Sep
2nd
Tue
2nd
Sep
14th
Fri
14th
Sometimes it’s best not to keep your cool.
In fact, hot-headed stock investors make better decisions, a study in the Academy of Management Journal showed.
… .
The conventional wisdom that emotions can make you irrational has less to do with how intense your feelings are than with how much you understand them, the study showed.
In other words, those investors who listened to their emotions were better able to regulate them.
Aug
17th
Fri
17th
I think there is no possibility of having it not shape your character, though. It’s even hard to separate if this is your personality or if this is your disorder. I’m a very extreme person; is that my personality or is that my disorder? I don’t know.”
“Pretty much everybody I’ve interviewed talks about it.”
“I think it’s intertwined. It’s a mood disorder, but one of the things it does is make you a highly sensitive person.”
“But maybe just highly sensitive people get the disorder?”
“I don’t know. Had I had a really normal family and regular life, I don’t think I would have been bipolar. Even my doctor said that, because my episodes were so severe.”
“But it’s genetic. It doesn’t matter if your family’s messed up. My family gets along, and I’m bipolar.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Plenty of bipolar people come from regular homes, whatever that means. I mean, conversely, everybody’s got fucked-up shit in their lives, and they’re not all bipolar.”
“I will never know. What my doctor was trying to explain to me was, if that gene hadn’t surfaced then I could have coasted through life with ups and downs. Once it breaks and you fall apart,” she continues, “you have it more severely. It’s like you’re glued back together, but that part of you will always break with the slightest. A lot of people have this genetic makeup, and they don’t take medicine, they function, they don’t have it as severely. The more bipolar people I meet, the more I realize that they are all completely different. Some can’t do anything, some do so much. Don’t you find that?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “But I think there is a direct relationship between how functional someone is and how repressed the person is in our society vis-à-vis mental illness. In other words, the most functional people have totally beaten stigma down, and the least functional people have been beaten by stigma. I think stigma is a much more important indicator of someone’s success than the degree of their bipolarity, although I don’t even know how you would begin to measure degrees of bipolarity. But I think that all bipolar people could have highly functional lives if certain societal improvements were made and they all had access to proper treatment.”
“Yeah, but in the end you’ve got to do it all yourself, for yourself. My family is still totally in denial. They all hate that I have it. I mean, my dad loves me to pieces, but it’s even harder for him. He asks me every month, ‘So when are you going to stop taking your medicine?’”
“Oh, God.”
“He’s like, ‘Well, you’re better now.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m better because I take this.’”
“He doesn’t understand it’s a chronic illness?”
“Where I come from people don’t understand the concept of chronic illness. You take medication to get better, and then you’re better. I mean, I think it’s a symptom of the Western world, too. I think people are overmedicated. Over there, you don’t always pop an aspirin every time you have a headache. You have to be bleeding to be sick. And they’ve seen me licking the floors—do you know what I’m saying? They’ve seen me in a mental institution.”
She continues. “I feel like I’m such a disappointment sometimes. My dad has always thought I was perfect. But I’ve totally disappointed him. To maintain a normal life for me now, I have to live an average life. I can’t be overly ambitious.”
“Sure you can. You can be anything you want to be.”
“Maybe you can, Lizzie. I don’t mean average in a bad way. I mean I work eight hours a day type of thing. I have a balanced life. I can’t be an overachiever, which I was when I was younger. I can’t have a stressful job where I’m going to be making $200 thousand a year because that’ll kill me. It kills most people anyway, but I can’t take that kind of stress. I can’t work and go to school at the same time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am positive. I am. Every time I take on a load like that, like I took on 15 units and got to midterms, and then I crashed. I need to rest; my body needs rest. I’ve already tested this out on my body. I always pay the price.”
Sara and I have exhausted each other. We’ve been talking for three hours. I thank her for her time, and she thanks me for brunch.
“You and I, I think we’re gonna be all right,” she says. We exchange phone numbers and go our separate ways.
“Pretty much everybody I’ve interviewed talks about it.”
“I think it’s intertwined. It’s a mood disorder, but one of the things it does is make you a highly sensitive person.”
“But maybe just highly sensitive people get the disorder?”
