questions that transform

what bipolar means to me & a shout-out to team 44.4

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment” provides one of the central organizing principles of my relating to what it means to be having a human experience on the earth.

I start there because as I look back at an old paper through which I am talking about my experience of bipolar disorder, it strikes me how the questions we ask make all the difference.

I’ve thought about that many times. Sometimes we need a whole new story to explain the challenges as well as the triumphs of our lives;

and sometimes what makes the biggest difference is simply to revisit all the same stories and perturbations through the lens of different questions.

I'm so grateful that I've had Raymond Carver’s “And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?” & “What did you want?”

To feel myself beloved, to call myself beloved on the earth.

That seems like a really beautiful place to start from.

I also want to be still in this paper that I've been slowly unraveling/taking pieces apart;

because poetry and beauty are informative and essential to our understanding of how we relate to one another; how we establish social policies; and how we call ourselves truly human.

So in my last digging-into this, I just read through certain basic questions…

But not just questions, it was the subheadings and headings of my paper from back in 2019.

So I'm reading just the tiniest bit of the paper today for Monday Morning Muse, partly because of the holiday and it's my dad's birthday, so I wanna head off and have time with family, but also because I think especially when we're talking about Memorial Day, it's a beautiful time to think about how have we been looking backwards

& are there ways in which we can reorient such that we don't have to be governed by old stories.

So here's just a short little snippet.

At the beginning of the paper I give a historical overview and the questions

Who's to blame?

Who’s to pay?

Historically, U.S. society has asked, “Whose fault is mental illness?” and “Who has to shoulder the practical and financial burdens for the care of those who cannot care for themselves?”

I think if we are to breathe into questions like that, we have to breathe equally into all the questions that that avoids; and that is what this paper does,

but before going in there in the weeks to come, I have to be honest with myself around the ways in which intellectualizing and digging into research (case in point, this paper that I wrote back in 2019 as I started a program in social work) …

There are elements of discussing policy and political action and social change that are utterly essential;

and then there are the pieces that we shove into the corner because they aren't valued highly enough by the people around us or by the society at large.

So coming back into a question of

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

If we were to add to a question, how do we approach health and vibrancy and thriving as a society, we would ask questions like

Are people getting what they want?

Are people feeling themselves beloved on the earth?

I can weep as I talk about it today with great feelingness and also with humble gratitude for the people who surrounded me all over the course of my journey through the failing systems of our clinical mental health care;

And I have compassion most of all for the people who were, you know, working within those systems with great love.

And on Friday this past week after and kind of still in the midst of a nor’easter, so many beloved friends and family members and witnesses joined in sharing this very fledgling script of 44.4 the Musical

& it was an elaborate staged reading that became a less elaborate staged reading due to the grass of the venue being just flooded out;

but also due to traffic patterns and weather patterns and my own tumultuous ride through the hurricane of remembrance: moving through paranoia into something that's maybe closer to paranormal-ness, paranormality, or paranormalia

where things that are beyond normal and the average experience become a little more quotidian, a little more everyday: this is how I relate to the world.

I could and will say more, of course, but for today I want to come back to this theme of the questions we ask, encouraging each of us as we walk through this day, through this week, through this season of major shifting:

Are there questions that are more beautiful than the ones we have been asking?

And if so, how do each of us take time to peel back layers and find the truer, more nourishing, loving questions?

How do we offer those and share them with the people who matter to us so that we can slowly and gently as a species transform?

Photo credit Ashley Elisabeth Smith, Wide Eyed Studios. Huge thanks to the creative team of 44.4 the Musical & all those who provided emotional and psychological safety and grounding as we staged our first reading together. To learn more about getting involved, please email 44.4collaborative@gmail.com.