What Darkness is Visible to Your Life?

Psalm 46:10 "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth."

Today's subject may puzzle a few and the few it doesn't puzzle might wonder if my meds are okay. Before I begin I'd like for those of you wondering to know that my medication levels have been checked by my doctor and he is monitoring my progress. He has made a comment to me the last time I visited him that was a great compliment coming from a psychiatrist. I feel so much better in my mental health than I have in about a year. The past 12 months have been rough. And those of you who know what has personally went on in my life the last year will understand what it means for me to finally have peace about what has happened and the outcome of what got started in October. I have peace about it but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm happy about all of it. When you finally let go and let God handle a situation, you find that kind of peace.

So my subject today has to do with a memoir I picked up by a guy named William Styron. Darkness Visible A Memoir of Madness begins with the author's note stating "This book began as a lecture given in Baltimore in May 1989 at a symposium on affective disorders sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Greatly, expanded, the text became an essay published in December of that year in Vanity Fair. I had originally intended to begin with a narrative of a trip I made to Paris - a trip which had special significance for me in terms of the development of the depressive illness from which I had suffered. But despite the exceptionally ample amount of space I was given by the magazine, there was an inevitable limit, and I had to discard this part in favor of other matters I wanted to deal with. In the present version, that section has been restored to its place at the beginning." My life has finally gotten to a point from the last year's mess that I feel like God has restored my mental capacity to a place at the beginning. My environment is totally different being as I live in Memphis now and the doctor has even commented that my environment contributed to alot of my mania the past few years. God is good when you finally listen to what He asks you to do, no matter how painful those choices can be.

William Styron wrote about manic depressive or bipolar illness in his memoir, "All of this emphasizes an essential though difficult reality which I think needs stating at the outset of my own chronicle: the disease of depression remains a great mystery. It has yielded its secrets to science far more reluctantly than many of the other major ills besetting us. The intense and sometimes comically strident factionalism that exists in present-day psychiatry - the schism between the believers in psychotherapy and the adherents of pharmacology - resembles the medical quarrels of the eighteenth century (to bleed or not to bleed) and almost defines in itself the inexplicable nature of depression and the difficulty of its treatment. As a clinician in the field told me honestly and, I think, with a striking deftness of analogy: 'If you compare our knowledge with Columbus's discovery of America, America is yet unknown; we are still down on that little island in the Bahamas.'"

I've got people close to me in my family whom I love very much still not able to understand what this disease is all about. Calling my hospitalizations "tune ups" and thinking it is my fault when I become manic. Not putting my dirty laundry out here for everyone to read but that was my existence if I stayed near my family in my hometown. God truly blessed me when He asked me to move to Memphis and stay with my mother who appreciates me, warts, tune ups, and all. She hasn't had to live through a manic episode yet but I may be doing so well I won't have one. One can only hope and keep praying for that; with my stress levels down significantly anything is possible.