She’s been replaced by quiet Selina. This Selina is the so-called normal, sane version. This Selina doesn’t embarass herself or talk much, if she talks at all. This Selina is pathologically shy and avoidant, and if you ask her a question she’s unable to come up with a witty reply. When asked what she got up to at the weekend, she’ll say “nothing much”. She’ll wear the same clothes everyday, go through the motions of living, eating, sleeping, but her mind seems tuned to cruise control. She won’t go out, engage in conversation, she’ll let plants die and eat food out  of packets. Hair will grow long, skin unmoisturized, letters unanswered.

If she didn’t have to be anywhere she’d be lying on her bed, resting. That way she doesn’t bother people. And to bother people would be disastrous. Bothering = inappropriate =funny =manic. She has learned, from too many experiences, that mania is apt to get one locked up and put in isolation. And she can’t be bothered going through that drama all over again. She she makes it easy for you, and goes to her room..much less trouble that way.

Some people can wring poetry out of this kind of despair, but Selina is no Sylvia Plath.

In the meantime Selina is doing research. This involves copious amounts of time on the internet. Googling. Combinations of words – ‘bipolar’ ”Cure’,’ ‘depression’

There has to be something out there.

‘lamictal’.

Lamictal? Never heard of it. All she knew were the names of these drugs: lithium, epilim, olanzapine, chlorpromazine, immivane, haloperidol, risperidone, seroquel, citalopram, aropax, clonazepam, all strong psychoactive medicines (some of which have even been banned from prescribing) that come in little seed packets and dolled out by an army of Nurse Ratcheds and irresponsible psychiatrists who didn’t know what the long term effects of anti-depressants would be. Oh, also they forgot to mention the side effects, but she did get suspicious whenver they kept asking her if she wanted to kill herself. Great way to make a patient feel better! It was like a therapist asking her if she’d been sexually abused. No? Oh don’t you remember? …No? Well, will you let us know if you ever think about killing yourself?

Selina has tried all the quacks  – osteopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists, reiki, naturopath, theta healing, pranic healing, mind-body-spirit expos, meditation, yoga, faith healers, shamanists, crystal healers, polarity therapists, massage, pyschotherapists, hypnotherapists.  She’s spent hundreds of dollars but it’s all been in vain. You can’t’ heal’ something like manic depression. But at least she got to know some people who work the name of alternative medicine, wounded healers all of them. Some real nut-cases too.

Damn fish oil, she’s been taking it for a year and still went hypomanic, then depressed.  Maybe it’s not enough. Even on the recommended dose. More research reveals clinical trials were using EPA eicosopantheontic (sic) acid, in pure form, with no DHA docosohexanoic (sic) acid so maybe her fish oil omega 3 supplement is the wrong one. So she searches but the only ones she can find with higher EPA are online. She takes the plunge and orders 7 bottles of Pura EPA to be delivered from the UK which actually works out cheaper than buying it from the local health food store.

And she’s going to see her psychiatrist to ask about lamictal, touted by some as ‘the wonder drug for bipolar II’  the only known side effect to be a fatal rash.  Well that’s better than the nausea, gastrointestinal trouble, lethargy, arthritis, swollen ankles, dry mouth, incessant thirst, tremors, weight gain, ammenorhea and mania inducing side effects of all the others. Because this manic depression constant recycling deja vu thing (hey, remember the time I felt like this before?)   is getting to be a drag.

‘Normal’ would be good.  Normal, on it’s own, with no side effects, please.

I really did try to read it with an open mind. Starting with Genesis, I thought, ok, nobody takes this stuff literally. There’s a talking serpent, God wandering around the Garden of Eden, Eve being disobedient, God sending a flood to destroy the world.

Then there’s the patriarchs, and how God is always granting male sons (NEVER daughters) to barren females. God has competition from other Gods, and gets furious when his ‘chosen’ start worshipping them instead. God doesn’t care about other ‘peoples’..he casually destroys the Israelites enemies and conquers their land while sending plagues willy-nilly. God is then happy to have a temple built for himself and various feasts dedicated to them. He asks that everyone circumcises their males and obey around 613 commandments.

After a time people get ‘messiah’ fever and Jesus is one of those people who claim he is actually God. Then people start writing gospels claiming he fufills all kinds of prophecies even though they are just bits and pieces picked out of the scripture at random. However this Jesus guy doesn’t actually fufill any ‘messiah’ propehecies at all. And no Jews believe that he is the messiah. But many others who aren’t Jews decide to believe that he is God because he supposedly rose from the dead and can forgive sins. Previously no sins could be forgiven if you weren’t Jewish because non Jews couldn’t enter the temple to place offerings.

