(November 8, 2012 at 6:07 pm)DoubtVsFaith Wrote: In case you don't know whateverist: http://atheistforums.org/thread-15558-po...#pid357398
I can relate.
I see. When it happened to me I didn't see a doctor so I never got any chemical help .. except for what I was trying on my own. So I can't imagine what that would have been like.
I suspect that I have a susceptibility to bipolar which may have been provoked by life circumstances and choices. My mother was hospitalized off and on for half her adult life. I started doing a lot of physical adventuring in my early twenties after a largely cerebral childhood. I was skateboarding all the time and probably not eating enough. I dropped down to 145 pounds and I'm 6 foot tall. I was also smoking a good bit of weed and experimenting with hallucinogens. I was reading a lot of pop psychology, Carlos Castaneda, zen, poetry, Alan Watts, and doing yoga and guided meditation at the local J.C.. In the midst of the mania I got divorced from my first wife. Her idea.
Tapping into manic states was becoming more difficult anyway but then some events happened which sealed the deal. Having just divorced, my younger brother and protege moved in with me. By then I was already more often depressed than manic. Then while out driving in his little Fiat spider, a drunk guy in a huge american station wagon swerved into us head on not far from home. My brother lived for a little more than a week but we were told he was brain dead immediately. I was knocked out, and then went in and out of consciousness several times. That put me on disability alone with my first dog until while out walking late at night she got behind me as I walked past the driveway to a bar. A pick up truck sped around a corner and into the lot. I immediately said her name when I first heard the truck and she came right away just in time to get run over. She died while I held her. Then I was completely alone.
The odd thing was that I couldn't really feel anything directly. I was somehow removed from it all and numb. In some ways it's like I never came back, I just moved on. Eventually I became accustomed to the new normal. I met and married my wife of nearly 30 years now, helped to raise her son since he was 6 and became a math teacher and then a gardener. The one constant in my life is I've always had dogs. I don't wish for a return to my former life and what really feels like a different self.
I think this is why I'm so interested in the nature of the self. What is it that we are? How much continuity should we expect in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? Our cells all replace themselves, perhaps our stories do too.
