#polar

In the beginning I revelled in being so rebellious and bad. I had recently discovered the new age book You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, which incorporated the power of visualization and affirmations. Even then the book resonated, resulting in me asserting, 'I, Paris, am the best hooker in town!' repeatedly on the long drive to work. I am not sure this is what Louise Hay had in mind! ↗

— Joanne Brodie

#louise-hay #prostitution #self-help #age

I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of. ↗

— Criss Jami

#censorship #evil #extensive #extremes #good

In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernize, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. ↗

— Emir Kusturica

#because #bipolar #good #good things #hate

President Obama is not polarizing, but the media sure is. ↗

— Yousef Munayyer

#obama #polarizing #president #president obama #sure

Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S. ↗

— Jon Ronson

#childhood #disorder #labeled #labeling #leads

I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue. ↗

— David Lovelace

#lithium #manic-depression #medication #pills #suicide

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.) ↗

— Anna Reid

#polar-exploration #siege #starvation #wwii #change

Love is not enough. It takes courage to grab my father's demon, my own, or - God help me - my child's and strap it down and stop its mad jig; to sit in a row of white rooms filled with pills and clubbed dreamers and shout: stop smiling, shut up; shut up and stop laughing; you're sitting in hell. Stop preaching; stop weeping. You are a manic-depressive, always. your life is larger than most, unimaginable. You're blessed; just admit it and take the damn pill. ↗

— David Lovelace

#love #manic-depression #medication #mental-disorders #courage

That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere. ↗

— Ken Wilber

#nonduality #opposites #polarities #spirituality #unity

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#illness #manic-depresison #experience