Message from Princess Leia

I DID GO to Doctor Strangelove at 9 in the morning. My alarm went off at 7 to tell me to take methadone early so it would be going full-blast by the time of the appointment. I couldn't get to sleep again. I think I'm in a better mood than yesterday. But I still told the doctor the truth. About how STRESSED I get over PETTY THINGS. We somehow got on to the subject of "when was I diagnosed" and I went and told her about the time I was so manic that when I opened a book the words exploded in my face. I am always digging my own grave: eg when I happened to mention to a psychiatrist that I heard voices that summarized my own thoughts from a minute or two before. This is a KEYNOTE FEATURE of schizophrenia (as opposed to any other type of psychosis, including psychotic mania). Also my tendency to take things extremely literally so that when I read schizoaffective disorder had an "affective component" I visualized a bright yellow electrical component that regulated the trillions of volts zapping straight through my brain. Yes I could read most of the time. My main problem in mania was that my brain was going so quickly I could not take information in. One day I was in the back of a car. I couldn't remember where we were going and kept thinking we were en route to an illegal rave because I was "high on ecstasy" (I hadn't taken ecstasy for about ten years). I agree with Carrie Fisher: that the bipolar high is better than anything else, anything at all. More transcendant. More sublime. And much nicer than drugs. I have never taken a drug that kept me high for more than about twelve hours and even that required multiple doses. On mania I soared stratospherically high for days on end and the whole episode took months to wear off.

It is very good to feel high, but when I remember how mentally disabled I became it saddens me. Reading a book from the library called "Madness Explained" I realized my main problem wasn't delusions (I wasn't really "delusional" most of the time) or hallucinations, which tended to be exhillarating and beautiful, not scary. A few times they have really offended me, but never terrified me. No my main trouble was "severe thought disorder". That is what made my mind go totally incoherent for hours at a time. A state of mind that kept coming back every day in the mid-morning to late afternoon. Several times I went out of body, out of mind. I once stood on top of the Universe, higher than anything and everything except God. I felt blessed and full of power. When I looked up, and I constantly was looking higher, because I felt like I was flying and was going higher, I kept seeing spirals. I had a friend who used to put salt in spirals on the carpet when she was tripping on ketamine. And Spiral Tribe, the most famous illegal rave soundsystem of the early 90s, were into Chaos Music. And eyes everywhere were staring at me. I saw them staring out of the bottom of the screen every time I turned the computer on.

I once wandered into a McDonalds and had real confusion because everybody in there seemed to be talking and they were talking directly at me. Long, long lines and crowds. So I ignored them all and somehow got a double cheeseburger and left.

Here's Carrie Fisher (author of Postcards from the Edge; Princess Leia in Star Wars): "Unipolar' people or even people with no poles should envy me or any bipolar person because the upswing is the greatest ~ better than any drug, better than anything in the world."