Terri Cheney Quotes

[ ] manic sex isn't really intercourse. It's dicourse, just another way to ease the insatiable need for contact and communication. In place of words, I simply spoke with my skin.

Stories don't always have to end happily.. Sometimes it's just enough that they end.

...love is a chemical imbalance, too. That perilous highs and desperate lows and extravagant flurries of mood are not always symptoms of a broken mind, but signs of a beating heart.

I actually stopped talking. I actually listened. So I knew that I wasn't all the way manic, because when you're all the way manic you never listen to anybody but yourself.

True beauty is not the absence of ugliness, but the acceptance of it.

Was drug induced happy still happy? Was it the right kind of happy? Did it count?

The cruelest curse of the disease is also its most sacred promise: You will not feel this way forever.

Without the darkness, how can we ever hope to understand the light?

There are people who fantasize about suicide, and paradoxically, these fantasies can be soothing because they usually involve either fantasizing about others' reactions to one's suicide or imagining how death would be a relief from life's travails. In both cases, an aspect of the fantasy is to exert control, either over others' views or toward life's difficulties. The writer A. Alvarez stated, " There people ... for whom the mere idea of suicide is enough; they can continue to function efficiently and even happily provided they know they have their own, specially chosen means of escape always ready..." In her riveting 2008 memoir of bipolar disorder, Manic, Terri Cheney opened the book by stating, "People... don't understand that when you're seriously depressed, suicidal ideation can be the only thing that keeps you alive. Just knowing there's an out--even if it's bloody, even if it's permanent--makes the pain bearable for one more day." This strategy appears to be effective for some people, but only for a while. Over longer periods, fantasizing about death leaves people more depressed and thus at higher risk for suicide, as Eddie Selby, Mike Amestis, and I recently showed in a study on violent daydreaming. A strategy geared toward increased feelings of self-control (fantasizing about the effects of one's suicide) "works" momentarily, but ultimately backfires by undermining feelings of genuine self-control in the long run.

It gets harder as times go by, because memory is the first casualty of manic depression. When I'm manic, all I remember is the moment. When I'm depressed, all I remember is the pain. The surrounding details are lost to me.

The world is essentially bipolar: driven to extremes but defined by flux. Saints are always just a stumble away from sinners. Nothing is absolute, not even death

The memory of sustenance is a terrible thing. Far worse, I think, than actual starving. Starving just kills you. Longing can gnaw away at you forever.

Happiness is fine, in its season, but happiness out of season is a sure harbinger of doom.

If you nurture it long enough, a lie can become a life.

Few things are strong enough to survive that deadly clash of mania and depression. Certainly not love. Love is far too fragile: it is a picture window, just begging to be shattered.

True beauty, I realized,is not the absence of ugliness, but the acceptance of it.

I only know that my greatest victories have always been surrenders.

Trust is as fragile as fairies’ wings and almost as hard to find.

There’s a very fine line, indistinguishable at times, between charismatic and crazy.

Comprendí que la autentica belleza no reside en la ausencia de fealdad sino en su aceptación.

But instability like mine needs considerable distance to pass for mere quirkiness.

At least when I was an adult, I had a name for what was wrong with me: manic depression. It's easier to make sense of things - even very disturbing things like sexual acting out and suicidality - when there's a big, fat label slapped on top. But as a child, I knew nothing. I had no diagnosis. All I had was a vague and gnawing awareness that I was different from other children, and that different was not good. Different must be kept hidden.

These flies were half the size of my fist. They came at you and stuck to you with a single-minded purpose you had to admire. We were hopelessly outnumbered, but we still slapped and kicked and karate-chopped ourselves until we reached an uneasy truce.

People always mean well, but they don’t understand that when you’re seriously depressed, suicidal ideation can be the only thing that keeps you alive. Just knowing there’s an out—even if it’s bloody, even if it’s permanent—makes the pain almost bearable for one more day.

