can only work within the structure set up by God, he doesn’t have the authority or power to adjust the settings. Or something. I really should ask someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Whenever I post something here and someone says “hey… me too!” I’m relieved because then it becomes just another part of the disease, and not some new horrible “thing” I’m afflicted with or have to deal with on my own. Generally, by the time I post something like the “mind block” thing I’ve been dealing with it on my own for years and years… it’s also like being partially blind and going years thinking there’s something wrong with you because everyone else can do things you can’t, then finding out it’s because there’s an entire third of the landscape you’ve been missing.
I am [redacted] as well as — for this round of the NHL playoffs — being “senators in six.” But now that the series has to go to seven games for the senators to win I’m back to [redacted]. Just to further complicate matters, when I post responses on Blogspot or Blogger or Anything Other Than WordPress, I sign as “Gabriel.”, “[the other blog]” or “…salted lithium.”
In case you lost Puddle when she moved, you can find her here:
http://puddlejumping.wordpress.com/
hell is an interesting topic. a friend of me once told me that in the “original version” of the bible there is no such thing as hell, it just got translated into it. originally the sinners are not buried with proper sacraments but go to “gehenna”, which happened to be a dump close to jerusalem. i don’t have the background to verify that, but i found it an amazing concept.
yes, i guess that’s what makes it a relief to “share” an affliction with someone. i found it much easier to admit to some things after i read it spelled out by other people. i didn’t really start searching the web to find people who suffered from the same ailments as me, but once i started reading a few blogs i recognized parts i always found weird about myself.
i knew you were [the other blog] and salted lithium, but i hadn’t realized you were gabriel as well. so i’ve already read a lot of your comments without knowing so!
i haven’t really lost puddles, she said her official goodbye to everyone and mentioned she would keep up her creative writing blog. i kind of miss her, but i still read her other blog. thanks for the thoughtfulness!
Your friend is kind of right, there is no Hell in Judaism… the “Written Torah,” or “Old Testament,” was ripped off from the Jews and in the translation into Christianity — and then Islam — “Gehenna,” the Jewish place of eternal torment, got mixed with “Hades”, the Jewish place of the dead, to become “Hell”.
Gehenna is a kind of Ultimate Purgatory where Eternal Torment is something like “outside the sight of God”. No fire, no brimstone, no Lucifer or your various devils. And Hades was just a place where the bodies of the dead hung out.
But all of this is being filtered through someone who was raised to believe Mao and Stalin were uberKewl, I know “The Faiths” from reading, not “Teaching”.
The thoughtfulness is all part of the Salted Lithium Experience.
this is interesting. there’s a lot i still don’t know. i guess i’ll really have to make the time to read some more about the torah and how it makes the foundation for the bible. i was raised an atheist – or agnostic rather – and what little i know is pieced together from religious education in school, discussions with friends, and reading the bigger part of the bible on my own, without further “teaching”. i guess that’s pretty ignorant.
you’ll have to help me with “uberKewl”, my english leaves me there …
As versatile as the language is I don’t think “uberKewl” can be considered as English… it’s just my way of being cute. I grew up in an ultra-Left group where Marx, then Stalin, then Mao were the Revolutionary-Religious Leaders. I wasn’t exposed to the “traditional” religious leaders as religious leaders until I was ten. Until then they were just names of philosophies and philosophers I was taught to associate with the Bourgeoisie Classes… ie: the class enemies.
I don’t think it’s “ignorant” to know little about topics that don’t interest you. The books are always there for when you’re ready. And I much prefer “agnostics” to atheists… I find atheists to be as arrogant and fundamental as any evangelical of any other religion. I wrote this on [my other blog] not too long ago:
“Atheism is about humiliation as much as hyper-Evangelicalism is about self-gratification. Not believing in God does not make you an Atheist, to be an Atheist you must have a philosophy of believing faith in any God is wrong.”
I could go on forever about religion… I think I’m the only person in my family who enjoys talking about this stuff…
i guess i really have to call myself ignorant in this case because stuff like that really does interest me. but if i have the choice i always pick some easy reading that takes me far away. i have to make a move and get myself a library card. can you point me towards some books you found particularly interesting?
i never thought much about if i’d consider myself an atheist or an agnostic. i think probably the latter. the stange thing is, i used to deny the existence of gods because i wasn’t raised to believe in one, to search my soul for belief. but it’s mostly christians i grew up with. then two of my best friends are buddhists. for the last couple of months i’ve lived in a muslim neighborhood. and for the last couple of years i’ve worked a lot with rastafarians. and that finally got me thinking i can’t really deny a god that inspires people to do things they wouldn’t have done without their belief. i don’t need a god for myself, never searched for one, but i can’t say i believe faith in any god is wrong. unspeakable crimes are committed in the name of one god or the other, but there’s also great beauty created.
I’ve been an atheist since I was 9 or 10 years old. I grew up in a vaguely Christian milieu. Some atheists are embarrassing (Richard Dawkins, for example).
There was a time when I’d argue pointlessly with any Christians who tried to talk to me about God. Now, I don’t much care what people believe. Although I do think believers are ‘wrong’ in the sense of believing something I see as obviously incorrect, I don’t believe it’s wrong in a moral sense. What people do, not what they believe, determines what kind of people they are.
I do still get annoyed at believers who want to limit the freedom of non-believers. For example, with abortion, I’m entirely happy with people choosing to believe it’s morally unacceptable, so long as they don’t try to stop people who think otherwise from accessing it. It’s hard to argue rationally with people whose only response is a bible verse. Personal faith, I’m fine with. Personal faith spilling over into laws, not so much.
Daniel C. Dennett has an interesting atheist perspective: Edge: Thank Goodness!.
In India atheists are not arrogant. They are in hiding most of the time! To not believe in God is considered a social sin!
That’s a great point Nita…
From what I understand it’s like that in most of North America as well… there are large chunks of Europe that are increasingly turning to The State as a substitute for God, but in Central America, Mexico and the United States it’s very uncool to mention your lack of belief in the “acceptable” Religions let alone your lack of belief in any religion. Religion in Canada is a “shrug affair”, someone mentions their religion and you shrug your shoulders. The same goes for someone’s lack of belief…
“Personal faith spilling over into laws, not so much.”
I don’t agree with this… personal faith is atheism, or atheism is a personal faith just like Christianity, Hindi or “Other”. Laws are always written based on personal belief and faith. The problem comes when one belief or faith is promoted over another. I wrote about this on my [redacted] site [the other blog], but when “freedom of religion and belief” and “freedom not to believe” are put into a Constitution those societies always prosper over countries which put “The State over religion” or “this religion over any other” into their constitutions.
I tried ready Daniel’s page but everything’s centred and complicated and I’m having issues with my concentration right now, but I’ll get to it soon…
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Nice bblog you have
…I’m pretty sure you’re Spam, but you don’t seem to be selling anything with the URL attached to your name, so I’ll leave it intact. In case you’re serious, however, thanks for enjoying my blog.