When Love Is All You Need

Wednesday, 01 October 2014, The Farmhouse Estate, Ceres, California…

Okay, I made it through the week and once again I find myself sitting here on a comfortable late afternoon, enjoying the sunset over the mountains to our west. I’ve been working on my things while sitting in the groovy chill space behind the Farmhouse all day long. I like this work place, this space to sit and create, it’s what I longed for when we lived in the Midwest. It was often too cold or raining there, we lived in a high traffic, congested area so I never felt very safe nor like I had enough isolation for my imagination to roam freely. Things are different here, I have pretty much exactly what I imagined I wanted and naturally I offer my most Grateful appreciation to the Cosmos for helping me get to the place in my life. I am indeed fortunate but it wasn’t always so, there was a time in my life when both chaos and pain ruled my daily routines. I used to have such terrible luck, I was always failing at the things I tried, I had trouble keeping a job or friends or lovers or even my own family. I was such a mess but the odd and curious bit was, I never really noticed it when it was happening. I was the center of the cyclone and rarely witnessed the destruction or impact I had all around me. I went through much of my life with this blind-sided view of reality, I stumbled and tripped through situations and relationships like a trapeze artist swinging across the three ring circle of life. It might have been a graceful thing to watch at times, but it was always scary. I never used a safety net either, so when I did miss the next swing or try to do one too many mid-air flips, I flopped hard on the ground. Splat, my life was once again an instant mess and it’s truly a miracle I survived as long as I have…I’ll be 53 on my next birthday and that’s as long as Jerry Garcia made it, so I figure I’m doing alright.

The difference between those circus days of my former life and the idyllic life I enjoy now is really very simple; Love. Love made the difference, corny I know…I am a parrot for The Beatles but I am absolutely positive, beyond any and all reasonable doubt that, in fact, All You(I) Need Is Love! Given you don’t really know me and unless you’ve read my book (“My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…”), you may not really understand what it’s like to grow up and try to function as an adult when you have a mental illness like I do, it isn’t easy. It’s a hell of a lot of fun sometimes, I have had some completely amazing adventures, but it’s also very painful, so much that there were times, for days and weeks, I would have no desire to live at all. I contemplated suicide often, I even tried it seriously once but luckily I failed. I have Rapid Cycling BiPolar I, along with a diagnosis of PTSD and General Anxiety Disorder all of which came upon me like tsunami of my soul, crashing through my realities and leaving me in a catatonic state, laid flat on my back on an expressway during rush hour (none of which I remember very much); six weeks later, just after my 45^th birthday, I was discharged from an extended stay in a psych ward but I remained incapacitated to care for myself, unable to work or even function on a daily basis. I could not care for my family, I couldn’t even leave my apartment for months at a time. Almost two years later I was eventually I was deemed “permanently disabled” but started receiving medical insurance. That was the key to the recovery process, a process which still (and always will be) in motion. Eventually, through a combination of “trail by error” with various medications, engaging in different forms of therapies and working on my own very hard to develop better habits, routines and self-managed care skills, things got better and better. Last year (2013) I sat down to write a book about this experience and this year, this month in fact, that very book is being released! That’s a very long road for a person once deemed “permanently disabled” and, like I started to say, Love Was All I Needed.

When I was a boy, I thought as a boy, I acted like a boy, I felt like a boy but my mother, someone who has more Love for me than I can imagine, knew that despite my unique abilities, there was something not quite right with me. Mom voiced her concerns to everyone, to doctors and school counselors, to the rabbi, a priest and after I started getting into trouble with the law as a teenager, she took me to psychologist, psychotherapist and even a church bible youth group. Nothing worked so by the time I was 17 I split the coop to make my adventurous way through life. However, despite it seeming like it was in vain, all mom’s efforts to get me help planted a seed inside myself; something might not be right about me and I might have to do something about that, some day. It didn’t get any better as I got older, in fact, it got worse, much worse. I was dabbling in dangerous and illegal activities, I was out of control, I was unhealthy in my body and I lived every day as if it was my last, without concern or regrets for consequences seen or unseen. Even after I became a father for the first couple of times, with two very different women, both who tried to love impossible me but not enough for me to ever feel (or return) the Love. When I reached the pivotal “Christ age” of 33, however, a young woman came into my life and from the very moment we met one another, both of us knew, we belonged to each other. Again, I sound a bit corny, but it was indeed love-at-first-sight, although she was only 19 and I was a lecherous 33, we ran off to Vegas and got hitched within weeks of meeting each other. We’ve been together ever since then, twenty years next summer and if it was not for this relationship, this one Love, my life would be all but over, essentially…if not dead, I surely would be one of those poor souls you see shouting cries of anarchy and doom in the shadows of the city streets.

Without that one Love, I would not be the man I am today because it was through this devotion, throughout the many years of pain and suffering, both for years before my psychotic breakdown and in the so many since then, this one Love, my wife…along with the beautiful children we’ve grown in with our Life, it was that feeling that kept me alive. Before the breakdown, after I had given up my criminal life and tried to find a straight life, it was this Love for my family that motivated me to walk the walk, talk the talk and never give up. Even though I repeated failed, job after job, gig after gig, nothing ever worked out for us, they stayed with me and I stayed with them, because I held onto that Love as tight as a life raft in a stormy sea. Once I had the PTSD episode, while I was in the treatment and recovery process, when I had little to hope for at all, it was that Love of my family that ignited my will every day. I saw my wife’s gentle eyes, her easy, comfortable smile, her soft touch and found inspiration to keep working on myself. I hugged my children, I made them laugh, I cradled their cries and in the innocence of their eyes, I saw the Love they had for me. I could never let them down, I wanted to be that man they saw with such awe, even if I didn’t feel like that man back then, I had that goal for myself. It was all because of Love. The life goes on, as it always does, in the most ordinary of ways except these days I am feeling so much better, I am strong and confident, I had both vision and the will to see this into reality and like John Lennon sang, all those years ago…Love Is All You Need.

Well, thank you once again for spending the time to read my little blog…as always, I invite your comments, I kindly ask you share my blog if you like it and please, if you too have a blog, why not invite me to read you too? In the weeks ahead, as we near the release date for “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…” I suspect I may not have as much time to write, but I will. I can be found elsewhere, both on-line and in real-time, live event things so I humbly encourage you to stay in touch!

Have Peace, Share Love, Find Bliss…Take care and be well!

Peace,

d’Philip