Against the Wind: reflections of bipolar ‘illness’

Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
-Virginia Woolf

Biology is our nemesis: it dictates everything beautiful and evil in the human race. Our efforts to outsmart it have been clever, coy, and very inventive, giving us what we call ‘culture’ and value so much: you know, art, buildings, law, literature, language and so on, and science, of course, medicine, religion, philosophy, and on it goes. But all of these are still no matches for the innate insistence of the body’s way. Nature trumps all, in the beginning, and in the end. We glimpse this truth even when we say “it runs in the family” and this certainly applies here.

Though I philosophize deeply against reducing my profound disappointment in human life into a medical label, I can’t refute our adamancy to harness and describe those particular chemical components of soul. It’s science: this chemical soup inside our heads and bodies is the physical depiction of this spiritual malaise.

There’s no reduction in calling my life pattern “bipolar.” It’s zero mystery to those around me that my moods veer in extreme ways. The depression world, and then the triumphant rise after a veritable entombment. I’ve always relished the truth that many writers and artists were depressed nutcases: I was pretty sure I was going to grow up and be a writer. So sometimes as a child the history of madness and depression gave me a sense of solidarity.  Call it what you want: most of the creative world is unhinged. In some ways, I feel sorry for artists who flat-line instead of getting their full heritage.

If your depression is bipolar, you get a bit hopeful when the dark cloak of nothingness gives way. You start breathing again. There’s a period of normalizing. It’s nice, brief, and not that familiar. Then you really start feeling amazing. Colours get brighter, and you start feeling the pulse of the mystery instead of thinking it’s all a crap heap. There’s so much flow, and other people’s attitudes don’t bother you as much. You’re super nice and energetic. Work it out, girl. Then you’re off the handle again, and it’s great. Everyone likes you here. No one likes to be in a dark room while you throw back the wine and whine about death. You’re baaaack. And you’re super creative, just like when you’re lowest, but then you’re slowest, and when you’ve got this much energy for creation, it’s a tidal wave. Amazing. You can rise to any challenge. You start a million things and make rapid progress on all kinds of stuff you’ve procrastinated.

Right about here is where you have a shotgun wedding, or shave your head, or date a hot Arab, or take a lot of drugs, and eat candy. If you’re Britney Spears, that is…. Mania’s promises are wicked, devastating, and you can’t see the damage that these impulsive turns can cause. They seem like a good idea at the time. The chaotic makes perfect sense.

I’m so blessed by some of the friendships I have known, and one especially has been my warrior of ‘positivity’, Daniel. His balanced mind and joyful spirit is enviable. Ask him how he is and he’ll sincerely tell you, “I’m LOVING life. And how are you?” Daniel is an amazing and gifted artist, though his true gift is the genuine joy and no-nonsense encouragements and admonishments he doles out. A few weeks ago, after about twenty years of friendship, I told him I finally figured out why he just can’t seem to get into art. It’s puzzled us over the years, because his talent for both painting and music is beyond belief. But the drive to put it together is intermittent, and it feels boring to bother. I realized why, finally- Daniel’s not depressed or crazy. He’s balanced.

Not everyone’s such a good friend, and like you, I’ve had my share of disappointments with people and have ‘trust issues’ and ‘boundary issues.’ It’s profoundly disappointing when people you would and did do everything for find it easier to up and disappear, the coward’s way, instead of coming to someone they care about and telling you what you don’t see. That you aren’t making sane choices, that you don’t see that you’re being vacuumed into crazy places you might not be able to get out if, into a world that will leave you broken hearted or dead. My life was not that much value to this type of friend, evidently. I think we have to be able to tell our loved ones when they might be getting lost. Hard things to say.

Of course there stands the questions: could I have listened? Can you stop a storm from coming? But that’s not the point, really. We have some duty to at least warn a loved one that they can’t see the forecast, try to free them from some extreme pain. A real friend would risk that hope. If a madwoman can be a loyal friend, then what the fuck? Even though you try to arm yourself against the takers, the bipolar person lives with a new slate constantly, hoping, giving benefit of the doubt, assuming it’s a new page. You fully expect others to operate the way you do, with a wide-open heart, because that is all you know.

