What is the magic of indwelling and what do I mean by that?
Dream language is symbol, metaphor, aphorism, expressed in images. Paradox is in-woven, threaded through every aspect of the image, the colour, atmosphere and quality. A dreamed or meditative image often shape-shifts. Understanding should be exciting and challenging, part of personal growth and self-discovery. Such images are Ariadne's Threads leading us deep within Psyche into subterranean, unexpressed feelings and emotions.
DreamWeaver's Corner with Dr. Niamh Clune is the place to visit if you want to learn the real truth about dreams. How to communicate with your soul through the symbols that come from the unconscious when you dream. There have been several posts so far that take you through many elements about dreams that you may have thought you knew but this is a whole different way of looking at what dreams really are. "We should not fear our images or emotions, even though they threaten to overwhelm us. This is the stuff of the unconscious..."Follow this reblog back to On The Plum Tree and read the most recent DreamWeaver's Corner and if you find intriguing what you discover then investigate further to see previous posts of DreamWeaver's Corner with Dr. Niamh Clune. While you are there you will also discover a wonderful source of creativity of all kinds. Investigate and find the artistic and magical and mystical. I highly recommend On The Plum Tree. I visit there all the time. Do take the time. You will value the opportunity and find art and enlightenment all at the same time. Jk the secret keeper
There are many things I would like to get to know about you but I am afraid I would be intruding on your privacy. I will guess instead or make up by filling in the spaces from what you say in group or afterwards. I am quite the detective. When I was a kid, I read all the Nancy Drew books I could get my hands on. Then as I got older I graduated to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. I read others but these two were my favorites and the most intelligent. I, also, got into the British detectives Inspectors Dagliesh and Morse on PBS. Liked reading P.D. James and Colin Dexter. I am a real mystery buff. Love a good mystery in a film, also. The point being I know how to put the pieces together rather quickly.
I should get on finishing up telling you about the cancer. The group, including Mr. Xxx were rather cavalier with my health when I received the diagnosis of Uterine cancer. It’s also called Endometrial cancer. When I got the courage up to tell the group I had been told I had cancer and they found out what kind, I felt like I got totally shot down and shut down. Everyone, including our fearless leader, thought it was the best possible news. Their logic being, if I was to get cancer, getting Uterine cancer was the best one to get. There was nothing to it. In and out for the operation and back on my feet in a couple of weeks. They were not very understanding or consoling at all. So, I think that had a lot to do with why I thoroughly shut down talking about it. I felt rejected. Like no one cared about me. I thought if I died it wouldn’t matter.
So, I started not taking it as seriously but still worried. Then My OB-Gyn told me it looked serious to her. My uterine wall was quite thick. It was a bad boxing day. That’s when she called to confirm the biopsy from the Uterine tissue she painfully scraped from the insides of my body. It was positive for cancer. Nice Christmas. She was great. She went out of her way to get the news to me as quickly as possible. Next step was to find the surgeon. It ended up being the Da Vinci
machine. State of the Art. Two weeks after surgery Scottie and I went to the surgeon behind the Da Vinci machine to get the results. He had us take seats on the other side of his rather large desk. He sat behind it looking like he was having a difficult time finding the words to say. His face wasn’t the kind anyone wants to see when they are waiting for news of this kind. We all looked at each other in the long silence. The doctor finally spoke.
He cleared his throat. “I am afraid I have some rather disturbing news for you, Madison. It seems the cancer has spread outside the containment area of your reproductive organs. It’s in your lymph system. The good news is that we feel and are quite certain that we took the lymph nodes that the cancer had entered. What this means is you have a diagnosis of Stage 3 Endometrial Cancer with an attachment to the lymphatic system. It means your case is a great deal more serious then we expected. Originally, we didn’t feel you would need anything more than the surgery. But now it appears after all you will have to go through a full treatment of Chemotherapy and a full course of Radiation Therapy Treatment that accompanies it. You will need to start almost immediately. Do you have any questions?”
I was dumbfounded and so was Scottie. It was going to really screw with her schedule. Not that she felt that was important at that moment. I thought it was and worried about it. I was trying to think about anything but what I had just heard. I was expecting to be cleared to go home and to continue on living my life in a normal way. With No more Cancer to worry about. Instead it had really only just started. I had just walked into a nightmare that was going to threaten my life from now on. I was never going to be safe from cancer again. From the moment my first doctor told me I would have to see a specialist, that was the beginning. I knew there was a reason I was avoiding it. My unconscious knew I was so god damn bloody sick. But I wasn’t going to listen to any of the signs. They weren’t going to tell me anything was wrong. Stubborn. Scottie kept telling me to call my doctor but I kept putting it off even though I was bleeding to death all the time.
Scottie and I left after we worked out a schedule for my treatment. It meant traveling over 3 hours every visit. That wasn’t going to work. I took the matters into my hands, especially after we would travel the distance for scheduled appointments and then wait there and find out after a few hours of waiting that we were not even on the schedule. I decided to find a place closer to home to receive treatments. They told me that would be impossible. They were wrong. I got on the phone the next day and before the afternoon was over I had a new oncologist. A new cancer center to go to and I could start right away with my treatments. All was transferred and it was a much quieter and comforting place.
End of the cancer saga for todays letter. Did not know I had that pent up inside of me. There is much more but I will keep spreading it out. It is more than I can deal with, so I can’t even imagine you, Annie, understanding what I was going through. No one can if they haven’t been through it. Truthfully, no empathizing will take you to the same place at all.
So, what I really wanted to talk about today was what has been happening inside me. More specifically, my feelings toward you. There’s just something that draws me into wanting to tell you everything. That must seem overwhelming I imagine. I started talk therapy when I was a teenager. It seems to have been converted into my confessional. My conversion into psychoanalysis. It’s a strong urge to understand my self. What’s the reason everything has happened the way it has. Why my life has been so fucked up. I need answers. I need to talk for all the years I was never allowed to. I was a silent child. I thought for quite some time that I was autistic. I was really convinced. I began studying autism in school. It seemed to fit all of my symptoms but I eventually figured out I was just a neglected and a severely abused child instead. Which was worse? I think both are.
Now I am living with another major setback attached to my psych problems. Have you ever heard of agoraphobia? Well, I am an agoraphobic who is not being treated and have never been treated for it or what it does for me except to have pills thrown at it. My fears are being allowed to grow. I don’t object because I don’’t want to experience the panic and anxiety that goes along with going out of the house or interacting with people. My partner, Scottie has her demons with dealing with it.
The pressure between us has been growing when Mr. Xxx started with his lack of support. Denying me my sense of reality. Making me feel like I am unable to interpret my feelings accurately about certain people I feel are treating me like shit. He defended Angie rather than supporting me. The problem comes in that we are both his clients but when he is in a session with me it is my time. That is when I should be getting his support, not her. He should be trying to understand what I am feeling and not Angie. He should be trying to help me understand why she is treating me with such vitriol. What I was feeling about what he was doing made no difference to him. He felt he had to protect Angie from me. I’ve been nothing but cordial to her and she just jumps all over me. Fuck Angie and Fuck Mr. Xxx.
I want to know why I am feeling so hostile. It’s always such a contest to battle out who is right rather then trying to figure out what is wrong. He just doesn’t feel like he cares or wants to understand the effects the group is having on me. I’m really hating to be in that room alone with Angie or him. It is becoming such a toxic place. Its only redeeming quality is that you are there and I feel you protect me. Otherwise I don’t feel safe at all.
