An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.

One is what one is,

one may be

terrified to go forward, but there is no question of going back.

Yet why not say what happened?

“Climbing high, into the sun”

Not surprisingly, perhaps, when both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family, and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self.

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true.”

it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them,

lack of time or a busy schedule was never an excuse for being thoughtless or unavailable.

I was simply in love with the idea of a strange idea,

As has been true a thousand times since, my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally, but the same curiosity, and the scientific side of my mind, generated enough distance and structure to allow me to manage, deflect, reflect, and move on.

“To be sure,” wrote Hugo Wolf, “I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

“How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one’s notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in

mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.

In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.

And I miss Saturn very much.

They Tell Me It Rained

It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life.

a true zebra among horses.

there is a season for everything, a time for building, and “a time for the wind to break the loosened pane.”

“Beneath those stars,” Melville once said, “is a universe of gliding monsters.” But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.

Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you’re irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t.

I think this is why i always fear being a burden and taking space

cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know of those limitless corners, with their limitless views.