And Where I'll Land, Nobody Knows

As anyone who is reading this will have noticed, I'm still finding my feet. I don't seem to have decided what exactly this blog is about. At the moment I'm just writing about whatever takes my fancy, so please be patient with me and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

I had originally intended to stick to the philosophy end of things but that can get to be a bit much, especially as I have a somewhat pretentious writing style when I'm trying not to be too academic. I also have just a tidge of the stage fright. Apart from some university publications, hardly anyone apart from my professors reads anything I write and what I do write for them is full of statements such as "logical invalidity of the exclusive disjunction in biological sex dimorphism" and "Weber's criterion of exclusive right to military force as constitutive of government is neither necessary or sufficient." That sort of thing gets unbelievably boring very quickly.

So then I started thinking about what I enjoy in other people's blogs. I don't follow so very many of them with regularity. One is nearly exclusively images, one is mostly news and facts, another is advice and information and the last is personal narrative. (You can have a look at them on the blog roll.) They're such a mix that I couldn't find much of a common thread except that two of them are about the Church and two are about bipolar disorder, both of which are of such abiding interest to me that anything I wrote would inevitably touch upon them both.

I also started thinking about what I had been looking for in a blog. I have struggled with illness and school and identity ever since I was diagnosed almost two years ago. I spent hours last winter hunting for whatever information I could find on bipolar disorder; I particularly wished I could find something, anything about managing school in combination with bipolar disorder. I never could find anything. Just last month I found 'The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive,' which has been wonderful to read. There is a distinct paucity of information and narrative about women and bipolar disorder. Women and PTSD, women and depression (the regular kind) are all over the place. I by no means wish to belittle those illnesses; I just really want something that bears directly on the illness I have. Men's narratives of bipolar disorder are helpful but they do have a different experience of it in some ways.

At this point I'm leaning towards school and bipolar and self-identity and bipolar. Church and philosophy will be in too: they are always with me. Same for health insurance, politics and social justice. But it's good to have a focus, isn't it?