But you see, the dichotomy of madness is that I couldn’t trade in any of those days now or in the future. I’d love to go back and avoid the addictions and avoid falling in love with people who would die. The pain is unbearable. But other broken people are the ones who loved me, had time for me, gave everything they had to me, and I them. You take what you can get when no one else is offering. Also, in some terrible ways, I thank God no one could stop me, because the times of greatest impulsivity and chaos are also the most creative times. While I’ve grown adept at creating in any mood through sheer discipline, nothing I do according to my organized and structured plans can come close to the output and innovation and sheer body of material and ideas that come out of nowhere. I could not be happier than times of brainstorming, productivity, hurricanes of ideas.

Yes, I’ll do my best to look where I’m going, and armed with hope and confidence and trial and error, I’ll get there. But despite the tsunamis I’m prone to, indeed, because of my risk-taking that nature built into my ‘sick’ brain, I have had an absolutely extraordinary and devastating life, a profound and vivid existence.

I’m grateful for both extremities: mania is a life force. Legend has it that God made the world in seven days, hello. This mythology shows us that the meaning of life itself, the force of it, is wild creation. Depression? It’s the other side of the revelation, for we are dark and horrible in part and depression simply reveals the wounds and the darkness. To live in balance is ideal, yes, even Buddha was striving for complete detachment from the whirling emotions. But no one has completely achieved that, for it is total illusion to think we have healthy, functional families and societies. Who wouldn’t be profoundly depressed by the sickness and malice and greed that fester in this world? Depression is not about ‘poor me’ so much as it is a sane reaction of the sensitive to the injustice of child abuse, rape, cruelty, torture, pollution, extinction, murder, disease. Depression is grief. Depression is a teacher. Another legend has it that a king died on a cross, wrongly accused, and suffered there the torment and abandonment of all that is good. This story is not about one religion being right over another. It was about the humility of depression, about how there is no reward for innocence, about abject grief over a world of darkness.

All this observed, I still thank God that once I thought it was a good idea to fly off in a beige pickup truck and see America. Thank God I have been so loved by some I loved so much. It’s better to have loved and lost. I’m so glad I somehow was inspired to make over 500 pieces of art in my first few years of picking up some art supplies. I’m so glad I spent the last two years starting over seven books and about ten other major projects. Where are they now? You’re right, not everything gets finished. But there are a few hundred thousand words coming at you soon, so get out your wallets.

Do you think I would trade those times in for something a little more even keel? Well, I’m trying…I seek the balance we all seek.

But- I know I can handle everything I’ve thrown at myself, everything thrown at me, and even if I can’t, it’s okay, because the unpredictable winds of the ‘manic depressive’ mind are just a metaphor for the unpredictable volatility of the cosmos.

There are sunny days, rainy days, violent hurricanes that could wipe everything out. Our deepest spiritual malaise is not really mental dis-order. It’s the deepest truth about our nature.

—

What do these names have in common?

Beethoven
Russell Brand
Lord Byron
Sinead O’Connor
Ozzy Osborne
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
Charlie Pride
Nina Simone
Britney Spears
Margaret Trudeau
Mark Twain
Vincent Van Gogh
Kurt Vonnegut
Virginia Woolf
Sir Isaac Newton
Florence Nightingale
Edvard Munch
Vivian Leigh
John Keats
Abbey Hoffman
Herman Hesse
Ernest Hemingway
Peter Gabriel
William Faulkner
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Charles Dickens
Kurt Cobain
Leo Tolstoy
Hans Christian Andersen
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cole Porter
Victor Hugo
Leo Tolstoy
Oscar Wilde
Charles Darwin
Albert Einstein
Tennessee Williams
Albert Einstein
Picasso
Goya
Mozart
Chopin
Bach
Berlioz
Robin Williams
Marshall Mathers (this is me speculating, he is not officially ‘out’ on this list, but come on.)

If you guessed ‘manic depressive’ or ‘bipolar’ you were half-right. All these people are, but that would have been obvious, given my essay. What all of these bipolar personalities have in common is INSANE CREATIVE PRODUCTIVITY.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

First snow today, way too early, on the heels of a nice long Indian Summer. (Is it still okay to say ‘Indian Summer?’ Probably not.)

The first snow usually brings a whole crushing doom with it, for it signifies the proximity of Christmas, which though barely passed, is looming ahead again. But this year I committed to Buy Nothing Christmas 2008, and months in advance of that annual helliday, I have none of the usual dread. Because I’m getting nothing for Christmas.

I’ve never committed before, though in theory, I’ve always been opposed to the money madness of the occasion. I’ve always hated the superficial sickness and hideous ornaments. I’ve despised Santa and all Santa paraphernalia. With everything in my core, from too many Hadean Christmas shifts in retail, I loathe Christmas music. It makes me sick to my stomach. There is nothing sacred left inside it when it’s already churning on the airwaves.

It was half a lifetime of Christmas retail work that drove me into an annual ‘me-time’ ritual of downing shots of Jack Daniels after every December shift, a ritual that has been noticeably absent since I left the mall.

Still, despite all that, I wasn’t sure it was possible or reasonable to just refuse to participate in something you don’t believe in. Can you buy nothing for Christmas and still exist as a member of society? Would society not fall completely apart if it weren’t for Christmas? Truly, our economic security on this continent is built on something as fragile as the glass snowflakes that are a steal for $19.95. Our economy is just as cheap as the plastic ones for $2.99 a string. This is the truth- stores make their profit at Christmas, and barely subsist the rest of the year. The tragedy of today’s stock market is really nothing compared to what would go down if we cancelled Christmas.

I cancelled Christmas, though, not because I’m a bitter old bitch, though that might not be untrue. I had to decide whether to stash something towards a root canal, or go toothless with stacks of prezzies for the kids. The choice is clear.

But of course, Christmas is for the kids. If you don’t buy them shit that’s made in China, what kind of love can you possibly show them? Kids love presents, they love surprises.

I overcame that hurdle early on this season, just letting it all out to save myself the stress. I announced it first to my godchildren.

I’m too poor this year to fill the sleigh, I told them straight up.

Much to my surprise- and big girls like surprises just as much as the kiddies- they said they still have plenty of presents from last year that they’ve hardly used.

Oh.

I expected the older one to start reciting lyrics from Neil Young’s Piece of Crap. She may only be six, but the girl’s an old soul and I’d be surprised if she wasn’t born with her mother’s political- hippie library printed on her brain. Instead she said it would be nice to remember poor kids this year while she played with her ‘so last season’ toys.

But would the nephews take it harder? Would it be this easy with my own flesh and blood? After all- the un-family family can always be excused on technicalities, but can you extricate yourself from blowing your future food or rent on your own kids?

But it was also easy. “Okay, Auntsie Ret,” the pair chirped. “Instead of getting us more junk, will you just come home and play Monopoly with us?”

Nobody over 19 ever really wants to put in a whole-hearted game of Monopoly, I thought, and yet in memories of childhood, playing a board game with Dad rank right up there with going for ice cream. You can’t beat chocolate, Dad always said.

So I committed to two separate games, with ice cream. Not a bad way to spend the holidays, all that spare time you’ve got over December, all those days not spent in traffic jams or strangling the cat accidentally with ribbon and those damn jingle bells.

My shaman-esque brother has always participated in Buy Nothing Christmas, long before I passed on my copies of Adbusters. He’s never felt he had to buy into anything that he would want to buy his way out of. He never bought presents for the family- saved my poor dad about seven Old Spice and soap-on-a-rope Christmases he’d endured from his daughters. It’s funny that no one ever thought “Man, Rob didn’t get me anything this year.” The cliché was so true- what we wanted most was Rob’s presence, not presents. He hated buying, in his words, ‘shice’ and prefers to live his life, even now, handling as little currency as possible. He likes to grow and excavate, to share…”to be.”

But the rest of us continued with the bidding of society. Dad made sure we got a good dose of ‘the real meaning of Christmas’ even as he struggled to fund a few thoughtful gifts. Mom’s best gift was the phenomenal spread. I can barely recall now as an adult what the hell I got when I was eight- was it Wendy Walker, or more Nancy Drews? But I can recall the memories around Mom’s table, the mouthwatering traditions that brought everyone home. Let’s face it, Mom’s cooking is the main course, and not just in our home but nearly everywhere Christmas is celebrated.

Rob says Christmas is as good as any day to give someone a gift, if you have a gift for them. To him, a gift isn’t something you go out and buy, ‘a thing.’ It’s a special sign or perfect artifact that comes along, bearing the spirit of that person. He shares my love of magical trinkets, but most of his come out of the ground- he digs through the past and unearths those souvenirs that surface. Food is just as sacred to Rob, who lives in a pure place where everything is sacred and you don’t take that for granted for one second. He grows his own hot peppers, and shares the homemade hot sauce he makes. Garlicky, searing, the best I’ve ever had.

But he does not plan these special gifts around ‘Christmas.’ Every day is a holy-day. The most amazing thing he’s made for me, though, is a tiny medicine pouch. He didn’t want to waste any leather, a gift from a cow, after making his own cap, so he made a tiny bag for me. I wear it against my heart when I start believing there is no magic in this world, and it helps heal the edges of reality.

