I was watching the news tonight with my friend S. about the massacre in Madrid. What a sad thing. The world is in such turbulance, but it was always like that. We are such a brutal species, we can think of the most appalling things to do to each other.

I try to be good, sometimes I think I fail miserably at it. Today I saved a snail from being smooshed by a careless footstep, I moved it back to the side of the path. But I ate a hot dog, and wore a leather jacket and shoes. I accidentally signed up to be a member of Greenpeace, and now I’m dodging their phone calls for their monthly membership fees. I am a bad person.

I am on a new drug now, Zyprexa. It made me feel like a zombie and gain 45 pounds the last time I was on it, but this is a low dose, so hopefully I won’t have to buy a new wardrobe again. I wanted to buy leather pants, but my fluctuating weight won’t permit it. So far the Zyprexa is working well, I’m feeling a little more even, it makes me sleep like a ton of bricks though. But yeah, I do feel more like my normal self.

We are all crazy on this planet.

I am tired of being considered a youth artist. I don’t know what ever happened to the term Emerging artist, althought after nearly ten years of creating video work I don’t believe I am really an emerging artist anymore. Who knows? Who decides? Art is an institution these days.

I am at a critical point in these new projects I am working on, this one hurdle I always seem to have where I start to wonder about my audience and if they really care to hear what I have to say. Then I remember the words of bell hooks, who says audiences are made from the art, not the other way around. Once you fall into the trap of pleasing people, your art suffers.

Maybe people do want to see boring bland art. I can’t argue with that. I don’t want to make it though.

The youth label does trouble me though. Jim Morrison died when he was 27, yet we don’t consider him a youth poet/musician. Someone told me I was considered youth because I’m native. This is also a troubling assertion because it implies a paternalistic colonialist viewpoint of native people being far more immature than a white person.

Personally, I think the whole “youth” label in art is just another way for the baby boomers to put us down and shut us out of their institutions. We’ll have to kill them. 😛

Don’t tell me I’m too sensitive because my emotions can be fragile, it’s part of my illness and my hide is as thick as it’s ever going to get.

Don’t tell me not to take my pills, I did all the holistic treatments for years and got little out of it but scars and dark nights.

Don’t make jokes about the crazies and then try to justify yourself by explaining that I am not crazy, I am, it could just as easily be me on the street.

Don’t discount my concerns or my ideas because of my illness, just because I have a brain that functions oddly from time to time doesn’t mean I’m stupid.

Don’t tell me to suck it up and get over it, if I could have I would have, years ago.

Don’t assume I am weak because I get suicidal or manic, I have survived some of the most horrific moments that would convince a “normal” person to take their own life.

Don’t count me out of life or love.

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of Heaven, is the channel by which we recieve the greatest blessings . . . the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of all arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art . . . So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense . . . madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human. Socrates

When I took a trip to Paris and Berlin, I came back to all these friends asking me “how was it?” I never wanted to really talk about it much, being that my vaction was a largely solitary one of visiting historical sites and looking at historical art. When I took a trip to Crazyland, nobody really wanted to ask me how it was. I was a little disappointed by it actually, because for once I had seen things that I wanted to talk about. But very few people feel comfortable listening to stories of visionary moments, especially when the moments are connected to psychosis.

Can it be that our contemporary visionaries are being silenced? One must remember that even Louis Riel was a mental patient. People nowadays want proof, something solid and tangible which can be measured, catalogued, grouped and ordered. A photograph, a big hand waving from the sky Hello! A new Jesus among us to put needles in and see that he bleeds.

I don’t consider the apocalyptic visions I had to necessarily be a real prophecy, rather they were more some kind of spiritual educational film that I suppose I had to watch to be able to feel like I could go on to the next level of my life. And as destructive as the episode was, there were some very real emotional events happening that never got addressed by my p-doc, by my friends or family, they were just waved off as unreality.

How do we define the real? For instance, a broken heart is considered a real thing, even though our hearts do not actually break, they don’t bust out of our chests and lay bleeding on the floor (although it can feel like that).

I was reading an article about Margot Kidder and her very public manic episode, aftwerward she went to an acupuncturist on Vancouver Island and was telling her about her delusions. She didn’t know what to do with the feelings around her brain’s journey, people said it wasn’t real, but she was still feeling very traumatized by the whole events. The acupuncturist said “Well, if it felt real to you, let’s treat it as a real event and help you come to terms with it.”

Can you imagine how much more humane it would be if our psychiatric system had spiritual councellors who would come in and help patients assimilate their visionary experiences in with their regular lives? Would it help keep the relapse rate down? Would it make seeing and hearing other realities a less shameful thing?

One bad night, no sleep, racing thoughts, so intrusive and loud you can’t ignore them. Winding up for something worse, oh god, I don’t feel like visiting the hospital again. The next day I call up a relative with the same disorder I have, looking for advice. She sent me to the store with a list of things to get, milk (for the calcium), vitamin b stresstabs, omega 3-6-9, sleepytime tea. I did all the calming down things, and jeez, within two days I seem to already been sleeping soundly yet again.

Being hypervigilant about my health drives my friends spare, I’m sure. I’m always talking about meds, about new models of psychiatric care, about moods and triggers and blah de blah things. I guess I am pretty obsessed with it these days. But then I think about my life, and how I have always been fighting for an awareness of social issues. I guess I feel like I’m willing to spend some time these days destroying the stigma of mental illness. And I understand that not every c/s/x wants to discuss it openly, for various reasons. It can be really difficult when you’re already feeling fragile. Talking about mental health is taken as an invitation for ridicule and derision in our society. It also really freaks people out to think that they could cross the line of sanity at anytime, and that’s an unsettling thought.

