An excerpt from: "Back When Tigers Used To Smoke

Part title

     "Eureka," I exclaim in manic joy. 

     "I have it," I repeat.

     "Finally," I finish.

     Only to be immediately beset with doubt. Questions arise.

     "Have what?" I inquire.

     "What proof have you?" I interrogate.

     "What does this mean?" I query.

     All in the space of just a couple of minutes I find an answer to one of the questions that plague me but in an onslaught of review it crumpled under pressure and just becomes yet another wild flight of fancy that my mind throws up from the unconscious, where I am under the distinct belief that there is a great deal more going on than the running my systems and reacting to stimuli with those reactions imprinted and learned of eons of experience that has imprinted in and on our psyche, registered in our DNA and slotted perfectly in our unconscious long-term memory for quick retrieval whenever needed.  The more the trait is used the more prevalent it becomes in the conscious mind and becomes more prevalent in the unconscious drivers that create our personality and mannerisms.  For instance; if a person were to have suffered trauma, or a series of trauma, the need for survival would become activated and prevalent and would stay active as long as the trauma remained in the first phase of processing stimuli, where it would percolate with the emotional response, never dwindling but repressed, until it is either processed properly by the mind and stored as a previous experience in long term memory or it continues to fester, overloading the prefrontal cortex and progressively impacting the conscious minds ability to process stimuli and impairs the ability to recall memories in order to process inherent behaviours.  And it has struck again.

     My mind is inserting a rational reasoning and response that says my latest conclusion is both ludicrous and patently absurd in all forms by any rational or scientific means available to the modern contemporary mind and certainly is an insult to anyone with a modicum of intelligence to their names.  It would be the height of hubris to peddle this latest fancy to anyone born and raised by what is ascribed to as western culture.  I fully expect that other cultures and viewpoints would find my conclusions equally absurd but in an effort to be sensitive to others belief systems I will go on record with only the culture that I was raised in being laughingly dismissive of my latest effort to understand the strange goings on that occurred in my life when everything, including reality, went off the rails as my mind slipped its leash in a desperate bid to hide from what was occurring, more than a decades worth of which had burst its dam and drowned me in grief and loss so profound I found myself staring into the abyss, soul shrieking in terror and my life became an uncontrollable odyssey that never ceased in its ability to reach new levels of craziness and new lows of despair.

     As bizarre as it sounds, it will make a good jumping off point from where I am sitting in time, looking back from a position of sound thinking and rational behaviour and beliefs.  Which make it very difficult for me as I relive moments from my psychosis that I then process and sort into memory that have two entirely different realities at play in the memory.  Which is also compounded by repeatedly experiencing the same phenomenon while my mind is firmly fixed, and I suffer no strange disturbances in my inherent belief system. 

     My knowledge on the subject, as well as my overall mindset, have grown considerably since I last tried to capture somewhat of my experience and time certainly has proven healing.  At least in terms of the psychotic episode.  The traumas from before still bother me, though there has been improvement.

     I haven't been hospitalized in over two years.  I take an antipsychotic by way of injection into my muscles.  It began as a high dose but has been reduced 66%.  I take mood stabilizers as well and recently a new drug that is supposed to help with PTSD.  The official diagnosis was Bi-Polar I with pronounced hyper mania.  This is based on how I presented at the hospital for the third time.  To this day, 16 years after I first approached a doctor about my mental state, not one doctor has interviewed me as to what I was living through by way of external stimuli and later, what I was experiencing in my life.  It appears that these experiences had no impact on my medical diagnoses.  I was diagnosed bi-polar in 2005 by my GP who dosed the shit out of me with Seroquel and Lithium.  The diagnosis was upheld several months later and not once, then, or in the intervening years was I listened to beyond notes to the effect that I was lying and exaggerating and seeking drugs.  I would really like to punch the doctor who said that.  Especially considering how far my illness went and how I am still, to this day, marginalized and my condition remains unreported on, therapy is non-existent and I have given up on trying.  I did manage to get my psychiatrist to admit I displayed the symptoms of PTSD 15 years after the initial trauma and 12 years after I first mentioned PTSD.  The reality is I have severe PTSD as a result of trauma, ongoing abuse, and repeated traumas alongside legal and business issues that arose entirely out of mitigating the fall outs from the trauma.  I honestly do not care if I am Bi-Polar.  Having emotional extremes of mood is absolutely fuck all compared to the pervasive depression.  Back when it first started, my coping mechanisms were not overwhelmed, I was not exaggerating, nor was I manic.  The doctor judged me as having a non-existent issue that I was seeking drugs for.  No.  That is not what was going on and the intervening years did not improve matters much at all.  Anyone, with any understanding of my perspective, would have been completely overwhelmed by the initial, criminal, abuses.  They would not simply be dismissed as a result of poor emotional maintenance.  They would have been diagnosed as traumatized by events that continued, year after year, without once letting up and downloading an inhuman level of responsibilities onto them.  Responsibilities that legally did not belong to them.  Responsibilities that were never discussed with anyone.  I just got the bill, or the bill collector for that matter.