Jesus also preached the end of the world – which didn’t come. But it doesn’t matter, because now people believe that when you die you can get to heaven anyway. ( A Place of fluffy clouds and built with precious gems)  But if you don’t believe, that Jesus is God  you are going to spend eternity in hell. (A dark pit or a lake of fire)

Apparently this is ‘salvation’ which seems silly as nobody knows whats going to happen when you die. According to the bible, all the dead will be resurrected and then either cast into hell (for not believing) or taken up to heaven. This ‘day of judgment’ will come even while people are alive which is why everyone had to get ready for it and start repenting in the bible. But to this day, 2000 years later, Jesus has not returned from his heavenly realm to rescue all believers. The ‘day of judgment’ must be pretty long – billions of people have been born since then. You’d think if what Jesus said was true, there wouldn’t be a delay in the ‘kingdom’.

Sound like Santa Claus delivering presents to every child who believes in one night? Yeah I thought so too.

One thing Christians who take the bible as inerrant must reject is evolution. God CREATED us, they insist, like a child who believes babies are from God or the stork and doesn’t know the facts of life.  Even after the facts of life are learned (i.e sexual reproduction) it seems safer to believe all life is God created. Or maybe God CREATED sex? Like God CREATED evolution?

I’m glad I read the bible so I could disabuse any notion of Christianity and Judaism being anything but made up. If I had not read it, would I have kept on believing in my ignorance? Probably.

The thing that got me most confused was Christian writers who clung to the idea that the bible was the last word on anything. If it’s not in the bible, then it’s not Christian. Trouble is, one of the most stupid ideas have come from the bible, like the Left Behind series, male chauvinism, and anti-intellectualism. According to the bible, the world is flat. Israelites are God’s ‘chosen’, but Gentiles are given grace just to make Israelites jealous. Women are told to ‘keep quiet’ in churches. If God isn’t all good, everything can be explained by Satan’s evil temptations.

In ‘Charles Stanley’s Handbook for Christian Living’ – the first book I picked up to try and make sense of the Christian religion, I read one of his reasons for being a Christian was that he wanted to believe when he got to heaven he would meet his parents, who died when he was young. hmm. It sounded a bit Cliff Richard to me. The reason why he became born again was rather mundane. He missed his dead father. Of course, Cliff had ni idea whether his dad was in heaven or not but I presume he didn’t want to take any chances that he wasn’t. Another thing was if you believed  once then hey presto that meant you were a Christian, and it didn’t matter what you did after that, your ‘eternity’ was secure.  This ‘eternal security’ was a ‘free gift’ but  he omitted mentioning that if you attended church you were meant to subsequently  tithe your income ‘to God’ (really the pastors).  So far, so bunk. But the one thing I couldn’t get over and the reason why I could never be a Christian was the teaching about the end of the world.

If the end of the world was going to happen, as it says in the New Testament, then why, 2000 years later, has it not happened. Why would they preach all that in the early days but not have it come to pass until some unspecified time in the future? and why were Christians so convinced that NOW was the ‘end times’?

I remember going to church and the pastor going on about the ten virgins, how five were smart and had their oil lamps ready but five were foolish and had not prepared. So when the groom came in the middle of the night  (why he would have 10 virgins, nobody ever explained, nor why the groom wouldn’t give advance notice of his coming ) the five smart virgins were able to go to the wedding feast but the five foolish ones were locked out. The five wise virgins were stingy and did not let the five foolish virgins have a share of their oil. Apparently this parable was meant to show how wise people were to prepare for the coming kingdom of God. This meant us ‘wise’ Christians and not foolish unbelievers. It was the unbelievers own stupid fault for being locked out of heaven because they were ill prepared.

I didn’t understand the part about the virgins. Where Christians meant to represent virginity? Was the Kingdom of God supposed to be like a sexy honeymoon? Why TEN virgins? And what about the bride?

So much seemed to be riding on this ‘Heaven’ business but nobody ever had proof of it because talking to the dead was forbidden in the bible.  Besides, according to the bible nobody was going to heaven until the day of judgment. So all those books, written by PASTORS who claimed to see heaven in a NDE were false because nobody is in heaven yet, according to the bible, eveyone has to be resurrected first.

the preacher intoned. I went in and sat down in the auditorium. I had been invited to a ‘healing crusade’ where I listened to an australian evangelist claim he raised a wombat from the dead.

I had been reading a steady diet of Christian literature and was determined to see if these claims of healing in the bible were true.

