Thursday, November 06, 2008

What it's like to be bipolar

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones.

Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people.
Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere this changes. The fast ideas are too fast, and there are far too many, overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friend's faces are replaced by fear and concern.

Everything previously moving with the grain is now against....

you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and emerged totally in the blackest caves of the mind.

You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

- Kay Redfield Jamison, MD


I don't like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible get a pillar between me and the train. I don't like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.

- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

2 comments:

Rainbow dreams said...

Hi Niki, you know I think this is an important post - important that there is an insight, an understanding of what it is like to live with anything - but also to see that in fact as with most things it isn't so vastly different to any of us.
To me is seems that, in so many ways, most conditions, for want of a better word, are like magnifying parts of us that already exist.

Sometimes I think that's the fear other people have of many things, because they can actually relate to it but don't really want to admit that... too close for comfort.

Thank you for posting this, Hugs, Katie, xx

Nikita said...

Thanks Katie...for a while now I've been wanting to explain how it feels from inside my mind, but I just can't do it right now. So these two quotes are the ones inside my journal, they're the ones I let speak for me.
*hugs* x