Starting from scratch

Decided to change my template. More changes than I'd imagined. The huge header is disconcerting so I am trying to figure out how to downsize it. Biggest change is that my hit counter disappeared so I'm starting from scratch on the hit counts. Before switching templates, my blog had had 11,166 hits. Not too shabby although I suspect at least 80% of those hits were from people looking for a White Stripe. Oh well, new day.

Irritability is at manageable levels today ~ as opposed to yesterday. Saw an interesting program today that discussed the link between mental illness and addiction. Current thinking and research suggests that addicts first begin using in order to medicate their primary disease. I'm bipolar ~ a diagnosis that has been confirmed by 4 psychiatrists. Most of my life, I had been considered m o o d y, emotional in the extreme and filled with unrealistic expectations (magical thinking). More frightening to me were the delusions and paranoia I carried around in some messy cerebral nest of secrecy and shame. I will discuss these things here at a later time. New template, new start ~ this time I plan to write about myself with brutal honesty coupled with introspection and, hopefully, little narcissism or self-pity. Re: the later, it is important to make a distinction between self-pity and having compassion for oneself. As Lao Tzu concluded in ??? 67, "compassionate toward the self, we reconcile all beings in the world." Me, I self-flagellate in the extreme. It's time to try holding back on the whips.