Things Are Rough

I keep vacillating between writing all or nothing about what goes on in my head and my life–maybe this will help me to go with the write-about-it impulse.

‘Mad Pride’ Fights a Stigma

The stigma begs for both openness and occlusion.

It Sucks…

…that I have spent the majority of the past four years of my life in either lethargy and apathy or consumed with trying to assess whether the meds are making me a certain way or the disease. All of this plus brief “happy” periods of hypomania and not-brief-enough mixed states. All these years wasted in “self-contemplation,” i.e. tremendous, perverse narcissism.

But who else cares?

In the many years before 2004, I was impulsive, self-destructive, and foolish at the very least. I was also a horror to deal with. But, I really didn’t care. The moods came and went, but I lived them. I lived an extremely fucked-up life in varying states of misery and elation. Introspection was infrequent and brief. But I was out there living a life.

Aphasia?

I’m not sure if it’s because of the meds or the breakdowns, but…

I have limited or delayed comprehension of spoken language. I often have to ask people to repeat what they’ve said to me. I also sometimes have trouble constructing sentences, and must speak slowly and deliberately to compensate. I also have moderate paraphrasia, more severe when I’m tired.

I also do this: “A phenomenon called press of speech also characterizes Wernicke’s aphasics. Patients may speak very rapidly, interrupting others. It may seem as though the patient is striving for a sense of closure or a sense that he has actually communicated what he intended to say (Goodglass and Kaplan, 1983).”

I have excellent reading comprehension skill at most times; sometimes I can barely read (usually when depressed). During and for some time after my worst and most recent episode, I couldn’t read at all, which was a caused me a great deal of despair and dismay.

And all of this improves greatly when I’m in a very good mood (not quite hypomanic or hypomanic).

Previous to my first major depressive mode and probably before getting on meds and definitely when speaking in public or to people I don’t really know, I have always spoken very slowly and deliberately. I also spoke very, very infrequently before getting on antidepressants because I thought I sounded “stupid,” but I don’t know if this is related to the problems I have now.

Related question:
How does this affect foreign language acquisition?

I can learn to read and write new languages, but not speak them, and have limited or delayed comprehension of spoken language. I can read complicated literature in Latin, and can write it a well, but I can’t comprehend or have delayed comprehension of Latin when it is spoken (by geeks) or when confronted with spoken famous Latin phrases.

Why I Read with a Pencil in Hand (or Why the Internet is Webbed)

Fernando Pessoa tells me why I love classics!

However much my soul may be descended from the Romantics, I can find no peace of mind except in reading classical authors.

(Emphasis mine.) A sentence which immediatley causes my mind to vomit up the quote that I love so much from Thomas à Kempis:

In omnibus requiem quaesivi et numquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

Roughly translated, it says, “I seek peace in everything, but find it nowhere except in a corner with a book.” And who do you think old Thomas was reading? Certainly not the Romantics, about whom Pessoa is complaining.

Pessoa goes on to say,

The obsessive analysis of our sensations (sometimes of merely imagined sensations), the identification of our heart with the landscape, the anatomic exposure of all our nerves, the substitution of desire for the will and of longing for thinking—all these things are far too familiar to be of interest to me or to give me peace when expressed by another.

(Again, emphasis is mine.) Yes! The misidentification of empathy, feeling in common, for real communication is at the heart of the postmodern malaise that our society suffers.

feeling ≠ thinking
relating ≠ knowing

I feel what you mean, I don’t know what you mean.

Pessoa continues:

Whenever I feel them, and precisely because I feel them, I wish I were feeling something else. And when I read a classical author, that something else is given to me.

This calls to mind Donna Tartt’s depiction of her main characters (classics students) in The Secret History as seeming and acting in a way that is “chilling to modern tastes,” which, in turn, brings me to her take on the Furies/Erinyes:

And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.

Ahh, contrary to popular belief, reading classical authors is an escape, a pleasure! Reading Pessoa, on the other hand, is exhausting.

All of which brings me back to . . . smoking. Here’s a little addition to a previous post: smoking is…a break from the intensity and intelligence of Pessoa’s profound musings. Oddly enough (or, appropriately enough, given Pessoa’s preference for writing), the same goes for writing vs. reading. One calms and soothes the mind, while the other agitates it into action.