I Am a Dangerous Man.
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I’m a desperate man. I’m dangerous.
My skin crawls with pathological truth. If it exists, I must say it. My right arm is garnished with patterns and systemic values, with depictions of the universal ideas I hold to be true. My left is blank. Someday I will begin to work on that, when I have passed the barrier of self. When I have risen to a proper level. When I have dropped to the lowest level. They are actually one and the same.
True madness is of a circular (spherical?) nature. It’s a bit of connecting the sliding markers of the mind. There are no beginnings or ends of spectrums. All are connected. It is all-encompassing, yet madness cannot hold me.
I still see the formerly-stigmatized and the no-longer-captured speak of having beaten stigma and capture using the vocabulary of the stigmatized and the captured. Have you not an imagination? Is illness really the only description seen fit to locate our condition on the spectrum of human existence?
It may be but words and dust. It may just be acronyms and semantics, just feces thrown against the blank wall to see what sticks. Oftentimes, however, semantics are all we have.
In the grand scheme of things, I really don’t feign to know that I am correct. It is impossible to view the amount of time and space required to make the proper judgment. This is the way with all things. We do the best we can to make informed choices and decisions, regardless of the extenuating circumstance that is the extreme brevity of our lives on this planet. The lack of information we have available to us, despite the information age, is astounding.
We do the best we can; I understand completely. But for the love of god, or whatever deity you do or do not choose to follow, and all that is holy and righteous in the world, look inward when seeking a label. Look inward, and realize that labels are, in fact, generated by label-makers. A label-maker’s only function is to do just that. They are not here to guide or improve the quality of life of those labeled.
I’m a desperate man. I see illnesses and their diagnostic criminals flitting about, aggrandizing themselves on the backs of the stigmatized, all the while selling the very stigmatization as a red herring of positive conformity. I was sold, once. I looked at my diagnosis of rapid cycling bipolar disorder as a godsend, a relief.
I had my label. I could be free to be just like everyone else. Yet that label, disorder, hits most people like a knife in the back. Pity and charity are often the more positive reactions. Fear, and fear, and fear of the unknown is the worst. People don’t remember the polite, calm, collected bipolar individual they have met as having the illness. No, they remember what is plastered on the news, or that guy who flipped out once and did some nasty things. These are the usual faces of illness. The celebrities who come out as ill, still speak of it as being ill.
Illness. Disorder.
I cannot read another first-person article about the struggle to regain normality. I am a very strange person, just ask the lovely lady. People do not appear to want to be free of the illness; they appear to only want to be part of a group large enough that it warrants an official title, and thus recognition in the labyrinth of the human condition.
I’m a desperate man. I do not choose to be part of a group much larger than myself. My belief systems entail that I know I am part of something larger, on a scale of behemoth and minuscule understandings. A group of people hanging out is like a middleman to those much larger entities. Not even a middleman. A drop in the ocean.
I’m a desperate man, as I feel I must fight every day against this illness label. I’m dangerous, because I don’t need it.
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Steve Imperato is a thinker and a writer, a wetware mechanic intent on unraveling the mysteries of his rapid cycling bipolar and consciousness in general. His main themes include the use of logical and spiritual techniques to enhance the fisticuffs that typically encapsulate the fighting inherent in the literal and figurative aspects of mental variation, which is typically labeled as mental illness. Check out his blog and his website on such matters. Currently a successful (relative to his situation) 9-to-5-er, he dreams of being a successful non-9-to-5-er. Recently married, he is creating a nice little conventional storyline while allowing his mind to flow wherever it endeavors to go.
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