Sounds like the title for a bad psychology 101 paper. Heh. I guess that's one benchmark for sucess in this culture - if you can't inspire brilliance, at least get a disorder named after you on your way out, right?
I've been trying to think of how come I can detach sometimes from the depression and look at it analytically, and then other times it's just too much and I can't sit back and separate it out. You know what the one consistent factor is? Sunlight.
Yep, sunlight. When it's sunny out or I'm sitting by a window and getting lots of direct and indirect sunlight, I feel perfectly fine. Normal, even. Sure, the depression can be raging around inside my mind, but it gets much thinner and quieter in the sunlight. I don't think that happy lights do the same thing. I think that I need to be in a well-lit area during the wintertime.
Well, at least it's a simple solution, but the problem is that I don't get enough of it in the wintertime and there's nothing to be done about that when the sun has set each night. But at least in my current job I get to sit right by a window and look out at the sunlight each day.
Hey, I'm counting my positives and blessings. It's not that I'm stuck in despair, but I just need to figure out how to get myself motivated and in motion again. Funny thing, that... with motion comes stability. Momentum will overcome slight bumps in the road. If I can build up enough momentum it makes the path seem straighter. Like attaining aerodynamics through rifling a bullet (so it spins as it flies).
Those are my thoughts on the matter. We'll see if they bear out.
Showing posts with label bipolar disorder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bipolar disorder. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Monday, January 22, 2007
Helluva Weekend
This weekend was a bad weekend, in terms of mental health. Since I stopped working for TracyLocke as a Studio Manager and Web Producer to follow the new career path of Creative placement services, I've been without benefits, medication, or attention from professionals. I've been making do by managing the tough times.
I say 'managing' but really what it amounts to is knowing when the time is getting tough and withdrawing into myself or shutting down social obligations in order to not share the pain or hurt my social relationships or professional relationships by actions taken while in the throes of spiritual angst and agony. It's not so much management as it is simply 'enduring'.
I do have one balm in Gilead... I smoke pot. It feels weird saying this on an open blog but I content myself with the knowledge that there's only a handful of folks who care enough to be interested in reading all the way through the copious notes and rambling journal entries I post. Hidden in plain sight, so to speak. There are many worse vices to have accumulated, but at least marijuana gives me both pleasure and relief. Smoking it induces a light euphoria, settles my stomach (which lately has not been a happy creature from sheer emotional stress), and elevates my mood and demeanor from the thunderbolt rollercoaster plunge to a slow, ambling geniality. Even when I was on the medications full time for manic depression, I found myself not having the same success on the medications alone as I did on the meds and the pot. So if every artist has his illness or his vice, I've got both in one.
This weekend was a bad weekend, and one full of mental despair to the point that even doing things that normally give a sort of release, or induce pleasure, were ashen and devoid of meaning, fully laden down with the burden of simply existing. My art homework has gone completely derailed, even the simple act of filling up an 8.5"x11" paper with vertical lines drawn completely by hand.
I finished Season 3 of Babylon 5, and it was probably not the best choice of viewing for me in my frame of mind. It chronicles the descent and struggle against the despair brought forth by the Shadows, and ends the season with Sheridan going to Z'ha'dhum, the planet at the heart of the Shadow menace. There being seduced by false demons of his wife returned in physical form but with all sense of self completely destroyed through her bonding with their ships, trapped against his will but not completely without his foreknowledge, he crashes a ship into the Shadow citadel armed with intense thermonuclear bombs and makes one last, desperate bid for self by hurling himself off of the balcony of the highest ring of a hell similar to Dante's Inferno without the flames, and plunges down into the pit as the might of stars explode above him, wiping out the city itself. Z'ha'dhum indeed. Fade into darkness as the ambassador/resistance fighter cum Prophet, J'kar, provides voiceover of philosophical utterances of doom, despair, and the tiniest glimmer of potential hope ... End Season 3.
