Yes, I believe in angels. Have come to accept that there is even angels who appear in human form. That there is their mission in life.
To console the grief-stricken, to feed the hungry, to become teachers, role models that our kids can look up to, people who can inspire others in their deepest darkest storms. There are many of my teachers I’d like to thank. Who made a difference in my life. And without whose encouragement I wouldn’t have become a writer and a poet and without their support and unconditional love I wouldn’t have my goals and dreams. Find your own human angels and tell them how much they mean to you.
I don’t know what people really think of me and if they really understand what a madness life is all about. A bipolar life.
Motherhood has been on my mind these past weeks. What did I sacrifice, I think to myself. Did I make the right decision. Never marrying.
Never having children. Never being in longterm relationships. Now I want a child. But bipolar is menacing and has sharp corners. It is misery and miserable. It is no good for anyone. So how could I wish it on an innocent. And as the years went by it became my national anthem.
You can’t be married and have children and be bipolar. That would be reckless. You won’t imagine the pain and frustration that I’ve lived with having a brilliant intellectual writer of a father who was also mentally ill. I see children everywhere and I think to myself I see my smile there, that could have been my laughter, would I have had a son or a daughters. Sons or daughters. My sister is living her own life.
She’s off abroad again very, very soon. She’s not going to look over her shoulder at me or my dad. She’s going out guns blazing never to return. I wouldn’t want to, put all that pain, wounded feeling and frustration on a defenseless child who wouldn’t know how to deal with my moods. I am powerful beyond measure but a child is often powerless.
At my worst I am a mess. No child can pick up those pieces without being as deeply traumatized as I was with my dad.
I’m not just mentally ill, or a depression sufferer, I am also a writer and reflect a lot on what is going on in modern society today, what took place in history to shape us into the individuals that we are today. And for the most part of that life journey we lived with racial tension, racial strife still to this day all because of apartheid and apartheid’s social evils. We think it is being debated or discussed but if it was, thoroughly, we still wouldn’t have the race issue on our lips.
I think of French women and the freedom that they have when it comes to ownership of their bodies and their sexuality. How they frame the physical, mental and emotional psychologically. Here’s a literary bucket list of thoughts. She (I) wanted to write a narrative reminiscent of the context and rich language and experience of Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre’s lover, and intellectual equal.
A madness life, a bipolar life is one in which every word has a right or a wrongdoing, a word can be subtle, mothlike, subtle in a complex, and uncomplicated way. So, what I do as a writer is blunder furtively into the distance, into the future, into tomorrow-land. Sometimes short and dumpy like the Humpty-rhyme, sometimes slithery, sometimes the bipolar is like a Radiohead song. Mostly “Creep”. Sometimes “Karma Police”. Sometimes you get tired of thinking all the time. What to do with all of this critical thinking, and then I have to visit the posh clinic again until I am restored to (a measure of brain-cleanliness, sorry I can’t put it into any other sanitary word) sanity. I’ve become accustomed to that word insanity, and the other one sanity like the clouds that look like Napoleon on some days, and Gandhi the other days.
I forgive her for what she said. She was only a sister, after all (my sister who I thought sometimes saw right through me, and what she saw was the madness, and my insane life.) She was a blood relative, and dad always used to say when he was all there, lucidly, the words like a steady acrobat in the air holding everyone hostage, suspended in disbelief, dad always used to say you could never squeeze blood out of a stone. I had written “Stone Voice”. It had come to me out of the blue murky depths of pain. It emptied itself out of me, I pruned the words harshly, but still it was accepted and is all there for people to read now. About Tara. Tara was a mental institution. I fell in love there, and I was loved there. I had friends there. And for a time I was popular too like those sexy high school girls who would walk past me in the corridors and not meet my eye. The same sexy high school girls who would not eat lunch with me. I had to hide away in a bathroom stall breaktime. I did have a friend. We would stand on the fringes, on the outskirts of the high school society, just watching, and observing life with dejected faces, withdrawn, serious.
I told myself I would forgive her. I would forgive my sister.
I think of the despair and hardship of displacement and being momentarily an interloper, then accepted, then I was an interloper again, then accepted again. And it would go on and on like this for what seemed like forever. Rejected by the coloured bourgeoisie, the middle class, the liberals. Was I too educated, too ugly, too misshapen by mental illness, by the bipolar that threatened my every move.
I’m afraid that we are going to have to start speaking about sexuality, our “apartheid”, this separateness from a race, gender, faith and class issue. It’s not just good mental health practice, let’s us do it for the next generation and the generation after that instead of wasting our pride on petty jealousies, and the politics of the day.
