I’m all caught up with the scheduled personal posts, so this one is freshly ground. Before I get into it though, I’d like to say a disthymic – euthymic – manic South African Bipolar Awareness Day to my ZA homies, homos, homeless, humorous and human chinas.
The national flag was designed by a former South African State Herald, Mr Fred Brownell, and was first used on 27 April 1994. The design and colours are a synopsis of principal elements of the country’s flag history. Individual colours, or colour combinations represent different meanings for different people and therefore no universal symbolism should be attached to any of the colours.
The central design of the flag, beginning at the flagpost in a ‘V’ form and flowing into a single horizontal band to the outer edge of the fly, can be interpreted as the convergence of diverse elements within South African society, taking the road ahead in unity. The theme of convergence and unity ties in with the motto Unity is Strength of the previous South African Coat of Arms.
||source||
The weekend was good, not in a helium flavoured euphoria way, in a solid and meaningful way, that wasn’t about me at all. And that was really good, because I needed a chance to give, to help. Sunday night waved goodbye with a thunderstorm (lovely) and a migraine (unlovely). It all facilitated the inevitable mixed episode crash, but I don’t miss the agitation or the mania at all. I live in a place and a way that keeps me safe though; that fact is always high on my list of things to be thankful for, as well as being satisfied with having structured my life this way. A migraine, like a hangover, is a distracting thing; there are no emotions, only pain and the journey towards no pain. Après the pain, the sadness. There’s progress there though, there are things on the gratitude list that make me genuinely happy. Even when the dark seems to outweigh the light, the light exists anyway. Two years of a particularly bleak depressive cycle and at last there’s been a shift. It’s a shift within, not out of depression, but it’s a shift and I am thankful.
I need to acknowledge the good shit before I bitch about the shit shit.
downbeat beautiful:
Monday happened in a kind of slow motion knife attack way and so I decided to hide, the base issue of the migraine was only the start of things, but it blunted the things that came after it. I don’t want to go into the situational aspects of the depression, I’ll just admit and accept it.
“From sorrow to sorrow love crosses its islands
and establishes roots that are watered by weeping.”
(Pablo Neruda)
I’ve got that fading feeling, you know? Course you do, you’re human and sensitive. I know I’m real, sure, but my own self image/perception/whatever feels faint and fading. If I don’t matter to me, can I matter to anyone? Does it even matter? My therapist would say that bird is flying over your head again, let it go, don’t let it build a nest in your hair. Then she’d probably look quizzically at my head again – I shave my hair as short as possible. It’s such a familiar feeling, it ebbs and flows like… eh, whatever. Fuck metaphors. With somebody else’s dildo. There’s every likelihood that the changes to my life and my self are catching up with me, or perhaps I am catching up with them. Life and I are lovely in many ways, but growing steadily more indistinct. A copy of a copy of a copy in a dodgy photocopier with fuckall toner.
Maybe I’ll tell people it’s ennui rather than depression. Maybe I’ll tell them I’m tenebrific. Maybe not.
I read all of your blogs and comment if I’ve got focus or energy, but at the moment I am slacking. I want my brain back. I’m whiny and tired and sad, sad, sad.
‘Leave me a place underground,’
XXVI From: ‘Las Piedras del Cielo’
Leave me a place underground, a labyrinth,
where I can go, when I wish to turn,
without eyes, without touch,
in the void, to dumb stone,
or the finger of shadow.
I know that you cannot, no one, no thing
can deliver up that place, or that path,
but what can I do with my pitiful passions,
if they are no use, on the surface
of everyday life,
if I cannot look to survive,
except by dying, going beyond, entering
into the state, metallic and slumbering,
of primeval flame?
(Pablo Neruda)
