All you need is...

Ok--so it is most intense desire and intention to get this blog off to a good start. My old blog was mostly a teenage replacement for the diary-under-the-bed. But that was almost six years ago, and the blog as a form has really evolved since then. In the past six years, we have seen men and women use the blog as a forum for intelligent discourse of many topics, as well as a chronicle of their daily lives. I read several "famous" blogs every day [see my Links section], and I am eager to put my blog on a plane above my LiveJournal.

That being said, I want to start my blog off with an excerpt from a paper I wrote for one of my professors last semester. The question posed was simply, "What grade should I get?" The underlying question, then, is "What did I take from this class?" Here is part of my answer:

"...I realized—more than ever—that love is the heaviest burden to bear, and the most important.

In all honesty, this has been the toughest semester of my life, as far as my personal life and my relationship go. Since January, I have been undergoing a fairly rigorous process of testing and treatment for what was eventually diagnosed as Bipolar II. This is not an excuse—my absences and my lapses in reading can in no way be blamed on my mental health, and this is not the point I intend to make. The truth is, you don’t have to be a Vietnam soldier to carry burdens. Humanity carries things every day. The things I carry vary—lab glasses, pencils, pens, a cell phone, my wallet, pride and ignorance, my disorder and the 75 mgs of Lamictal I take each day to stabilize my mood, therapist appointments, anxiety, joy, beauty, art—but I never stop carrying love. It is the only thing I can never put down. From the day we are born to the day we die—we carry love. We shed skin, baby teeth, hair, clothing, virginity, propriety, sobriety, notions of God and universal good—but love is indelible.

I thought the lesson I would take from this class would be a concept of monstrosity. In my head, this concept has arranged itself around a quote by Joyce Carol Oates: “We are beasts—and this is our consolation.” But it really is no consolation at all. Monsters are monsters because they cannot bear the burden of love: their existence is spent trying to shed what cannot be shed. Grendel, Frankenstein, Nathan Price, Okonkwo—they all look in at the labors lf love, and know they cannot carry the burden. Love is too heavy, and it turns them inside out. It could have turned me inside out too.

I intended to make the sweeping generalization that all humans are monsters, but I have realized that this simply is not true. I have done monstrous things in rebellion against love, but it is still my burden. I still carry it..."