Coping

First of all I have to say I love Macs.  I know it’s a detour.  But they are wonderful machines.  I am sitting outside on a beautiful night in October, and my keyboard is lit up so perfectly, that I can type with ease.  You can be sure Apple will NOT be the same now that Steve Jobs is longer there.  He was Apple.

It’s a difficult exercise to try and explain how we feel.  I just know there are times when stress levels are high, and we have things we need to do, and we push to get those things done, then we crash into lethargy.  But I am really enjoying where I am right now.  Right now I am in a I just wanna feel good mood, and it’s wonderful.  I wish I had gotten there earlier.  But that’s what happens when you are a slow learner.  And that’s why I’m still stuck in Adolescence.  I haven’t been able to shed that experience, which revolved around my mother dying.

The ironic story, of course, is when my doctor couldn’t explain why I hadn’t conceived and according to the standards he followed, after a year, you were technically infertile.  Around that time I had a psychological intervention with a Residential psychiatrist, a woman, Peggy Loomis.  We meshed well and explored deep psychological problems — about how I felt about myself, as a woman.  And I discovered I had suppressed my burst into Adolescence because my mother was dying.  Once I could let go of that I started feeling feminine.  And within a couple of months, I was pregnant!  So never underestimate the power of psychology on our feelings and behavior — our perceptions of ourselves are often conflicted, mainly because our moods are so disruptive to what would ordinarily be a normal day.  I have been asking the same question for years:  What is normal?

I don’t know what this has to do with coping, but I guess what I wanted to say is what I just said.

One last thing.

It is very difficult to explain these diseases to people who have not been subjected to them.  And as much as we try, we haven’t really found a good way to describe them.  If you’ve noticed, I’ve always put “mental illness” in quotes.  That phrase reeks of stigma.  I can’t think of a worse way to describe it.  We really need to develop some language that de-stigmatizes these illnesses.