On social media, as much as we can, we share our ideas, opinions, hopes and fears, even our personal life experiences as honestly as we feel to. I'm hopefully not making excuses for my bad behaviour and trying to gain sympathy with a boo hoo hoo story, I just feel like confessing some painful truths of what a life of enduring bipolar fluctuations involves.
To be bipolar probably entails a chemical imbalance both inherited in one's DNA, the chemical pollution of the environment one grows up in and tbe egregious social circumstances of one's life.
Growing up in a very poor family post World War 2 in the 1950's my necessary nutrition was wanting. With PTSD from the war my father had a hair-trigger temper and beat me around the head from infancy on, possibly causing brain damage. I evinced anti-authoritarian behaviour early on, refusing to do what I was told, having terrible temper tantrums and wrecking any outlet for joyous involvement. Straight-jacket psychiatry calls it "oppositional defiance disorder."
One sympton of my bipolar dysfunction is a version of Tourettes Syndrome. I compulsively say shit that I dont particularly mean and which I can't control. It's very much like an epileptic fit, a rage that only ceases once a huge patch of my neurone nerve cells have fired off in a cascade effect. I've been taking meds for this condition for years, Epilum and now Lamotrogine as the anti-epileptic was not working due to habituation.
At kindergarten, primary and high school I was thrown out of many classes for shouting out inappropriate expletives, insults, critiques and craziness. I was continuously sent up to the headmaster to be mercilessly strapped for disrupting the smooth flow of group brainwash. There was no counselling, no one had a clue as to my mental/physical disability. Nor did my domestic violence situation get considered and ameliorated. Beaten at recess, lunchtime and after school, violence followed me like a shadow in the hot sun.
This has carried on into adulthood and old age. There's always something that can set me off, usually some surprising contretemp when I least expect it, when Im just settling into the "zone" and someone disturbs me. I go into an uncontrollable rage, having a version of an epileptic fit. Very few understand what's going on. They take it personally, my ugly rage being very confronting. If only compassion would prevail and my interlocutor say, "Calm down Toby, have a cup of tea and a panadol. Lie down and have a rest. You're over reacting, you dont need to flip out. Chill." (This is what I do as a nurse when a patient is disturbed and it works most of the time.)
Being conned into LSD conversion "therapy" to "straightsville" by The Family cult kind of exaggerated my mania. I'm still "tripping out", having psychedelic visions, daring to explore any dangerous scenario, dancing abandoned in a hurricane, laughing and crying with an absurd humanity. LSD changed my world paradigm irrevocably and as much as it feeds my personality disorder I don't regret it, it sent me out into the world an iconoclast. I might've stayed a gay wimp in Melbourne otherwise. It didn't convert me, it made who I am more explosively intense.
As a working class queer I have recieved much bigoted abuse and exclusion, beaten, raped, scorned, deadbeat is my default way of being. My bipolar response doesn't help, I fight back, it enables me to stick up for myself, I am not a wimp or a doormat. My anger, furor, loathing of an unjust, exploitative, cruel world gets channelled into my art, it's punchy, I don't hold back.
The two sharp edges to a bipolar condition is depression and mania. I don't confess this to anyone but after much despairing in the turmoil of surviving contemporary life in Sydney I run away to India considering to suicide there, high in the icy Himalayas or a dingy pauper's hotel room in Mumbai. Instead, India fires me up, empowers my soul's turbines, recharges my heart's battery, excites me as to the marvellous adventure life offers if one is brave enough to go for it. I return to Australia invigorated, willing to take on the challenge of show business in an unintetested world and achievement in a competitive swamp of desire and narcissism.
I mostly produce my art in a wild mania, stay up for many nights writing, drawing, painting, scheming. It's a kind of delirium, ecstatic, on fire, also vulnerable to flip outs, rages, paranoid mistakes. I do and say outrageous things, from fatigue, from exasperation.
With all this madness I have produced wildly expressive artwork. Novels, short stories, essays, drawings, paintings, movies, animations, video clips, documentaries. And it seems I've garnered a reputation, a small fame I'm kind of unaware of as I'm too engrossed in my research and creative activities to track my history. With this blessedly comes jobs, but also unwarrented and annoying attentions, from the "authorities", from "fans", from those types who like to play "cat and mouse games", to one up me, to attempt mounting me like an alpha male monkey does to a zeta male. I don't take it kindly, I snarl, "Get off my back!"
Thus I have a bad reputation with some, particularly artshole careerists. The competition is fierce, no matter one's social standing such as lying broke in the gutter, there's always a crew willing to stand on one's face in the race to get "somewhere" while all the while pronouncing they are in it for "social justice."
Such is life. I'm 74 and somehow survived all the ups and downs I've found myself enduring. I have three more paintings to complete that will be the crowning achievements of my creative delirium. Plus the 3rd book, Lone Stranger, with illustrations, completing my trilogy, "The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat." I have to stay alive another year to complete this, then it's an open, empty highway for me to disappear on. Possibly a last few weeks in India when tensions have mounted up to propell me there, my bipolar breakdowns blowing me away. Travelling across India is a joy, a trial, an accomplishment, like swimming 7 thousand kms into a raging sea and away from my safe comfort zone.
Making it back to Australia is just as intrepid a swim. Here's hoping I don't suicide. When you see my latest poster up on the walls of inner-city Sydney in 2024 you will know I'm still alive and maniacally creating from the delirium of my depression.