Not exactly the best time to be viewing this, in the midst of my own despair. The special effects didn't captivate, the storyline felt like rough sandpaper on my already raw emotions. But there was nothing else I could conceive of to do. Nothing else I found any ability to watch at all. At one point in the weekend Storm came over to me from his stint at the computer and found me sitting alone in the living room, no cats even, the TV off and the only sound being the faint hiss of the surround-sound speakers that you get when there's no audio being fed through but the receiver is still turned on.
Saturday was the worst. Sunday got better. Today? Too early to tell much, but I do feel myself somewhere back amid the midtones instead of thrashing in the charcoals. It's such a sobering thought, knowing that I'm ill with an incurable disease which will continue to grind at me for the rest of my life. No stop. Only pauses. If it were controllable by an effort of will, I would do so. I fully believe that it's only the fact that I know this is a disease which allows me some small detachment from the actual episodes, and my magical training of willpower which allows me to go to that inner place and weather the storm. Otherwise I think I would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks some time ago.
Knowing this to be an illness, I can conceive of it and deal with it as separate and external to myself. That's my path of sanity. There's times when I can't come out to play because there's just too much going on just beneath the surface, but the good news is that it's just a layer, and there's sanity on the inside. The real trouble comes when the bad times hit and you try to maintain social relations, and don't give yourself the gift of isolation and processing alone. That's when the manic depressives I know get in real trouble. Myself included.
Every single episode of social consequences in my life has happened because I didn't heed my inner weather patterns and tried to keep up appearances or maintain interactions. Faced with the choice of being perceived by others as periodically aloof and arrogant, or being forced to continually clean up and deal with the consequences of my impulsive actions during manic periods or known as some kind of drama queen during my despair, I think I'll choose to be perceived as aloof. Thankyouverymuch.
The real regret that I have during those periods however is that they waste time like nothing else. All the hours spent on World of Warcraft, Civilization, and SimCity don't begin to dent the hours wasted by being despaired or maniaed into relative immobility. In fact, many of those hours on the computer game time sinks are directly related to the approaches to despair. Even though there was absolutely no pleasure in the games at all this weekend, I played two complete games of Civilization IV, built one new city in SimCity, and seriously toyed with the idea of getting Burning Crusade using a gift card that we had.
The other thing which was bad this weekend was the fact that we have no cash to speak of, and no food in the house of consequence. Ramen, Lipton Noodles, and spaghetti were the bill of fare. Not from a lack of planning, but just sheer lack of resources. Well, that and the fact that the electricity turned off and we overpaid when we had it turned back on. Folks living on the edge like us figure out that when they shut you off you don't usually have to pay the full bill, just a portion of the overdue amounts, and we paid off the balance in full. While this was good in one sense, it hit us at a time when one series of checks coming in have somehow gone astray in their timing for payouts because Storm's old employers screwed up big time on paperwork. And we suffered for it.
I'm fairly certain that this weekend would not have been so dismal had I been able to eat better. Lack of proper nutrition contributes greatly to mood swings, I think. Such was my blindsight stupidity that I forgot I had several packets of Herbalife multivitamins still up in my cupboard... I should have at least taken them. And protein and vitamin shake mix too, from Herbalife. Damn. Well, done is done, but I'll keep those in mind in case something happens like that in the future again. Now we just have to get through this week and we'll be back on some kind of regular paycheck schedule.
For me, at least, I'm not bottling all off this up anymore. I told Storm this weekend exactly what was going on, and the focus of my preoccupations. It pained him to hear it, but better to share the pain and the burden than try to be the superman who is uber-reliable and can totally handle anything. I don't have the resources and wherewithal to be a continual shield around our family anymore. I'm sure I no longer have the resources simply because I was stupid enough to try in the first place.
I continue to wrestle with my decision to leap from safety into the void of my own. Jumping to Alden from TL meant leaving behind a sure paycheck with benefits and a life routine that, while boring, was steady and allowed other things to be built on top of it. And I left for the promise of money beyond my imagining that could be gotten by working hard and applying myself at the task of corporate recruiting. At least at Alden, they continually waved the promise of a big paycheck around in front of us as some kind of motivating force.
