Bipolar Blessing - a memoir of transilience [Format Kindle]

It is the eve of my 33rd year on this planet and all I can say to sum this book up is-I am not alone. Finally, words from someone who knows where I live, hide, haunt, and, most importantly, sleep. I will read this book again after I download The Bear's other literary gift he mentions having published. It was a quick summer romance on the first read. I was so intrigued and surprised someone else knew what it felt like in my head I turned pages as fast as possible. I want to make my relationship with this book deep and that like the elderly couple who can finish each other sentences. Because just as the world is round, I know I will have to recall the sentences and events later on--maybe in days, maybe years--to pull myself up again.

I wish I had hardcopies to hand to my friends and family with handwritten notes inside the cover saying, "This is what it's like."

In the summer of 1986 at the age of twenty, P.S. Lutz suffered a catastrophic breakdown that landed him in a mental hospital for seven months. It was the end of innocence for a promising young man whose sparkling future had seemed assured, and the beginning of a twenty-five-year relationship with bipolar disorder - a shadowy companion who has walked by his side ever since.

The evolution of this relationship is the subject of Bipolar Blessing, an illuminating memoir that should serve as a beacon of hope for anyone who suffers from this disease or knows someone who does. As far as Lutz is concerned, bipolardom is no curse, but a potentially helpful spiritual guide whose counsel, if listened to, can lead to a symptom-free life of extraordinary fulfillment.

To be sure, the book never shies away from the devastating effects of the disease. Lutz describes without sentimentality the fathomless hells that bipolar disorder has periodically tossed him into and offers an insider's take on the psychology of suicide (an act "as dispassionate as calling to cancel a magazine subscription, foreign as a first kiss, necessary as urination, single-minded as operating a chainsaw."). He details the strain that mental illness has placed upon his relationships, the side effects of medications, the pressure of cultural stereotypes, and many other difficulties that have come with the condition.

But transcending all of this is Lutz's robust, liberated vision of the bipolar life, which he calls "perpetually distilling, a constant fasting of the mind toward ideal mental health, toward the life of a liberated soul." It is a vision that moves far beyond the cautionary attitude of many medical practitioners who idealize "the moodless mind" for bipolars, fearing that feelings of any kind pose a threat to their patients' precarious mental equilibrium. To this tightly bound perspective, Lutz replies boldly: "Where we feel, when we feel, with whom we feel are the critical bipolar stress considerations, not that we feel."

Bipolar Blessing offers a way forward for anyone who wishes to see this condition as something more than a disease. What opens before us in this book is not a pathology, but a noble life path - one that, if properly understood, affords "every chance in the world to meet life head on, to feel our true feelings and live our true lives."

An incredible journey. In transforming "disorder" into a blessing, Lutz offers much more than wise counsel for the afflicted. He reveals, to all who will listen, the secret to a beautiful life.