Bridges are only kindling, I thought. I decided to torch this one. I

I wanted simple and sane. Barring that, I wanted nothing. I wanted numb.

It may have sounded like no to a glass of wine, but in truth it was no to a great many things. And yes to a great many more.

It is a testament to the sharp beauty of a life lived in extremes.

Thin to me meant more than pretty. It meant disciplined, empowered, in control: all the attributes I secretly knew I lacked. But mostly, the illusion of a sound and healthy body was essential camouflage. I needed it to hide the evidence of an unsound mind.

It’s a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can’t doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can’t wait to start looking.

I won't say that writing tamed the Black Beast. It soothed him, though, enough so he agreed simply to occupy a corner of my mind...Gradually, I redirected my focus and skills towards causes much closer to my own heart: writing and mental health advocacy. [...] I felt so good at times that I even wondered, was I still bipolar? In my community work, I saw so many people who were much worse off than I was - deep in their disease in a way I no longer seemed to be. I knew that this often happens to manic-depressives: the brain forgets the ravages of the illness they way a woman forgets the pains of childbirth. You have to, to survive. But it's always a dangerous place to be, because you inevitably start to question the need for medication, therapy, and all the other rigorous stopgaps of sanity so carefully put into place to prevent another episode.

-Hola -dijo- soy Jesucristo. Pero puedes llamarme Jesús, o Señor, si lo prefieres. -¿Señor? -pregunté, tratando torpemente de ser graciosa. Es decir, aquello tenia que ser una broma. Jesucristo en un hospital psiquiátrico... Menudo tópico. -Señor Dios, por supuesto -respondió, frunciendo el ceño con desconcierto- ¿Acaso eres judía? En ese caso, no hay problema, puedes decirme Cristo. -No, soy católica, he sido bautizada y educada según la religión. -Entonces, tendrías que haberte arrodillado al entrar -me amonestó, y se apresuró a hacer en el aire la señal de la cruz- Por esta vez, te perdono. Pero que no vuelva a ocurrir -dijo. Después me miró con esos ojos de donde parecían surgir dos rayos láser y se me heló el corazón. Me pregunté si era posible que Jesús aun estuviera vivo y que hubiera terminado en ese lugar. La linea que separa el carisma de la locura suele ser muy fina.

But the most striking contrast by far was me: thrilled to tears simply to be alive in such surroundings, and determined as ever to die. I never felt so bipolar in my life.

I realized then why I was avoiding all the other patients. They were all potential mirrors. What I really feared wasn’t the insanity of strangers. What I feared the most was my own disease. I was terrified I would catch a glimpse of myself in passing.

I’ve never liked the telephone. It’s a noisy, shrill intruder. If it were up to me, I’d ban all phones and bring back visiting days, like in Jane Austen and Edith Wharton novels:

It’s a well-known fact that God makes green-eyed men for one purpose only: to remind me that love is a chemical imbalance, too. That perilous highs and desperate lows and extravagant flurries of mood are not always symptoms of a broken mind, but signs of a beating heart. If

The memory of sustenance is a terrible thing. Far worse, I think, than actual starving. Starving just kills you. Longing can gnaw away at you forever. But

True beauty, I realized, is not the absence of ugliness, but the acceptance of it.

We were the Gatsby couple, or so our friends called us. We made a martini look good. It was the eighties, and he was as essential to me as shoulder pads.

there is no line, there never was a line, and any line that might have been disappears altogether, along with all of my discretion and judgment.

...the sound of my laughter startled me back into something resembling sanity. How could I die, when I could still laugh?

None of us knew how to express ourselves because mental illness was a long, inarticulate howl. It needed a voice. It needed words.

How could I ever hope to tell a normal person about the terrors of being happy? Unless there was a damned good reason for it, something objective and verifiable like a winning bingo card or a negative biopsy, happiness wasn’t a safe harbor for me. It was just another checkpoint on the road to mania.