That's when I realized that I'm not motivated by the pursuit of money itself. I'm firm enough in my grasp on reality to know its importance, and to be able to see how miserable an existence it is when the cost of living is so very high and the cash flow is not there. I'm no fool, I live and breathe and eat in this world, not the dreams in my head. But it's not my motivating force. Sure, I would love the richness of a life lived with a high cash flow, and yes, attaining that would liberate me from a number of concerns and reduce a significant portion of the stress in my life. But money as a goal in and of itself... not so much. I keep hearing Billy Joel's line in my head "And if you can't drive with a broken back/at least you can polish the fenders".
However, it's painful to me that my foray into the recruiting world so quickly came to a choice between the pursuit of money and the need for work/life balance. I'm very afraid now, as I begin to walk down the art world path again, of seeing art in any way as a kind of a way to ever make a living. I know it can become so, but I know as well that it is far too premature to take that viewpoint or dare to hope that I will be lucky enough or persistent enough to get there. I'm already seeing the trouble I'm having in being persistent with my current career path... they say that it takes a full year of effort to get yourself to the point where you can really make a decent living being a recruiter. I'm seeing the wisdom and reality of that statement myself. and Oh, how stressful is this time between.
That's the rub, really. I've switched careers after 10 years. 35 seems to be the right time to do it. And now there's all sorts of beginner's strife to put up with once again. I'm making placements, and I'm "earning" money, but I'm not yet seeing payouts or commissions because the billing cycle for Creative recruiting is soooo long term. For example... on Friday one of my candidates had a review for possible conversion to full time status. If that happens, we the company earn a payout percentage of her starting salary offer. Of that percentage of money, I personally earn a commission. Straightforward, right? But we the company give a guarantee that the new employee will be fine for 90 days from date of hire. That means that at the very -earliest- I will see any of that money which I'd be entitled to if they had hired her -right now- would be the beginning of May.
Yeah. That's a tough time to have to wait, knowing that at any point in the process my candidate could "fall off", get fired, quit, or not fulfill her 90 day guarantee. And then, realistically, just because after 90 days the bill becomes due in full doesn't mean that the company will pay out exactly on the due date. Quite the opposite. In all realistic expectations, I'm not going to see any money for six months, unless my boss decides to pay out once the bill becomes due, not paid. She's said she would once the guarantee period is done, but there's a while to go and we don't yet know of any firm offers.
So when folks complain about recruiter fees, they need to take a real close look at how long it takes to pay out, the kinds of risks we have involved, and realize that it's going to take longer than a full year for me to begin to see any of the "money money money" that some recruiting firms like to dance in front of you.
The silver lining in all of this is that once you make it past your first year and start racking up the placements, yes, indeed, for those with the talent and the gift needed to make it in this industry, you most certainly can earn quite a lot of a money. But it's never fully under your control, and in the end it becomes a form of slavery in and of itself. If you walk away for something else, you lose the money still pending. You fall short of actually seeing the return on your investment of time and anguish.
So that's where I am now... in it for the long haul and hoping beyond all hope that the economy turns around and the demand for Creatives picks up tremendously. Because I see all of the hopeful job seekers, and I see some excellent talent which is going to waste because of the vagaries of the Creative hiring process. I also heard tell that TracyLocke HR folks spoke to a team of Creatives after the last round of layoffs and said "If you're thinking about jumping off, now is the time to do so since Q1 is the best time to get hired." I've got news for everyone... traditionally, yes, this would be a good time to jump, but I'm hip deep in the hiring process and this year there are far more companies handling layoffs than they are staffing up.
Damn. All I want in life is for some help with the burden of living. I'm trying and doing everything that I'm supposed to do which will lead to success, but I begin to feel as though I'm working harder, not smarter, and I'm boggled by the fact that I simply cannot figure out how to make my efforts smarter. At all. I'm 2 steps away from saying fuck it all and going back to school for Law.
