Sometimes I forget that joy is not mania, and sadness is not necessarily depression. In other words, sometimes I forget that I am a human being.

Spiral Out, Keep Going

                                                                               

 

(image from wasteofsociety tumblr blog)

I loved this image on sight.

Bipolar disorder is a circular disease. In one of the earliest clinical descriptions of it, French doctor Jean Pierre Falret published an article in 1851 on a condition he called "la folie circulaire" -- circular insanity.

The description rings true: endless cycles -- regular or irregular -- and the helpless sensation of "going in circles," carried along on a senseless merry-go-round. But what speaks to me about the image of a nautilus shell's spiral whorls is that it suggests the possibility of a direction for all this centrifugal motion. It recasts the circle as a spiral.

The small letters (I had to look twice to even notice them) snaking around the chambered shell spell out the words "spiral out, keep going." They urge me to just keep walking, hope in hand. I can't see it yet from inside the tight coil, but the circles get wider and wider, and they lead to a better place. One day I'll emerge from all the circling and cycling, the scary and confusing whirl of bipolar disorder, and find I've been climbing a spiral staircase, not spinning meaninglessly. I've gotten somewhere. There's air to breathe.

I'm in a spiral rather than a circle. Like the whorls of a nautilus shell, I'll trace an expanding pattern toward freedom.

I like it so much I've taken to repeating it to myself  -- usually when anxiety starts whispering in my ear. I resist it by reminding myself to "spiral out, keep going." When I'm losing hope, it's a gentle reminder not to. The rhythm of the words, repeated over and over, is like a work song or a martial cadence, a line of poetry or a prayer.

"Spiral out, keep going," and the image within the words, serves me as mantra, metaphor and incantation: a bipolar prayer.

Diamonds