They always use an Apple-branded notebook computer in the movies. Most actual writers do it with a pen and a stack of papers, I reckon, but that probably doesn’t shoot well and pen makers don’t barge in with in-movie advertising fees. How curious — maybe how unconscious — that I’m actually writing this in an Apple-branded notebook, as opposed to the readily-available Dell desktop at my workplace desk — how uncanny that I actually unpacked the notebook from my backpack and its power source before sitting down to write, still at my workplace but minutes away from getting the hell out of here and going for my one-hour commute.

I never said there wasn’t a rationale for having a spanking white Apple-branded notebook computer under my fingers right now. I’d had a Mac and after a few years relying mostly on that computer, given that I didn’t have a real job and a separate workdesk, I knew I would upgrade to another Macintosh when the time arrived. Then it happened that at the workplace a friend managed to lodge me into I used a Dell notebook belonging to my boss for the longest while — the computer upgrade cycles here are unbelievable, so my “official” machine was an unusable mess I had them eject from my desk.

So I got used to having a laptop computer — something I could rest on my laps, feet up, dayvan cowboy-style. It happened that last christmas season I could afford a portable new Macintosh. As I’ve come to expect from Apple computers, there’s not a dash of a problem with it. Unless you count the obvious physical distress — I am clumsy and Apple made these flimsy, maybe for small savings in materials or maybe to meet weight expectations. Sure I’m glad I’m carrying a flimsy case of plastic instead of a firm case of metal back and forth.

But this wasn’t going to be about my computer. I do own a computer, as most people keeping a web log do. Mine happens to be of the portable type, and probably my back will hurt in my autumn years from all the time spent in various non-ergonomic positions on my white keyboard. Then again, I neither like or feel capable to do a proper account of the existential debts I’m accumulating during my youth for my autumn and winter years. All the chemicals, all the stress, all the loud music. Maybe there’ll be relief available for some subsets of the accumulated result of my unconscious fuck-ups — the bad posture, the hours not slept, the miles not ran. Maybe I or a life companion will be able to afford it. But if I was to sit and reckon, I would never get anything done. I haven’t even started writing about myself — about the current, non-heisenberged me.

About me. How pretentious and how movie-like. Every writer in the movies seems to be always typing about himself. It’s almost like the gall to present yourself as a subject of sufficient interest among the many things a writer of whatever caliber you happen to belong to can write. Or like if being a subject of interest was somehow correlated with being an author of interest. I can’t, however, think of a reason that would bar a very boring person from writing marvelous wordpieces. A very boring person might have indeed an edge over his writing-calibermates in that none of his pesky life pursuit-like beams of meaning might blur the actual notion of whatever he’s trying to write about.

There is, of course, a source of bias in the fact that movies can’t depict boring people that merely happen to write. It’s bad fiction to let abstract descriptions get in the way of actions (and whatever descriptions happen to be subordinate to depicting such actions) — and how long can you really film someone in the act of typing or (even worse) handwriting in order to get a sense of who he is, and why wouldn’t that be preferrable in final written form instead of painfully long sequences where not much happens visually?

So if I may return from my long digression on the popular depictions of writing, allow me to try and excuse myself from trying (and indeed spending much metaphorical ink) to find one of those biased fictional depicitions of writers. I don’t know any writers in a much personal manner — though I have the occasional brush with an author, there’s a clear inverse correlation between how much an author is relevant and how much of its life I’ve managed to observe first-hand. I’m no stalker, and though I know the whereabouts of a couple of best-selling authors, there’s not much I could learn from watching Paulo Coelho or Chico Buarque strolling down the beach, basking in their semi-planned mix of anonymity and publicity, probably having estimated well how many people would even recognize them in a given half hour of fresh air. I know I wouldn’t recognize them anyway, and I’m not affecting a lack of pop culture knowledge — the sunlight by the beach changes faces from what you’d see in the kind of studio portrait accompanying their books or interviews.

