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Mood Swings |
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Subject: Mood Swings From: flattop Date: 24 Sep 00 - 03:05 AM On the clique thread I said that I was going to create my own thread. I thought that I would create a thread about mood swings, how aging guys like me who are going to seed may be subject to unexpected rides on the mood rocket, and how wild my swings have been today, or how it might just be that I've kept my life in turmoil for too long. Funny thing is that as soon as I started to write my mood changed and I felt like I shouldn't admit to any of this. So I won't. I will just send my musical mood references which only fit down moods. Tonight I played Van Morrisons CD, Days Like These. I can't think of a better CD to play when I'm depressed. For a long time I thought that the title song was saying that his mother told him that there would sometimes be bad days. Now I think Morrison is saying that his mother told him to not be frightened by those strange days when we are not depressed. I could be wrong. Then there are other great songs on the CD like, 'Underlying Depression, got to crawl into my room.' Don't you just love it? And, 'When I'm really down get me off the ground. Melancholia, Melancholia, Melancholia.' The other musical connection, early this evening I read an article in the Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper, that really brought me down. I will post the article below. |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: flattop Date: 24 Sep 00 - 03:07 AM She Died for Love Bob Geldof's ex had finally found true happiness, reports CHRISSY ILEY. But when INXS's Michael Hutchence was found dead in a hotel room three years ago, Paula Yates began a downward spiral of drugs and depression that ended this week with her death. CHRISSY ILEY Special to The Globe and Mail Saturday, September 23, 2000 LONDON -- People like to measure out their lives by other people's deaths. You know, Where were you when Princess Diana/John Lennon/President Kennedy died? I doubt very much that there'll be a global cry of: "Do you remember where you were when Paula Yates died?" But I will always know. Her death has touched me more deeply than Princess Diana. I wasn't a friend of hers. In fact, we didn't even like each other very much. We were too similar, ravenously insecure. It's embarrassing to see yourself like that. Easy to mock. People had written Yates off as a groupie, just because she most famously hooked Bob Geldof in the back of a limo, by doing what she thought was the proper procedure for rock stars in limos. She was a multiple personality. Super attention-seeking, sharply witty. A pleaser, a flirt. The eternal rock chick. The earth mother who was still the lost little girl, who in the end died for love, or rather the love she lost. When they pulled her out of her sad, glamorous but squalid Notting Hill house Sunday her head was resting on a pillow filled with former INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence's ashes. She was 40. Their baby, the four-year-old Tiger Lily, had answered the phone from a family friend saying she hadn't been able to wake mummy up. Mummy had in fact gone to bed with a cocktail of vodka, pills and heroin. Death may have been accidental. Self-destruction certainly wasn't. Yates met Hutchence when she interviewed him on television many years ago while still married to Geldof. But she said it was one of those "known him in another life, have to be with him forever" moments. When she interviewed him again on her television bed for the popular British TV morning talk show The Big Breakfast (for which Geldof was an executive producer), it was an unstoppable force. He was a sexual Svengali rock legend, who took her to places she spent the rest of her life fantasizing about. They were high on each other, but also high on drugs. She never even used to drink before she met him. After he died, she drank constantly to forget her pain. Oh, there were cries for help and rehabilitation clinics. Lots of suicidal thoughts and threats, and endless buckets, rivers, Niagara Falls of tears. Hutchence hanged himself in a hotel room, Christmas, 1997 in Australia. She couldn't believe in the verdict of suicide. He would never have wanted to leave her and Tiger. A friend of mine lived next door to her, briefly. He recalls riding his bike around the corner to find her weeping in a heap on the doorstep, and the little girl trying to comfort her. Yates was too weak with misery to get her key in the lock. Since his death she had lurched from one unfulfilling toy-boy type relationships to another. There'd been a hideous custody battle, where Michael's parents had tried to prove her an unfit mother, wanting to take Tiger to Australia. They had given up. Now, Michael's dad, Kelland Hutchence, 69, says he's too old and too frail and though it "tears his heart," he thinks it's wrong to separate Tiger from her sisters Fifi, 17, Peaches, 11, and Pixie, 10, who have been living with their father, Geldof, and his girlfriend, Jeanne Marine. When I met Yates she was with Geldof, with whom she'd created a fairy tale, Waltons-like nirvana, after the nightmare childhoods they'd both endured. People never understood how the relationship lasted 18 years. Her, the ultimate blond Penthouse-posing flirt. He the cerebral malcontent that wanted to feed the world (incidentally, because she stuck a poster on the fridge after seeing a TV program about Ethiopia, saying she wanted to raise £200). When she met Geldof in 