I say 'managing' but really what it amounts to is knowing when the time is getting tough and withdrawing into myself or shutting down social obligations in order to not share the pain or hurt my social relationships or professional relationships by actions taken while in the throes of spiritual angst and agony. It's not so much management as it is simply 'enduring'.
Balm in Gilead
I do have one balm in Gilead... I smoke pot. It feels weird saying this on an open blog but I content myself with the knowledge that there's only a handful of folks who care enough to be interested in reading all the way through the copious notes and rambling journal entries I post. Hidden in plain sight, so to speak. There are many worse vices to have accumulated, but at least marijuana gives me both pleasure and relief. Smoking it induces a light euphoria, settles my stomach (which lately has not been a happy creature from sheer emotional stress), and elevates my mood and demeanor from the thunderbolt rollercoaster plunge to a slow, ambling geniality. Even when I was on the medications full time for manic depression, I found myself not having the same success on the medications alone as I did on the meds and the pot. So if every artist has his illness or his vice, I've got both in one.
This weekend was a bad weekend, and one full of mental despair to the point that even doing things that normally give a sort of release, or induce pleasure, were ashen and devoid of meaning, fully laden down with the burden of simply existing. My art homework has gone completely derailed, even the simple act of filling up an 8.5"x11" paper with vertical lines drawn completely by hand.
Babylon 5 Season 3 Done
I finished Season 3 of Babylon 5, and it was probably not the best choice of viewing for me in my frame of mind. It chronicles the descent and struggle against the despair brought forth by the Shadows, and ends the season with Sheridan going to Z'ha'dhum, the planet at the heart of the Shadow menace. There being seduced by false demons of his wife returned in physical form but with all sense of self completely destroyed through her bonding with their ships, trapped against his will but not completely without his foreknowledge, he crashes a ship into the Shadow citadel armed with intense thermonuclear bombs and makes one last, desperate bid for self by hurling himself off of the balcony of the highest ring of a hell similar to Dante's Inferno without the flames, and plunges down into the pit as the might of stars explode above him, wiping out the city itself. Z'ha'dhum indeed. Fade into darkness as the ambassador/resistance fighter cum Prophet, J'kar, provides voiceover of philosophical utterances of doom, despair, and the tiniest glimmer of potential hope ... End Season 3.
Not exactly the best time to be viewing this, in the midst of my own despair. The special effects didn't captivate, the storyline felt like rough sandpaper on my already raw emotions. But there was nothing else I could conceive of to do. Nothing else I found any ability to watch at all. At one point in the weekend Storm came over to me from his stint at the computer and found me sitting alone in the living room, no cats even, the TV off and the only sound being the faint hiss of the surround-sound speakers that you get when there's no audio being fed through but the receiver is still turned on.
Rollercoaster Ride
Saturday was the worst. Sunday got better. Today? Too early to tell much, but I do feel myself somewhere back amid the midtones instead of thrashing in the charcoals. It's such a sobering thought, knowing that I'm ill with an incurable disease which will continue to grind at me for the rest of my life. No stop. Only pauses. If it were controllable by an effort of will, I would do so. I fully believe that it's only the fact that I know this is a disease which allows me some small detachment from the actual episodes, and my magical training of willpower which allows me to go to that inner place and weather the storm. Otherwise I think I would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks some time ago.
Knowing this to be an illness, I can conceive of it and deal with it as separate and external to myself. That's my path of sanity. There's times when I can't come out to play because there's just too much going on just beneath the surface, but the good news is that it's just a layer, and there's sanity on the inside. The real trouble comes when the bad times hit and you try to maintain social relations, and don't give yourself the gift of isolation and processing alone. That's when the manic depressives I know get in real trouble. Myself included.
Every single episode of social consequences in my life has happened because I didn't heed my inner weather patterns and tried to keep up appearances or maintain interactions. Faced with the choice of being perceived by others as periodically aloof and arrogant, or being forced to continually clean up and deal with the consequences of my impulsive actions during manic periods or known as some kind of drama queen during my despair, I think I'll choose to be perceived as aloof. Thankyouverymuch.
