sloane

“This was just how adult relationships were, how love felt once you had a few battle scars.”
― Gayle Forman, Where She Went

“On occasion, these periods of total despair would be made even worse by terrible agitation. My mind would race from subject to subject, but instead of being filled with the exuberant and cosmic thoughts that had been associated with earlier periods of rapid thinking, it would be drenched in awful sounds and images of decay and dying: dead bodies on the beach, charred remains of animals, toe-tagged corpses in morgues. During these agitated periods I became exceedingly restless, angry, and irritable, and the only way I could dilute the agitation was to run along the beach or pace back and forth across my room like a polar bear at the zoo. I had no idea what was going on, and I felt totally unable to ask anyone for help. It never occurred to me that I was ill; my brain just didn’t put it in those terms.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

“Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

“I was not only very ill when I first called for an appointment, I was also terrified and deeply embarrassed. I had never been to a psychiatrist or a psychologist before. I had no choice. I had completely, but completely, lost my mind; if I didn’t get professional help, I was quite likely to lose my job, my already precarious marriage, and my life as well. I drove from my office at UCLA to his office in the San Fernando Valley; it was an early southern California evening, usually a lovely time of day, but I was—for the first time in my life—shaking with fear. I shook for what he might tell me, and I shook for what he might not be able to tell me. For once, I could not begin to think or laugh my way out of the situation I was in, and I had no idea whether anything existed that would make me better.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind