The Chinese Believe That Before You Can

The Chinese Believe That Before You Can Conquer A Beast You First Must Make It Beautiful. In Some Strange Way, I Have Tried To Do That With Manic-depressive Illness. It Has Been A Fascinating, Albeit Deadly, Enemy And Companion; I Have Found It To Be Seductively Complicated, A Distillation Both Of What Is Finest In Our Natures, And Of What Is Most Dangerous.

Everyone Has Good Cause For Suicide, Or At Least It Seems That Way To Those Who Search For It. (74)

It Was As If My Father Had Given Me, By Way Of Temperament, An Impossibly Wild, Dark, And Unbroken Horse. It Was A Horse Without A Name, And A Horse With No Experience Of A Bit Between Its Teeth. My Mother Taught Me To Gentle It; Gave Me The Discipline And Love To Break It; And- As Alexander Had Known So Intuitively With Bucephalus- She Understood, And Taught Me, That The Beast Was Best Handled By Turning It Toward The Sun.

Everything Previously Moving With The Grain Is Now Against - You Are Irritable, Angry, Frightened, Uncontrollable, And Enmeshed Totally In The Blackest Caves Of The Mind. You Never Knew Those Caves Were There. It Will Never End, For Madness Carves Its Own Reality.

I Think You Have Waves Of Awareness And One Of The Things That I Found With Grief Was Actually - I Was Well Prepared For It By The Cyclicality Of My Manic Depressive Illness Because I Was Used To Things Coming And Going And So Forth.