Risperdal, do you know it. Zopiclone, Pax, Ativan, Lithium (yes, the drug that has brought millions to their knees, that sent me flying into a coma, and nearly killed me). Do you know Epilim (the wonder drug of wonder drugs, the mood stabiliser), Centroforge (for the high blood pressure), Eltroxin (for the underactive thyroid). I think of the multi-vitamins when I can afford. The herbal teas that my sister gifts me with when she comes home from Johannesburg.
I have taken up raja yoga meditation (taught to me by my parents from a young age), read Chopra’s books, “The Anatomy of the Spirit”, and all I am doing is to hear the voice of God in that still moment.
Prayer has become important. In those moments I talk to God. There should be nothing embarrassing about someone who is mentally ill talking to God (in prayer). It is people who make it so. Having a mental illness is the sickness of our time. In this, a time of technological advancement and millennial-fever. When I use to be a child-adolescent I used to think that the church was a lie because it was filled with Sunday-Christians. The women wearing their meringue-like hats on top of their heads. Dad said I should be forgiving. He still tells me this to this day.
I have a love for other people now. Especially other people living in Africa in these times. Although I am shy I find people lovable now.
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Everyone has a gift. Not everyone has a talent for finding what their gift is before they die. In sonic youth I had a profound self-confidence (because of bipolar). No longer, (because of the same reason, because of bipolar). The self-confidence (arrogance to most who knew me then in my early twenties in Johannesburg) has ebbed, ebbed, ebbed away-a-way out of me. I have become profoundly neurotic over the years. I cannot explain my neuroses away. They have helped me form this type of, kind of Khoi-personality, and then I think of Krotoa, and Saartjie Baartman. Ask myself, are they in my genes. They must be. They must, for my paternal family were slaves in some distant past. I think of St. Helena. The island of Napoleon’s exile. The island were my paternal grandfather was born.
