penguingod made a comment the other day about how it’s incredibly hard to describe bipolar illness to anyone; much like describing a psychedelic experience, you never quite capture it.
I won’t try, but I recalled this story the other day that can explain one part of it — how when you’re dealing with the condition, you end up analyzing and parsing all your reactions to decide what’s a legitimate concern and what is the disorder talking; is your good feeling a symptom of mania, are you stressing and depressing over something unimportant? You end up distrusting a lot of your own perceptions…
It’s something like this:
You go for a walk in a swamp. There’s a lot of thick brush, and you know there’s also lots of quicksand that has killed a lot of people. You take a cane with you to help test the ground.
It gets foggy, and you get lost, and it’s night time with no moon. You move along very cautiously, trying to find your way out.
You get through a particularly thick patch of thorns and branches, stumbling through, the wood breaking around you as you trip over things.
You place your cane on the ground to test your footing…and it doesn’t resist. There’s no pushback. You try to interpret that, and you think to yourself: it’s quicksand, there’s no resistance back because the cane is sinking in.
You touch the ground all around you, with a steadily increasing sense of panic, and realize that you’re standing in the middle of a patch of the stuff on the only available solid ground. A step in any direction will be fatal.
So you stand still. You spend the night terrified to move at all, and though you’re exhausted and are ready to fall over from hunger and cold, you just…stand there.
In the morning, the light comes up and the fog burns off. You look at the ground in order to see if there’s a way out and realize that in the struggle to get through that thicket…you broke your cane off about a foot above the ground, and the lack of resistance you were feeling had nothing to to do with quicksand. The cane just wasn’t giving you accurate information, because it wasn’t touching anything at all.
The road home is just ahead of you, but you’re so exhausted and stressed and disgusted with yourself and your stupidity that you just can’t move toward it…
Something like that.
Yeah.
Dark Matter 