Meditations

I have received very good news. Bonnie, if all goes as planned and hoped, will be returning home this Friday, recovered from our shared journey through the perdition of depression. This represents a best-case scenario, in that although her treatments were begun later than expected, the quantity has been halved, it having been determined by her doctor that further treatments are at this time unnecessary. I have seen for myself the vast improvement in her condition and am thrilled to once again embrace the vivacious person that I know Bonnie to be.

It was closer than I had ever expected - my next post will reveal just how close, but long-term institutionalization has been averted and our life together, with some modifications, will reinstate itself and continue forward, thanks in great part to the prayers, thoughts and good wishes of you wonderful people whom I have met through this marvelous medium called the Internet, and am proud to call friends.

I have lately been rereading some of my more recent journal entries, reflecting on the experiences that I never expected, nor really desired, to have shared in a public forum. Nevertheless, I am neither a rock nor an island, and an experience such as I have undergone is almost impossible to countenance in solitude - it was necessary to my peace of mind that I reach out to a few people, to share my pain, and to those of you who responded to my need, I cannot thank you enough. I am still here and writing because of you, and I have to hope that that will suffice.

The personality with whom I share a body, that "cold, dead being" who only comes forth when I am beset by intolerable stress, has admirably accomplished the tasks that were required of him, and is once again returning within, to the rest he has so deservedly earned. It is perhaps unfair of me to characterize my alter ego in such a fashion, but it is descriptive only in an emotional manner. I am normally an unambitious, easygoing, somewhat lackadaisical (for which read lazy) and complacent person, and without that other side of me to display the iron determination that I cannot, I would, in all probability, be lost. I speak of this other side of me in the third person, because I neither really know nor understand him. He is inside me, there can be no denial of that fact, but we do not communicate. The times that I have made entries in the journal these past few months have occurred when I was in the foreground - my other half is grim, stolid and uncommunicative. It is perhaps necessary that this be so - I might otherwise have been crushed beneath the weight of despondency with which I found myself freighted.

I have been in a quandary as to whether to continue on with the journal - it has sometimes seemed too monumental an undertaking. I have never kept a paper journal, relying on my memory to stand me in good stead. Now, though, it is, I think, invaluable - I am glad of the opportunity to look back, to see where I’ve been, to understand where I now am, and to perhaps receive at least a dim glimpse of where I may be headed. And reflecting upon it has allowed me to realize something - while the entries may appear to be all over the map, there are at least two underlying themes that represent personal wayposts of sorts - creativity and love. Without either of those two attributes, I would not be the person you have come to know. The Creator has endowed me with the capacity to demonstrate these qualities, to what extent it is not for me to judge, but I am supremely thankful that they constitute a portion of who I am.

I must take this opportunity to say a word or two about mental illness. All too often, even in these supposedly enlightened days, many uninformed people still consider mental illness to indicate a character flaw, to represent some sort of moral failing on the part of people so afflicted. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will in future be demonstrated, I believe, as with so many other afflictions of the body, that there is a genetic basis to the illness. The brain is as yet a comparatively poorly-understood organ, and what we do understand represents still but a drop in the ocean of medical knowledge. The brain is the seat of our intelligence, a complex and delicate biological computer, and as many of you have experienced, mechanical computers are prone to crash occasionally. How much more so, then, is the computer we bear in our skulls likely to suffer a breakdown? The components of our brains are so much more fragile and interdependent than those of a personal computer. How many of us can honestly say that we go through life on an even keel, never deviating from the emotional course we have set ourselves?

Enough of this blather. If you have today told a loved one how much you care for them, tell them again - and again -and keep on telling them. We all need to know that we are loved, that someone truly cares about our welfare, that we have companions on the long and sometimes lonely road of life.

I wish you all limitless love, and unending

Peace.