#388

Guess the thing for me to worry about right now, besides all the seriously material shit in my immediate surroundings and the world at large that demand strained thought, is to wonder if I don't merely have depression, but bipolar disorder. Suppose I should have wondered more about this earlier, but maybe it just morphed into this over time. 

I was a very happy child. Until I got depressed for the first time when I was eight, nothing got me too down for very long at all. Happy baby, happy toddler, happy little kid. Bad shit was bad shit, but you rolled on, found the joke, picked up a book, got a hug from someone, and time would go on under the light of God. The first intimations of a more durable maturity and the depression was immediate and tactile, and basically instantly, I wondered if it would not be better to be dead than to feel this way.

Got over it, but after I turned eleven I got depressed again and that never really went away till I was maybe twenty-three, though it turned inward and became a hot and accessible rage that fueled my teenage years especially. Then it was matter of riding out feeling normal and riding out feeling depressed, outside of those occasions in a given springtime when I'd lose my mind and hit the eject button on my life. Yes, manias. Sure. Mania is certainly not outside of my experience of depression. Neither is joy, nor satisfaction, nor feeling free of the extremes. Felt like I understood myself pretty well since I turned twenty-eight, and till this summer things were as stable between my familiar highs and lows as they have ever been. Maybe the lows have been lowering the last couple years, but in a way mostly grippable.

But the way it played out this summer and fall, I have to wonder if things are the same. The up was too up, and I didn't realize it at all until the crash almost killed me. Still skidding and rolling. Some days literally can't do a single thing outside the confines of my property and only a select few within. 

In this darkness there is still contentment and satisfaction, the happiness of accomplishments and love and play, friendship and ice cream, etc. There is still this here, this text field, and the other ones in which my service as a conduit brings me to life. Reading Martin Buber's I and Thou translated and magnificently introduced by my beloved Walter Kaufmann, and that has brought me feelings similar to reading Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, which is the highest compliment I am probably able to pay a writer of thoughts. 

There is no denying or leavening of the bare fact, though, that being that I feel as bad as I have ever felt in a life extremely intimate with bad feelings. As Kierkegaard would put it, I am deeply and profoundly ill with despair. 

*

The only way out is through, having become stronger, with time. Ah, time! But time is so precious now, here, in this maelstrom of irresponsible acceleration.

Nevertheless, I won't be rushed. Hate that. Clinging like ivy to the wall of this world is an act of patience. That's all I can say. Sometimes ivy grows and sometimes it doesn't. 

You cannot rush it. You cannot help it. It just has to hang on.

--JL