How this Blog Came to Be About Bipolar Disease and Poetry

Naturally I don't share everything here. I share what I can while preserving a modicum of privacy, because of this medium; and I don't want to pander to Peyton Place voyeurism. But today I think people thirst for the authentically personal because their lives are inundated with impersonal information.

It's odd how this blog has evolved. I started with humorous essays, of which I've published dozens elsewhere. They weren't very popular. Then I related our difficulties in Mexico, where Kathleen's hearing-ear-dog was held for a $10,000 ransom. I would have paid the money if I'd had it. Instead there were six months of captivity in a land I have come to detest. People were interested in that struggle.

Finally, after that stress was over, and we got our own place back in California, I sank into a depression. It's somewhat typical for a bipolar to react after the stress is over, much like migraine sufferers get their headaches when the final is over. How I wish I only suffered migraines! But suffering is not ours to choose. "Adventure is chosen, suffering is imposed."

So now my blog has morphed into two streams--probably the two things I know most about on this planet--manic-depression and poetry. I dread the former and love the latter. The fact that the two are inextricably linked through history makes for a nice fit, though I'd rather talk about poetry than mood disorders.

I teach poetry online. I also counsel bipolars. And many of the poets I know are also bipolar. One student, long since graduated, has been in the bughouse nearly 30 times, and she goes on. But she's in that "lucky" 15% of bipolars who suffer more from mania than depression.

On the net I'm best known as a poet. Yet in my bios I pointedly included my bipolar disease for the sake of honesty. Am I proud to be a bipolar? No, that would be like being proud of my height. I had little to do with either; they were the cards I was dealt, along with lumbar scoliosis, and later, severe degenerative disk disease.

Frankly, I resent the hell out of being manic-depressive. It has been a curse and also the strongest single determinant in the major choices of my life. My great burden is that I have been able to function at a high level even while psychotic, which prevented treatment. I've won many academic awards while essentially psychotic and wondering why they were given to me.

Thus I came to treatment late. In my psychiatry residency I was the golden boy so no one on the faculty considered the possibility I might have major mental illness when I got sick and had to drop out.

So, in a sense, my intelligence and the stoic endurance my mother instilled in me have worked against me. I never knew when to say "uncle." When I was finally diagnosed it took a good friend, also a psych resident, to persuade me to come to his hospital for treatment. And in my 30th year I finally met a doctor who made the diagnosis in all of half an hour. And so it goes.

Today I'm probably at 1.5 kilorats. On the bright side, when I awoke, I did have feelings of love for my beautiful wife. It's good to know they're still there, since depression reduces all feelings to a flat landscape of obsidian squares beneath a brass sky.

I'm laying off posting poems for now. If any readers wish for me to post them more often, I'll be happy to comply.


Thine in Truth and Art,

CE