You give me support. I wish you were the leader and that Mr. Xxx would resign from the group. He’s threatened to do it enough times. Why doesn’t he just do it and turn the leadership over to you full time. I’d like that more than anything else. Maybe Angie would leave with him.
You’d be so perfect. You could rebuild the group and maybe we would actually talk about something relevant and we would lose him monopolizing every session with his damn stories that haven’t any relevance. We could actually do therapy. Oh, do think about it. Maybe you could work on him and make him decide he is not right for the group any longer or the group is not right with him, that it needs a woman leading a women’s therapy group and not a man.
That is probably enough for this letter. This just exhausts me. I promise I will talk more about it. I just want you to know that I am really beginning to trust you. It’s because I want to and I am believing you will come through and live up to deserving that trust, I think you have already. I do trust you. I want and need to.
I’ll have more to tell you next time. Maybe we can talk some about the individual members of the group besides Mr. Xxx. You need to know more detailed information about them to better understand the dynamics between everyone. It is quite an interesting group broken off into its’ segments. It’s all too depressing to me.
Until next time I will leave you with one secret. Watch out for Robin. She is not your friend. Do not trust her. I don’t want to see you get hurt. That is all I will say for now.
Regards,
Madison(This note is to ensure that each letter is written in the strictest of confidence.)
To Annie,
At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the barriers or boundaries of what the potentials could be between us and the development of our relationship.
I am adding this in order that you, Annie Haskell, will know that I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. It will free up my words as I speak them upon the page. And on some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I write in honesty, but for now I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
I rather left you hanging in my last letter regarding my cancer saga. Not trying to be flippant but a touch less severe or dramatic. The story does continue. But today, there are other matters I want to write about. So, I will keep it brief that aspect of my past that has to do with my recovery.
After leaving you hanging on my near death experience and no diagnosis could be found, eventually they discovered a virus that was causing the effects of some tropical illness. Nothing would stay down. My insides were shrinking. They had to hydrate me. I was losing masses of weight. Over the course of one night i lost twenty pounds. I just could not eat and when I did it wouldn’t stay down. I was on a diet of jello and ginger ale and my regular medications. They had to switch everything over to IV.
There were these great blue parachute bags that opened up quickly and kept what came up well contained. No messes. I use to be bulimic and this was worse then that ever was. Losing weight did satisfy my anorexic mindset but as Scottie would say, “That is not the way to lose weight.” I think it became her mantra with me. Eating was not one of my favorite things. And now that I am feeling a touch better. I am so particular about what I want and can put in my stomach. Everything needs to be mild and mostly white.
As I began to feel better, all seemed like I was recovering. No more Chemo. Hurray! But still Monday through Friday Scottie took me to my radiation treatment. They were an experiment in visiting Hell. They were killing the bone marrow in my hip where blood was made so enters my anemia with an already compromised immune system this was affecting my ability to make red and white blood cells.
I will stop here. Without meaning to I wrote more than I wanted but I guess it is something I never talked to anyone about at any length. I kept it all hidden. Not even Scottie. She was overloaded with caring for me. She lived it. I’m sure she didn’t want to hear about it.
What I really wanted to write to you about today is my connection to you in the women’s group. Ever since I returned, I want more and more for you to be leading the group. You may not say much but what you do say is so much more poignant than anything Mr. Xxx ever goes on and on about, blowing his bubbles, signifying nothing. You are so sensitive. You actually listen. He’s always waiting to jump in somewhere with what he wants to say next. He just has his stories he has to be sure to tell. And they never really focus on what you pour your heart into saying. That’s why I have pretty much given up. He has sucked any emotions I have out of me. I haven’t felt anything but panic and anxiety since I first started seeing him.
The closer I feel toward what you are meaning to the group and me the further away from Mr. Xxx I am growing. He has been my private therapist since I left doing therapy with another therapist. I never wanted to leave her but insurance caused us to end our relationship of over 7 years. Her name was Irene. I was so strongly attached to her. We met once a week and between sessions I would always need to call her to talk and I would write her a letter every week.
The month of our last visit was the same month and year that Princess Diana was killed in the car crash in Paris. I had started with Mr. Xxx right away. I was a basket case and needed to continue therapy without any interruption. After one or two of our sessions he asked me to write a poem about something, anything. I had told him that I was a writer and had written a novel and started many others. I, also, mentioned I was a poet from the time I was a teenager or maybe even before that.
I remember my grandmother and I had invented a secret alphabet in order to communicate privately with each other. We didn’t want anyone else to be able to read what we were writing to each other. I was pretty young when we did that. It was the signs of the beginnings of a budding author or someone with a keen imagination. That’s what my grandmother told me. She always encouraged me. She was the one person in my childhood that was not a nightmare to me or an abuser or bully.
Back to Mr. Xxx, while I was seeing him I did write that one poem. It was about the effect Princess Diana’s death had on me, which was very traumatic. It turned out to be the only poem and the only thing I wrote during the almost ten years that I have been seeing him. He slowly started sucking the life out of me. Everyone thought that I should replace him. I knew I needed a new therapist but I was too afraid of the change.
The people in my life were and are constantly putting pressure on me to terminate my therapy with him. They all feel it is a toxic relationship. I feel nothing inside with him. I am an emotional zombie with the exception of my alter Brad, who is filled with rage and comes out and tells him off all the time. He is always pissing Brad off. I should tell you up front Brad is a young teenager, male, who protects us all. He is our guardian. We want to confess to you that we have dissociative identity disorder. There are many of us inside but Brad is the most out going. He isn’t afraid of anything or anyone. Some day as we get to know you we will tell you more about us.
Back to the asshole, Mr. Xxx. I suppose we shouldn’t call him that with you. I will just tell you he makes us feel on the defensive all the time. We can’t trust him and for sure we never feel we can open up to him. We keep our true feelings or thoughts locked in a secure place inside us. Directness with him is like a battle for attention. Mr. Xxx always wants the floor or has an excuse for what he has to say.
He tries to make or causes us to deny our sense of realty. We would finally think we could tell him something real. But then we would feel like Charlie Brown kicking the football and he would become Lucy. I just realized she is a cheap therapist. So is he or should be. So, at the last moment he would prove once again we couldn’t trust him. He always has a way of twisting my feelings into being wrong and defends the person I am having the negative feelings about even though they were being mean as Hell to me. That’s when he would push me into a dark corner and Brad would come out in a raging fury and want to tear him apart for being such a Dickhead.
It was always more his session than ours. He has to show off how smart he is and would always try to one up on us whenever I said anything about art or what was happening in the news or any ideas. He always felt insecure or something and felt he had to prove he knew more than I did. I am not an egotist but I am rather brilliant and artistic and inside of my mind there is so much activity going on all the time and such a thirst for knowledge and philosophical thinking and creative ideas about subjects I wanted to write about. What I lacked was understanding from him. But enough about him or I’ll scream.
Now I would like to get a touch more personal with you. I told you some of the outline of my relationship with Mr. Xxx. It helps explain why I am thinking seriously about finding a new therapist. I know you are in no place for it to be you, at least right now. But someday, I want to know if I ever do ask that question whether the answer will be yes?
I should be completely honest with you about some of the ways that I feel. One thing that is strong in me is that I get jealous. I also get attached and can be rather dependent. I am in control of my behavior but I do feel very intense about people I care about. For an example, you seem to have a certain relationship between yourself and Robin. You engage in some intense conversations after group is over and then you give her a ride home. Now I am not exactly sure why this bothers me but it does.
