An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods.

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.

I was used to my mind being my best friend; of carrying on endless conversations within my head; of having a built-in source of laughter or analytic thought to rescue me from boring or painful surroundings.

It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

Which of the me’s is me?

Fragments of ideas, images, sentences, raced around and around in my mind like the tigers in a children’s story. Finally, like those tigers, they became meaningless melted pools. Nothing once familiar to me was familiar.

But it was a very long time until I recognized my mind again, and much longer until I trusted it.

P eople go mad in idiosyncratic ways.

Some of my reluctance, no doubt, stemmed from a fundamental denial that what I had was a real disease.

In the mirror I see a creature I don’t know but must live and share my mind with.

Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable.