After nearly two weeks in the foothills near Yosemite, we returned to the Bay Area Sunday. Toward the end of the visit I was feeling discouraged, as my posts made clear.

My lack of purpose after the demise of the acupuncture business was hitting home. The book project softens that a little, but the right formula eludes me. So far the prose sounds like my least successful blogging: too wordy and intellectual. Lyrical description of the richness and lessons of my experiences may be beyond my ability.

Recent essays expressed remorse about my relationship with my father. Through writing here and after corresponding with my aunt, I eventually moved past that. But there remained a shadow of sadness.

The neck pain and the bad news from the recent MR scan weighed on me. I felt lonely, too.

In short, I was stuck in the familiar place of self-criticism, fear, and discouragement.

Then, on one of our last nights in the forest, something shifted inside. Peace returned.

Whenever I feel defeated the same phrase comes to mind: “God, help me.” This must be the most common human prayer, and although I don’t often believe the cosmos listens, I say it anyway. The words feel comforting, despite their futility. This time, to my relief, I heard a voice speak in a loving tone near my left shoulder: I’m right here!

Maybe I was half asleep and slipping into hypnogogic hallucination. Maybe my own thoughts rose to audibility. Regardless, I felt reassured. Why question the source? Whatever conscious presence exists in the universe, I’m convinced it arises from the depths of matter. It is not something separate from life; it is something integral to it. So if it shows up at all, it must come by way of ordinary neural pathways. Why distinguish between a dream, a thought, or the voice of God? If it feels divine, I choose to accept it as such and not worry about its provenance.

In the calm aftermath of that simple phrase uttered by something that cares, my sense of purpose became clear. I decided that since the material world no longer seems to cooperate with me, I might as well focus on the spiritual. I could even interpret the way the cosmos has frustrated my plans as God pushing me to commit to the mystical path. At times over the years I’ve glimpsed truth and entered resonant states of mind. Why not quit trying to achieve in the human sphere and instead seek awakening with all my heart and soul?

In truth, I’ve run out of options. I will either find relief through higher consciousness, or find no relief at all. And yes, I’ve been working toward realization for a long time, but not as my primary goal.

Writing still feels important, but I’m viewing it as a means to an end. It helps me make progress toward grounding in life, love, and meaning. It isn’t a project in the usual sense of the word, whether I’m working on the blog, the book, or my poetry. Writing is the road rather than the destination.

Deep down, I know with utter conviction that peace awaits, provided I get serious about taking the needed steps. This means abandoning striving for success. Instead, I will concentrate on taking care of my body, building my meditative skills, and healing my heart. It is time, at last, to journey inward toward the Light.

Ever feel like you’re not getting a point across?

Blog writing, at least as I practice it, is done on the fly. The essays are written quickly and revised only slightly beyond first draft. Sometimes the immediacy of the process obscures the intended message.

Many of this year’s posts have described my struggles, disappointments, sorrows, pains, and illnesses. Given that my goal is to write about life and growth using my own experience as illustration, it is only natural that setbacks prompt essays about difficulty. But the comments and emails I receive show that my larger perspective is not getting the attention it deserves.

It’s comforting to receive notes of sympathy and support. They help me feel that others listen and care. And yet, if my message was truly coming through, there would be more congratulation than commiseration.

Because the most striking fact of the past few months has been how little all these hardships get to me. Sure, I have moments of doubt and sorrow. In mentioning these, however, my hope has been to highlight the difference between how I’m responding now and how my tribulations would have affected me before. These days, I feel grief and pain flow through me at times, but my spirits stay fairly stable despite superficial complaints. In earlier years, my mind would have plunged into intractable depression and anxiety. With great relief, I’ve learned to watch life from the perspective of a deeper, broader, and more detached consciousness that doesn’t get pulled in.

I feel a clear separation between my transient emotions and my more enduring self. I can allow the feelings freedom to respond to life, but I watch them from a distance. I don’t, and can’t, take my suffering very seriously. Years of fostering meditative skills, spiritual grounding, and wise insight have led to this profound benefit. My quest has brought me to a state peacefulness I never could have imagined upon starting out.

