Bipolar
After a series of (self-)destructive events, my father was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Culminating a rapid succession of disasters of all kinds, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for 1 month. They did not medicate him, they did not help him. They only separated him from the world, where he had managed to cause so much damage. Then, half a year later he was imprisoned for 3 months; and there hurt and humiliated.
1 month after his release he passed away. He chose a difficult exit.
He was an intelligent man with a good sense of humor with an unusual way of living. He could have achieved more and better… or maybe not?!
The following was my attempt to understand him, from his position about 2 years before his diagnoses.
How do we know that we’re not dead?
How can we know?
What makes us alive?
It can’t just be our hearts’ beating. Mine still does it, but I don’t feel alive… I once did…. once upon a time… a long time ago. In fact it seems so far away as if it had been another life…. or was it a dream?… or was it a thought?… A passing thought… Was it MY thought?… I can’t hear my thoughts quite well. Not the crazy ones; those I can hear. They are pounding heavily right in my center. The ones I can’t hear are my REAL thoughts. They’re just somehow distorted echoes fading away in the back of my mind like a distant hum …. What IS my mind?… What happened to it??… What happened to me???… What have I done?
I feel so numb… a kind of paralysis that has crept over me so slowly and with stealth that even though I have seen it form and loom in, it seemed so slow and so far away that I never actually thought it could devour me. It swallowed me up like a tidal wave of a tsunami would a fishing boat…and now I’m consumed by this kind of a black hole, a paralyzing, killer NOTHINGNESS. As I said, I can’t honestly say that I never saw it coming, because I did. I was warned more than I would like to admit it. I thought I could beat it. That I would leave it so far behind that it could never reach me… yet not only it did, but with mindless confidence I myself ran right into it… with all my decisions, all my actions… even the ones I had carefully evaluated. I was so wrong!… It was death creeping up on me. Not the legitimate, all-encompassing, merciful death… it was MY DEATH… that of my Soul.
It withered inside of me… I’ve been perishing from the inside out. My body is in absolute synchronicity with my Soul… or with what’s left of it… of both. I’m disintegrating on the full spectrum of my existence. Skin, bones and emptiness.
This Nothingness is too powerful… the only thing left for me to do is face the consequences of my actions and make peace with my own masterful self-destruction. Maybe that way I could let in a little bit of light… maybe that would give some reason to all this Living Death… maybe it would make it a little more dignified.
I did it. I did ALL of it. I wish I hadn’t have…or would I?…
Interestingly the experience I had 1 year after his passing and write about the Lineage article gave me an unparalleled insight into his condition.
My father wouldn’t let me help him… I hope you will.