1978, he was a Boomtown Rat. But it was almost as if his stint being a pop star was an accident. In fact, he had set his heart on establishing a magazine in Vancouver. He had fled to Canada in 1975 to get as far away as possible from Ireland, where his mother died when he was six and his father used to beat him up severely for getting only average marks at school. He told me, "You learn independence. My opinions became dogmatic. There was no one to temper me. I see things only in black and white, and I'm not liberal at all." He didn't care about being isolated or on his own. He went to Vancouver to embark on a journalistic career. He became music editor at The Georgia Strait. Susan Hill, the editor of his autobiography Is That It?, confirmed that Geldof's Canadian days in his early twenties were among the happiest in his life. But his application for a permanent visa was turned down, so he was forced back to Ireland, more bitter than ever. And the result of this was the expression of such anger in the Boomtown Rats. He was the type of guy, he says, who would never ask a girl to dance in case she rejected him. Paula was a sexual predator. He needed that type of girl. The band called her The Limpet. Once, she went to Paris in the snow hoping to find a poster of where the band was playing. She said, "The only words I knew in French were oui and courgette." I can remember her eyes now, looking up at me to check that I thought this was funny. I remember she was wearing one of those vintage floral dresses with a droopy hem. For the snowstorm in Paris, she was wearing a ballgown and sequins. She found the club where they were playing, but the gig was over. She banged around the back and he was still there. "That was the turning point in our relationship." She wanted to make a wonderful house and wonderful children, and re-create the childhood she never had. Her mother was a starlet called Helen Thornton, a Blue Belle dancer with the length and the breasts that Paula never had. She squirmed with admiration for her mother and recounted to me the time that Federico Fellini dropped a cockroach down her mother's swimsuit. "He hoped he would be allowed to fish it out, but instead she hit him and he was knocked out on a sun lounger for hours." The mother was always leaving her, though. "To avoid confrontation, she would go out in the middle of the night, so I would never know when I woke up whether she would be there," Paula had told me. "So I was this hideous child that would follow her around and lie lengthways across the bathroom door in case she tried to escape." Now we understand why she was The Limpet. Why she was so raw. She was desensitized by her own needs. The man she grew up believing to be her father was called Jesse Yates, and he was a London TV presenter with the God slot on Sunday. It was a campy religious program, where he'd get Grace Kelly out of retirement to read the Bible. Paula's parents split when she was about five, but on visits with her father, he would make her sit in a wooden box while he would play hymns on his organ, and made her wear a balaclava in the house in case she caught a cold. Five years ago she learned that a different TV presenter, Canadian-born Hughie Green, a womanizer and an over-the-top charmer known most for his oleaginous talent show, Opportunity Knocks, was her real father. She was naturally troubled. Both men were dead and could provide no answers. Her fury with her mother meant they didn't speak for the last five years. All of her confusion was locked inside of her. Michael Hutchence had been the balm for all this. She had found whatever it was she was looking for. Sexual nirvana and complete acceptance. She was at one with the world. People say that it was a sexual obsession that would never have stayed hot. But I believe it would have because Paula was a person of such electric turmoil she would never let things cool. She believed that Michael made her fit. When he died, nothing fit. Her world was literally torn into a different place, a place where she'd pop into her local shop and buy vodka miniatures six or seven times a day. A place where her skin always looked grey and her eyes distant, still looking for him. She couldn't bear to tread that road again. Her whole life had been searching for love, really. She'd mistakenly got fame and attention and world adoration obscured in the mix. Looking back in her autobiography which has morbidly been serialised here this week, she talks about the death of the man she believed was her father. How it was the biggest shock she'd ever received. She says, "When he died, I looked at my life. I believe in heaven, but I've concluded that the ghastly cliche 'life is not a rehearsal' is true. When you die you leave behind a few signs of your existence -- in daddy's case mountains of press cuttings and a few costumes, and a lot of people that are sad. You've gone from them." Paula left mountains of press cuttings and quite a few costumes. And children and an ex-husband and firm friends who adored her and a huge space that has made me very sad. She wanted everything. She wanted unconditional love. She didn't care how she got it. And for a moment back there with Michael, it wasn't a rehearsal. It was the real thing. |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: Kara Date: 24 Sep 00 - 07:07 AM Thanks for posting the article, hope this cheers you up ooo |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: Jeri Date: 24 Sep 00 - 10:34 AM This is a very broad generalization, but it sounds like Paula's happiness was attached to other people. That can make a person very vulnerable. I'm not talking about love - two people can love one another and still be strong individuals. Just that needing confirmation of your worth from other people in order to feel worthy...in an ideal world, we'd all know we were worthy and enjoy hearing about it from others, but not depend on it. Re mood swings, we all got 'em. If the bad ones hang around too long, something's not right and we should get qualified help. For most of us though, they come and go, and the only thing to do is ride them out. Anyhow, musical offering:
THESE DAYS
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: 53 Date: 16 Mar 02 - 11:36 PM Is mood swings the same thing as being depressed. I'm not feeling very good right now and I was wondering if anybody else has real low times? I just seem to be drifting further and further down, and I have just come home from the hospital and it seems that my life is slowly falling apart. I just need a friend to talk to. |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: wysiwyg Date: 16 Mar 02 - 11:45 PM See PM Bob. ~Susan |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: Blackcatter Date: 16 Mar 02 - 11:58 PM Gee, I was kind of hoping to find a swing set that you set swinging with changes in your mood (sort of like those old mood rings...). 53, Mood swings can be conected with depression. Generally, mood swings refer to the emotions of people who change their mood quite rapidly. Typically brought on by chemical or hormonal changes such as drug or alcohol use or menopause. Depression is another beast altogether and can be either situational or non-situational. Situational is where your life really sucks for some reason and that makes you depressed: The ending of a relationship, the death of a friend, loss of a job, etc. You have every right to be depressed, and that sort of depression is almost always temporary - it's part of the greiving process. Non-situational has to do with mental or physical issues. If you are depressed, but have a decent job, friends, interests and nothing tragic has happened, that is the sign of a mental health issue. Similar to mood swings is the disorder now being called Bi-polar (used to be Manic-Depressive) That disorder is a mental condition where a person goes from being depressed to manic and back again on a fairly regular basis. The big difference from Bi-polar and mood-swings is generally the rapidness of the changes and the underlying causes. I hope you feel better. Take stock of your life and try to talk to friends. If you need more, please talk to a therapist or doctor. There are treatments (not always drugs) that can get you back to being a positive and happy individual. Chinese medicine has helped a great deal for a friend of mine who is diagnossed as Bi-polar. pax yall |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: Mark Cohen Date: 17 Mar 02 - 12:03 AM Bob, it's common for people to feel down at times, especially when health problems start piling up. Some of the suggestions people often make in these circumstances may sound trite and silly, but they can really help. Are you getting any physical exercise? Many many studies have shown that people who exercise regularly, even if it's just walking, feel better, stay healthier, and "age" more easily and happily than those who don't. See if you can find a way to help somebody else: volunteer at a shelter or soup kitchen or school, play music for hospitalized kids, read to somebody who can't see, join a civic or environmental or religious group. Learn about meditation: you don't have to become a mystic, but spending a few minutes a day quieting your mind can produce surprising benefits. Finally, make sure to talk to your doctor about your feelings. Many of the bad or depressed feelings people think of as "stuff I just have to learn to live with" actually come from out-of-whack chemical processes in the brain that can be improved with medications or counseling or both. Aloha, Mark |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: 53 Date: 17 Mar 02 - 10:15 PM Thanks Blackcatter I appreciate what you said, and yes I have been diagnosed with Bipolar and Ocd and a few other things that are wrong. Bob |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: wysiwyg Date: 17 Mar 02 - 10:49 PM People who can be supportive might PM Bob so he has people here to count on, off-thread. ~S~ |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: 53 Date: 17 Mar 02 - 10:52 PM Thanks Susan. Bob |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: kendall Date: 17 Mar 02 - 10:54 PM Woodchucks have a great song about moods; "I feel like Hank Williams tonight." |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: jup Date: 18 Mar 02 - 03:27 PM 53, I would rather have 2 broken leggs than depression. Hang in there ,Black Catter and Mark Cohen are on the ball with what they said. We need all our best people right now! Don't ya hate being told to snap out of it though.I've lived with depression for years and when I'm down I try to keep doing things.PLAY MY GUITAR UNTIL MY FINGERS ARE SORE. I had a book called "Feeling Good" new mood therapy which I found helped a lot.Maybe one of our friends can tell you more about it,I gave my copy away and haven't got another one yet. ALL THE BEST,DOUG. |
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Subject: RE: Mood Swings From: 53 Date: 18 Mar 02 - 07:01 PM I like the idea about playing guitar until you can't play any more. Thanks Doug. Bob |
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