Time Wasting
The real regret that I have during those periods however is that they waste time like nothing else. All the hours spent on World of Warcraft, Civilization, and SimCity don't begin to dent the hours wasted by being despaired or maniaed into relative immobility. In fact, many of those hours on the computer game time sinks are directly related to the approaches to despair. Even though there was absolutely no pleasure in the games at all this weekend, I played two complete games of Civilization IV, built one new city in SimCity, and seriously toyed with the idea of getting Burning Crusade using a gift card that we had.
The other thing which was bad this weekend was the fact that we have no cash to speak of, and no food in the house of consequence. Ramen, Lipton Noodles, and spaghetti were the bill of fare. Not from a lack of planning, but just sheer lack of resources. Well, that and the fact that the electricity turned off and we overpaid when we had it turned back on. Folks living on the edge like us figure out that when they shut you off you don't usually have to pay the full bill, just a portion of the overdue amounts, and we paid off the balance in full. While this was good in one sense, it hit us at a time when one series of checks coming in have somehow gone astray in their timing for payouts because Storm's old employers screwed up big time on paperwork. And we suffered for it.
I'm fairly certain that this weekend would not have been so dismal had I been able to eat better. Lack of proper nutrition contributes greatly to mood swings, I think. Such was my blindsight stupidity that I forgot I had several packets of Herbalife multivitamins still up in my cupboard... I should have at least taken them. And protein and vitamin shake mix too, from Herbalife. Damn. Well, done is done, but I'll keep those in mind in case something happens like that in the future again. Now we just have to get through this week and we'll be back on some kind of regular paycheck schedule.
Some progress, at least
For me, at least, I'm not bottling all off this up anymore. I told Storm this weekend exactly what was going on, and the focus of my preoccupations. It pained him to hear it, but better to share the pain and the burden than try to be the superman who is uber-reliable and can totally handle anything. I don't have the resources and wherewithal to be a continual shield around our family anymore. I'm sure I no longer have the resources simply because I was stupid enough to try in the first place.
I continue to wrestle with my decision to leap from safety into the void of my own. Jumping to Alden from TL meant leaving behind a sure paycheck with benefits and a life routine that, while boring, was steady and allowed other things to be built on top of it. And I left for the promise of money beyond my imagining that could be gotten by working hard and applying myself at the task of corporate recruiting. At least at Alden, they continually waved the promise of a big paycheck around in front of us as some kind of motivating force.
Money, Motivation, Career Changes & Despair
That's when I realized that I'm not motivated by the pursuit of money itself. I'm firm enough in my grasp on reality to know its importance, and to be able to see how miserable an existence it is when the cost of living is so very high and the cash flow is not there. I'm no fool, I live and breathe and eat in this world, not the dreams in my head. But it's not my motivating force. Sure, I would love the richness of a life lived with a high cash flow, and yes, attaining that would liberate me from a number of concerns and reduce a significant portion of the stress in my life. But money as a goal in and of itself... not so much. I keep hearing Billy Joel's line in my head "And if you can't drive with a broken back/at least you can polish the fenders".
However, it's painful to me that my foray into the recruiting world so quickly came to a choice between the pursuit of money and the need for work/life balance. I'm very afraid now, as I begin to walk down the art world path again, of seeing art in any way as a kind of a way to ever make a living. I know it can become so, but I know as well that it is far too premature to take that viewpoint or dare to hope that I will be lucky enough or persistent enough to get there. I'm already seeing the trouble I'm having in being persistent with my current career path... they say that it takes a full year of effort to get yourself to the point where you can really make a decent living being a recruiter. I'm seeing the wisdom and reality of that statement myself. and Oh, how stressful is this time between.
