A Buddhist way through mental illness.

I have always been a terrible student, with below average grades, and, even until high school, all my notebooks have doodles all over the place. One may conclude that I’m unengaged or I have some type of attention disorder. Of course the right implication is that I’m not unengage, my psychiatrist suggests that I may have ADHD or a mild Autism Disorder, but my main diagnosis is Bipolar Disorder type 2. This diagnosis may sound catastrophic but as the Buddha says there’s a right and a wrong way to view things. And I believe all living things have to survive in their conditions. My bipolar disorder manifests from a mix of obsesion, creative power and constructive power, last time I was in distress and without diagnosis I created a technology to plot multidimensional surfaces.

I’m not arguing to use your mental illness as a superpower, because each maniac episode cumulative damages the brain and in the long run this may evolve in dementia. It is also a fallacy to believe that an episode is the only way through creativity. Creativity is Orthogonal to mind states. What I’m proposing is a Middle Way. Being conscious of your situation and earning a livelihood through mindfulness. A Buddhist way through mental illness. On the orthogonality of creativity to mind states, there’s the buddhist principle of non duality, where duality is seen as an illusion. As an example in Bipolar disorder, a maniac and a depressive episode both are states of the mind and for me creativity is a manifestation of the non self, thus non dependant one onto the another.

The goal of this essay is to use buddhist lens to help others accept and navigate a lifelong illness.