Before I became ill I always took Robin home. We would have these intense conversations. Now I am not sure if I am jealous, just a touch because she talks to you, or you talk to her and spend time with her. What I am saying I think or feel I want to be in Robin’s place. I want the intense conversations with you. But also I want my friend back. That’s a real Catch-22.
We also take the same road home and I can see you both sitting in your car talking. How crazy am I that it bothers me. I don’t really want you two to be close. I can absolutely not talk to Mr. Xxx about what I am feeling. The Goddess knows what he would say. Not going to trust that.
I hope you are able to understand the trust I am placing in you being so direct and honest. Closeness with you is something I would like to build between us.
Until the next time I see you I will close with a thank you for listening.
Regards,
Madison(This note is to ensure that all is written in the strictest of confidence.)
To Annie,
At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the barriers or boundaries of what the potentials could be between us and the development of our relationship.
I am adding this in order that you, Annie Haskell, will know that I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. It will free up my words as I speak them upon the page. And on some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I write in honesty, but for now I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
I feel a need to be a bit less formal in addressing you. So, from now on I will just use your first name Annie. It sounds so much better than writing: Dear Annie Haskell. That does sounds rather formal and weird.
Let me start out by telling you something of what I have gone through over the past year, to fill you in on me. If it were not for the support of the women from my therapy group, I don’t know what would have happened to me. To begin with, I am the only one that remains from the original group. As you could see from last week, everyone was so warm to me on my return after being away for over 8 months. And they really made me feel wanted, like I belonged. If you knew what world I came from you would understand how important that is to me.
When I was in the hospital, group members visited daily. I never believed anyone cared that much. It definitely made me feel good. My body was so weak. It was hard to find the energy to stay conscious while everyone visited. My health sucked. Dying wasn’t very far away. I had blood transfusions. It may have been exhausting to visit with my friends but I wanted them to be there. Some place inside of me and the help of their energy, I found an inner strength so I could stay conscious during their visits.
One special friend, Kristina, came every evening. We would talk or just hang out. We’d listen to the television. The nursing staff would check on me. Do their tests. Lots of needles. Hate needles. Kristina was a great friend. I never had to pretend with her. We talked about whatever thoughts came into our minds. Her friendship was open to any conversation and any topic. Nothing was taboo. She stayed until late just as I would start falling asleep.
I should mention that the hospital had open visitation twenty-four/seven every day of the week. Visitors sometimes slept there and joined in meals with friends or family members. It was an inviting place. I loved the nursing staff except one.
She would always wake me at 2am. One night, I could not believe it, a really bad night, I had finally fallen asleep. There she was, shaking my shoulder to wake me. She made me get out of bed so she could weigh me. If I had the strength I would have told her to GO FUCK OFF. But I was too tired and too polite. I relayed this story to another night nurse, she told me I should have told her to GO FUCK OFF. I could do that. Well, I did not know that. I was losing weigh rather drastically but please do not wake someone so ill when sleep is so precious and limited. I am surprised that murders do not happen in hospitals more often, but to the staff with people like that jack-ass.
My mate, Scottie, that I’ve been with for almost forever, wasn’t too partial to hospitals, so we spoke more on the phone, several times a day, and just before I went to sleep at night. She did visit me in the hospital every day but I could tell she was like a cat out in a rain storm, just not her place. Inside her head, the following words were reverberating, “GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” And that is the correct volume level those words would make.
She was there for me completely, though. she was constantly on a deadline, an artist in great demand. She is a film director and writer. She was in editing during this time so she could be around more than usual. She was there for radiation treatments and three hours of chemotherapy. I usually fell asleep. Eventually, we decided I would contact her by cell phone a short time before chemo was over for the day. That seemed more than generous to me for her, then she wait with me all that time. I felt a touch selfish imposing on her, taking her away from her own time and demands. The studios weren’t going to so patient if she didn’t get her film edited by the deadline. Fortunately she was also one of the producers. So she did rule somewhat. But she didn’t need to watch me have poison dripping from a hanging plastic bag, coursing through my veins, gradually making me feel violently ill. Scottie didn’t need to be there for that. She needed the time off from me, too, and the things she needed to do for me that no one would want to ask anyone to ever do for them.
Unfortunately, the day came when Scottie was taking me to one of my usual chemotherapy treatments. She always waited until I was set up with my medicine bags and settled in before taking off. On this particular day, it seemed like it was taking forever for them to get things started. I had my usual blood tests before treatments. They always checked for blood counts and other important tests to be sure I was physically okay to receive the treatments. Scottie and I waited in one of the treatment rooms, which was near enough to the nurses’ desk. We could hear some of the words that were being exchanged between staff. We could hear the Doctor speaking. Not the specific words until I heard my name. Scottie looked at me. Both of us were puzzled. It was then I heard the word hospital. Plus no one had come to set up my medicine IVs. No one was coming to talk to us. It seemed like time had vanished. Nothing was moving forward. I was getting a bad sense that something was starting to move in the wrong direction. Motion stopped. Just sounds could be heard but nothing was making any sense.
Finally my doctor and nurse entered the treatment room. They faced Scottie and me. They revealed it was my body. The blood tests were not good. My body was not tolerating the Chemo. Instead it was close to killing me. (My words, not theirs. Their words were that I was extremely ill.) Scottie took my hand when the doctor told us that my blood count was basically nonexistent. My chemo had been cancelled and arrangements had been made to admit me into the hospital immediately. My condition was serious. I had a fever and an infection that they were unable to diagnose and no immune system to fight it. An expert from the Center from Disease Control was called in on my case. No one had any idea what was wrong with me. I was put into quarantine. Not sure if they were afraid my health would be compromised or whether I was a danger to the other patients in the hospital. All sorts of special procedures were initiated while treating me. No one was allowed to touch me or get too close to me. Any medical staff had to put on special clothing. It was all rather “House” or “ER.”
Well, I’d say that’s enough for now about the cancer. I want you to know that today I noticed you again, Annie. I couldn’t help but want to look at you but I didn’t want you to know that or anyone else to. I don’t like people to see my feelings on the outside, even in a therapy setting. It makes me feel too shy. Looking at you makes me feel shy. And it makes me feel awkward wanting to just watch you but feeling I couldn’t and shouldn’t. Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not a stalker. It’s just you. You’re hard not to look at. It’s not objectification. You must know that you are beautiful and there is something deeper than that. You have an aura of tenderness that surrounds you. I know I must not be the only one that feels this way or senses something really special coming from inside of you. I know I am really highly sensitive to other people. I feel what’s going on inside of them. That’s why I often need to block people out.
But let me put a question to you. Is there anyone in your life that tells you how beautiful and amazing you are? I mean on a regular basis? If you answer no, than I need to say that there should be. I, also, noticed how very quiet you are. It seems you are as shy as I am. But then, this was only the second time we were in the same room together, I could be wrong about the shyness. We’ll have to wonder about that for another time.
I saw my therapist later after group and I asked him about you. The first thing he told me was that you were there more as an observer, trying to learn about group dynamics. How they functioned in a real setting. Sometimes, he said that you would participate, but not that frequently. I must say that was a disappointment to hear. I was hoping for more but for now, simply your presence will have to be enough. He did inform me you are working on a college degree and training to become a psychoanalyst. That was the best part of what he said. That is somehow comforting to me. I am delighted to know you are working on becoming a psychoanalyst.
But even better for the present, I would be seeing you in our women’s therapy group every week. That to me made my day complete. I love that idea. But then he came out with the best part, he told me that if he wasn’t able to cover a group session, you would take over in his place. I held back my enthusiasm. He didn’t need to know how much that statement thrilled me. Just to have someone else cover a group session would have been enough but to have that person be you, well, that brought my day up to the highest level possible.
