Download from Smashwords (eBook)
Smashwords
Category:
Biography
ISBN-10: 0987118803
Type: Non-Fiction
Copyright: April 04, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780987118806
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
From the comfort and safety of your chair, join the author as she dared to live her dreams travelling through the extremes of bipolarity. Witness the strategies she used to survive the consequences of putting one foot in front of the other while on a path she believes ordained by the Man Upstairs..
Warning: this book is -like Life - not divided into chapters. Like Life it is a continuum along which one can travel then find, whoops, what's happening here, then back to the baseline from which the loop escaped.
My intention in sharing this is to provide those around - family and friends - some idea, feeling of the experience. Obviously everyone's journey is different but the trajectories will be similar. A psychiatrist, having red the manuscript, stated it an accurate description of behaviour. Her only point of difference being that relating to ECT.
I can't say ENJOY this book, but I do hope it leads to a better understanding.
Excerpt
And I thought I was quick on the uptake.
Then the penny dropped.
One of Life's profound truths.
The pieces had been there all along.
What a blind fool not to have seen the answer sooner.
So simple.
*****
An undertaker opened the training course on handling grief. Sixteen of us had volunteered for the Sudden Death Support Group at Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide. We all had first hand experience. He talked of his feelings after the death of his son. His fear of going mad, tipping over the edge, going round the bend, of having a breakdown, losing his mind. None roused any fear in me.
I told him that I heard what he was saying and that going mad was not so bad. As with the fear of anything, the fear of going mad is worse than the event. He said he didn't realise he had been telegraphing this message. It had not been his intention to do so. Not going mad was a choice he had made.
A choice.
I had never considered that there had been any choice at those times when I have quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, gone mad. Insane. Flipped my lid. Whatever you want to call it. Fear ? When you are there, in a world completely of your own making who is there to fear? Your self? Your hidden self? Your "real" self?
Then it dawned on me.
Some people may be inwardly monstrous. However nice they might appear on the outside, they could be filled with dark unpleasantnesses. Call it evil. They quite rightly fear going mad. Then there are those of us whose internal reality is filled with places of peace and joy never known in our external lives. For us madness is an escape into sanity.
Seems to me that while people may, with effort, avoid going mad, the effort itself leaves them "sane" but twisted. "Sane" being defined as failing to be defined by any other psychiatric label. Some very strange people are regarded by themselves and others as "sane." And if they are, I am glad not to be.
|
