Me and my sis and bipolar

When I was six years old, I was looking at a photo album my mother had put together of our family, and I started crying; crying because I knew someday that everyone in that photo album was going to die.  I felt their mortality, and mine with it and I was overwhelmed by a profound sense of loss and loneliness that I had no words for, no expression for, no way of talking about to my parents, or to anyone else.  I thought there was something wrong with me.  Of course there was; it was either the dawning of an existential being, or the beginning of a life of crazy! 

            Years later, I had an equally profound, yet different experience.  Somewhere around age twelve, I was walking with my family on a warm spring afternoon, right after the rain had subsided.  My sister and I were ahead of my parents, running and splashing around in the puddles, laughing and having so much fun.  Suddenly the sun came out, streaming through the trees; I turned around to look at my parents and I was overcome by a penetrating sense of joy, even beyond joy; it was something like ecstasy.  I felt beyond myself, as if I was looking at my family from a distance and seeing them as they were from the inside out.  I felt full of love for them…they were beautiful; everything was beautiful and I felt connected to all that was around me, at one with the world that surrounded me, that was beside me, inside of me, part of me. Energy was coursing through my body and I felt truly alive – I was trembling with electricity; the light was brilliant and there were rainbow colors hovering around me. The feelings were real, more real than anything I had ever felt.  I felt whole; I was connected to my self, my family, to nature, to all of my surroundings in a way I had never experienced before.  I was free and full and deep and open and full of beauty and joy.  That lasted for what seemed hours, but it was only minutes and then it dissipated and I felt bereft, as if I’d lost something precious, essential to my being.  I felt confused and lost and lonely again, as I did when I was that six-year old.  There was obviously some strange force working in me, right?  Later in life, my psychiatrist would tell me I was bipolar because of these swings from “mania” to “depression,” but I went somewhere different than that damaging diagnosis....