He, also, finally got to the place where he told me that last week, the week I returned, was coincidentally your first session with the group. That really surprised me. It made me wonder why he hadn’t introduced you last week to the group. But then I remembered I was a few moments late arriving. Anyway, I let it go.
Back to you entering into my life the same day that I entered into yours. I enjoy when serendipity happens. It creates a sense of magic in my mind and an opening up of so many feelings inside me. The best part is feeling the excitement that maybe someday I could actually ask you a super important question. It might sound strange coming from me right now but I’m going to ask it anyway. Here goes, I would like it if some day when you have completed your studies and are finally registered as a professional psychoanalyst, if you could or would see me in a professional capacity. Sometime in the future, I would like to be your client.
Surprised? At this moment, I will not explain why I would be asking you that question. Wait patiently and in some future letter, I will go into more detail on why, I feel, that question is appropriate.
Regards,
Madison Taylor
Ps. I believe in my next letter I shall drop the formality of signing my letters to you, using my family’s name. I will just use Madison. Let’s see how I feel then before I definitely decide.
ATTENTION: (This I add to each letter I write to you, so that you know they are all written in the strictest of confidence.) To Annie, at this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish with sense of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the barriers or boundaries of what the potentials could be between us and the development of our relationship. I am adding this in order that you, Annie Haskell, will know that I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. It will free up my words as I speak them upon the page. And on some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I write in honesty, but for now I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that. Regards, Madison Taylor.
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.” ― Alain de Botton
“The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It’s Intimacy” ― Richard Bach
“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock ‘n’ roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.” ― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
“It’s funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.” ― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves
“This is what intimacy does to us over time. That’s what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other’s stories.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
“My skin will never work like that again, so aware of the other person that I’m unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with another person.” ― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
“Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is reserved.” ― John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
“In every friendship hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating, but one being torn asunder.” ― Fulton J. Sheen
“Can the purpose of a relationship be to trigger our wounds? In a way, yes, because that is how healing happens; darkness must be exposed before it can be transformed. The purpose of an intimate relationship is not that it be a place where we can hide from our weaknesses, but rather where we can safely let them go. It takes strength of character to truly delve into the mystery of an intimate relationship, because it takes the strength to endure a kind of psychic surgery, an emotional and psychological and even spiritual initiation into the higher Self. Only then can we know an enchantment that lasts.” ― Marianne Williamson, Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power Of Intimate Relationships
“Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.”
― John Green
“Mystical experiences do not necessarily supply new ideas to the mind, rather, they transform what one believes into what one knows, converting abstract concepts, such as divine love, into vivid, personal, realities.” ― R.M. Jones
When Bipolar: Experiencing Depression
Part 2
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Abstract Digital Art by j. kiley
Posted on 03.11.13
I am addicted to film. They are a way of working with depression. I lose myself in films as long as I am able to absorb myself in what I am watching. As of late, I have been having difficulty keeping my attention on anything that I do except when I am working on my creative writing or working on my art work or while reading or doing research all related to the creative work that I am doing.
I hope this is helpful as an inspiration to help entertain & help while feeling depressed. Looking for a way to help release the emotional pain that depression brings on can feel unbearable & leads one many times into a state of depression that carry with it the depths of darkness where suicidal feelings lay in wait to be awakened by the slightest trigger. Once the suicidal thoughts & feelings come to the surface it is most difficult to process or find relief from their destructive nature.
With depression & suicidal thoughts, one needs to learn a method to work through the sensations that are extremely painful or numbing & can make one feel so desperate that death feels like the only answer to eliminating the overwhelming intensity of pain. There is an increasing level of thought that goes through the mind that feels like the devil is sitting on one shoulder and an angel sitting on the other. What choice should you make? It seems often that to kill one’s self pulls at your attention the strongest. You try to think about the ones that you love & would hurt if you killed yourself. But the state of your mind doesn’t always feel that it would matter that much if you were gone. You would miss their love as well as your loving them. Certain people you would feel more of a loss and it hurts you that the love you felt would turn into pain but it isn’t always strong enough to hold you here, Your animals would come to mind & you know there are certain ones that would be lost without you. No one else would understand them or be able to love them the way that you are able to. You would feel awful leaving them alone. Somehow your senses are being pulled so hard to harm yourself. You just want to die. You just can’t feel the way you do any longer, no matter who you were leaving behind.
I let these thoughts & feelings go through me & I experience them all. I write poetry & other writing, like letters to particular people I feel will understand, But often I don’t turn to anyone. When I feel that depressed that I want to die is when I am least able to reach out to anyone. So many times I have tried to call a chat-line for people who want to kill themselves but I have only gotten as far as almost pushing the button but I can never do it. Even calling my psychotherapist is extremely difficult. I go back & forth as to whether I will call her to speak or leave a voicemail. It is hard for me to ask for help when I am feeling that deeply into a depression.
Eventually, the mood is released & I am pulling out of the nose dive & starting to come up again. The feelings of craziness starts to subside. I always feel like I have done something wrong for feeling those feelings. It is the same when I am at the other end of the cycle. When in a manic phase I actually feel crazier when I am excited than when I am wanting to commit suicide. At least when I want to die I am extremely subdued but when I am manic, I act out & I know that I get so wound up that I sound in my own head like I am as mad as the hatter but I cannot help my behavior. I am just a bit off my nut. I get the feeling of whimsy and get extremely poetic. That is when I actually feel like I am getting myself into more trouble & I am causing those I love to think I am more crazy when I am high than when I am depressed & want to die. Either end of the mood cycle I would say that I am a bit off of what is good for me mentally & emotionally. The extremes take me out of my safe zones where I feel I have any control. And control is extremely important to me. I do not like losing it at all. I am afraid to be too real. It may feel real & real may feel connected but it scares the hell out of me to think or feel I may be out of control in any way. Even though, I must admit, when I am free, I feel good in the sense that I am alive whether high on a mania or low in a depression & want to kill myself. At least, I am doing something with my life rather than subduing all the elements that make me act like I am being a human animal with all the thoughts & feelings of being alive & real & being who I really am.
When I am feeling depressed, the things that I choose to come in contact with are usually sad. The movies I watch, art I view, drawings I sketch, poems I write, and music I listen to are all depressing and – at times dark. My therapist wants me to laugh but I want to listen to music that makes me feel what I feel inside. If I am depressed I want to watch a film that is sad or listen to music that is filled with pain or longing. I love the group Evanescence & their song “My Immortal”… It’s about grief and loss. While listening to the song, I feel what the song feels. I listen to a great deal of emotionally raw music b/c I feel connected to it. I love Whitney Houston & I cannot go a day without listening to something that she sings. It seems I am always finding new songs that she recorded that I for some reason have never heard. It makes me feel like she’s still there with me. I just feel really attached to her. Felt that way from the first moment I heard her sing “Greatest Love of All” many years ago before I had any idea who she was. I fell in love with her voice and her. I’ve never stopped caring about her and loving her.
