Just When I Thought
I Was Stable

27 June 1999 – Diary
Life for the last two weeks since I came back from New York has been like nothing I have experienced before. I wonder if it feels this way for everybody else. For the first time, if I choose to do something, I can do it without a fight. There is no secondary pressure stopping me from doing it.

I think - "Let me make sure that the company's radios are in order" and I can handle it - getting the information I need, making a decision, and implementing it - without being caught in indecision or being stuck on the simplest information or being sidetracked by something completely different. I can start something…and I can finish it. You cannot believe how difficult that used to be in the past.

Things which have been sitting on my desk for the last two or three months have been cleared up. Things at home are being done. I don’t get caught in trying to do five things at once – I can organize them one by one and complete them. I can order tasks and plan for the future. These capabilities simply did not exist a month ago.

I am not perfect. I am lazy and I procrastinate like any other person. But at least now if I make the effort, I can get something done. Previously I had no choice if I could not just do something.

I have not felt like this since I was fifteen or sixteen. For the first time I feel that my capabilities can come to a full flowering. I am exhilarated by the potential and scared that I will lose it. It is to me perhaps the second most precious thing I now own.

The medication does not seem to have taken away anything essential. I have my gift of words, I am left with sensitivity to color and form, I can think clearly and articulately. Perhaps even more so than before. I am only now beginning to realize how narrow, how dull, how closed my life has become. I have lost years to mediocrity when I could have done so much more. That is the curse of being manic/depressive. It steals your life, your real life, and gives you a paper cutout that you use as living and believe that it is true.

The mania only gives the illusion of depth. Any project taken on without the benefit of careful thinking and research is one-dimensional. Mania prevented me from doing either and I had the passion but not much else.

And the depression shut me down completely.

7 July 1999 – Diary
My brother is away, and I am in charge of the office. I keep on expecting the mania or depression symptoms to show themselves, but they don’t. Rather I feel rock solid. Not hypomanic in which I do everything either superbly quickly, or rush around and around, or think of the one hundred things I want to do. Rather a slower paced, steady feeling that allows me to take one thing at a time and deal with it and then move on to the next thing

I can priorities and choose what I want to do – something I cannot do with the mania. I can stick with one thing to completion – something I cannot do with the mania. I can take a deep breath and relax and DECIDE, something I cannot do with mania (which just pushes me along sometimes). I can deal with people and assert my personality and my decisions as I am supposed to do as a manager, without stress of chatting with people (either a manic or a depressive symptom).

I can also force myself to do the obligatory things, visit people, make telephone calls, go swimming. In the past as the depression kicked in, these would become more and more difficult to do.

For the first time I am feeling that I have regained the identity that I moved away from when I was sixteen.

What I do now is starting to merge with my sense of who I am, my own sense of identity, the person who I have always seen myself as being. In a very real sense I feel as if I have returned to myself, home, that I am finally back to being Jinnah.

I am quietly enjoying this new sense self, reinforced by my actions, but sometimes I want to go into the park and shout at the top of my voice into the sky for the sheer joy having myself returned to me.

This is a cause for celebration certainly, but it also brings a sense of loss, of bitterness. In some way – between seventeen and thirty three – a part of me stopped growing, or grew for a while and faded.

I don’t know exactly what was lost but there is an ethical / moral / spiritual / identity aspect to it. Some part of me, some part of my personality, is still sixteen years old when it should be thirty three. In all the triumphs that I am having I cannot overlook that I am proud of being like a sixteen year old. Even though some of my experience is twice that age.

Something is still missing. I now have to mature as if part of me is sixteen and part of me is thirty three and I have to merge the pieces. I expect it will be easier than I think, but nevertheless I am not fool enough to believe that that part of me that needs to grow up will do as well as a person who has lived through those years.

The parts that need to mature are perhaps those parts that were most destroyed by the bp - the self-centeredness / selfishness, the lack of concern for others (which is an inherent part of the mania), and those curses of the depression – poor self confidence and inability to develop close friends or lovers.

Being bipolar has left sixteen years of my life, if not wasted, then curiously incomplete.

The medications work well but it doesn’t work all the time either. I am not cured, nor do the medications cure me. All they do is hold the bp at bay. Nothing else. The metaphor I would use for being on medication now is:

"Like in a boat innocently and naively on the ocean's surface and there is a lurking sea monster waiting for a chance...
To forget that he can come to the surface is to invite disaster"

Bp is not all chemical in nature either. The bp is something other than me, but it also created who I am in part. I have lived with it for too many years for it not to have made a permanent impact on me. And even if I do not like what it has done to me and even if I am on medication to release me from its thralls it is not easy to change.

Khalil Gibran said it best in his book "The Prophet"
"...how shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets,...and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache."

continued