Money doesn’t make me

Money doesn’t make me
that’s cuz i am finally free
of all this money’s negativity
living my life in serenity
figuring out
what its about
letting the words flow
letting the emotions go
accepting the now
forgetting the how?

cuz money doesn’t make me
I plant the money tree
I let the seed grow
and time will show
that passion and love,
when fitted like a glove,
combine to form a tree of life
which no knife
can disturb
this life herb

cuz money doesn’t make me
I decide how my life is going to be
Love is what gives me glee
Why then must society
tell us that money is the key
Happiness is enjoying the journey
it has nothing to do with dollar burning

Normal?

Normality is a relative term. You cannot determine if something is normal until you compare it to something that is normal. This leads me to question what normal is in a clinical context. Is normal what the text books say or what is normal in society? I feel like it is the former; for instance, the text books say that we should not be overweight, should have clear skin, symmetrical, should be should be able to concentrate, should not be anxious, and that we should not be moody. This would be great and dandy, but I look around and all I see are fat greasy unsymmetrical anxious moody people. This leads me to question where the clinical model came from and if we are using it as a unacheivable standard. And if we have created this unachievable standard, where does it end? If doctors have their way how many medications and other regimens would they perscribe?

Life is..

Sometimes I like to make up my own quotes. Here is on of my better ones:

life is the unsuccessful organization of chaos

I like it bc to me it means that chaos is all around, bc that’s what life is. We try so hard to organize it, but our attempts are futile. It reminds me that we can let go and actually enjoy the beautiful chaos that we live in, a chaos that has it’s own agenda and secret order that we don’t completely understand. So stop organizing, classifying, and analyzing life all the time– you suck at it anyway.

Hi, I’m Bipolar and 23

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Carl Jung

I am biploar or manic-depressive. This means that I experience larger than average changes in my mood from depressive (low) to manic (high). I was diagnosed in August of 2009 when I had a VERY intense manic episode. Since I have NO family history of any sort of mental illness, and I was living alone, my manic episode was extended. There is maybe 2 weeks of my life that I cannot account for and multiple people that I hurt during this. I was arrested twice, and had to take a semester off of school. During which I remember thinking that my dad was the Devil, that I was pregnant, and that I met Albert Einstein (just to hit some highlights).  I was hospitalized twice, lost about 40 lbs (that I didn’t need to lose), and took some of the most potent antipscytoic medications.  I remeber being on house arrest because I could not be trusted. The childlock on the car doors became essential to keep me under control. In less than a month after my diagnosis, I gained 60 lbs back , sunk into a deep depresssion sleeping about 16 hours a day, and dreamt of going to the heavens. With the love and dedication of my parents, some intense psychotherapy, and my desire to leave CA and go back to TX to see my boyfriend, I went back to San Antonio in October of 2009. I admit that this was probabaly sooner than I should have gone because I still wasn’t myself, but my depression was only getting worse being on house arrest in a city I wasn’t familiar with (I was raised in TX my parents live in CA). After lots of struggles, Feburary 2010 comes around and my boyfriend of 5 years, the one I was dying to see the entire time I was in CA, breaks up with me, claiming it had nothing to do with the episode I just experienced (*right*). 

In these 6 months my entire life was changed. I dropped my desire to contiune with my chemistry research, although my manic state allowed me to get published that summer, my outlook on life was different, I was newley single for the first time in about 7 years, and it seemed like more than anything, my episode sucked all of my self esteem. I felt like I was this new strange person: Bipolar me, not me. I was starting my last semester in college with people I didn’t know (since all my friends already graduated) with a degree I didn’t care about and no idea what I was going to do from there.

Two years later, here I am. Since then, I got a job with a medical software company, moved across the country, and have learned to accept myself.  With this I have made new friends who don’t know my experiences being bipolar. I am scared to tell most of them becasue it is very personal to me, and there is a stimga that is associated with being bipolar which scares people. To me, the mind represents the center of a person. It controls the person in every way: physically, mentally, and  emotionally. That is why mental illness is so scary to me. I am a result of my mind/mood.

Being bipolar, I live it every day. I experience wonderful highs and disturbingly awful lows. I sometimes struggle with my self identity being that my thought process and outlook on life changes drastically and sometimes quickly.  I have come to grips with this reality of mine and I see it as a challenge that I must over come. I am grateful for this challenge however, since with all great challenges come personal strength (I just have to ensure that it doesn’t kill me like it has so many others with my prognosis). I am convinced that the challenge that mental illness creates, if overcome or tapped into, great things.

Happiness is counterintuitive in American society

I have been raised to believe that happiness is the goal of life. If this is the underlying goal of so many people, why then does it elude so many of us? I belive it’s because we are not socialized to accept happiness in American society. 

