The weather has turned chilly, rips appeared in my remaining presentable pairs of trousers, and my Mac crashed so thoroughly and then refused to start up and show any life until the third day of fixing -- more than just a battery replacement -- that I know the computer is on borrowed time.
In sum, I prefer to rejoice in a rare piece of good news, when a far-off friend mailed me to say something I'd done for her was right on the mark but "officially insane", and also I'd like to explain that being "normal" is coming rather hard to me! I think this is an entry about two sides of one coin.
My mood for days has steadily been subdued and one of slight depression, with the rare dose of absurd humour. In my reading, I find most psychiatrists consider a mild depression the state of a human mind best attuned to what is commonly taken for reality: the world as we're able to share our views of it.
A week ago, I published a look back over a first full year when the Log has been devoted to the 'Voices of Women' by name (though this was really only an extension of what had already happened in practice), with an ear to the future. I removed that entry, for my plans seemed premature until I know what is going on in my heart.
Being a man who is held often to be good at listening to the hearts of his friends and enjoys trying to hear everything he can learn of the musicians who come up here, it struck me how rarely I've directly expressed my own mood unless it's been in the Orchard, regarding the big highs and lows of my strong bipolar cycles.
In talking with other people, I've also frequently adopted the style of a sensitive outsider who can empathise with them deeply, draw conclusions and make suggestions if they are troubled from what seems like a detached viewpoint.
Getting out of the emotional heat
Today it appears that, in a way, I have been an outsider!
Strange moods have affected me since I stopped taking a serotonin regulator my therapist contends became counter-productive at some stage in many years of treatment. I had to start adjusting to new medication for my brain chemistry, after in March entering the manic phase of a seven-month cycle just before plunging into the most crippling depression of my life.
I shan't repeat what I've posted about having to learn more and fast about manic-depressive illness and devising a strategy to beat it, on being warned that a third cycle even more extreme than my past two could kill me, possibly literally, but very likely figuratively by putting me away for a long time.
Yet the discovery of what I can only take for normal emotions has been very hard to endure and constantly disconcerts me, combined as often it has been with sporadic surges of mood-tinged memories up into my conscious mind at unexpected moments. These have concerned several periods in my chequered life.
For a couple of nights last week, I couldn't sleep for trying to process this new data and make sense of it, and I feel there's a foot planted now on the lid of a pressurised can that's going to blow off when I let it, which I simply must do next week with the help of a bomb disposal expert.
I have to be prudent in my choices of music, like when coming out of a "downer" in which I couldn't take any music at all. So given my constant tendency to explore what's new in my ever-growing library of mainly women musicians, I'm relieved that the "magic iPod finger" can usually be depended on to pick the right voice. However, my "year-ender" won't appear on the Log, because I know what other people I've been reading lately mean when they say their weblogs seem to become to-do lists.
It's best instead, as Kathryn Petro showed in a typically enjoyable entry on a visit to a wildlife reserve, simply to do or even just to be. She found: "My body felt it could breathe" (A Mindful Life). But I want my mind to be able to breathe easy again. This entails telling my therapist that accepting my strategy for recovery, giving me new medication and advice about that and then saying "Good luck and get on with it!" isn't quite enough.
It takes more than drugs to heal a mind
The new therapist hasn't gone guite this far. But I suspect, all the same, that while his approach has been better than others I first saw but won't name and we get on well, that we're both victims of a trend in "modern society" that Kay Redfield Jamison warned against on just page three of her trailblazing book, 'Touched With Fire' (an Amazon France link this time).
I prefer to be in mutually active relationships of exchange, rather than taking all the initiatives, but therapists do have a tendency to sit back and wait. After a few lines about the "fine madness" and simplistic notions of bipolar disorder in people of an artistic temperament, Kay wrote that:
"labelling as manic-depressive anyone who is unusually creative, accomplished, energetic, intense, moody, or eccentric both diminishes the notion of individuality within the arts and trivializes a very serious, often deadly illness. There are other reasons for such concerns. Excesses of psycho-analytic speculation, along with other abuses of psychobiography, have invited well-deserved ridicule. Due to the extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, much of modern psychiatric thought and practice has moved away from the earlier influences of psychoanalysis and towards a more biological perspective. Some fear that the marked swing from psychoanalysis to psychopharmacology is too much, too soon, and that there exists the risk of a similar entrenchment of ideas and perspectives."