Moreover, and as nasty as this might sound, I would refuse the hypothetical possibility of downloading their entire writing acumen into my brain even without erasing any of my current overall capabilities. There are writers I’d like to and often do out of immaturity emulate in voice, style and medium. It only happens in spurts, though — the desire of completing some long sentence with the crafty turn of phrase that a given author would use in my half-baked model of their writing style. If I could completely emulate writers, I’d either try and collect a ghostwriter paycheck or just read. I don’t think that the slim chance and the dim reward of literary fame would be enough to drive any aspiring writer who’s not completely broken down into delusions of relevance. The whole point of writing is seeing my voice out of my head, sipping through my fingers — I don’t think I’d be comfortable dictating and I hope I never need to — and splashing into the pond of paragraphs just written.

But I haven’t been too succesful at writing, and by “not succesful” I mean “not having jotten down enough words at a reasonable rate”. I get out of bed every day, dazed with the fairies of sleep calling me back and sit through a bread-butter-milk breakfast in quasi-asthenic stupor. But at some point of my long commute the methylphenidate kicks in, and ideas for writing — angles on subjects that seem interesting enough — pass by and I aspire them with whatever germs the air conditioner is sending to my lungs. Most of them die a quiet death of relative irrelevance in face of everything else a full day demands of me. Some of them get started and dropped after a few paragraphs or after I realized I have digressed enough that I can’t find the will or the relative relevance to keep pouring it. There’s other things I have to do — and the fact that many of them involve writing about subjects that others have determined to be of interest and signalled through the capitalist system until it reaches the hands of my boss. Smart enough to allocate workload according to each of his men’s weaknesses and strengths, he’ll have me write some research report about something of such utter disinterest or form that people actually have to be paid to get it done somehow.

I get paid; I write, out of a sense of duty but also of fear of losing this comfortable position as some kind of researcher/consultant mixture that still coexists with my many quirks. So between trying to backtrack between all the digressions that have infested my original idea, now fuzzy at the edges and soggy at its core, and following through with obligations I often procrastinate way further than reason and good sense would dictate, the latter prevails. Once in a while, it’ll even be said that I’ve overdone it — I’ve spent too much juice on what could have been a much drier study. This is juice I could have poured onto my own writing efforts. It’s a reverse failure of sorts. And as if duality mandated it, often things are underdone simply because I have procrastinated too much and worked too little on them. White on black, black on white, it’s a square failure and not one that has been compensated by the fruits of my personal writing mandate.

The point I’m trying to make here is that I haven’t been succesful in the execution of my personal writing mandate, mostly because I digress too much, and that’s why appealed to that hollywoodian picture in the beginning: in the movies, writers always do it so slowly. And maybe it is that I have tried to write too much, too fast. That is part of the reason I set out to explore these sorts of logical or philosophical ideas-in-bloom that come out of the quasi-obligatory addendum that’s a staple of the online journal or web log medium — the “about me” page.

I have in the past cobbled together a couple of paragraphs for sidebars describing various subsets of important things that could be said about me. For some period in a not so distant past, most of my online writing was this highly technical, theoretical in the extreme kind of essay in economic theory. I had strong positions about issues of the day that I found most fundamental. I knew where I was and I knew what I required from the world, and I even knew that I wouldn’t quite get my deal in things, even if my stack of cards was set right for me. I would describe me as a “young kantian” and maybe mention that I was getting knee-deep into econometrics though my essay-writing was as far-removed from empirics as you can get without being entirely in the domain of metaphysics and “pure” ontology.

Then I had this apparently endless succession of mental breakdowns which not only interrupted the flow of writing, but severed my concrete being from lofty, complex thought. For a while I had reverted into writing about functional programming, mostly in an evangelistic rant style raising dust about programming language chieftain Guido van Rossum’s decrees that functional tools were redundant and replaceable in syntax. Of my several journals’ minor episodes where a polemic actually rose some controversy, this was surely the widest. It’s even somewhat likely that mr. Van Rossum gave himself the trouble of skimming through my criticisms, but my requirements of Python were really incompatible with “pythonicity”. I sang of formal calculi and theorems that put the ordinary programmers’ mental model upside down. Personally I can’t imagine mr. Van Rossum even getting the point of map fusion in first place and, in any case, I was by then threading on deep waters far from my zones of best knowledge and while I tried to absorb theoretical functional programming like a sponge, I was mainly floating in the void between breakdowns that are close in their time of onset and inevitable in their co-causality.

