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Portrait of a Lady on Fire

You’re bipolar type 2: agitated without necessarily being euphoric, but sometimes also seductive, flirtatious, very sexual, outwardly very much alive, but inclined to make the type of decisions you regret the most, while being dead sure that they’re right and that you’ll never go back on them. Then after that you’re dead sure of the very opposite, you realise that you’ve done the worst thing possible, you try to fix it and do something even worse. You think one thing and then its opposite, you do one thing and then its opposite, in frightening succession. But the worst is that if you’re like me and are used to analysing yourself, once the diagnosis has been reached and the mood swings identified, you gain hindsight – only this hindsight is of little use. Or if it is, it’s just to see that no matter what you think, say or do, you can’t trust yourself because there are two of you in the same person, and those two are enemies.

in the definition of bipolar disorder, the pole opposite the dive into depression isn’t necessarily a state of spectacular euphoria and disinhibition that leads to social suicide and often to suicide itself, but just as frequently what psychiatrists call hypomania, which means in plain language that you act like a fool, but not to the same extent.

“I may be entering my Final Days.” Gravely, matter-of-factly he begins to speak in this way. He begins to speak of “my final days.” Final Days. The words strike terror into my heart. In a way I cannot believe that I am hearing such words. Matter-of-fact words. No. Yet there is something dignified, noble about such words. “I may be entering my Final Days.”

"the usual 'I' we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specialises in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgetting and misrememberings, the portions of life lived through others' stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling." The Faraway Nearby

Angst bestaat uit drie fasen. Denk aan een antilope en een roofdier dat het op haar gemunt heeft. Op open plekken is de antilope behoedzaam, ook al is er niet meteen een roofdier te zien. Ze zet haar aandacht heel breed en speurt de omgeving af. Er bekruipt haar een onbehagelijk gevoel. Dat noemen we angst. Als het roofdier plots opduikt, dan gaat dat over in vrees. Dan is de antilope daar volledig op gefocust. Ze kan aan niets anders meer denken dan aan het acute gevaar. Valt het roofdier aan, dan komen we bij paniek. Dan is het alle hens aan dek. Een antilope zal met haar bekende bokkensprongen wegduiken in de hoop het roofdier te slim af te zijn.

Even when broken down into the actions of individual neurons, much remains to be understood. Try understanding the behaviour of 86 billion of those neurons, and the abilities of the world’s collective neuroscientists are confounded. We do not know how these neurons come together to achieve the brain’s defining function: consciousness. But it’s worse than that: we struggle to even define what consciousness is.