Manic-depressive illness forces one to deal with many aspects of growing old — with its physical and mental infirmities — many decades in advance of age itself (p. 132).
This is one area where I’m not entirely sure I’m clear on Jamison’s point, or, therefore, whether I agree with her.
As I said earlier, when I was a teen and a young adult, I couldn’t picture what life would be like at 40 or 60, and I presumed, therefore, that I wouldn’t be alive then. As does so much in hindsight, that sounds pretty fucking stupid. It signified nothing about my life and everything about my lack of imagination and life experience.
I don’t appear to have any physical infirmities now that are here sooner than they otherwise would have been but for being bipolar. Mild joint twinges? Check, but I led an active childhood and youth (two surgeries, a number of less-serious ER visits). Rotator-cuff surgery? Check, but that appears to have been necessitated by a bone spur, not being bipolar. Mild misplacing of certain parts of my vocabulary or Jeopardy! arsenal for an hour or a day? Par for the 47-year-old course, not to mention commonplace for any parent of young children.
A guy my age whose daughter went to day care with mine had a massive heart attack at home 18 months ago. Had he been alone at home at the time he would have died because he couldn’t have crawled 10 feet to the telephone. A colleague just two years older than I is at home recovering from surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his salivary gland. A colleague two decades younger than I had a precancerous tumor removed from behind his nasal cavity a year ago, and now there’s something else back there. To the best of my knowledge, none of them is bipolar.
Anecdotes are not the same as data, I realize. And yet I flagged this passage because it resonated with me.
But that was weeks ago. And now? Honestly, I don’t know why I did it.
any news coming ?