That's the rub, really. I've switched careers after 10 years. 35 seems to be the right time to do it. And now there's all sorts of beginner's strife to put up with once again. I'm making placements, and I'm "earning" money, but I'm not yet seeing payouts or commissions because the billing cycle for Creative recruiting is soooo long term. For example... on Friday one of my candidates had a review for possible conversion to full time status. If that happens, we the company earn a payout percentage of her starting salary offer. Of that percentage of money, I personally earn a commission. Straightforward, right? But we the company give a guarantee that the new employee will be fine for 90 days from date of hire. That means that at the very -earliest- I will see any of that money which I'd be entitled to if they had hired her -right now- would be the beginning of May.
Yeah. That's a tough time to have to wait, knowing that at any point in the process my candidate could "fall off", get fired, quit, or not fulfill her 90 day guarantee. And then, realistically, just because after 90 days the bill becomes due in full doesn't mean that the company will pay out exactly on the due date. Quite the opposite. In all realistic expectations, I'm not going to see any money for six months, unless my boss decides to pay out once the bill becomes due, not paid. She's said she would once the guarantee period is done, but there's a while to go and we don't yet know of any firm offers.
So when folks complain about recruiter fees, they need to take a real close look at how long it takes to pay out, the kinds of risks we have involved, and realize that it's going to take longer than a full year for me to begin to see any of the "money money money" that some recruiting firms like to dance in front of you.
Hope ahead? Hopefully.
The silver lining in all of this is that once you make it past your first year and start racking up the placements, yes, indeed, for those with the talent and the gift needed to make it in this industry, you most certainly can earn quite a lot of a money. But it's never fully under your control, and in the end it becomes a form of slavery in and of itself. If you walk away for something else, you lose the money still pending. You fall short of actually seeing the return on your investment of time and anguish.
So that's where I am now... in it for the long haul and hoping beyond all hope that the economy turns around and the demand for Creatives picks up tremendously. Because I see all of the hopeful job seekers, and I see some excellent talent which is going to waste because of the vagaries of the Creative hiring process. I also heard tell that TracyLocke HR folks spoke to a team of Creatives after the last round of layoffs and said "If you're thinking about jumping off, now is the time to do so since Q1 is the best time to get hired." I've got news for everyone... traditionally, yes, this would be a good time to jump, but I'm hip deep in the hiring process and this year there are far more companies handling layoffs than they are staffing up.
Damn. All I want in life is for some help with the burden of living. I'm trying and doing everything that I'm supposed to do which will lead to success, but I begin to feel as though I'm working harder, not smarter, and I'm boggled by the fact that I simply cannot figure out how to make my efforts smarter. At all. I'm 2 steps away from saying fuck it all and going back to school for Law.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Dear Theo notes
More notes.
The reading begins to get tough for me because it's so similar in weird ways to my own patterns of thinking. VanGogh must have been bipolar, as I am. I'm fighting against the urge to skip ahead and read the last letter to get a gauge of the depths of the descent into madness and despair which might lie ahead just because I don't know if I can handle it.
I hear the optimism and the sheer force of will, pushing ahead and, just before age 30, striving so very hard to be true to two contradictory forces at the same time. On the one hand Van Gogh was struggling to do everything that was expected of him. He lived a good portion of his life by the expectations of others.
At cross purposes to this, however, was the drive to remain true to his own inner vision, his internal quest.
Oy. Resonates kinda deep. Especially since this afternoon was a depressed afternoon for me, when I was struggling with the question of "What am I doing wrong, and why do I struggle so very hard just to be this poor?" Egads, what a shock to settle in for some reading and find that -exact- question reflected in the pages from Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo from 1881.
I know that I have made several different choices in my life so I'm not reading this as some kind of soothsayer's path before me, but it's still a phenomenal cautionary tale. In another time and place, I would not be far off from dear Vincent's plight. Although I have to admit that I don't obsess about painting and drawing to the same level he did.
And that's a good thing.
Still, hearing how he wore out his welcome from the painter/mentor Mauve and the fact that he used turns of phrase which I've written myself, often in letters to my own brother Tom... this continues to be a difficult read because it is so exceedingly eerie in its similarities across time and space from then to now. Perhaps it's just that I'm bipolar, or perhaps there's something to the notion of being an artist which brings this kind of mind set about. I don't know. I haven't studied the daybooks and biographies of artists yet, but I'm looking forward to those continued studies.
