So due to life getting in the way: a very busy week at work, a sick husband, and then a sick me, I did not get as far in my readings as I would have liked. However, after sitting on my couch all day, wrapped in a blanked with coffee, then tea, I’m feeling good and inspired about the progress I made.

My goal for this week was to dive into the two books I snagged from the library: An Unquiet Mind: Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison, and Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love by Zack McDermott (which I have yet to jump into).

So far, I am loving Jamison’s work. While I have not finished it, and have chosen to jump around, I am thoroughly enjoying her vulnerable and strong voice. As a professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Jamison details her experience with manic-depressive illness, honestly portraying how even with her medical background, she never made the connection between her patients and her own illness. I find this fascinating, as it seems to be human nature to identify things in others, whether illness or idiosyncrasies, that we ourselves manifest, yet refuse to don’t see.

My purpose in reading this work was twofold. I wanted to learn from Jamison’s expertise the intricacies of manic-depressive illness as research for the development of the character, Trevor, who I plan to mold into a young man suffering from manic-depressive illness that chooses to stop taking is medication, as it limits his creativity. Through my research so far, I’ve gathered some characteristics of manic depressive behavior:

• it’s genetic
  • My plan originally was to have Trevor’s manias manifest themselves after his mother’s death, as if this was the catalyst-a major trauma. But so far, I have not found research to support this type of illness to begin from trauma. Instead, I plan to have his mother have had manic depressive illness that went untreated, or undiagnosed-I haven’t decided-who commits suicide. Due to this, Trevor’s dad struggles with his son’s diagnosis.
• Jamison describes her manias as a time that “gave rise to great personal pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy…” (5-6)
  • Trevor will be some type of artist, either musician or writer, that can’t seem to focus when on his meds.
•  Lost within one’s own mind, staring out window for hours, not moving. 
• Reading the same page over and over without comprehending
• intense despair combined with awful agitation
• staying in bed because it’s too hard to get out of bed
• falling behind in classwork
• wearing the same clothes for days at a time because it’s too much effort to pick out new ones
  • This also reminded me of an OCD ritual of not wearing a certain item of clothing or accessory because a memory is attached to it. Example-not wearing a pair of earrings because you had a bad night in them; so therefore, OBVI you’ll have a bad night if you wear them again. 
• quick, obsessive thoughts of the morbid variety
  • running or pacing to try and remedy these thoughts

I have also started to glean lines that are inspiring my writing such as: 

• “The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.”
  • Something that through my own personal experiences with OCD I have learned. When I stopped looking at my OCD as something out to ‘get me’ or to ‘hurt me’, I was able to begin to heal.
• “Yet why not say what happened?”
  • So many people fear stigma, Jamison included. She feared what her diagnosis, and speaking about her experience, would mean within her field of work. Would it discredit her? Would it make her patients weary? But the only way to fight stigma, the only way to change it, is to speak against it.
• “My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches’ brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes”
  • It’s a crap shoot really-the genes we’re born with. While I believe nurture plays a huge role in people’s development, we can’t ignore the nature side of the debate. For those of us who struggle, sometimes we were just made this way. Circle back to the Chinese belief that we must make our beasts beautiful, because there is so much to be learned within them.

And to sign of for the day, I’ll leave you with this work of mine:

“Field of Wildflowers” 

the mind is a vast

expansive land

filled with beauty

and grace

color

and

melodies

songs like a light breeze 

through a

field of wildflowers

-peppered with mines.

small

unseen

to the untrained eye.

mines.

ready at a moments notice

to be set free.

to release all they hold close

in a torrent of storms

that will rain down on ones self.

Drowning.

Punching.

Struggling.

For air.

Take me back

to the

field of wildflowers.

xoxo

M.B.