I’m not saying I believe for a second that we should never buy anything. But it would serve us well to remember the value of money. It is not ultimately about status at all, but about the time a stranger put into it, a portion of his or her life, and so it had better have some meaning. Meaning? What if we LOVED each of our objects, and each was as special and infused with love or memory as the next? What if we really use what we have?

The Monopoly comes to mind. I’m ashamed to say they’ve asked me at least five times to play. They got it for Christmas a few years back. I’ve always said no. I don’t really like playing Monopoly- what it stands for. Yet I’ve been off playing the real monopoly, handing my meagre earnings over to The Man, who is as far removed from the Great Gift we’re celebrating. And we could have just been eating, drinking, and merrymaking this whole time. Making presents if an idea struck. Helping together in the kitchen. Feasting on clementines.

It all sounds like something from a nonexistent epoch where life was simple and smooth. Nonetheless, I didn’t expect that Buy Nothing Christmas would have such an impact already on my life. After all, by its very nature, I’m not actually doing anything. And we’ve still got over 60 shopping days left to go- days in which I’m going to relish watching the lot of you scramble while I idle around with my godchildren. Maybe we’ll get out the tempura paints and send some home made cards over to their African orphan?

It is a bit premature to say so, but I don’t think I’ll ever get back on the Christmas rat race. With more than two months to go to see how great it feels, I already suspect that I’m bowing out for the rest of my life. I’m starting to really like Christmas, and I think I want to keep it that way.

Visit Scroogey Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Buy her book about death online at Indigo.ca

All Creatures Great and Small

October 5, 2008

Among the wacky and wonderful things that the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto does, Sunday’s barnyard service was…well, the wildest.

I grew up in the kind of church where loving a pet too much bordered on idol worship, and certainly any mention of a saint meant your soul had been tainted by Catholic theology, and you were heading straight into the pits of sulfur, where St. Francis with woodland friends were waiting for you. At least we buried Silly Tillie under the lilac tree in the front yard, but we most certainly did not have services for her life or her death.

MCCT does both- the annual Blessing of Animals celebrates living pets and commemorates those who have blessed us already and moved on to that special forest glade where lambs leap and bow-wows woof and butterflies alight upon the heads of even their enemies.

We have Sandra Millar to thank for organizing this annual blessing ceremony. Sandra raises Shelties and knows how much pets mean to others in the congregation. The pastoral team knows that our flock comes from all walks of life and that to some, pets are all the family had, and for most, pets are a big part of the family. So once a year, Sandra organizes a brief celebratory service where you can bring your animals to be blessed.

St. Francis, who is the patron saint of animals, has long presided over such ceremonies, and hence, so many of paintings depict him with all manner of critter friend gathering around him. A statue of the good saint shared the altar with Reverends Hawkes and Bell this Sunday afternoon. And the congregation? I’ll say it was among the most surreal of my churchy experiences. For the pews were filled with Figgy and Dexter and Dolly and Chee Chee and Puffy and Pookie and Fluffy and Buddy and Cougar and Daphne and Lolita Esperanza. Poodles, terriers, golden retrievers, and mutts of every ilk filled the church and woofed happily along as we sang All God’s Creatures Have a Place in the Choir. The outstanding Dawn Sinclair, holding a friend’s pet chicken, sang You’ve Got a Friend. And then every cat, dog, and chicken present came forward for a photo with Pastor Hawkes or Reverend Bell.

I came on behalf of my three cats, guessing that since they only ever leave the house to go to the vet, they wouldn’t view the blessing   as quaintly or sweetly as their mother did. So I invited my bff Maeve and her dog, a strong boy of over 100 solid pounds of energy and muscle. Bodhi felt right at home for his first time in church, among dozens of barking beasts. After all, at MCC, all are welcome, even Buddhist dogs.

I’ve long held the view that pets are angels sent to help us on our miserable walk here on earth, to teach us, and offer companionship. Angels indeed have fur and feathers and fins.

We are not the only ones to have an annual blessing of pets, though it is not commonly held by most  churches. The ceremony is usually held close to October 4, which is St. Francis’ feast day.  Whether or not you attend such a ceremony, you could recite St. Francis’ canticle for your pets whenever you want to express your gratitude for their friendship. “All praise to you, Oh Lord, for all these brother and sister creatures.”