Post #1 – Berlin and Violins

The tube felt like an old abandoned hospital, that chilled and grey afternoon in Berlin, and me and my friend were vibrating with the promise of youth and the residue of unknown places, friendly faces and chemical elation. The little old woman in the bright pink raincoat stopped us dead in our tracks. She was crouched in a corner, her face barely visible beneath the few strands of scruffy grey hair and my breath caught at the surreal notes coming from a little battered up violin in her rusty hands. It overwhelmed me how something so unconcernedly and obnoxiously ugly could bring tears to my eyes and shakes to my chest.

I looked around in that moment, at the people walking briskly by, busy and absorbed in their duties and endeavors, not a single eye blinking in our direction. It was our secret, the pink little lady’s and mine, and in that minute I felt as if we were floating in some cosmic web of truth, which only we understood: all was perfect. An attractive, well-groomed man in his late twenties bumped into me then, a brief apologetic expression on his face and then back to his fast pace and his fast day.

The bliss abruptly gave way to resentment and I pitied him, I pitied humanity, for being so incapable of distraction. Incapable of stumbling upon the beauty and the detail that filled my days with joy. The way the sunlight warms your face on a breezy spring afternoon, a friendly face on your daily commute, a complimentary glance, a sentence in a book that makes you feel less alien to the world. All these viscerally important things seemed so trivial to all the bodies rushing past. My hands tickled with excitement and I was catapulted back into their world: I was completely lost.

That day in Berlin I realized that, regardless of my violent moods and temperaments, of my many disappointments and unsuccessful endeavors and of the constant and invasive confusion in my mind, my life held infinite value. In that brief sequence of events I discovered in myself, and in my ability to perceive all that surrounds me, what will always be my utmost reason to live and thrive in this world.

As mentioned in the ‘about’ section of my website, I was recently diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type I, after years of struggling with severe shifts in mood, insomnia, anxiety and psychosis. As a result, I am currently taking a year off my academic career, in a quest to find some balance in the murky warzone that is my mind.

I am starting this blog as a record of this yearly adventure, in order to document the lessons I will hopefully learn through psychotherapy and personal exploration. I have decided to share my thoughts as practice in confessional literature and in the hope that someone may find my words insightful and inspirational in undertaking their own road to self-fulfillment.

This web-site however, is not a handbook on how to cope with a disease: it is an expression of my growth as a human being, and my various attempts to thrive in who I am, and what I have to offer the world. I perceive myself as an occasionally organized chaos of ideas, emotions, moods and beliefs, which may have traits in common with the symptoms of manic-depression, but are also entirely my own and distinct from everyone else, whether they be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition or not.

Some of these sections have been written in moments of profound mania and frenzy, some are creative and some are boring, some are dull and others rather clever. It’s all in here for you to delve into if you please: a partial recording of my ups and downs, my booms and busts, my rational reasoning and my occasional insanity.