Part I: Boom!

When I reveal to some people who don’t already know I’m bipolar because of all my blabbing about it, I have to explain how I deal with crushing episodes of depression. And then they jump back ten feet. Because I’m always smiling and always making someone else smile. How is that? How is it that I put a smile on everyone else’s face, but can’t put a smile on my own?

I seem to have two energies. One is a clean energy–wide-eyed and bushy -tailed with pure innocence–the other is determined to terminate my existence in every possible way. I’m surrounded by clean energy. Good friends, even better family, in spite of rough patches, fulfilling employment, constant ability to eat food and sleep in a warm house, on a warm bed, the ability to engage in life-changing conversation and the word of God as the stabilizing blessing that holds all of it together.

It’s not depicted and managed by the people or things around me. It’s my energy, my approach. Somehow, some way, I always provoke positive energy.

A week or so ago, a friend of mine–a pilot in the air force–explained to me the intricacy of the Sonic Boom: the transition in which a jet breaks the speed of sound resulting in a thunderous clap. At that point, the jet is moving faster than the rate at which sound waves vibrate. Sound waves. I should know all about sound waves. But I don’t. As a musician, I should have been able to discuss the ins and outs of those frequencies with him and the point at which those frequencies “break”. But I couldn’t. I knew nothing about it. And yet something about this aspect of flying drew me in like a stripper to a pole.

It’s sound. What the hell is sound if it’s not the medium with which I create? Why wouldn’t I know a thing about the very concept that breathes air into my musical lungs?

So I seem to know how to bring smiles to everyone’s face but my own. Strangely, being depressed should make me more, not less, knowledgeable about happiness. I know everything about it–I do–and yet I know nothing at all of what it really feels like.

If I can figure out how sound “breaks,” maybe I’ll start to understand.