It makes sense to me to want to hear her music. It brings me closer to her. I can feel her with me. That may sound crazy but I need to feel those feelings. Someone wrote that they needed to fully embrace the experience of the depression & the sadness, It brings it to the surface & I feel the fullness of the feelings. I just can’t let those feelings go. The depression comes on me and so does wanting to die. I have to accept that those feelings exist. I, also, have to accept that I do get high on the feelings of the mania. I have all this energy. I am working on both ends of the spectrum and on the middle ground too. It’s a slow process but I am working on it. I need some help. I need my therapist and I need to be able to express what I feel. Most of all I need to know from those people I love that it is okay to be me. To not feel I have to hide what or who I am & to not fear expressing my feelings. I am working on trying to do the good things that will help me with all these mood changes. Maybe someday I will find level ground. I know I don’t want to lose who I am. I need to create. That I can never allow anyone to take away from me ever again. No more messing with my mind, my body, my feelings, which means my heart and my soul. jk the secret keeper
“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” ― Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” ― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
“When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” ― David Foster Wallace
“Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.” ― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” ― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint-it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.” ― Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
“The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud — the obstacles of life and its suffering. … The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. … Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. ” ― Goldie Hawn
“Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.” ― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
“Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.” ― Sally Brampton, Shoot The Damn Dog: A Memoir Of Depression
The Hours: Depression. Suicide. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – a thread throughout the entire film. An intense film can draw you out of yourself. I, so, love Virginia Woolf that the mere presence of her in the film carries me back in time. It causes me to feel such intense feelings for what she must have experienced. I connect to her pain & awkwardness & complete sense of feeling madness taking over her mind. She doesn’t want to burden her husband Leonard any longer or her family, that she decides to place heavy rocks in the pockets of her coat and walks into the river Ouse & drowns so that all the pain will be washed away. Suicide is a theme in this film & failing relationships. It is attractive to me when I am depressed for I feel a oneness with several of the characters & it makes me feel more connected with my own self through their lives.
What Dreams May Come: Death. Finding Your Loved One In Hell. Going through the many level of death, trying to get your loved one to remember you. Once done you both are brought to Paradise. Illusions in film are sometimes beautiful & often horrible but the thought of being reunited with the person you most love is well worth the journey. Most would go to the ends of the Universe to find their love but to the basement of Hell that is one long perilous journey.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Losing Your Memories of Ever Knowing the Person You Love. You ask for your memory to be wiped. I am rooting for the two main characters in this film that they will find a common ground in which to make their relationship work but it seems they always end up wiping their memories clean & once again play out their destiny to meet & repeat their love affair all over again. It is serious & amusing at the same time. So there are laughs but there is a sadness & desperation of wanting the two to actually work out their love relationship. It is the romantic in me to believe that there are soul mates out there and that love can& does in some cases last forever throughout eternity as it was for the Browning’s, Elizabeth Barrett & Robert.
Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Fellowship of the Ring. The Two Towers & Return of the King. Escape. Fantasy. Lofty. Good triumphs over evil. Appeal to noble instincts against the worst sort of odds. Coming together of people from all magical dimensions to fight the good fight and be triumphant. The struggle to carry out the journey only one can achieve, of course, with the help of his best companion & being waylaid by evil all along the quest.
Harry Potter: (all eight in series) These films grew in maturity & I love Daniel Radcliffe & Emma Watson. I loved the fact that practically every top rated British actor did a role in these films. Once again Fantasy, it always hits in a good place for me. It takes you into a world that is impossible to have experienced until you either read the books or watched these films. It was a tradition in our household that S would receive as a present every hardcover book of Harry Potter as soon as released, usually around her birthday. And the best collection of each film would follow around Christmas to show up under the imaginary or potted tree for a present for S. I love Harry & Hermione the most. Ron was a good sidekick but I really wanted to Hermione & Harry to end up together but I suppose it did all work out. There were several gasps when certain characters died that you did not expect. Especially, a certain rather short fellow that you got attached to. Time for a Harry Potter marathon. S does LOTR marathons all the time. I usually get into Twin Peaks marathons. I am due a Lost marathon. I missed all of year 6 b/c of being extremely ill. I literally Lost that year of my life. There is no recall of anything that happened that year.
Somewhere In Time: A Love Story where the two lovers are separated by Time, torn apart & the only way they can be rejoined is for one to travel back in time in order to meet. An unfortunate thing happens with a penny from his present. Its presence in the past cause him to be jerked back to his present. He is too weak so is unable to return. He must die to be reunited with his beloved. The music & the love story is the most beautiful, sad & love story ever. I cry every time I see it. I listen to the music from it quite often.
The Sound of Music: Favorite film of all time & most watched film, also. Love. Family. Romance. Shyness. Finding a mother who loves you. Falling in love. Beautiful music. Longing glances. Escaping the Nazis with success but leaving their old life behind. The only life that they knew, Facing an unknown future. Beautiful music & scenery & love growing throughout.
Ruling Class: It is about Insanity, in part. Peter O’Toole opens the film as Jesus Christ & his father erotically hangs himself by accident while trying to achieve sexual satisfaction. JC inherits the fortune. It’s a comedy. Really. Interesting transformation. The family are all nuts. In the family’s efforts to lead him off the cross they haphazardly turn him into Jack the Ripper. He goes from the God of Love to the God of Vengeance. There is singing, dancing, lewd jokes & murder. It is quite funny. Makes you forget about the fact that you are feeling so depressed.
V for Vendetta: Evey is an ordinary girl capable of overcoming her fear and being a part of a revolution. This is an empowering film. The hero V blows up the root of Power – The House of Parliament. After living under the oppressive rule of a Talking Head tyrannical government. First, V starts with a list of people who are high up in the group of Talking Heads & one at a time starts methodically killing in a manner that fit each one’s past transgressions. Great Explosive Ending. The People’s Revolution a total success. Very Uplifting.
Except for great mysteries, the category of films that Girl Interrupted is in, I would say that I love most films that take place in mental hospitals or that have psychotherapists and patients as main characters. I’ve been drawn to psychological films since I was a child when I first saw David & Lisa. Psychology has fascinated me with my first contact with the subject. Understanding how the mind works. Why we feel the way we do. How our lives are affected/effected by merely living it. All the traumas of the world that we have or come in contact with during the course of living. There are predators out there that fuck you up. There are chemical imbalances that fuck up our brains or so they say. I like to watch people with questionable mental creativeness interact. The ability to not block your ego from letting everything out. Feeling your inhibitions unblocked or so it seems. What is insanity after all? Does it really exist or are some people just too sensitive for this world?
There is a long list of films in this category that I have seen & would recommend when depressed. First film after David & Lisa and Girl Interrupted are the following: Suddenly, Last Summer. Lilith. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Prince of Tides. Spellbound. Freud. A Dangerous Method. Good Will Hunting. Sybill. Mr. Jones. Primal Fear. Nuts. Marnie. Beyond Therapy. (All excellent films & dramas except Beyond Therapy, which is a Robert Altman comedy of errors. If you are an Altman fan you will find this film hysterically funny & it will lift almost any ones depression at least during the time while you watch this film.) Another film S reminded me of which she absolutely hates but knows I absolutely love. I had a therapist that use to tease me jokingly about this film & said please don’t ever do that to me. The film is called: What About Bob? This is the ultimate OCD film comedy of all times. Bob gets a new psychotherapist who is about to go on vacation, He sees Bob once & recommends another psychotherapist he can see during the summer during his vacation. Well, Bob has bonded extremely intensely with his new therapist & goes to extremes to follow him to where he is on his summer vacation. Every psychotherapist’s nightmare. His family absolutely adore Bob. It is extremely funny & frustrating. Good for any depression, I think. The psychological film list of greats: As Good As It Gets. Three Faces of Eve. Persona. Shutter Island. A Beautiful Mind. Harvey. Twelve Monkeys. All of them excellent. Forgot The Sixth Sense: “I see dead people.” An amazing film that will take you out of yourself. You will be so amazed at the twists & turns of this film. By now everyone knows the ending but just in case I am not revealing it here. I do in my dreams what this kid does in his waking hours.
The film list continues with just a few more suggestions…
Donnie Darko: Destiny. Who expects something to fall out of the sky & crash through your bedroom roof & kill you while you are asleep. That is not the film. The film is what happens before the Big Event. It’s a quirky, time distortion, strange story about a kid who seems to be living in another time zone from the rest of the world around him. Great film.
Proof: Shows the growth of a loving relationship between a daughter, who is a touch questionably balanced, & her father who was losing his mental faculties. Both brilliant mathematicians who are trying to solve an extremely important & complicated math problem. At least, important to them. Then enters the sister from Hell who after their father dies, tries to sell the family home & bring her sister back with her to live in the city, after spending her entire life in that house. It’s a brilliant film. Very moving but pisses you off b/c the sister just doesn’t get it.
Inception: This film will blow your fucking mind. It takes you on a trip through the corridors of time & space so that you cannot tell where or when you are in reality or inside of a dream. The world around you keeps caving in. Might be a great distraction for someone depressed. The world in the film seems a hell of lot worse than the delusions you might be experiencing in the reality you are presently in. I still haven’t figured out the ending. Totally disagree with S even though we have played the last scenes over and over again.
My favorite films with Julie Andrews, who I adore & she can help me through some of my many mood changes. Good love stories & musicals, sad or happy: Tamarind Seed. The Americanization of Emily. Thoroughly Modern Millie. Victor/Victoria. Princess Diaries I. Mary Poppins. I mentioned The Sound of Music earlier. Just having them on in the background helps.
Musicals on the stage & on film. Those over the years that have helped with depression are: West Side Story. All That Jazz. Showboat. Funny Girl. The Pirates of Penzance. Hair. Hello Dolly. Chicago. Moulin Rouge (with Nicole Kidman & Ewan McGregor). Musicals help me to get in touch with what I am feeling but those feelings are usually good or real, not bad. Feelings are never bad.
jk the secret keeper
This is the end of part 1–part 2 follows next post When Bipolar: Experiencing Depression
Virginia Woolf: “If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know. Only I can understand my condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.” — “The Hours”
Virginia Woolf: “You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.” — “The Hours”
Virginia Woolf: “Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.” — “The Hours”
Virginia Woolf: “A woman’s whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life.” — “The Hours”
Virginia Woolf: “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It’s contrast.”
— “The Hours”
Angelica Bell: “What happens when we die?” Virginia Woolf: “What happens?”
[pause] Virginia Woolf: “We return to the place that we came from.” Angelica Bell: “I don’t remember where I came from.” Virginia Woolf: “Nor do I.”
— “The Hours”
Clarissa Vaughn: “I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.” — “The Hours”
Leonard Woolf: “Do you think it’s possible that bad writing actually attracts a higher incidence of error?”
— “The Hours”
Virginia Woolf: “Did it matter, then, she asked herself, walking toward Bond Street. Did it matter that she must inevitably cease, completely. All this must go on without her. Did she resent it? Or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? It is possible to die. It is possible to die.”
— “The Hours”
Virginia Woolf: “I was going to kill my heroine. But I’ve changed my mind. I fear I may have to kill someone else, instead.”
— “The Hours”
Virginia Woolf: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel I can’t go through another one of these terrible times and I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices and can’t concentrate so I am doing what seems to be the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I know that I am spoiling your life and without me you could work and you will, I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. Virginia”
— “The Hours”
Galadriel: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. It began with the forging of the Great Rings. Three were given to the Elves, immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven to the Dwarf lords, great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the race of men, who, above all else, desire power. But they were, all of them, deceived, for another Ring was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master Ring, to control all others. And into this Ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One Ring to rule them all.” — LOTR “The Fellowship of the Rings”
Galadriel: ” And the ring of power has a will of its own. …some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge. …Darkness crept back into the forests of the world. Rumor grew of a shadow in the East, whispers of a nameless fear, and the Ring of Power perceived. Its time had now come. …something happened that the Ring did not intend. It was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable. A hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, of the Shire. For the time will soon come when hobbits will shape the fortunes of all…”
— LOTR “The Fellowship of the Rings”
Frodo: “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.” — LOTR “The Fellowship of the Rings”
Elise McKenna: “The man of my dreams has almost faded now. The one I have created in my mind. The sort of man each woman dreams of, in the deepest and most secret reaches of her heart. I can almost see him now before me. What would I say to him if he were really here? “Forgive me. I have never known this feeling. I have lived without it all my life. Is it any wonder, then, I failed to recognise you? You, who brought it to me for the first time. Is there any way that I can tell you how my life has changed? Any way at all to let you know what sweetness you have given me? There is so much to say. I cannot find the words. Except for these: I love you”. Such would I say to him if he were really here.” — “Somewhere In Time”
V: “…words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning…where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission… He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent… More than four hundred years ago a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives… if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you…allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.”
— “V for Vendetta”
Cobb: “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”
— “Inception”
Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison: “War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he’s capable of. It’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us, it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.”
— “The Americanization of Emily”
Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison: “I don’t want to know what’s good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn’t good, or bad, or true. It’s merely factual, it’s sensual, it’s alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be.”
— “The Americanization of Emily”
the perks of being a wallflower
film review by jennifer kiley
created 02.17.13
posted 02.18.13
Emma Watson—Sam; Logan Lerman—Charlie; Ezra Miller—Patrick
The Perks of Being a Wallflower was a surprise from beginning to end. When choosing to rent the film “Bully” other films were suggested. I had heard of this film but did not know many details about it, so when I saw it amongst the other choices to check out I looked into it. My partner told me that Emma Watson was in it. Well, that was all I needed to hear, being a Harry Potter fan and loving the character of Hermione Granger & sharing the same birthday as Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself. It was a go. I watched a brief trailer and read a synopsis of the film and was more and more encouraged to wanting to see it like NOW. Well, after putting it into the DVD player a little less than five hours ago from writing this, I was totally swept away by the first song that opened up the film. I have the video on this post: Could It Be Another Change by the Samples. Brilliant lyrics, beautiful song. It draws you quickly into the feel of the film. I included a trailer and the three stars and director appearing on Anderson Live. It is a short but fun video of this amazing cast and the director. Perks… is adapted from the book. The screenplay is quite intelligent, written perfectly and the story is a surprise in every moment. You have no idea what to expect. It unfolds sometimes with a bite and then a gentle nudge.
The relationships that develop are unique. The uncertainty of whether one is watching a comedy sometimes and a drama at others makes for a delightful and warming comfort that these young people in high school have found each other. But it isn’t simple at all. Events, memories and conversations that occur are never predictable and hold many startling surprises. I was spellbound by the entire film. I rewatched it with barely a break between the ending and beginning it again. That is how powerful and great a film it is. There is such depth and the film is filled with so many profound moments throughout the entire film. There is never a moment that you want your attention to wander. It seems essential to hear every word and see every movement between people and settings.
This group that Charlie has been invited into by Sam and her step-brother Patrick, see themselves as wallflowers, which in this film is a good thing. The others in the film who are on the periphery. The characters you expect to be the bullies, who meet that criteria, and the “popular” (whatever that actually means) kids are the ones that seem out of place and boring and sometimes quite insufferable to watch. You really want them to just disappear. To go away. Poof!
