Of the best stuff, but cracked.

"When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time...When I was crazy, that's all I was." ~ Sylvia Plath

It's been a long, long time since I've posted anything here, let alone kept up with the blogosphere, and there's a good reason for that. For the past long time I've been bearing the heavy burden of mental illness, and it has ravaged not only my blog, but my job, my school-life, my faith-life, and my relationship. For the past 4 months I've been on leave from work, and hospitalized or in 5-day a week therapy the entire time. I've been on and off of a total of 14 different psychoactive drugs and 5 different diagnoses. (They've finally settled on Bipolar II and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). I've been in some really dark places. I just got out of the hospital again today, a particularly brutal and unhappy stay.

I've finally decided to re-vamp this blog and write again. I've been aching to write, but my identity as Quaker has been being nudged out of the way by my new identity as Mentally Ill. I've found myself feeling increasingly alienated from my own blog, my own voice. I haven't known what to say, in part because I've been alienated from a lot of other things as well.. In fact, I can't go to Yearly Meeting this year because of the financial and personal toll the Crazy extracts from me. How can I sit in Sessions when I've got 5 "sessions" a day to attend at a partial hospital program?

I've decided to be open about this because I know for sure that there is a deep and important nexus somehow in this kind of suffering and faith.

In Let your Life Speak, Parker Palmer devotes an entire chapter to depression: "All The Way Down," and he begins it with a quotation from Pinsky's translation of the Inferno:

"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard--so tangled and rough

And savage thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well

I'll tell what I saw. . ."

and it's a good preface to my own writing on the subject, as well. I'd like to share some of Parker's words, too.

"Hour by hour, day by day, I wrestled with the desire to die, sometimes so feeble in my resistance that I "practiced" ways of doing myself in. I could feel nothing except the burden of my own life and the exhaustion, the apparent futility, of trying to sustain it.
I understand why some depressed people kill themselves: they need the rest. But I do not understand why others are able to find new life in the midst of a living death, though I am one of them. I can tell you what I did to survive and, eventually, to thrive--but I cannot tell you why I was able to do these things before it was too late."

And that's what I want to do here now. In this space, as I struggle to survive and thrive, I want to share "the good I find there as well" when it comes. I know that just the sharing of it, the writing of it, will be part of that good. I am going to make a commitment to write here every day, even if it's just a line, circumstances and God permitting, for at least the next month. Maybe it'll be my own yearly meeting, to start with.

Much love to all my Friends. See you tomorrow.