The weirdest part is that this latest hypomanic period has brought a lot of fascinating artistic ideas that I want to work on this next while. What a looney disease! 😀 I’m a nerd, it’s true, I use smileys and I shouldn’t, it’s not professional of me.

Why is there so much art about nothing these days? It all looks nice, but it never says anything, there’s no point, and as soon as I am done watching or looking at it I forget about it entirely. It bugs me. It’s a tease, promising an engaging moment between the viewer and the screen, and then turning out to be about bugger all.

Perhaps we all finally have nothing left to say. There are no more stories to be told, no stigmas to be broken, no new ground to cover. Everyone said everything important and now it’s like we’re sitting in the parlour having our tea, with an uncomfortably long silence. Everyone wants to pretend like the stalled conversation is okay with them, “everyone has stopped talking, an angel must have flown by.”

Somebody, for the love of all that is holy, make some art that blows me away!

Testing something, did you know 40 is the new 30, and 50 is the new 40, which means I am turning the new 16, and started making videos when I was the new 6. In the immortal words of Helen Reddy, “I am still an embryo, with a long long way to go!”

“The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, by so much more am I an artist – a creative artist . . . this green shoot springing from the roots of the old felled trunk, these are such abstract things that a kind of melancholy remains within us when we think that one could have created life at less cost than creating art” Vincent Van Gogh

With the exception of Anhedonia (which was created during a major depressive episode, or perhaps created the depressive episode itself), the majority of my creative works have been completed during my seasonal hypomanias, April and May or in late fall. Oddly enough these periods are usually the most productive for artists and writers with manic depression. Lucky for me they also happen to fall at the end of the semesters at Emily Carr. I am not saying that I am an artist because I am crazy, I am saying that somehow like the Borg I adapted and was able to use my moods to fuel artistic ventures, as did many great artists.

Possibly one of the most difficult things about treating manic depression is that the drugs can minimize creativity, sometimes even destroy it entirely. If your vocation happens to be a creative one, the possibility of losing your edge in order to maintain your sanity is pretty frightening, and probably one of the big reasons why people quit their meds. And to be perfectly honest, after you see the face of God, who would want to go back to a hum drum existence?

I have self destructed numerous times in the name of art, to the point where I expect it. I wonder sometimes if that is just the way my particular creative process works, or if it is the way my manic depression works, or is it both? I find increasingly that I cannot seperate the illness from myself, as much as others would like me to. It is a part of me, like the air I breathe, and as much as it can be a pain in the ass, I also have a fond respect for it.

In Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir An Unquiet Mind, she says that in order to defeat a monster, you must first make it beautiful. In my own way, I am trying to do that. I believe madness has a role in human society, I believe that there is a place for us. We were once honoured people who had visions and went into the wilderness and brought back ideas for our community. Now we’re just sick.

There is a way to bring the visions back into the world though, there’s art in all it’s varied forms. Norms might not realize it, but their world is constantly being influenced by madness, by the people who go to hell and back and bring with them some blood, some love, some god. I wish that for every crazyphobic media propaganda about madmen killing people, there was an acknowledgement of the huge contributions to society which the “mentally ill” have made and will always be making.

Sylvia

Last night I went to the Ridge to see Sylvia, a film about the life of Sylvia Plath. I wanted to write an interesting and insightful review of this film, but the fact is, I can’t. I cannot get over the fact that the film is basically all about Sylvia’s life in relation to a man. Why do these films about the lives of notable women artists and writers always focus on the men, how the men in these women’s lives impact them? Why is it not the other way around? Why is Sylvia’s life before Ted Hughes not important?

I found the same thing happened in Frieda. One might say that it’s because of the times in which those women lived. However I think there are far more interesting struggles going on in the lives of women such as Sylvia Plath and Frieda Kahlo. Consider Kahlo’s self portraits examining her relationship with chronic and severe pain, or Plath’s writings on madness. These lifelong struggles situated within the female body are minimized and ignored in favor of whatever penis was strutting around at the time. The implied message is that the only important part of a woman’s life, even a woman such as Sylvia Plath, is their husband and the things they do for their man.

The good news is that since it was a reperatory cinema I only paid five bucks.

The Joys of Mania

Possibly the most difficult part of being manic depressive is the highs. When I’m low I know something is wrong, even if my brain starts spinning stories of who hates me and why they hate me. But when I am high, I have no idea how sick I am getting. It feels good. It’s like being on drugs. And when you’re used to being depressed and down and ready to snuff it, being happy is a revelation all on it’s own.

Being happy isn’t a bad thing, but this kind of happy is deceptive. Suddenly you’re a superhuman, not needing sleep or food, thinking all the time, and creative thoughts start pouring out. It’s the creativity for me that makes me want to hang on everytime the mania comes out.

There are definitely things I hate about having a chronic brain disorder. I hate not being able to discern between a genuine emotion and a symptom. I hate the physical exhaustion of depression. I hate the wild paranoid thoughts of mania. I hate the fact that 90% of marriages with someone who has manic depression end in divorce. I hate that I’m 25 and my mother still has to worry about me.

But I love the creativity.

I love the spiritual epiphanies that occur. I love the fact that I can absorb new information like a sponge. I love the abstract thoughts, the symbolism, the expansion of mind that lets you go just that extra step further to make something powerful. I love the energy that can get poured into a project. I love the sudden insights that come one after another.

Manic Depression is a curse, that’s true, but it’s also a blessing in an unusual way. A lot of creative people with manic depression don’t want to get rid of their illness entirely. It gives you shining moments of brilliance inside of a dark world.

Sometimes I think, maybe I have this disease just so that I can feel everything in a far deeper way than most people.