“I don’t know. Had I had a really normal family and regular life, I don’t think I would have been bipolar. Even my doctor said that, because my episodes were so severe.”
“But it’s genetic. It doesn’t matter if your family’s messed up. My family gets along, and I’m bipolar.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Plenty of bipolar people come from regular homes, whatever that means. I mean, conversely, everybody’s got fucked-up shit in their lives, and they’re not all bipolar.”
“I will never know. What my doctor was trying to explain to me was, if that gene hadn’t surfaced then I could have coasted through life with ups and downs. Once it breaks and you fall apart,” she continues, “you have it more severely. It’s like you’re glued back together, but that part of you will always break with the slightest. A lot of people have this genetic makeup, and they don’t take medicine, they function, they don’t have it as severely. The more bipolar people I meet, the more I realize that they are all completely different. Some can’t do anything, some do so much. Don’t you find that?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “But I think there is a direct relationship between how functional someone is and how repressed the person is in our society vis-à-vis mental illness. In other words, the most functional people have totally beaten stigma down, and the least functional people have been beaten by stigma. I think stigma is a much more important indicator of someone’s success than the degree of their bipolarity, although I don’t even know how you would begin to measure degrees of bipolarity. But I think that all bipolar people could have highly functional lives if certain societal improvements were made and they all had access to proper treatment.”
“Yeah, but in the end you’ve got to do it all yourself, for yourself. My family is still totally in denial. They all hate that I have it. I mean, my dad loves me to pieces, but it’s even harder for him. He asks me every month, ‘So when are you going to stop taking your medicine?’”
“Oh, God.”
“He’s like, ‘Well, you’re better now.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m better because I take this.’”
“He doesn’t understand it’s a chronic illness?”
“Where I come from people don’t understand the concept of chronic illness. You take medication to get better, and then you’re better. I mean, I think it’s a symptom of the Western world, too. I think people are overmedicated. Over there, you don’t always pop an aspirin every time you have a headache. You have to be bleeding to be sick. And they’ve seen me licking the floors—do you know what I’m saying? They’ve seen me in a mental institution.”
She continues. “I feel like I’m such a disappointment sometimes. My dad has always thought I was perfect. But I’ve totally disappointed him. To maintain a normal life for me now, I have to live an average life. I can’t be overly ambitious.”
“Sure you can. You can be anything you want to be.”
“Maybe you can, Lizzie. I don’t mean average in a bad way. I mean I work eight hours a day type of thing. I have a balanced life. I can’t be an overachiever, which I was when I was younger. I can’t have a stressful job where I’m going to be making $200 thousand a year because that’ll kill me. It kills most people anyway, but I can’t take that kind of stress. I can’t work and go to school at the same time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am positive. I am. Every time I take on a load like that, like I took on 15 units and got to midterms, and then I crashed. I need to rest; my body needs rest. I’ve already tested this out on my body. I always pay the price.”
Sara and I have exhausted each other. We’ve been talking for three hours. I thank her for her time, and she thanks me for brunch.
“You and I, I think we’re gonna be all right,” she says. We exchange phone numbers and go our separate ways.
— excerpted from Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D by Lizzie Simon
Jun
30th
Sat
30th
It is foolish to look for absolute meanings in your lives: you cannot be an absolute anything or understand an absolute anything (like infinity); you must live your life in that world of possibilities between outrageous, emotionally-inspired extremes that are irrelevant to a description of the world process. Ironically, though you fight it, you would be much happier if you rid yourselves of absolutes of all kinds, including your unhappy, futile search for ultimate meaning.
— Mark L. Collins, from The Happiest Beings Are Nihilists, Part 1: Zetosophers, page 264
I’m having a crisis of confidence, and I blame Jesus.
Actually, my crisis is not so much about Jesus as it is about the impending rapture, which I don’t necessarily believe will happen. But I don’t believe the rapture won’t happen, either; I really don’t see any evidence for (or against) either scenario. It all seems unlikely, but still plausible. Interestingly enough, I don’t think there is a word for my particular worldview: “Nihilism” means you don’t believe in anything, but I can’t find a word that describes partial belief in everything. “Paganism” is probably the closest candidate, but that seems too Druidesque for the style of philosophy I’m referring to. Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache.
— Chuck Klosterman, from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