This is what nearly happened to me.
I know so much about some mental disorders and getting help to inspect one's parts and put them together again that sometimes it's easy to feel that others have too much faith in my ability to come up with answers! At the same time, however, I know a part of me has a lot of the answers. It's also the bit that helps other people and there's no reason to believe it's any different for you.
I'm no longer interested in the practice of psychoanalysis (apart from a soft spot for Carl Jung -- Wikipedia -- and acceptance of principles of some importance) because experience has given me an aversion as strong to people who lock themselves into "schools of thought" as musicians usually hate being classified by critics and narrowly labelled on store shelves and in magazines.
I want helpful therapy. Strong empathy with the moods of others, usually in circumstances when they need to talk about these feelings and want help, hasn't given me enough tools to understand my own moods, since I've got nothing subjective with which to compare "normal". So next week, I plan to take an emotional "crash course", since I can live with the memories, on condition I can be confident what I feel never means I'm headed for an even worse cycle.
Throughout this whole episode, I've heard more sense out of honest and ordinary people than from those who wrote some of the lousy books I've skimmed and from psychiatrists with rigid minds. I've been able to talk openly with cooks in the canteen at the Factory who always spoil me, colleagues who have been understanding and interested in my views on healing with music and in society rather than some institution, friends who say simple and wise things, and my down-to-earth general practitioner.
I guess I've frequently been good at helping people live with emotional extremes and through periods they find hard going because those very extremes have been my habitual territory! In pressing me to become a teacher and use the music Log as my prime means of doing this, some have also called me a bit of a witch-doctor and a shaman. This I'm finally prepared also to accept, because two things have happened since March to reinforce my sense of what's in our souls.
I've said very little about the second "massive spiritual experience" that accompanied a total brain burnout. The doctor didn't put it on my medical record as such this time round when I asked him to refrain. I've been thinking, too, about a talk with a friend in Africa -- not the Lauren who thinks what I do is "officially insane"! -- regarding her loneliness and dislocation and how people best deal with madness and purportedly deranged people in so-called primitive societies.
What people in such traditional societies, close to nature, do not habitually do to those with disorders of the mind and the soul is put them away. In modern France, though, I encountered resistance from some health professionals and even one or two people chose to me to my determination to heal within society, which is absolute. Next week my therapist will again find himself helping out with a strategy I have taken to him: "This is the plan, will it work?"
If I can listen to it, you see, a part of me knows what to do.
The medicine-man inside us all
 I believe this bit of me is my inner shaman, my personal medicine-man, and that it's the same part that found me Sheryl Crow and Natalie Imbruglia's 'Left of the Middle' to listen to last week, the album of a spirited woman in her early 20s. She is singing about a new start in the world.
Oh, I could readily identify with that desire! Natalie asks 'Leave Me Alone', rejects the second-hand opinions of others and trusts to her 'Intuition'! I had no idea she was going to title a song for it, but have used the word recently and split it into the bits that apply in what I need to do: "in-" for the inside where I went to find myself and get over the very mad month of March, and "-tuition" for the rest. Put together, that is our knowledge within.
Our knowledge within. This is the essence of my second spiritual insight. It brings me no closer to using the word "God" when I can simply talk about the "Big L", love, and all its power. It would be hard to find verbal language for what I discovered in "that place" in March, when I ceased to sense my own ego again, but I know it is shared ground.
The details of what I did for Lauren, as sometimes I can for people regardless of the fact they may be an ocean away and we've not been in touch for ages, are our business only, but I just knew something about her situation and mailed her to tell her so and what she might do. She wrote back:
"it is officially insane that you know how to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, nick. (...)
was re-reading yr long missive this ayem [...], my eyes straying only slightly but coming back to the points where you hit the nail so head on it's a wonder i don't suggest you get into spiritual carpentry (no that was not a jesus reference, just so's you know, i know you don't do that collective monotheism bandwagon thing)..."
No, I don't like bandwagons, nor do I have major woodwork or building plans. The only screwdrivers and sledgehammers with which I'm well acquainted are medication for the mind, the kind of which I approve and the drugs I've known and hated because they left me feeling artificially "better" but more cut off from others and myself. I've always said I don't regret the 14 years I had to forego any sex life, but that's no longer true. I just hope never to regret certain outcomes of the decision...
On seeing a musical connnection last year, I felt it was to state of the obvious about the common "languages" of the art and sexual activity, but now I know better and so appreciate encouragement I've been given to go on through that particular door into Lilith's domain.
"Non, je ne regrette rien" is the brave kind of thing a woman like Edith Piaf (Wikipedia) could sing. The Log is no place for the kind of abusive psychobiography I dislike as much as Kay does, but it could fairly be said that regret is a normal emotion and Piaf had a very disturbed life. It can be courageous to claim you don't regret what you can't change.
The famous song is about significant memories, with their strong emotional component. I have a new and subtle emotional palette to learn -- including grieving events and losses I haven't yet because I never could -- and strong recollections with which I need to come to terms. For the moment, I know that my life has been lived close to one or the other extremes of feeling relatively invulnerable or broken up yet again, which meant my finger found Jann Arden's 'Time of Mercy' tonight, with songs like 'Give Me Back My Heart', where she goes straight to the point! I admire people who have lived all their lives with the real vulnerability I currently feel. What I want from Azoulay is more in my "tool-kit"!
A tool-kit for personal tuition
This was a tool-kit I got from Kay Jamison and Azoulay's retired predecessor ... and from that inner shaman of mine. It belongs in the part of my being Lauren and everybody else who has learned anything from me has to thank for it. I need to be fairly alone with the shaman for a few days.
It isn't going back to work that has had such an effect on me; it's the trappings that have surrounded it on emerging from the deepest journey inside I've ever made and probably wish to make out into a city that often shouts "artificial" and, in some respects, "officially insane" at me. But I made that trip because I was mad myself for a while.
If, then, I am to use the Log to return to women musicians and teach by telling their stories and sharing their songs, I plan to do what all good teachers must in life, which is just to share with others the tools we've found, as equals. I can't deal with people otherwise now I know we all have our own inner shaman, every one of us, and I'm essentially no different from you.
Like Pinocchio, I've discovered that honesty pays, while closing your mind and your heart gets you nowhere. Each day can bring surprises, if I venture to talk quite deeply but without hiding anything from others about what's happened to me, since I find it tends also to draw some of them out of their shells, no longer afraid to speak of what upsets them.
I don't know how often I shall log again. In the period that starts with some medical exams on Friday, this over-stretched Mac of mine must sadly go and be replaced. It's hardly good timing now I'm more aware of the need for new clothes with fewer holes. Worse, the day I disintegrated again was my daughter's 17th birthday, so I must make up to the Kid for having turned down an invitation where I'd have felt like a ghost at the feast given the way I felt then.
However, the weather forecast gets better.
I've ordered a new eMac, which comes for the weekend. It may not be a brand-new model, but I like robust eMacs. It was a nice surprise to find out I can still trade in this one while there is any life in it against the price of a rather more powerful machine that can face the music. So when I'm not in emotional therapy and making sure of my inner shaman's compass bearings, I'll have to tame the Tiger too.
What with all these cats for which Apple names its operating system, it's scarcely surprising that my finger found its way from Imbruglia to Arden via Massive Attack and Liz Pappademas and her piano-driven Hurts to Purr (band and debut album).
For once, I'm going to be discreet about a woman I fancy, just saying I've known her for some time and her circumstances have also changed. We shall soon be having dinner and when I asked her how she had put up with me all these years, she said: "In small doses."
"Well, I hope," I said, "that in future, you might be able to endure slightly bigger doses if they come on a more manageable scale."
That won me a little smile and she asked me to wait until she'd sorted out some other stuff by the end of May. My experience has usually involved being madly in love, but now I know why people say "madly". Is going without feeling over-excited a normal emotion?
12:49:01 AM link 
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