I just wish I could absorb it all faster, because with how similar the phraseology is and the bipolar outlook and the sheer desperation to somehow find that point at which the inner vision and the outer expectations meet in a glorious combination of economic support... and knowing as I do with the gift of hindsight that Van Gogh never finds it in his lifetime... reading this begins to get exhausting because it triggers intense sympathy from me, and I really don't want to prolong the slow spiralling descent into another man's madness. I've got to work so hard to prevent that from happening to me with my own life.
Van Gogh is definitely a bohemian ahead of the bohemian revolution. And I'm some kind of reluctant bohemian of the postmodern sort, who can point to their life and say "I work very hard to be this poor," with some kind of self-bemused ironic appreciation underlaid with the faintest stirrings of despair.
Yeah, reading on, but struggling between the urge to skim and the need to bear witness to the tortured existence of an unrecognized Master as he passed through this lifetime.
And I hear the phrase attributed to God's response when mortals cry out in suffering, "It'll all be over soon."
If I do end up skimming, forgive me, but since I'm living a modern variation on this kind of hell, I don't know if I have the heart to endure the burden of another... even one long gone.
Reading on.
The reading begins to get tough for me because it's so similar in weird ways to my own patterns of thinking. VanGogh must have been bipolar, as I am. I'm fighting against the urge to skip ahead and read the last letter to get a gauge of the depths of the descent into madness and despair which might lie ahead just because I don't know if I can handle it.
I hear the optimism and the sheer force of will, pushing ahead and, just before age 30, striving so very hard to be true to two contradictory forces at the same time. On the one hand Van Gogh was struggling to do everything that was expected of him. He lived a good portion of his life by the expectations of others.
At cross purposes to this, however, was the drive to remain true to his own inner vision, his internal quest.
Oy. Resonates kinda deep. Especially since this afternoon was a depressed afternoon for me, when I was struggling with the question of "What am I doing wrong, and why do I struggle so very hard just to be this poor?" Egads, what a shock to settle in for some reading and find that -exact- question reflected in the pages from Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo from 1881.
I know that I have made several different choices in my life so I'm not reading this as some kind of soothsayer's path before me, but it's still a phenomenal cautionary tale. In another time and place, I would not be far off from dear Vincent's plight. Although I have to admit that I don't obsess about painting and drawing to the same level he did.
And that's a good thing.
Still, hearing how he wore out his welcome from the painter/mentor Mauve and the fact that he used turns of phrase which I've written myself, often in letters to my own brother Tom... this continues to be a difficult read because it is so exceedingly eerie in its similarities across time and space from then to now. Perhaps it's just that I'm bipolar, or perhaps there's something to the notion of being an artist which brings this kind of mind set about. I don't know. I haven't studied the daybooks and biographies of artists yet, but I'm looking forward to those continued studies.
I just wish I could absorb it all faster, because with how similar the phraseology is and the bipolar outlook and the sheer desperation to somehow find that point at which the inner vision and the outer expectations meet in a glorious combination of economic support... and knowing as I do with the gift of hindsight that Van Gogh never finds it in his lifetime... reading this begins to get exhausting because it triggers intense sympathy from me, and I really don't want to prolong the slow spiralling descent into another man's madness. I've got to work so hard to prevent that from happening to me with my own life.
Van Gogh is definitely a bohemian ahead of the bohemian revolution. And I'm some kind of reluctant bohemian of the postmodern sort, who can point to their life and say "I work very hard to be this poor," with some kind of self-bemused ironic appreciation underlaid with the faintest stirrings of despair.
Yeah, reading on, but struggling between the urge to skim and the need to bear witness to the tortured existence of an unrecognized Master as he passed through this lifetime.
And I hear the phrase attributed to God's response when mortals cry out in suffering, "It'll all be over soon."
If I do end up skimming, forgive me, but since I'm living a modern variation on this kind of hell, I don't know if I have the heart to endure the burden of another... even one long gone.
Reading on.
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