This film does have its hidden secrets, but I will not reveal what they are. I am NOT GOING TO DO SPOILERS here. You need to find out on your own. I would strongly suggest you rent or buy this DVD and add it to your collection. In my humble opinion, I feel it is something you will want to watch and need to watch and something everyone should watch. See the film and you will understand why I am saying this. The young actors who play these well defined characters are familiar, especially Emma Watson, who plays Sam, a young girl who is so loveable and kind, you just want to hug her for all the wonderful things she does. You feel her vulnerability and generosity when she meets Charlie, played by Logan Lerman, a writer lives within him. A superb actor who I first discovered in the TV show Jack and Bobby. Christine Lahti played mom and a college professor. Logan’s character was a young kid destined to become president.
Then there is Patrick played by Ezra Miller. You may know him from a film that, also, starred Tilda Swinton: We Need to Talk About Kevin. If you saw this film you would remember. It is a film made in 2011 that fits right in with the constantly increasing violence and mass shooting murders happening all too often in the USA and around the world. A difficult film to watch but brilliantly made and the acting and screenplay haunting. Patrick is an out going, marvelously developed young man who befriends the misfits and stands up for who he is and doesn’t take shit from anyone. You absolutely adore him or at least I did and so did my partner. He is a marvelous character that anyone would want to emulate.
All three are loveable young people, that you cannot help but cheer for and want to support throughout the film. I cannot praise this film enough. The Perks of Being a Wallflower has received raving reviews from critics and audiences. It is well worth your time to see this film. If you don’t you will never know what a majorly profound moment in time you have missed or better said you have been left out of or let pass you by. If I could rate it higher than the usual Five Stars most films give as the highest marks, then I would raise it to TEN STARS.**********
Oh, I did forget to mention it does take place in the early 1990s, with drugs and love, and sex confusion, gay characters that are not always treated with respect or into the closet and obnoxious about it. The trial of being teenagers and some who have lived through traumas that are discovered throughout the film. Charlie, is the main focus but all those around him are devoted to reassuring themselves that he is taken care of and is alright. It will hold your attention. I wanted to be sure I heard every word and nuance that occurred during the entire film. A brownie anyone.
The book has become a bible to some teenagers. One of the actor’s had to read it first before a group in his school would allow him to join them as friends. It is an important story that all people should become aware of it. Read the book and watch the film. It is the story that touches everyone’s experiences someplace in their lives, in some way. One last thought: the fact that it is a film and book about the lives of teenagers does not limit it to be something that only teenagers would want to see. It goes into the collective mind. We have all been someplace in this story. It does have an effect on all of us. — jk the secret keeper
“Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: ‘My worth is my sexuality. I’m dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries.’ That shapes their ideas about the world around them: ‘No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can’t be trusted.’ It doesn’t take long for children to begin to act in accordance with these belief systems. For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant.” ― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself
“We accept the love we think we deserve.” —Charlie, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Silver Linings Playbook
(The Film’s Lead Character Bipolar)
Post Created by the secret keeper
02.12.13
Review by Lisa Schwartzbaum
EW’s GRADE A
Details Released Date: Nov 21, 2012; Rated: R; Length: 122 Minutes; Genre: Comedy; With: Bradley Cooper (Pat), Robert De Niro (Pat Sr.), Jennifer Lawrence (Tiffany) and Jacki Weaver (Dolores-mom to Pat)
Family nuttiness, football madness, romantic obsession, and certifiable mental illness coexist happily in Silver Linings Playbook — a crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn. Our damaged, bipolar hero, Pat Solatano Jr. (Bradley Cooper), first makes his entrance in a psych ward. He’s been committed because he beat the crap out of a guy, though there were mitigating circumstances: The guy was sleeping with Pat’s wife. Who has since dumped Pat. Which has sent Pat on a mission to win her back. In any event, when the precariously upbeat fellow is sprung from the bin by his doting mother (wonderful Jacki Weaver from Animal Kingdom), he returns to the bosom of a Philly family that thrums with crazy as a way of life, much of it generated by Pat’s father (Robert De Niro). Fixated on the family’s favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, and doing haphazard business as a bookie, the old man employs an arsenal of superstitions and obsessive-compulsive behaviors to ”ensure” his team wins. It’s been ages since De Niro has had a role this juicy, or has looked so alive and fully engaged — the difference, I suppose, between taking yet another role that’s a Fockers-like parody of aggressive De Niro-fication and one that’s a man in full, OCD and all, frustrated by the ways a loving father just can’t help his own son.
Cooper, meanwhile, has been having a helluva career rise. But the sense of personality wobble he brings to his portrayal of Pat is something new in his repertory, and it’s a revelation. There’s a look the actor gets in those nice blue eyes, something between a stare, a dare, and a cringe, that distills a whole mess of conflicting impulses and emotions into one appealing expression of vulnerability. And Cooper meets a singular partner in crime (and chemistry) in the fabulous Jennifer Lawrence(Remember “Hunger Games”), the girl on fire, who is incandescent as Tiffany, a local young woman with issues of her own.
Somehow, in the story’s loose, loopy trajectory, Tiffany and Pat learn to dance together — I mean really dance, so they can enter a ballroom competition, with all that signifies for emotional connection. Yet in scenes of Pat and Tiffany rehearsing, doing flailing aerobic sprints down suburban streets, and squabbling with the special intensity of two people with unreliable filters, nothing about this crazy-boy-meets-wacky-girl romance is what a moviegoer is cued to expect. For such freshness, writer-director David O. Russell can take the bow. Silver Linings Playbook is based on a best-selling 2008 novel by Matthew Quick. Still, Russell’s own flair for playing with characters who flirt with disaster is what gives the movie its peculiar verve and unique sense of controlled chaos. His last outing, The Fighter, was a Big Broody Brotherly movie. But it’s the filmmaker’s empathy for exotically and often hilariously unhinged characters — something he’s displayed in odd jobs including Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, and Three Kings — that is his signature contribution to Americano-auteurist storytelling. Silver Linings scoops up a whole lot of ancillary nut-jobs in the course of the mayhem, among them Rush Hour’s Chris Tucker as Pat’s buddy from the psych ward, Anupam Kher as Pat’s shrink, and John Ortiz as a stressed-out neighborhood pal married to Tiffany’s controlling sister (Julia Stiles). Russell welcomes them all into the rumble with open arms. The movie is lit with a love that catches the viewer by surprise. We’re ready for the comedy of craziness, but the depth of compassion is the movie’s silver lining. A
“I hate my illness. I want to control it.” Pat, Jr. (Bradley Cooper)
“The only way to beat my crazy was by doing something even crazier. Thank you. I love you. I knew it from the moment I saw you. I’m sorry it took me so long to catch up.” Pat, Jr, (Bradley Cooper)
“Let me tell you, I know you don’t want to listen to your father, I didn’t listen to mine, and I am telling you you gotta pay attention this time. When life reaches out with a woman like this it’s a sin if you don’t reach back, I’m telling you its a sin if you don’t reach back! It’ll haunt you the rest of your days like a curse. You’re facing a big challenge in your life right now at this very moment, right here. That girl loves you she really really loves you. I don’t know if Nicky ever did, but she sure as shit doesn’t right now. So don’t fuck this up.” Pat, Sr. (Robert DeNiro)
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.”― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it’s poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art.”― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“When my mind plays tricks on me I can deal. But when my mind plays tricks on my mind I can not tell what’s real”― Stanley Victor Paskavich
The following was written as a response to an article on PsychCentral “Keeping Creativity Alive with Bipolar Disorder” By Kat Dawkins. The link is: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/bipolar-life/2013/02/keeping-creativity-alive-with-bipolar-disorder/ I couldn’t help myself, once I started writing my comment it turned into the following. It is really a great idea to use your creativity to keep yourself alive and to help believe in yourself. It is a great article and I highly recommend everyone read it, not just those who identify as/with bipolar. It is a really positive article and reassuring and supportive. So, this is how I responded personally to what I had read and how I felt after reading the above mentioned article.
