Thursday, March 26, 2015

Soul Sharing: I'm Bipolar

For the Soul section, I'll walk through the poem line by line or stanza by stanza and explain why I wrote it. I'll talk about word selection, inspiration, multiple meanings, and where I placed a part of my soul in the piece. Let's begin.

"Apathetic Artist" 

First off, the tittle is alliterative which is one of my favorite and one of the easiest and most recognized poetic devices. You are going to see this a lot from me. For me, the title is usually a brief summary or my favorite line of the poem. A lot of times the title is the last thing and sometimes even the hardest part to write. This one came pretty naturally combing the first line and the theme of the poem.  And this is the first poem in my book of poetry because it embodies the theme and inspired the title of the book. (Spoilers!)
I'll be using a lot of those poems for this blog. But more about my book and all that later. This is the final version of this poem. The original is only slightly different in a few lines, but that's the difference between the umpteenth draft and the final piece. I used this poem for an assignment for my poetry class that required some sort of meter. So this is the only poem that I changed for someone else, and hence one of the very few poems in which I purposefully tried to set a meter. But hey I got an A and a better version of something that I was content with. And in the end, I was happy enough with it to enter it in a national contest. But yeah, the other poems won't be as thoroughly technical in the Art section.

I’m an artist without a muse,
A poet not in pain.
Happiness makes me confused.
Summer is really lame.

I actually wrote this first stanza when I was bored a couple summers ago. Like right off the bat of summer break in May (thank you Facebook history). I didn't finish the rest of the poem until the end of that August when school started, moving from summer to fall. This makes it more significant in that I really was an artist without a muse to keep me writing. And I was happy, but it's easier for me to write about pain. The original line was "happiness is overrated." Overrated/confused same difference. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be happy if I couldn't write anymore. And I really just don't like summer. The weather is nicer than winter, but it's so much lonelier, at least in my experience. The other changes to the poem were simply rearranging or substituting words. A couple lines had to be rewritten but I liked the new ones better than the originals.

Neither here nor there,
I sit in silence until a friend calls.
Apathy arrives and I don’t care.
Then I wake up and notice that now it’s fall.

So like I said, I picked up this poem in the fall so I decided to write the next stanza about transitioning to fall, expanding on the lameness of summer. It seems like every summer all my friends find themselves wherever I'm not. Sometimes it really does feel like I'm just sitting and sleeping until summer is over. Estivating, more or less.

Surrounded by stimuli I react with body and brain,
But my soul and heart still wander for meaning.
Chemical and emotional reaction reign.
Winter comes crawling in, clotting the bleeding. 
Pulsing in pain from the incredible loss. Apathetic.
I don’t care. The medication haze hides life’s aesthetic. 

This is where my soul enters. I didn't even realize I did this, but the volta or turn is line 10. It's usually easy to identify because it usually starts with a conjunction (but, and, so etc). I drone on in my apathy, reacting physically. I'm emotionally disconnected with the world but for that one line I don't want to be. But it's literally a physical challenge for me to stay emotionally connected. You see, I'm bipolar. I've know something was off with me since I was 15, and in retrospect since 11. I'm good now and getting better every year with the right medication and therapy. *(see my Instagram pic below). But I remember when I was the antithesis of good and getting better. Winter symbolizes the dark depression and the cold scientific and medical approach to an emotional problem. The lines do get longer because like I said I have more to say when it comes to pain, and the longer lines represent those depressing thoughts that only seem to stop with either a physical or emotional bleeding or release. But the cuts stop bleeding, and I'm still left to pulse in pain from the incredible loss of feeling anything at all. Apathy is my self defense default nature. You don't have to deal with uncontrollable, unexplainable emotional spikes if you turn off all your emotions. Whether I turn them off myself or my medication sedates me enough, this apathy prevents me from seeing the beauty in life. That's why I'm an apathetic artist. I turn my apathy into art. And that art is my escape from my apathy.


Instagram wave4dave: I started crying because this shows where I've been and where I am now. I wrote a reminder on my arm "Buy pill cutter." I don't think I told anyone yet, but my doc says I'm well enough to get off my meds. The next decrease in dosage is smaller than the smallest pill. I'm two more weeks away from being done with this 11 week trial of getting my 300g pill down to 0g. and then from there we can talk about getting off the other smaller pill too! #ItGetsBetter #ButterflyProject


The Butterfly Project is a social media project I found on Tumblr. When you feel like cutting, you draw a butterfly on yourself instead. And you can't cut until the butterfly wears off without you washing or rubbing it off. And if someone else draws a butterfly then those butterflies are extra special. And if you do cut, then you kill all the butterflies on you. I'll talk more about this and other projects like "To Write Love on Her Arms" when I talk more specifically on self-harming. And that leads me into talking about a common theme of harmful stereotypes and how projects like that and society at large can unintentionally hurt people like me, people like you.  

I'll talk more about bipolar disorder and self-harming in the Therapy section as well as breaking down the harmful stereotype that is associated with therapy in general. I bet you don't even know that you've probably had therapy sessions without realizing it.

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