The Art of Psychic Kintsugi

It's hard recovering from a psychotic episode. It is essentially a total shipwreck of the mind, one that leaves you scrambling for whatever shore you can find, if there is one, in which case you flounder about in the ocean of your own subconscious for a while until you are hopefully rescued. To lose one's...

Stranger In My Homelands

My family had to move recently, and I do mean had to, in a number of ways.  Our lease was up, and due to the increasing popularity, changing culture, and rising costs of the city we lived in, we had no choice but to look elsewhere.  The politics of the state we lived in had...

Looking Back to Move Forward

I got a coffee cup as a gift from my mother-in-law recently. It has the image of a long-necked bird facing backwards upon it called a sankofa, a word from Africa. It is meant to symbolize the fact that sometimes, in order to move forward in life, one must look backwards upon where one has...

Turn the Page

As has been the case since my initial manic episode/awakening in May 2018, I often think back on what I was doing a year ago or two years ago on any given day, and lately I'll go as far back as three years for comparison.  This is a useful exercise for someone who tends to...

The Body Keeps the Score

Over the last two years since I had a major breakdown in May '18, I've done extensive personal research on a wide variety of topics related to my mental health.  I was partially driven by a desire to find alternative treatments to harsh psychiatric drugs, as well as better explanations for precisely what was happening...

Six Months

It's been about six months since my August '19 episode, and much like the one I had in May '18, I'm having a hard time not thinking about it.  Unlike the first one, though, which I felt a lot of positivity about, all I have are bad feelings about the second one.  I'm still having...

Sleepless in Central Texas

It is 6 in the goddamned morning, and I have not slept a wink. It's my own fucking fault: I drank coffee after 6pm and then a giant Coke around 11pm when I asked my husband to get me a cheeseburger. He's going to be all worried when he gets up now because of what...

Re-Emergence

It's been a long time since I updated here.  Last year I transferred everything here to another blog, which I have since closed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I now reject the label "bipolar", but that's a long story that's going to take some time. One of the...

A Quiet Year

2014 was largely uneventful for me.  Which is good.  I like quiet and uneventful.  Which isn't to say it wasn't a good year: it was.  My husband's job got reorganized and in the process he got a raise and the ability to work from home.  Which was a good thing, because I quit my job...

The Darkness Inside

A number of thoughts and emotions went through my head in the minutes and hours following the announcement that Robin Williams had killed himself.  My first thought was that the world was now a lesser place without his wit and depth of personality.  My second thought was to feel sorry for him, as he was...

Stigma

I've watched the phenomenon of the Ice Bucket Challenge with some interest.  At first I didn't understand it.  I wasn't clear as to how dumping  buckets of ice water over people's heads was raising money for ALS.  A friendly discussion enlightened me as to how the awareness had raised millions of dollars, as well as...

Transformation

I have to change a lot of things about my life, and I don't know how to do it. Maybe I should back up.  Last year I went to the hospital for chest pains, which were diagnosed as acid reflux (which is crap: I know what that feels like and that wasn't acid reflux).  About the...