According to the bible, Jesus had healed the lame, blind and deaf. He also cast out demons

This isn’t what happened at the healing crusade. We were told, on the flyer to ‘come expecting a miracle’.

I wondered if ‘bipolar disorder’ was demonic. If so I couldn’t wait to be delivered from it. And if Jesus could heal the blind surely he could do something about myopia. So I had some expectations of some sort of miracle at least.

This evangelist was a paunchy Australian who was a very good showman and told lots of jokes. It was more entertainment than scripture. To hype us up, the church band rocked out verse after verse of worship – “I exalt thee” over and over, and “Amazing Grace”. At least that was one I knew.

Finally after many descriptions of remarkable ‘healings’, his jet-setting lifestyle, and exhortations to have faith – to move after we’d been healed – he finally got down to business. Passing round the collection bag. The lady next to me said this was a ‘love offering’. She was from another church, and seemed to be a regular on these healing circuits. I had a look around me and wondered what this was all about – shouldn’t healing go where it’s needed, like in hospitals where people were really sick?

Or maybe by miracles people meant financial miracles. I suspected this church was preaching the prosperity gospel – because it seemed like the people who went to this church boasted of what they got out of it -new boots, a house, furniture – not too disimilar to the claims made about the Universe in ‘The Secret’. They had a slick telegenic pastor who preached about revival in New Zealand and building churches in London and Paris, and who always reminded people to tithe. A blessing from God meant a windfall rather than anything spiritual.

The evangelist asked people to come up and get their healing. This involved standing in a line, getting anointed, and being touched on the forehead and being prayed over. What I didn’t realise was you’d get pushed backwards while all this was going on, into a roving team of ‘catchers’ .

I found out later that this was called being ‘slain in spirit’.

Nothing happened. No miracle occured. I was pushed backwards onto the floor. I didn’t pass out. I was kind of mad. Why not pray over us while we were sitting? Was this even biblical?

A lady in a wheelchair came up to the stage. Apparently the evangelist had lost all the power and WE were the ones meant to demonstrate through our prayers that she could rise up out of this wheelchair. And we were meant to be as noisy as possible while doing this. People cried “heal her! Heal her!’ and spoke in gibberish. Nothing happened. “The power is draining away – have more faith” exhorted the evangelist.

Nothing happened.

On with the show. A line of people (picked beforehand?) decided to testify, that yes, God was good, and all their joint pain was gone away. Anyone would think they’d stumbled into an arthritic convention. Some others claimed their depression was gone, their asthma had cleared up, their itching had disappeared. Personally I didn’t see anything miraculous happen – if they believed the symptoms had gone, it was obvious they were going to testify anyway. People got up and danced to prove they could move around. But I would have been more convinced if they had been bedridden and were so sick they couldn’t even MAKE it to the meeting. Or thrown away their glasses. Or crutches.

I left the meeting, dubious. Could I go back to this church after witnessing such a farce? I’d tried it out, mumbled the sinners prayer, got the book – a pulp version of the New Testament no less – I even got the spiritual heebie-jeebies in a hands on prayer anointing one night.

But I didn’t meet Jesus or hear God speaking to me like the pastor claimed. What I did hear was a lot of talk about having enough faith so that we would give money to the church so that we in turn would be ‘blessed’.  I realised what this reminded me of. It was the Christian version of Amway.

Because after all it’s everyone’s ambition to run their own church, isn’t it?

I prefer happy and delusional but my sad and cynical state would rather I stay out of it.

This state of affairs comes about imperceptibably, just when I’m recovering from feeling grand about myself.

Maybe it’s the trick of the light/daylight saving/withdrawal from sedating olanzapine/mortification at my manic self but now it’s here and no amount of withdrawing into reading that pile high stack of books (that I don’t actually need to read) can get me out of this world and avoiding society’s duty of being happy, civil and functioning.

I know I can’t do everything I want, that without the mania I don’t have the confidence, the bravado, the risk taking adventure of finding out. It’s scary. It’s part of me that would want to be a nun if I was Catholic.

Don’t take me to dinner parties where I have nothing to say, that’s risking conversation that reminds me I could blurt out something not-quite-right. If you racked my brains I’d have nothing to rack, to avoid being that insufferable over-friendly, familiar, uninvited self I am now shrinking from.

I ponder another course of hypnotherapy, too bad it wasn’t permanent, or some other drastic measure to fix my fragmenting soul. I haven’t sung in weeks, that’s why, but I have this sneaky feeling that any feel-good vibes I had from music was only something myself could know. It’s like getting innocent joy out of something but not realising the same thing that gives you joy gives everyone else a blinding headache.