American culture is known for its capitalism which saturates our media with advertisements, and pop culture which resonates our medium with glamour and riches–what most of us don’t have. We read magazine articles which tell you “10 quick steps toward happiness”; these articles fulfill our need for instant gratification, but we need the next months subscription to learn the “5 tricks to beat stress and be happier”. The truth is that we all want sustained happiness, and American culture has made us want it packaged in a 500 word article. Sustained happiness is attained by losing the desire to want what you do not have;to accept what you have and to appreciate it. With all the marketing and advertising that goes one, we are constantly being exposed to alluring pictures of what we could have; you will never see an advertisement that doesn’t point out “deficiencies” in your life. Reality TV shows and People magazine contribute to this idealization of a person who we know we will never become. 

 So why do we do it? We engross ourselves in pop culture, reality TV shows, and consumerism to escape from our life; to find instant gratification in a partial view of someone elses life. When you relate to a celebrity, this has been showed to make you happy for an instant since you are able to almost picture that person as yourself. Americans want instant gratification. They want to instantly be happy.

 However, there is no formula for happiness. This is why economists fail trying to measure a people’s happiness. To be happy, you must have a pardim shift (if you want to hear what this paradim shift sounds liks listen to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Happy”). Sustained happiness doesn’t occur upon recieving something, whether it be a promotion or a new car. Sustainined happiness occurs when you take a snapshot of your current state and you can say, yeah, this is my life and I am proud of it. Appriciation is the key to happiness since it is a form of acceptance. Appreciation of what you have is important for happiness because you cannot appreciate what you have until you accept it. Accept your crappy job, accept your broken marriage, accept the things that you can’t change and highlight the things you can.

Acceptance and appreciation are difficult to come by when we see all of the things we would want in life through our media. This is why there is so much unhappiness within society, but just know that it is possible. So please, take this upcoming Thanksgiving day, to reflect, not on the Black Friday sales, but on what you have in your life. It won’t bring you happiness per se, but it will bring you one step closer to living a more fulfulling life.

Alpha Female

So, It is 2:47 am, and I just got a business idea that i want to execute eventually. so here goes. I want to start a company that inspires and helpes high achieving women. High acheiving women are everywhere, but society doesn’t celebrate them. This is going to be a location where woman can find tools to help them deal with stress, accept themselves, move forward with their carreers and dreams. I think i will start in San Diego, CA. I need to get a good base though. I need to figure out what it takes to do this so I can execute it. I am tired of hearing tha tyou need to compromise. that is bull shit. You can have it all. you just need the right support system and tools. I want to be able to help these women.

Why me? how can I help? I am an alpha female, self proclamied, but also identified by others. I am a leader and I want to lead this empowering “movement” to help women not imporve by being like men, but to imporve by being better women. I believe women can take over the world; it is my goal to prove this to women.

Mission statement: To help bring out the best in women

Vision statement: To create an army of women capable of taking over the world

Passion

One summer, working with a lawyer, he asked me “what do you want to do when you grow up?”. Having all the options in the world as an overachieving undergrad, I state quite confidently: I want to do something that I am passionate about and makes me happy; happiness is my end goal in life. Feeling proud of my response, all that was returned was a snicker: “yeah, don’t we all”.

Passion is the inner emotion which makes amazing, and many times unpredictable things happen. It makes the world go round in a more exciting fashion. When you are passionate about something or someone, nothing else matters; suddenly excuses don’t exist, set backs don’t matter, you are on track to completing a goal.

I think passion and happiness have an intimate link between them. Being both overwhelming emotions, having a passion sets you up to be able to accept happiness. I purposefully said “accept” happiness because I think that happiness is the undetectable ether that we live in; people claim its is there, others try to measure it, reproduce it in vitro, but upon failure they come to the conclusion that is doesn’t exist. Happiness is all around us, sometimes we are just not able to accept this overwhelming emotion. So, in a quest for passion, we will many times find happiness tagging along.

I have thought about this lawyer’s response over the past 2 years now. It stuck with me. It resembles the unhappiness/unpassionate living that resonates across societies. Here, this very successful lawyer admits that not only is he is not happy or living his passion, but that this is the baseline of society, and that I am novice in thinking that I can break through this glass ceiling of unhappiness, regardless of the opportunities that I have been given in my life.

Today, I find myself working an 8-5, not living passionately. Without the passion I am used to, I realize that I need a change. So here I am: writing to find my passion which will let me embrace the happiness that we are all capable of finding while lighting a fire inside me which will benefit myself as well as others. I hope that I can help inspire others through my entries.