I am in need of creating every day. Almost all the time I am awake. I need to be reminded to eat. Take infrequent breaks to watch some tv but can’t concentrate, need to get back to my laptop. i write a blog, poems, essays, prose, learning to write in the Japanese Style of Poetry. I am working on a screenplay. I do art for my posts and for myself. I create collages and posters. When I was a kid I wrote a lot and painted. I wrote songs and played multiple musical instruments. Now I am making short movie videos, just really learning. I want to get deeper into photography. I do computer graphics. I cannot be creative enough. And most of the time I do not realize I have all these abilities to the extent to call myself an artist, a writer, a musician, a screenwriter. I never had any belief in myself. I felt shy about saying I did anything creative or that anything I wrote was worth mentioning or showed any sign of talent. Basically, I am saying that I did not believe in myself on any level. Even though, when I was a teenager, my first psychotherapist convinced me I should use poetry as a way of communicating what I was feeling since I was having such a difficult time talking about anything. She felt I really expressed myself in my poems. After that for some reason I think my older sister saw my poems and decided she was going to show my poetry to a professional writer and poet. He wanted to meet and talk to me. I was surprised when his critique of my work was so positive. He told me I had an eye and saw things differently. His encouragement was that I should continue to develop my abilities, that I had it. I was a developing poet with great potential. I was blown away but wasn’t really sure how to take what he said and what my sister said to me afterward supporting his opinion. I never had any encouragement about things I did that were creative or sports or theatre or anything artistic. Not one word of encouragement until I was past the believing stage and didn’t believe what other people said or what I saw in myself. Yes, I knew what I could do but I never felt I had anything that was special. I did not believe in myself.
Let me continue…
I wrote my first screenplay when I was about 13 yrs. old and my first novella when I was in high school. I was in the youth orchestra, the church choirs, did theatre in high school. In college, I worked my way up from being the poetry editor to become the editor in chief of the college newspaper. I was actually in a professional singing group. We played guitars and I wrote some of the music. I use to write music and lyrics that people actually liked but still I didn’t believe in myself.
I see all these things written down but I would never believe in myself or say out loud when others talked about being writers or poets or artists. I could never believe in my identity as a creative person who was an artist. Until this person came along quite recently and started telling me that I was good and I kept getting better. I have all these ideas in my head. I told a friend on Skype tonight that I never knew ahead of time what my post was going to be that day or night. I write at least one post a day but often more, sometimes up to four. It depends on how much energy I have and how much I want to express.
To think a few years ago I was afraid to write a poem and when I started to b/c of the encouragement of my then psychotherapist, I felt so embarrassed and shy about showing to her one poem or even to read it to her because i felt I would be misunderstood or it would be too revealing and I felt my feelings or thoughts were perverse or really fucked up. She finally convinced me that I should send off one of my poems to have it published. That freaked me out but eventually she won and I sent off a few poems to a journal she felt would like my work. A few months later, I picked up a copy of this journal and began reading it. When I got to the section where submissions of art and writing were, I read through it. There was this one poem I read that I particularly liked. Not realizing it was one of mine, I really liked the courage of the poet who wrote it. For some reason, I finally saw the name of the poet. It was me. I was shocked. Kind of blown away. They never contacted me that one of my poems had been chosen to be published. I think at this point I must explain why I didn’t recognize my own poem. It is basically, I have what is called short term memory loss. If something doesn’t make it to my long term memory, I will not remember it. An easy example has to do with names. I never can remember anyone’s name unless I have heard it over a continual stimulation so that it makes it to my long term memory. This is an even better and I find amusing example, my partner didn’t think it was funny, but we were watching the show “Elementary” where there is a character whose name is Sherlock Holmes. The show lives in a world where there is no such character of fiction as Sherlock Holmes. That’s not important though. There was this female character that for some reason I could not remember who she was and I kept asking my partner questions about her. At times, I thought she was a psychiatrist. She wasn’t. Then I thought she was a journalist. She wasn’t. I kept getting these ideas b/c of the dialogue she was saying. My partner kept telling me that she was a profiler for the FBI or CIA and had once been personally involved with Sherlock and revealed personal things he shared with her in a book she wrote. For some reason I could not remember this. I do not have short term memory as bad as the character in the film “Memento” but sometimes I feel it comes close at times. When I write something, moments later I will have no idea what the hell I have written. The same thing happens with watching films or reading. While doing the activity as long as I am not interrupted I mostly can follow the story. But if I take a break, I need to start again.
So now that I got so far away from what I was writing about, I am back.. That is why I didn’t recognize my own poem. So I had been published. But I was always posting poems and editorials when I was working on my college newspaper. But somehow I lost all of that once my life had changed so drastically afterwards.
Now where I am in my life I write about anything. My partner said about something I posted a few days ago that she would never print something like I had written. I call it Free Stream. I just named it that when I was filling out the heading to the post. I like that “Free Stream.” That’s exactly what it was. I started out writing a poem but I knew that I was never going to get what I wanted to say to fit into a poem. Not b/c of length but b/c of how i wanted to say it. Anyway, with my new mentor/muse/friend I have found the confidence to write about anything and to feel free to express myself anyway I wanted to. My friend tonight on Skype said that my posts were a work of art. I do art and writing and always have at least one piece of music and I love quotations, so all my posts have at least one quote but usually lots more than one. And I create such a variety of types of posts, which is what makes it so much fun for me and I hope for those who follow and read or view my posts. It feels good to receive encouragement and to feel an identity that you can honestly believe in.. It is important in order to build confidence in one’s self.
It is important to my sanity to be creative and I highly recommend it to anyone especially if you are bipolar b/c it gives you a place to center your energy and you will find you have a lot to say and it will make you feel good to express yourself. And when you start to have people like and enjoy what you create and some people even comment and you comment back and on their blog posts too. It makes you feel connected and you actually do develop relationships and you see such creative art out there. My friend, who is so majorly creative, that I was Skyping with tonight who said my posts were a work of art also called me brilliant and creative. I didn’t have that as a kid or as an adult much either. I was so shy when I was growing up and abused on an unpredictable schedule but the abuse was fairly constant. There were mentors here and there some professors and some therapists after I was able to escape my family when I was an older teenager. But to have some very special persons I have met online and have made great friends with, who I really care about and love, is beyond anything in my life. Those persons I am talking about live on the other side of the world and across oceans but they give me so much and they encourage me to create. One of these persons is so demonstrably creative that the inspiration I gain from her goes beyond imaginable. They love what I have to say and how I express myself. It is so rewarding. So do it. Really do it. Create. jk the secret keeper ps: and I highly recommend reading the article that inspired me to write this piece for this post.
“The sheer secrecy of creativity — the difficulty in understanding how it happens, even when it happens to us — means that we often associate breakthroughs with an external force. In fact, until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers: being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the ingenious gods. (Inspiration, after all, literally means ‘breathed upon.’) Because people couldn’t understand creativity, they assumed that their best ideas came from somewhere else. The imagination was outsourced.” — Jonah Lehrer
“The creative process is a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity.” —William James
“Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration…shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.” — Frederich Nietzsche
“Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.” ― Vladimir Nabokov
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” ― William Blake
