Skip to main content

Manic Phase

I read this Slate essay as a mother-daughter relationship story - really pulling out all the fluff and the extras until only the breath of life remains. It reminded me of my former co-worker D whose daughter did a fair share of drugs but not to the point where an intervention was required - atleast not at the time I knew of her. D was mostly on edge except in those fleeting days and weeks between crises when her daughter sounded happy and normal, making a serious effort to stay away from drugs. 

That was when D shone - she could dive into work, immerse herself in it completely and produce the most remarkable results in a very short period of time. The manic phase as she referred to it, kept her employable and earned her the reputation of someone who got hard things done. There was this glorious period of two or three years when the daughter had been completely sober and was really making strides in her own life. D relaxed in sync and did some of the best work of her career during that time. 

One of her projects got national recognition and won her an award. And then just like that, D checked out of the workforce and in time from my life as well. Last I spoke to her several years ago, she mentioned that there are only so many manic phases left in a person's life at her age and they took their toll on her. D had not spoken to her daughter for over a year at the time but I have no doubt she would be there for her anytime the need arose - that was an immutable fact of her life.

Blanchard was circumspect about her relationship with her daughter. “Is she living the life I’d have her live? That’s an absolute no. Am I living the life my mama would have me live? F no,” she said. “I tell people all the time, ‘You feel like you’ve been buried. You’re under the dirt. I get that. But were you buried or planted? I was buried for a while here in this. I chose to see if I could grow. And I did.’ ”

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more