HELP.

My forays into the Bible had been pretty haphazard so far. I was given a Gideons in school which contained the New Testament, I sneaked looks at my sister’s Good News, and my friend had given me an NIV one year when I was mad.

The NIV was a student’s version, and it had reading plans and everything that I duly ticked off, but it was like dipping in and out of chapters that confused me no end. I think it was too much.

When some avangelists crusaded on campus I got shepherded into church and was given teaching on ‘carnal’ nature. I remember a tract that had a picture of a train and a ‘caboose’ (no idea what that was), and it was like this – if you didn’t get on the train (going up to heaven) you’d be Left Behind.

So I got on the train and found the bible to be a weird compilation of history about a Jewish race that was chosen, which made me wonder why God was being so unfair to everyone else. Why couldn’t I, by dint of not being born Jewish, be chosen too? And how could a man, who came back from the dead and promised eternal life, not be actually living on earth today if he was so supernatural?

And why were Christians all in these different churches, and what about Catholics? What were people doing when they were praying? Weren’t they just silently wishing for things? Why did people go to church and then sin like nobody’s business, like those paedophilic Christian Heritage politicians? And would I know anybody in heaven considering none of my family believed? How could I honor my mother and father when both of them didn’t believe in anything? Where the ten commandments binding, or only applicable to Jews?

What was hell? Did Jesus preach the revelation or was that something else apart? What did it mean to be saved? How could you tell a Christian from a non-Christian? Was it soley on faith or was it works? How could anyone explain nuns and monks? What was the point of ‘tongues’ if nobody knew what your were saying? Did those preachers really push you down on the podium, or was it the devil? How many souls had to be saved? And why did spiritualists insist on chatting with the dead if these people weren’t  in heaven? What was going to happen at the end?

I had a bunch of questions all right. And God wasn’t answering. The only recourse was to look in the Bible, and see what it said.

Your txt messages are more cryptic than ever, could you maybe not send them at 2 am in the morning? I’m afraid I do need my beauty sleep…

I promise to study up on my Star Wars. I had no idea how much it meant to you.

lots of love

your miffy-wiffy

ps. of course you can come over here.

If a movie has singing and dancing in it – I want to see it, provided it was made before 1954.

Poor Judy. Those musicals really took a toll on her. They left her exhausted,  suicidal, drug addicted and with a terrible eating disorder. But you wouldn’t know it if you saw her on the screen.

Bloody MGM.

Lots of love
from your
miffy-wiffy

On the one hand, they have such titles as ‘Jane Bites Back’ or ‘One bitten, twice shy’ or ‘Undead and unwed’ – simply awful. These paranormal romances are terrible.  There’s sequels, then sequels upon sequels, and every single vampire is dead sexy.

Lapsed Catholics and Mormons write them. The sexually desperate read them. More often than not it is plump, juicy females who can’t get enough of them – willing victims. They borrow them by the dozen.

The whole point of Dracula was that he was destroyed in the end.  So how come these vampire novels keep popping up? Can we blame leukemia and Anne Rice?

Viv in a Scarlett dress

Vivien Leigh was known as the British actress who wowed movie-goers with her portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara in the epic 1939 movie Gone with the Wind.

In the film, Scarlett is a woman who is an absolute bitch – in the words of Margaret Mitchell ‘Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realised it when caught by her charm’
It’s not hard to love Scarlett because she acts like a petulant spoilt brat who always wants her own way and charms everyone with the flutter of her eyelashes. She doesn’t have any real friends except for Rhett who sees her for what she is – and loves her for who she is, in spite of everything.

Vivien Leigh,  did not have many nice things to say about Scarlett after playing her – except admiration for her courage. ‘This woman is a bitch – I can’t play her’ she moaned, but that’s how Americans wanted her and that’s what they got.  Scarlett is like the American Dream – one spitfire who risks damnation, sells her soul, and makes loads of money defying all convention and morals for crust and bread. Gumption, they call it.

Miss Leigh won the Best Actress Oscar for it and later in her career won another for playing another southern belle- Blanche du Bois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ .  If one can’t take one’s eyes off Vivien Leigh on screen it’s hard to put down a biography of her personal life, which was as tumultuous as the characters she played.

She was married to one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century one Laurence Olivier, graced the stage with her presence and was as glamorous ane beautiful an actress as they came. But her life was marred with illness, she suffered from TB and battled bipolar disorder, dying at the age of 54 in 1967.

To find out more about Vivien, please visit The Vivien Leigh Pages
or join my yahoo group Vivien forever