mexico

a found lost

i found a rather eerie picture of myself at 19. it appeared through an email from a past internet self.

i feel that the look in my eyes can only truly be described through part of Jane Kenyon's "Having it out with melancholy:"

 8  CREDO   

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work  

but I believe only in this moment  

of well-being. Unholy ghost, 

you are certain to come again.   

Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet  

on the coffee table, lean back,  

and turn me into someone who can't  

take the trouble to speak; someone  

who can't sleep, or who does nothing  

but sleep; can't read, or call  

for an appointment for help.   

There is nothing I can do  

against your coming.  

When I awake, I am still with thee.

today i remember that look, i remember that feeling, and even though it has been years since my last major bout of depression, i still find myself fearing the worst. i was always watching, waiting, and almost welcoming it back like an old friend. today however, i have come to realize that if it does return, i can handle it. i can get through it just like every other time. in the past i used to get paralyzed by my fear of its return and it wasn't until i began to trust the ebb and flow of life that i finally allowed myself to breathe.

my fish axel...

i liked what people used to do in the old days when they took pictures of the dead, so when my dear beloved axel passed i felt it right to preserve his memory through one last portrait.

windows

Six Random Things...

I was tagged for the meme- 6 random things about me by: The Safety of Madness

I'm not sure what a meme is, but thought I would give it a try. I am supposed to post the rules, but given that I am not going to follow them exactly, I will just tell you that I am supposed to write six random things about myself and then pass it on to six more people.

I am not going to send this to six people, so I hope I don't get something like "fifty years bad luck" or whatever it is you get when you don't forward emails. Anyways, here are my random facts:

1) I have one sister who is 8 years older then me. I often forget to tell people she is my half sister because I don't ever think about it and find it irrelevant because she is just my sister, no half about it. This is never an issue until I say something about her "other" family and people get confused. For example: "my sister's dad designed the boats for two James Bond movies." This is true and people always get really confused. "your sisters dad? isn't he the same as yours???" Look him up: Doug Riddle. Riddle Marine Boats. yep yep.

2) I am six feet tall. For some reason people only feel that this is justified when you are a super athlete or a model. I wanted to do both but quickly decided that that was not the life for me. I would rather be tall and myself. That should be justification enough.

3) I am bipolar. This wasn't discovered until I was 19 and had a total meltdown. In my life I have been hospitalized for a total of 28 days.  I am now working to fight stigma and have now been stable for about two years. My mom and I are writing a book and we now have a website. We are also presenting at conferences around the country and working to publish in numerous magazines.

4) I once had a goldfish named axel. His name was not meant to come from Axel Rose, I just thought it was a good name for a goldfish. That or Thor which I will someday name a dog. Axel was a manicly depressed fighting fish. One day he decided that he didn't want to fight anymore and he sank to the bottom of his bowl. I waited for him to revive himself, but he only floated to the top. I gave him a funeral at Lake Michigan where we said our goodbyes and threw both him and his bowl into the water. Right as I was releasing the bowl he came back to life. But then died again. Maybe he is still living in Lake Michigan.

5)I am afraid of the downy bear, pretend easter bunnies and santas, and stuffed animals that come to life on television. Sometimes when the snuggles comes on tv I have to leave the room.

6) When I sleep I take over the entire bed. I sleep sideways and as my boyfriend says, like a triangle. I used to sleep with my feet in my sisters stomach, but those were the days when I was vicki vale and slept with "batman," an old backpack stuffed with junk with a cape tied to it. Now I sleep so wildly that I had to buy a satin pillow case just to keep my hair from being so matted when I wake up.

this and that

i find it amazing how i tend to break things into sides. as i have been told all my life, i am very "black and white." i find this interesting considering my being defined as bipolar. is my tendency to break things into good and evil, happy and sad, beautiful and ugly something that follows these newly defined brain patterns, or is it my natural disposition? could i have instead simply been influenced by the fact that i was raised by someone who is also said to be "black and white." i find it interesting how our social labels and categories are always used as a way to explain and excuse are natural tendencies. i tend to feel that my pull towards duality has a little to do with everything. i have always been a person that is entranced by beauty, and i have always felt that what we see as beautiful or ugly are only truly complimented by seeing both sides. you can never know how bright it is until you have been in the dark. you never know how slow you are going until you have transitioned from the freeway to a small side street, or vice versa. there are always two sides and i feel that without both there is no way to truly see the beauty in the ugliness. now, i have been told that i am full of shit when it comes to this topic, but this is how i feel and this is what i will stick to.

