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Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression QUOTES

Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression QUOTES

1 " For one awful moment, I felt the pure panic of an imminent emergency. And then I stopped. My mind staggered, jolted and was sundered. The screen of my mind froze. Time ceased to pass. One intense present moment. Nothing moved. Nothing could move. I could feel no motion in my psyche and all the usual easy fluency of thoughts streaming into each other, confluent waterful, was slung into reverse. It was the silent onset of sheer dread. It was like the terrible sucking back of the oceans just before a tsunami crashes to the shore; the frightening in-breath before the storm-surge roars inland. The sky was going to fall through the sea, the clouds would smash on impact like glass, and the great pale sheet of a dead white sky, motionless, frozen and unbroken, would lie noiseless at the bottom of the ocean. "

― Jay Griffiths , Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression

2 " To me, the experience of having had manic depression can never be separated from my sense of who I am. It runs through me like wine through water: everything is coloured (or tainted) by it. "

― Jay Griffiths , Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression

3 " In depression, I feel I have been taken over and have lost my self entirely. Instead, a rude incumbent has slumped into my life, leaving half-eaten sardines under the sofa and stale smells in every room. "

― Jay Griffiths , Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression

4 " Manic depression is both artist and assassin. While it plays artist, it is on your side: generous, generating, connective and vital. But then the psychomachy begins, a battle between a God and a Devil for the possession of the soul, and the artist stealthily becomes assassin. In depression, the mind feeds on itself, self-cannibalizing. The soul-loss of depression is well attested, and many people in the anguish of depression know that familiar cry: ‘I hate myself. "

― Jay Griffiths , Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression

5 " For three weeks I was in a state of slippage, a gap widening between me and my usual self. "

― Jay Griffiths , Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression