Sometimes I try and go back to previous posts and read them. Especially ones that have received a good review, or many likes.  I try to read them without the emotions that originally led me to write them in the first place.  Something that is easy for me to do because I have a habit of writing a piece and then literally walking away from it mentally, emotionally, and even physically.

I don’t need to remember what I felt yesterday, I have too many other feelings today. There is the old adage that we need to learn from our past, but writing here I try and concentrate solely on my emotional being.  This means that lessons aren’t there in the forefront; they are buried behind my reactions.  And there aren’t many lessons that are needed to be taken in reactions.

I am an emotional person. I recognize this; I take pills for this.  I live in a world where pain is magnified to a degree that it literally takes color and shape, and happiness is represented by obscure and oftentimes, unreal images that my mind makes up.  I personify emotions.  I even pull human attributes and place them within the emotional context to try and get my ideas across.  To someone who suffers bipolar it is hard to not deal almost exclusively in emotions. They are the currency, the protagnoist, and all the monsters in one.

But when I venture back into an old post certain things happen: I get stuck on the horrible grammar and wonder if I can just rewrite the paragraph so it will make sense, I see my wondering mind and can finally justify all those looks of what I like to think of as wonder, on my coworkers faces; or I become amazed at the person I was that day.

It is hard to understand a mental disease, until you have the opportunity to reread all the posts you have written in a year.  You can see as clear as the trees on a spring day, the ups and downs; the depression, the darkness and the bleakness.  You can see days when I had humor, and days when there was simply poetry.  You can see days of bubbling happiness, and days of erractic confusion.  What you can’t see is the same voice day in and day out.  The same words used, the same ability to find ways to describe that which very few people understand.

I have seen my posts where the magical descriptions of a love between a mother and her child, cause me to look around and wonder who wrote that.  I have seen my posts were the sheer shadows of my depression makes me believe that I was one step away from a night I could not return from.  I have seen my posts where the obscurity of my thoughts makes me wonder if I should ever write again.  And I have seen posts that make me question the very talent that I always thought that I had.

Reading your own words, especially when you cannot allow yourself to revisit the emotions that came with them, is an eye opening experience.  The people that I am in the times that I write seem so much different than the people I have always thought I could be.  The people, the voices, that yell all day, all night don’t seem to have the same inflection as the voices that I write.  The way I hear, the way I feel doesn’t seem to always be the way I write.  Is this because I can’t see the truth of myself anymore than anyone can? Is it like the answering machine, where the voice you record simply sounds different when coming from your mouth? Is it a disease that makes me believe that who and what I am is not what the world is allowed to see? Do I do it on purpose, or is the real me a large and diverse population made up of the demons and angels that get me through the day?

Who I am when I am writing? Who does the world see when I am not? Is the voice that I have in my writing, possibly ever duplicated in the voice I have in my dreams? Am I the person I write, or am I the person that I am.

I imagine that sometimes it is just like an actor. Are they the character on the big screen, or are the the human that lives deep inside themselves? Are they in story the world creates, or in the story man creates? Where does the truth lie. Where do I want it to lie. There are days when the posts that I write move me; when I am astonished by the voice that comes from deep inside me; a place I can neither see nor visit.  And there are days I read the posts and I wonder why I bothered to get out of bed.  Was I really trying that hard? Did I truly believe that I had something important to say?

I will keep writing, because I need it. I need to explore that which I am feeling today in order to let it go tomorrow. I need to give my heart to the voices that reside inside me, and give them the vehicle to be at peace.  My writings give me more peace than any drug ever could. It makes me look at the world, and my own lonesome self in ways I cannot do on my own.  The words, the writing, brings me the clarity I can’t see with my own eyes. Of course, it can bring me embarassment, those words can bring me frustration and anger.  It bring me peace, it can bring me great sadness.  It can bring me peace and it can bring me war.

But I have to do it anyways. Despite the very real fact that it can bring me as much as it can take away, I have to write. I have to continue to find the words, the thoughts, the feelings to bring to myself a glance of the pixie dust to fly. I have to breathe, I have to eat, and I have to love.  And writing is as important to my conitnued existence as any of those things I can’t live without.