in my life i have seen both sides. i constantly move from what i see as "the good girl" to the "troublemaker," the bad girl. i always felt strangled at one end and guilty at the other. things are always hot or cold, right or wrong, happy or sad, everything or nothing at all. These are things i need to reconcile. these are things that do need to find a happy median, and while i do love to see both sides and compare one to the other, it is not always healthy and appropriate for certain situations.

i was taking a class where we read sense and sensibility. at the end of the class we were supposed to write a paper and i remember having such a hard time because i couldn't stop thinking about what i saw as the two vastly different sides. there was the romantic world of beauty and art and religion and the enlightenment world of science and reason. i had such a hard time because i wanted both and i felt both but i couldn't find a way to bring them together. after completely panicking as to why i could not see the middle i had a conversation with my boyfriend josh. now, while most people think their partners are wonderful and perfect, josh is truly the most amazing person i have ever met. he talked me down off my cliff and explained that he can't see it in any other way. he can't separate the two because he feels that they are so perfectly connected. at first hearing this i kind of wanted to punch him; here i was trying to figure something out and he comes along and says that he already figured it out. but then i realized that that wasn't what he was saying at all. he demonstrated to me that he is just the opposite. he just works differently than i do. his world is always connected and he seems to have the opposite problem.

this is beautiful because i stopped being upset and angry at myself for not seeing it in a certain way and realized that that is how i am. i am a person that tends to see things as dualities. it is not my fault that i see it one way or his fault that he sees it the other, it is just how we are. so today i work on finding the gray area in important life struggles that need a bit more stability, struggles that don't do well when you totter from side to side. today i also allow myself the ability to be okay with comparisons. i allow myself the ability to see both sides and find the beauty in one and then the other. but even that is about balance. it is a balance of finding the right time to use my new skills and the right time to allow my natural tendency for "black and white" to come out.

beach and snow

two weeks ago...

one year ago...

why the bunny years?

well, these are the years in which i am plagued with symbols. when i went into my "cave" i did not see a penguin as the narrator of Fight Club did; i instead saw a bunny. and then they followed me, popping up whenever life was ripe with meaning: the last night i was in chicago, drinking forties in the park with the man who saved my life, the first time i went to look for apartments with a boy, the first time meditation really found me...

the dungeness spit

there are certain things that accentuate our existence: a 5am 5 mile hike on dry sand, a bald eagle ten feet from your face, a dried otter on the beach, smiling flirting seals

Bombs and Feathers

on a day of sun and joy and plenty of free boyfriend time we decided to take an adventure, so we moseyed on down to the SLUT (or the seattle trolly thing whose initials are all i happen to remember, and i suppose that the true name isn't truly needed when we could simply call it the SLUT). Anyways, slut abound, we rode all the way to the city center. we wandered in and out of various seattley type places. walked through the expensive and newly remodeled SAM (seattle art museum) and missed the Chicago Art Institute. Went to the pike place market and wandered into an anarchist bookstore. spent lots and lots of time reading books about art, religion, mental health, science, history, philosophy, etc., etc., etc. my thoughts began to get somewhat anxious as i thought about china and tibet. iraq. iran. terrorism in south america. starving children. poor indian reservations. i started to hate the world and love it and wanted to save it and forget about it all at the same time. as i read and thought, (and inevitable bought) way too much i kept hearing screaming from outside. i thought i was losing my mind as my head turned over thoughts of fear and pain and inequality. i thought the world was ending. I knew i was hearing something and in my american media fed head i thought that there had to have been some tragic gun or bomb related event going on outside.

so we went outside

and we saw this...

 

and then we stood there in awe.

in my mind full of fear and violence and anger i thought the worst. and we all do. because time after time we hear these things on the radio on tv on movies in books. violence. war. fear. pain.

but instead it was merely fluff, and quite literally. feathers flew everywhere as hundreds of people brought their pillows for an impromptu pillow fight in the market. police in riot gear surrounded fearing the worst when all people wanted was a chance to mindlessly pound a stranger on the head with fluff.

hmm.

symbolic i suppose.