As I work in the background on the book project mentioned earlier, I am feeling a sense of protectiveness toward that writing that seldom comes up in blogging. This larger work will demand careful editing before release. Online journaling has taught me how my unpolished language lets transient events obscure enduring truths. My book about mysticism and science needs to say its piece clearly and calmly, as if spoken from my most evolved mind; keeping that perspective in the foreground will require lots of rewriting. I hope to describe my position honestly, but with emphasis on realization rather than process.

Each approach has its advantages. I think the rawness of journaling appeals to certain readers, or else no blog would ever become popular. But the time is coming for me to clearly articulate a perspective on life that I’ve developed over decades. This can’t be done if it’s unduly influenced by the ups and downs of daily life. It needs to be written from that same perspective that is currently keeping me sane: broad, deep, accepting, and wise. I’ve gotten to the point where this viewpoint is always within reach, but it’s not always within my grasp, as recent posts have shown.

Who am I fooling?

Myself, mostly. The last piece did the usual intellectual thing and talked about an approach without talking about approaching. What matters is getting close to life, not describing getting close. And right now I feel very far away.

Enough posts lately have catalogued my recent misfortunes; I won’t list them again. Besides, although I’m sure the hardships play into my feelings, they aren’t playing through my thoughts. So what’s causing this sense of detachment and sorrow?

Pain, first of all. Physical discomfort in my neck, left arm, and abdomen. Although I consider myself skilled at using meditation (and not medication) to manage my pain, there are limits. I’ve reached them.

Hopelessness, second of all. With the demise of the acupuncture practice came a great reduction in stress but also the loss of a meaningful project. Sure, I’m slowly preparing a WillSpirit upgrade, which gives me a new focus, but it doesn’t feel as rich and exciting as clinical work.

Acupuncture connected me in a person-to-person way with others. Now my only helping activity is right here on this inconspicuous blog. Although writing gives me some sense of making a difference, we are talking about action at a distance. There is none of the sweetness of treating patients hands-on. I miss that and realize such experience has probably passed from my life forever.

Then comes the fear. With no way of making a living, I’m at the mercy of my disability company and the greater economic system, both of which have proven horribly untrustworthy. This isn’t a new reality, but I can no longer imagine breaking free of it. I feel trapped as the future and old age bear down on me.

And loneliness. I do a poor job of maintaining social contacts. A promising friendship got nipped in the bud when the person in question moved to the opposite coast. Another friendship ended during my manic episode. I value my small social circle, but there’s no denying its narrow circumference. I’ll keep reaching out, but in this mood it’s difficult and it isn’t like I’m much fun to be around.

The mood will lighten eventually, of course, but for now the darkness is deepening. Based on past experience, I know the bleak emotions may get a lot worse before they dissipate. I no longer feel compelled to fix the situation with pills or rash action, but I still feel oppressed.

So for all my talk of behaviorism and acting rather than obsessing about thoughts and feelings (as in the last post), I feel pretty stuck. Yes, I’ll go through all the necessary motions today: an AA meeting, swimming, some errands, a doctor’s appointment. I’ll write this blog post. I’ll walk the dogs. I won’t just lie in bed and feel sad.

But curling up under blankets sounds tempting. I find myself asking how much longer life will last. Like a kid in the back seat of a car, I look forward to the end of this journey. That’s not a happy way to live, and I try to keep from focusing too much on that question, but it’s in the air. My air.

Ever since starting this blog I’ve tried to remain honest. Often it seems like my hard work has paid off and I feel a sense of mastery over my mental state; on those days I write accordingly. But today I feel lost and confused. I wonder if anything substantive has actually changed. Have I just been fooling myself?

Our acupuncture office has closed, officially and permanently. As we acceded to the inevitable, fortune smiled on us, in that another physician acupuncturist liked the space and assumed the lease. He also purchased some of the furnishings and equipment, which was helpful financially but also saved us the trouble of moving and storing heavy items.

Breaking down the office my wife and I worked so hard to set up made me sad, but at least there wasn’t much doubt about the decision. The business had been struggling from the get-go, and the many problems had stressed us both. After hospitalization I was left with a new source of pain (in my abdomen), worsened neck problems, limited use of my left arm due to nerve compression, and heightened psychiatric instability. Continuing to practice with so many impairments would have been impossible and also unethical, so finding someone to take over the space felt like a Godsend.

Oddly, it hurt even more when I revised my acupuncture website (this link will eventually be deactivated, but it’s good for now) to announce the practice closure. I’d invested a great deal of time in building up the site’s design and content. Posting an announcement to kill the project left me a bit shaken. But I see a positive aspect to this response: it shows how much I enjoy fussing with websites and how much creative energy such work absorbs.

It’s part of the reason I’m planning a big reorganization and upgrade to this blog’s format. The initial template that I chose in 2009 has long since been abandoned by its developers. I’ve been adjusting and altering it for years, and I’ve managed to keep it functioning, but there are many glitches and I lack the expertise to fix them. So WillSpirit will be moving to a new and more robust template soon.

The updated appearance will be less quirky and more pedestrian; it will look like a typical website. I’ll miss the old format, but change cannot be avoided, especially in technological realms.

I am currently organizing the archived posts into categories. The old Tag Cloud system is also being revised and is currently disabled. I apologize for that inconvenience, by the way, though I’ve never believed tags all that helpful for finding pieces of relevance. My goal is to make the new site a place where people can more easily find articles pertaining to their needs and goals.

So, in summary, a treasured but difficult and failing project has ended. This frees up time for me to further develop WillSpirit, which requires attention anyway. One endeavor ending, another reviving. Life moves forward.

On balance, I feel better about all this than expected. The acupuncture practice was supposed to improve our financial situation, but it actually ended up costing a great deal and did not appear destined to become very profitable. The answer to our budget issues appears to be ever-increasing frugality, especially as prices continue to rise. But one gains a spiritual boon in learning to get by with less, so I’m OK with tightening the purse strings.

I’m OK with everything these days: the new pains, the new sorrows, the ongoing uncertainty, the new directions. Through all this uproar my sensitive soul keeps learning. For instance, it’s nice to finally feel convinced that life doesn’t need to be comfortable to be valuable. I embrace it all, come what may.

Time to turn over a new blog leaf. Watching the growth in readership stall, and then the numbers start to dwindle, has happened twice since I began this blog (effectively July 1). Both changes occurred after I went nuts and wrote really long posts that had only a little to do with mental health. My tag-line is ‘Just another Mental Health and Spirituality Blog’, but the sites I visit are almost all mental health oriented. So far I’ve not found a spiritual blog community that would be receptive to my biologically-based views on ‘God’. Given that the conversation I’m entering revolves around psychiatric issues of one kind or another, I will try to keep my blog in line with that topic. You all are teaching me what interests you or, more to the point, what doesn’t. In the future I will put the long posts about memoir-related or spiritual topics on webpages separate from the main blog, and then just provide the links for those (few) who are intrigued. I also plan to (once again) try to keep the posts shorter. I’m not sure what my cut-off should be. Maybe under 600 words?

With this new resolve, and the fact that I am typing better today, my mood has improved. My left ring finger, wrapped in gauze, has the sensitivity and accuracy of an elbow. But it’s only real job is typing ‘s’ (‘w’ comes up rarely, and ‘x’ almost never); with practice, I am learning to get it right. As usual, my spirits bounce back when I accept things as they are. I need to be OK with my minor injury, and not hate myself for all it seems to imply about my loss of dexterity, trouble coming off Cymbalta, etc. (The things I whined about in my last post.) I need to recognize that blog stats are just numbers, and not the same as people. I need to be satisfied with having one or two commenters say they enjoyed a post. After all, that rewards me far more than when AwStats shows a large number of ‘visitors’ who may just be web-bots for all I know. I need to get used to the fact that my blog project will not take off immediately, may never take off, and that ‘taking off’ is not the goal anyway.

Like all of us, I have concerns about finding financial security. But the joy I get out of writing, and out of communicating with others who share my concerns, has nothing to do with money. I need to hold on to that truth, and not get distracted by my anxiety about paying the bills. As is so often the case, the rewards this task has brought me are different from the ones I hoped for. The large number of fine blogs, the difficulty in attracting attention, and the frustration of realizing people don’t want to hear my ‘loftiest’ ideas have made it obvious that notoriety and financial success are unlikely. On the other hand, I’ve made contact with special and sensitive people of like attitudes, and I am now writing far more than ever before. Even to someone with chronic desires for high-achievement (tempered only a little by a decade of failure), who was raised to value status and ‘winning’ over relationships and helping, those seem like pretty good results. Thank you to all of you who have helped me find this treasure.

I have no choice but to make this short (or what counts as brief for me): I only have one hand. Slicing broccoli normally doesn’t cause me problems, but as my mental condition deteriorates off Cymbalta, even routine tasks are becoming hard. The knife careened off the stalk I was skinning.

I like to put broccoli flowers in salads, and after I chop up the tops I always split the peeled stalks with Ralphy, one of our two dogs. Tonight the blade slipped as I was cutting off the rind, and I somehow managed to slide the tip of my left ring finger between the knife’s edge and the cutting board. The blade nearly sliced off the part of the figertip distal to (sorry for the medical term–’distal to’ just means ‘further out than’) the nail. My pain tolerance is high, but this surprised me with how much it hurt. The end of the finger obviously contains a dense network of nerve endings. Luckily, there was enough of an attachment remaining that after a long period of washing, and then even more time placing pressure to staunch the bleeding, Mandy was able to secure the little flap in place with an adhesive strip. As an operating room nurse, she would have preferred to drive to the emergency department to see if they could stitch the tiny piece down. As a former (ophthalmic) plastic surgeon, I felt that a successful job would have taken very fine suture and a high degree of skill. I did not think I would get that level of care for this minor problem, and a trip to the ED would only waste 3-4 hours driving, and who knows how long waiting to be seen. In the end, I would have come out with an adhesive strip–much like the one Mandy already attached.

Time was I never would have been so careless with a sharp blade. I prided myself on being able to handle knives, scalpels, etc., skilfully and safely. Now, ten years later, I am very much out of practice. My acquired ineptness with cutting instruments, combined with antidepressant withdrawal (which floods me with the distracting conviction that life is pointless, and also saps my energy levels) caused me to stupidly cut myself. So here I am typing with two fingers and a thumb on one hand, while I keep the other elevated to reduce swelling.

Before this injury, I had toyed with making my next post about the dreadful and permanent side effects I’ve suffered from taking psychiatric drugs. That would have been a big step, because I feel a great deal of shame. Yet doing so will ultimately help me heal and, more importantly, might serve as a warning to others. Maybe cutting off a part of myself was an unconscious way of putting off this decision. So, another time.

I would have a better outlook, increased energy, and sharper judgment if I went back on Cymbalta. But, mainly because of how similar drugs have wrecked my body, I just can’t bring myself to swallow that nasty little green pill. So I keep on in this deteriorating mode, hoping that things don’t get too much worse before they start getting better. I suspect my body needs to regrow a huge number serotonin and/or norepinephrine receptors, as per a post I wrote not long ago. Given how far I’ve sunk since I penned that essay, it seems like it could have been in another lifetime.

Mandy thinks I need to take a break from writing, and a number of other activities important to me, in order to give my fingertip the best chance of healing properly. Since my mood continues to take me to more and more maudlin and self-pitying places, that might be a good idea even without the finger issue. So for a little while I may spend less time blogging. If nothing else, I can concentrate on learning how to customize my blog functionality and layout. I have a stack of books on html, css, php, java, mySQL, etc, that I’ve been unable to devote time to because of the hours spent drafting posts and exploring blogs. I figure if writing never leads to an income, by acquiring programming abilities as I work on my site I will be in a position to look for work in computers instead. But to achieve that objective, the books need to be read.

Nothing as ambitious as success (either as a writer or programmer) will be attained if I don’t recover my emotional equilibrium. I can’t express how much regret consumes me when I think about how a therapist finally talked me into taking medications, and how I went ahead despite a lifetime of opposition to psychiatric drugs. My hesitation was born of watching my mother destroy herself with drugs given to her by psychiatrists, and now I have done exactly the same thing. Except that unlike her, I remain alive… Barely.

I tried keep this short enough to work as a ‘comment’, but I have obvious difficulty with brevity.

First, I felt a little bad after my last post, because my tone came on so strong. We all work hard to survive and grow, and for some reason I felt like I needed to vigorously defend my choices and my progress along my trail to enlightenment (which, as we both understand, is something we can only glimpse along the way, not a destination to be permanently found). But, it became all-too-clear to me later on later that my response came off sounding sarcastic in places. It is not my desire to judge, and certainly not to attack, another person’s choices or opinions.

That is my whole point: I believe no one can really say what is best for another person. Maybe the place we agree the most is in reacting to the arrogance of a mental health system that treats people like diagnoses rather than individuals and tells them what they ‘need’ on the basis of symptoms. Involuntary treatment stands as the most egregious example, of course. (Although in defense of psychiatry, society does demand that ‘something be done’ about people who are too disruptive. In that sense it is not ‘psychiatry’ that is at fault, it is our whole culture.)

My intent was not to inflict injury, and if I had that effect then I am very, very sorry. I have glimpsed the acrimony and judgement that crop up often when these topics are debated. This conflict gets exacerbated since we are each more or less hidden behind our computers and never see each other in person. I have felt discouraged by the whole situation, and I sometimes question whether to blog at all. I’ve definitely slowed down after my recent burst of enthusiasm (which mostly went unnoticed anyway). Gianna at Beyond Meds has signed off in response to such abusive treatment. I really do not want to be causing that kind of distress to anyone, no matter how much I agree or disagree.

I have had terrible experiences with therapy, by the way. Probably my neediness made me vulnerable (but isn’t that the point?), but without doubt a few of my therapists acted unethically in ways that damaged me. Not long ago I wrote a post that touched on these misadventures.

This discussion has been fun and instructive. Whether it seems like it or not, my attitudes have shifted; I am not convinced of your position, but you have moved me closer. I appreciate that you engaged me and sent a few visitors to my nascent blog in the process. I look forward to following your writing as time goes on. I also admire how you also blog in Danish, and thus widen your message. It would be a shame if the anger others direct at you makes you decide you to back out of the arena–though I certainly understand why you might need to do so for self-protection. I do hope it does not come to that, and I apologize again for any pain my comments caused you.

Since I started this blog at the end of May (and ramped it up in July), most of my posts took on a rhetorical style. In college (UC Berkeley) I took a year of Rhetoric rather than Freshman English, for reasons I no longer remember. Ever since then, it has been hard for me to write without composing an argument. My guess is that readership will not be attracted to an endless column of that stuff, as much as I enjoy logical analysis of issues.

While I cannot change into someone new, as much as I sometimes wish it, it is important for me to also be ‘real’ in this project. So what follows gives a brief sketch of my current lifestyle, at least as I lead it when in the Bay Area.

After waking up early, I sit at my computer for an hour or more looking at any comments that might have come in, writing responses, and visiting blogs. Then my wife and I walk our two little dogs: Emily, a chihuahua-dachshund mix, and Ralphy, who is some version of a poodle. Both weigh 10-11 pounds, and are the cutest dogs in the world (but it’s possible I’m a little biased). Some days I also go to an AA meeting a few miles from home; it’s a daily meeting, and it is one of the few places I’ve made friends as an adult.

After the dog walk, Mandy and I usually go to the gym. This takes us to noon, or a little later. The afternoon I often spend running errands, though I prefer to have time to write. That is one of the reasons I prefer living in the foothills (where we spend 1/4 to 1/2 of our time); it presents fewer distractions to my writing.

Mandy usually cooks dinner, and I either do the clean up alone, or with Mandy’s help. I actually prefer to do it by myself because, truth be told, Mandy does 90% of the housework; I have never been one to assist much. I feel guilty about it, but evidently not enough to pitch in on a regular basis. That’s another reason I like being up at our mountain place: there is a great deal of work to do outside, around the land. That way I can contribute to the function of the household, since I am poorly motivated toward cleaning and doing the indoor work.

In the evening we typically watch a rented movie. Then I do one of two things. If I am feeling OK, I spend more time at the computer. Unfortunately, very often I get depressed as the day ends, and I retreat to a dark room, curl up in a ball, and try not to think. I focus on my body and its sensations in order to escape the torment of my thoughts. Not a pretty picture, and obviously not one I am proud of, but there it is.

When I am writing, my guilt about not helping around the house gets alleviated slightly. Since my surgical career ended in 2000, I have spent six months in graduate school, three months teaching high school, and eighteen months doing public speaking for the California Department of Public Health (about childhood lead poisoning). I’ve also done some volunteer computer programming and other unpaid work (including a little recent work as a mental health patient advocate). But you can see how I do not have any earning capacity. For now we are coasting along OK, but someday an income will be needed. Since I have crashed at every endeavor since my surgical career ended (due to neck problems), the only thing I have left is writing. Although it may never pay actual money, at least it feels like work rather than mere laziness.

Writing as a living is obviously a very, very uncertain thing. Especially for someone with so little background in the field. I have what I think is an interesting story to tell, but whether I can tell it in a compelling way is an open question.

Believe it or not, those eight (rather short) paragraphs sum up the better part of my current life. It is simple, uncluttered, and sometimes boring. The difference between what I do now and what things were like back when I had a clinical practice is impossible to overstate. Back then I worked fifty hours a week (half of those in the operating room), fixed up our vintage house in San Francisco on the weekends, and spent the rest of my free time either sculpting or reading about sculpture. I was busy as hell. I felt productive and proud of myself. I was probably a little arrogant.

In those days I had minimal spiritual sensibility. I tended to see things from a materialist perspective and gave almost no attention to the murmurings of my heart. Stress consumed me.

Which is better? For all the loss, grief, depression, and defeat, I am now a more enlightened, understanding, and humble person. Admittedly, I sometimes take the humility thing too far until it borders on humiliation. But most of the time I see myself as a better person than before. (I admit my wife might have a different take on things.)

So that’s my story. I don’t know if anyone will care, or even read this far into my post. But I want this site to include some of my real day-to-day experience, rather than just arguments. Besides, I see now that my opinions about mental health topics sound naive compared to what I read on other blogs, where similar topics have been kicked around for a long time.

Lately, I’ve been battling a low-grade conviction that life is s**t. My grip on living has been slipping, and I find myself dreaming of the long fall off the Golden Gate Bridge, just like the old days. (When I was in the hospital, the therapists grilled me about why I was fixated on the bridge, when as a doctor I could–they thought–easily get my hands on some pills to die painlessly. My answer came down to what I mentioned in another post: my mother loved the bridge before she died. It seemed to represent something to her, even as she faded into the mists of depression back in Michigan.) That’s why I gave in and boosted the Cymbalta again.

Since the dose increase, my mood is perking up. Of course, I pay the price of diminished sexual responsiveness and the discouragement of losing ground in my project of breaking free of pharmaceuticals. But at least the nagging feeling that life just isn’t worth the trouble has lifted–sort of.

I’d like to end on a better note, but that would not be true to my current condition. When I started this blog my hope had been to show everyone a path to freedom out of depression: I actually believed my progress exemplary enough that I could begin to teach others. Rather predictably, however, I’ve slipped back into the pit, though fortunately not too terribly far. I have every expectation that things will look bright again before too long. I even have hope of feeling connected, once more, with the cosmic resonance that I feel at my calmest times, especially when surrounded by arrow-straight pine trees and dozens of birds, whose clicking, chirping and trills remind me of God’s voice.

Since I already carried a burden of hostility toward the system for how medications damaged my life and my body, the rejection propelled me into a belief that I should be an activist from without, rather than a clinician on the inside trying to do a better job. Problem is, I’ve never been an activist before, having mostly done safe (though long and tedious things) like go to medical school and become a surgeon. But at least I like to write, and apparently one can accomplish a lot just by putting ideas on paper. ‘Activism’ doesn’t only mean I have to get out and hit the streets.

What is happening, however, is that I am being pushed into a more extreme position than that from which I started. I’d like to think medications are not all bad. I do believe they have a role in acute situations. It’s just that as chronic treatments, they suck. Side effects and destruction to health build up, and efficacy diminishes. In the end one gets stuck in my position, having a really hard time getting off the drugs because my brain has gotten habituated (read: addicted) to them. Yet, the more I read, the more I wonder how much the benefits outweigh the hazards. While some small number of acutely psychotic people will perhaps always need some medication, most likely the majority of  ’patients’ could be treated better with kindness, cognitive techniques, and comprehensive attention to their spiritual and physical health. This is the kind of approach I believe Tom Wootton’s Bipolar Advantage is advocating. Maybe we have enough medications for now. Maybe the whole endeavor (and highly profitable industry) of looking for and marketing new drugs needs to be shelved. These are questions that I can’t answer right now. Not for myself and certainly not for others. But I do see my attitudes becoming more and more opposed to the medical model and psychiatric drugs. This wouldn’t be occurring if I was on my way to becoming a psychiatrist.

