1. ‘Conscious’ is not ‘consciousness.’ 2. “The energy’ is not a verb. Energy is a (potential) transfer of motion. It is questionable as to whether it has physical quala. I read a Facebook comment recently that waves and fields as they intersect produce subatomic particles and that shit has me doing some reading. Fields appear to be irreducible forces. Consciousness could easily be a field that interacts with space/time waves and matter. That is some complete horseshit to some extent, because I’m an idiot, but at least I get that. Religious people turn to someone else for explanations and have too much faith. Spiritual people just make up their own horseshit out of ego mostly. Somewhere between philosophical absurdism and actually reading Wikipedia is where I am at.
However one of my greatest frustrations with AA is that the clarification it is a ‘Spiritual program, and not a religious program’ does not produce comfort on my part as a bipolar person. “Oh, you are encouraging micropsychosis in a bipolar person,” I think to myself. Let’s not. That isn’t going to help me. I always hate a forum where it’s word salad about god.
I can’t even trust my psychiatrists. One asked me if I have a sense of spirituality, and I said I don’t believe in ghosts. They said that isn’t what they meant. I had them define the word. They stumbled around with me for about 5 minutes before they reduced it to a sense of community. I saw racism and power play in that definition but kept my mouth shut at this point and assured them I had a social support system. They put something in my charts at that point that my psychologist won’t even tell me what it is, but indicated she disagreed and that it was insulting. Honestly, I don’t even understand my life, but all the bullshitters feed into my paranoia at times. It’s not helpful. It’s scary to point out the emperor is naked and be over medicated, when you need something, just not Haldol shot into your arm against your will by a doctor you know at this point is racist and insane. People are kind of hostile narcissists that can’t be reasoned with by someone with stigma and it makes being bipolar way harder.
As a bipolar person, I understand many of us are like this woman and struggle, but also many of us are not like this woman and are highly responsive to medication. Getting the correct medication is hard, and much like this woman even affectively stable, I find myself under-employed. Additionally, as a veteran, people are both afraid of me, and yet unable to see that I am a complex person who has issues that intertwine as a veteran that aren’t simply due to me being bipolar. To complicate things, we tend to have addiction issues that aren’t really alcoholism, but all we are left with can be AA and the criminal justice system sometimes when it comes to healthy supportive relationships. That’s a really messed up concept because true alcoholism and moral deficits aren’t exactly what I am dealing with. In fact, while I really need to avoid drinking, I can drink minimal amounts to fit in if I do it on rare occasions, and that fact can ostracise me from other people in AA. As far as the Criminal Justice system goes, my behaviour can be erratic, while I am struggling with dark subject matters, but that maybe when my survivor’s guilt is kicking in, which may be a combination of legitimate veteran’s issues and unreasonable levels of guilt associated with bipolar. People have no idea what it is like for me as an individual because no one label defines me and even intersectionalism falls flat. I have however come to have an unusual number of black friends, coworkers and past lovers as well as my current wife, as someone who has found themselves stigmatized and thrown to the bottom of society. It’s produced a lot of mutual sympathy and compassion that makes for a great desire to understand those in other struggling socio-economic and sub-cultural demographics that struggle to make it because people are frightened of them, see them as sub-human, and are treated kind of horribly as undesirable and/or inferior, in general.
Joker's Wild 