When the noise got too loud, the sponge that was my brain froze soaked and I was left silently screaming in a corner carrying a cement brick in my mind, I turned to psychiatry. I can’t give enough credit to biological psychiatry in cutting the gordian knot that my psyche had become. Analytical models of psychodynamics would probably have the median psychologist spend lifetimes untangling the wires, all while I got more and more tangled in myself. That I had come to sustain unwise ideas is undeniable — ideas about self, the requirements of self-transcendence and the helplessness that minor frustrations inevitably led to.

By most external appearances, I don’t fit the dictionary view of manic-depressive disorder. I have always been a very internal person, to the point that I tried to redefine “introvert” (as opposed to “shy”, which I once was and then transcended, like many a normal teenager) to fit the kind of self-absorbedness that might be at the core of my personality make-up — to the point that I would have everyone believe that “introvert” meant what I meant it to mean, and not what the overwhelming majority of uses of that word mean. I’ve been depressed at least to the point of “learned helplessness”, as the cognitive-behavioural jargon will describe — and then repeatedly trespassed the walls of the depression jail through ascent in this kind of stairway to a generalized abstract sense of being valid and worth, only to find myself in a larger prison and to repeat the operation over again.

For a while, such was the cognitive dissonance between such an overwhelming character of self-absorbedness and the concept (long rationally accepted, never actually denied) of being “just bipolar” — not autistic nor a pathologically avoidant personality — that I constantly wrote about psychiatric matters. Many of the people I had found common ground with had already been diagnosed as bipolar, but I had never made the leap of thought (which would have been illogic anyway) — so I typed down and uploaded endless ramblings about the multidimensionality and, yes, multipolarity of so-called bipolar disorders, to the point of making a pretty damning indictment of the dismissal of Topamax as a psychiatric drug as an epistemological slippery slope concretized into faulty experimental design. Friends actually complained that I talked about psychiatric matters too much and identify myself with the theoretical disease all while hiding from the real me. It was around this time that “bipolar” entered the subset of characteristics that would be crowded in an about-me paragraph, and though I felt it seemed to occupy too high a hierarchy in all the things that could be said about me, it was indispensable at that time that I was understood to be bipolar and that bipolar disorder was understood to be something that could show up as the things I said it did. I more often than not use “bipolar” because of its softer edge, but intellectually I have to align myself with Kay Jamison in her denouncement of the term as hiding the full complexity of manic-depressive illness.

The actual going-abouts of my mind were too fast-changing and context-dependent to chronicle, and making verbal sense of them would require fixing, even if temporarily and for the sake of record and narrative, specific mental frames of reference sampled at a random moment of time in a way that would be psychologically unhealthy for me. Psychopharmacological treatment — without any sort of talk-therapy, psychodynamic or otherwise — set off a process where I gradually made analytical sense of my own maladjustments in ways that are unlikely to convince anyone who’s hell-bent on psychodynamic methods as a first-line approach and even hard to believe by many on psychiatric drugs who had never had that sort of feeling. I won’t attempt to remind myself of any sample moments of that sort of down-river dynamic of self-healing. As far as psychodynamic analysis goes, the sickness is in the frame of reference, and I really can’t find instantly one of those frames of reference or make sense of some random moment where I verbalized them to someone else. At the height of this “first stage” of healing, I had these very symbolic dreams and, in parallel, an analytical process unravelling the symbols and identified what they hid.

Fundamentalist proponents and believers of psychodynamic theories will often denounce “the drugs” as being, well, “drugs” — artificial means by which we hide our pain. I can’t say I speak for everyone that I know as a diagnosed bipolar and they’ve often claimed to envy me because of the incredible leaps of progress in self-knowledge that by my account was only made possible by psychopharmacology. Surely enough, there was and probably there will always be a benzodiazepine, a drug that’s prescribed for the explicit purpose of making you number, more resilient to hurt, fear, stress and shock. I said here before that “home is where the clonazepam is” after a rough patch where I didn’t have one of those delicious packets of chill at hand to make it through without unnecessary mental anguish. And while it’s true that I’d probably experience a return of excessive pain responses to disproportionately small stressors, the simple fact is that the anticonvulsant and antipsychotic drugs actually unravelled that fucking bramble, that weird thorny blanket I had knitted to hide myself from the hurt. Those “psychoanalytic dreams” I mentioned actually exposed my scratched skin to the full extent of my pain.

I did (and still do on a daily basis) use numbing drugs to make it through, because I still “overhurt” from stressors. But the whole point of the psychodynamic theories of existential disorder is that we knit weird thorny blankets to hide from the outside world of hurt and stress and shock. That the suggested course of action is to carefully remove that blanket attempting to minimize the scratching and the additional hurt through “ultimate theories of the psyche” is a sign of hubris that dwarfs all the pretense of medicalizing the entire existential fabric of behavioural dysfunction of extreme biopsychiatry. Each and every psychoanalytic theory is a stab at an ultimate, quasireligious theory of the psyche: orthodox freudians would say the pain outside is oedipal, while the likes of Erich Fromm would blame it on post-industrial economics. I might have begun to formulate an ultimate theory of the psyche based on my unravelling experience, had I not been in touch with others with my kind of superficial hurt and gotten to find glimpses of their own versions of hell, entirely different from the one I had discovered.

And what’s more, people who haven’t had to fight dragons don’t have a fraction of the self-knowledge that people who have gone through psychiatric issues possess. This alone would justify the vast overrepresentation of my recent mental health troubles in the composition of a document that’s supposed to be “about me”. If you are an individual randomly sampled from the general population, chances are that I know more about myself than you’ll ever know about yourself, and I may even know things about you that you don’t. But the main reason for bipolar disorder being over-represented in this more extensive attempt of writing the elusive “about-me” page is that, in typical bipolar fashion, I’ve self-recursed: I have been actually describing a history of how I wrote or would have written about-mes in the period of time where I had an online journal of the genre that seems to necessitate an about-me page. And yet the fabric of me has been in its continued process of weaving for more than twenty years before the problem of about-me came up.

This problem compounds somewhat with the fact that I have a few conflicting theories of certain points of my life — the clearest example being separating which moments of defiance were manic and which were just one of the many steps into becoming a man in full that every boy must take — but it doesn’t get any simpler if I just gerrymander my personal history into a simplified theory of the gradual development of manic-depressive illness. It’s surprising, in retrospect, that having had such strong theories of self at certain points of my pre-journalling life, I never thought of the problem of self-description. At some point of my early adolescence where I fashioned myself a detective story author I stumbled upon the problem of crafting characters that were sharper than I was. My fictional attempts would later gravitate towards the surrealistic farce, where the fact that stories arose from a creative process I didn’t fully understand opened up the possibility that the actual, multiple meanings transcended my first intent. In 20/20 hindsight, I would never be a fiction writer because I would never get past the “writing from the heart” barrier — I would never stoop to explore the about-me and strut it, probably because it always included hurt enough that I intuitively knew would be unhealthy to explore on my own back then. The best authors don’t “write from the heart”, but they’ve gone there and done that. I hadn’t, and I can’t go back to writing from my 13 years-old heart because I don’t have a good handle on it anymore.

Semi-consciously, I started “blogging” as an experiment on how much I could handle, on how live and raw I could go. At the beginning, an about-me would have been impossible to write — I was trying very hard to temper the little pieces of raw me I had managed to offer with infinite towers of justification and meta-justification. It would have either been an impressive feat of fiction-writing or a full schizophrenic breakdown if there was a single stable infinite tower of meta-justification; there never was any consistency in my half-hearted attempts to hide what I had just half-hearted exposed, and it’s very hard to shoot such a moving tower — assuming that I would even want to undo my contrived and inconsistent preemptive defensiveness.

My writing settled down due to either diverse factors of life’s accidents and the fact that my schizoid characteristics dissolved at about the age that schizophrenia either blooms in full or dies out as a fragile weed stomped by the sheer pleasure of being transparent and naked and alive. That schizoid — literally fractured — defensiveness just faded, either out of its irrelevance, given how fit and well-developed the naked me is, or because schizophrenia never was in my genetic make-up. I was free, I was real, and successive about-mes — at the heights of kantian confidence or the depths of mental anguish — were unleashed upon the world, just as I’ve told you until now. But, alas, I have written scores and accomplished nothing but an additional layer to a potential infinite tower of about-about-mes.

So how exactly do you break out of this prison of infinite jest? It appears to me that the problem comes with the about-ness of “about me”. Maybe aboutness begets roundaboutness. Maybe it should just be me. And that’s just who I am, that’s just who I am.