My biggest question is: would I have been able to make more difference as a clinician? Would helping dozens, or hundreds, of patients get (what I consider) appropriate treatment be more valuable than writing? The point is mostly moot, of course, since I don’t have a door into the field. On the other hand, I could reapply (to programs that don’t already know me) without being so revealing about my psychiatric history. Yet, all I’ve read since I entered the (badly named) blogosphere convinces me I’m better off not going into the field. Marian makes a persuasive argument about the compromises that one inevitably makes in the course of entering any kind of organization. Plus, if I could bring myself to get my whole story out (I’m still hesitant to reveal the worst of it), it might attract some attention and really increase awareness. It would require a lot of work, and that much effort might be beyond me (not to mention the requisite compelling writing style). It is an idea for the future. For now I am just exploring options, writing my blog, and commenting on the blogs of others.

I never wanted any of this. Although I once had dreams of glory, more recently my ambition has just been to settle down as a happy worker bee, productive and comfortable. Unfortunately for those modest dreams, however, my past has caught up with me. My only choice seems to be to tell my stories and comment on the messed-up systems of psychiatric care. That puts me out in public view, where the way to be successful is to try to be as visible as possible. So now the question becomes, once again, how successful do I want to be? Especially knowing that the price of success is exiting my comfort zone and losing my anonymity?

Which brings up the whole question of obligation. Having learned medicine formally, a lot of psychiatry informally, and possessing a pretty good understanding of cellular neurophysiology, I certainly can speak with an authoritative voice about the medical implications of modern mental health care. Add to that how I’ve suffered really horrible side effects and lost a decade of my life  to mental illness-related disability (which might not have happened if I’d not been given so many medications), can I justifiably stand by and not speak out? Can I actually, in good conscience, let this go on without trying to make a difference? Painful questions for someone who just wanted life to get easy.

Forgive me for using this website as a chalkboard for sketching out a future strategy and a guiding philosophy. I am learning a lot from your blogs and your comments, and look forward to a lively and productive conversation.

Whew! Finally!

I have a fair amount of computer experience and have done some basic programming. I’ve read the better part of a book about HTML/XHTML/CSS. I think I understand this stuff. Yet I spent hours yesterday trying to add a photo to my post. Had to contact the web hosting support system. They changed the permissions for the photo to the same settings I’d already entered (!). With a bit more fussing, and a full night’s sleep, I finally got the darn thing to work this morning. I don’t understand how there can be so many great-looking and elaborate blogs out there when I had to struggle so hard just to post one lousy picture.

Every time I start to get confident, it seems, life comes along and shows me my limitations. Since this has been going on for ten years now, I really don’t think this lesson is needed anymore, but it keeps coming. Imagine that I once had the ability and self-assuredness to operate on eyelids and faces. Now I hesitate to pass slow-moving trucks on a two lane road. Mental illness can do that to you, though I don’t suppose it has to. But getting hospitalized and having to give up on projects because of emotional instability deeply affected me. Such experiences left me unsure of my remaining capabilities.

After the photo debacle, it would be easy to conclude: they don’t amount to much. But hey, that didn’t have anything to do with mental illness, just inexperience. To some extent, even the problems I’ve had that were related to psychiatric symptoms may have been due to lack of experience: I needed to learn how to work with what happens in my mind. Not that I could (or would want to) be a surgeon again. But there are many things I can do well, many of them that I could only do poorly before my illness, if at all. One of them, it seems, is laugh at myself. Another is to take it easy and not always push, push, push for success (remember that?) and perfection (say what?).

The good news is, I succeeded in getting the photo uploaded and visible. Now anyone interested can see where Amanda and I stay when in the foothills; thanks to her for taking the lovely picture. It’s very nice up there. Quiet. Peaceful. Surrounded by life and nature.

People evolved in natural settings, and I find myself returning to those roots. When all else fails: back to basics. Mastery is easier, and limits fewer, when life is simpler.