manic-depressive illness

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without
dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over the essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

There are for all of us certain moments in time or place when we say something changed our lives, for me it is most often music or the written or spoken word. When asked what attracts me most to someone, it is the way they speak, the words they choose to use, the way they romance me with their words, not by gender but merely by being, or it is in a certain phrasing or idea or the way words are written and woven, it’s often a sentence or two that stays with me long after I’ve closed the back cover of a book or novel, or even the last page because that last page is often read after the first four or five, it’s always been so for me, the need to know how something ends before it’s even truly begun.