Some people are doomed to follow the path of least resistance. It is in his blood. It feels like a stone. It tastes like wine. It doesn’t matter if you are not happy, you are not attached, single, miserable, frustrated in the workplace, all that matters is that you are sane. And that the blood that runs through your veins is made up of a pure and vital thread without any madness spell there. There were many times when I felt shattered, out of luck, like I didn’t have an ego, a sense of worth, close to insanity, which is one thread’s distance from suicide. It was a trip to hell and torment. My younger years were turbulent times. It is almost indescribable what I went through to get here. That passage of time is forever grounded in the fabric of my conscience. I think that literally the first time I felt a sense of healing was when I felt a deep sense of spirituality and when I began to meditate. That helped. I often wonder if I will have children. All women have a loving spirit.

I don’t think that having a mental illness is the most perfect environment for raising a child. My father also has bipolar disorder, but there were cases where there were strains of the illness that were similar to each of us and some were not. I have left everything in the hands of God. I don’t go to church, so other Christians would probably say how can I believe in God if I don’t go to church, but now I’ve made it my priority to think that it’s none of my business what people think of me. . I am the virginal suicide. I was once as pure as dew when I remember the times when I was a child, those days when I was more free, innocent and pure. I turned red when I blushed and an olive brown when I returned to my normal color and then as I grew up a beautiful blue woman took her place. There were days when I felt like I was literally hiding in a coffin, not in a bed or bedroom. With my teeth like pearls, lips that say eat, I’m hungry, hunger can no longer be ignored. I have hungry eyes. I can get drunk on hamburgers. I may be thirsty for French fries.

Once I came across wild girls and puppets in books I was mesmerized and could relate to them. Their rebellious natures were never dark to me. I thought to myself who would grant my wishes now. Books and the art of a higher sense of learning have aged me magnificently. I’m thirty-something, but I feel closer to seventy. I always think of Shakespeare when I’m depressed. I look for specks of meaning in his works, the characters and a light to shed, I send figures of truth, not dust and that earthly feeling that boils in my blood. He is a wonderful ghost of a writer. It makes grieving the loss seem poetic. My hands are stained with blood like a Lady Macbeth, a lurking ghost, walking softly through a dark house, blinded by madness or thunderous depression. The god of depression looks at the surreal and blurry, a little out of focus my ‘I’ go through furniture and appliances with slow desire. We gather to meet their shadows. After all, I am not that fragile. Depression is just a cover up.

Thoughts raced through my head. It was my drugs. I took notes on towels, receipts, kept lists and treasured them. I pretended I had a contract with them. Every word had a story to tell. I told myself that everyone who is alive should read Khalil Gibran. They must search for their own personal truth in the Sufi poet Rumi. I cradled Coelho’s Veronika Decide to Die in my hands. I watched Jodie Foster’s Little Man Tate until my eyes went glassy. Most of the time I held the book or books, the ‘it’ with its powerful mojo against my heart as if there was a physical and discordant connection there instead of where I normally felt it, in my heart. Veronika and I had things in common. In it I found a confident secret. I spied on her and in return imagined that she was spying on me. He tied my broken heart with the gift that there was a well of infinite hope there in outer space for me.

While drinking tea and eating peanut butter from the jar, I listened to Schubert and Tchaikovsky, I leafed through Athol Fugard’s works wondering if I could ever write just a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant and exceptional tour de force, tear down the house in the opening play of the night of my life. I took the time, counted the laps in the pool that I swam, ate French toast, and so cooking became the least invasive therapy I ever had. And since I never had anything better to do or because I was bored, I went to my father’s study and immersed myself in his collection of books. I flipped through this veritable collection starting first with his textbooks before pounding on his unpublished manuscripts, Depression: The Disease of Our Time and My Bipolar Experience. He had also written a series of brochures on stress. He wrote about its development (everything is in the mind, the pain of the mind). Their dynamics and interaction and how it affected educators, students, their parents, and the tragedy of people living with AIDS in Africa.

If people knew about life and coping skills, they could be given the tools to transform what they think and feel on their own. He also wrote about teenagers living on the edge with suicidal thoughts running through their heads. Young people who felt they were not good enough for the world they lived in. I could relate to that. There were books, thick tomes on psychology, education, physics, and chemistry from his college days. I discovered that in those days he was dying to belong as much as I do now. I always used to think that being a teacher was all I knew. Teaching wasn’t just a part of his life, it was his whole life. I read his journal that he kept at the University of London, but could not extract much from it. I was lonely and depressed. He couldn’t understand the London way of life. He felt isolated and torn between reality and depression. I thought English learners were racist. They sat alone in the canteen, and in groups in the library, they huddled together.

There was no connection between the world he had come from and the world, the society he was now immersed in. The continent had a lot going for it in terms of culture, perhaps, but the inherent feeling of accepting others just wasn’t there. I was homesick. His only friend was Jones. On the days when they were out of school, they would go to Dillon’s and peruse the books that were banned in South Africa, had a meat and kidney pie in a tea shop, and drank tea with the blue-collar workers of England. This is what my own father had told me when I was reminiscing about the past. But why do I mention this? Didn’t you want to go to England once? Once, didn’t you want things, material things? I wanted to study creative writing at Columbia University in New York and work in a restaurant where I could flip burgers, work in a restaurant that sold chili, fries, mac n cheese, lasagna, bolognaise, fattening pastas, fried chicken with hot sauce. . , meatballs and homemade cake accompanied by ice cream.

Black and white photographs were taken of the two, Adam and Jones facing the unknown, the world they had escaped together standing together in Trafalgar Square feeding pigeons. It gave me a dazzling feeling inside to see the two of them standing together like this. The world they were in dazzled me. He wanted to be part of her, that desperate loneliness, paired with another stranger of the same gender who struggles with identity issues, cultural identity. I wanted to get lost in the British Museum and in history, but this morning I only got to run a comb through my hair. I only got so far as to see reruns of Mission Impossible this morning and China Beach. It has become intrinsic to my survival. I must take notes. I must make shopping lists of words. Otherwise I’ll go crazy, beep, out of my head, beep, crazy as a fruit cake, beep. In retrospect, when I glimpse, I only glimpse the past, it seems like I did everything wrong to get here.

Now when I look back, it seems like there is a detailed plan hidden in everything I did. When it comes to matters of faith and spirituality, they are always cryptic, cryptic, cryptic. From my coma, my near death experiences and living on the streets, they say you see light at the end of the tunnel or experience some kind of God consciousness feeling. From my insomnia, to running away, living in the Salvation Army, finding myself in a shelter for abused women and abandoned children, helping organizations called Movement 76 in Hillbrow, Johannesburg and Women of the Sun in Braamfontein, bringing the arts to another community. wide. From being a wanderer and a volunteer, maybe it was just God, a god or a higher self, a higher power lining up this infinite universe playfully. Perhaps this god knew that I was crying out to be born again. Tell me that pain is simply a temporary shortcut to reach that sacred contract between soul and eternity and that when we dream, that raw energy has a deep intelligence and an understanding of its own.