Stretched-out Moments

Looking at a photo of an old toy called the "Fisher Price Activity Center", I am taken way back. Back to a time which I am not supposed to be able to remember. To a time of big linoleum floors, floral aprons, and towering table and chairs. There is a dial to turn - like a rotary dial that goes nowhere. A spinning pinwheel that goes on forever. A stripe that turns and turns indefinitely. A mirror. I was sucked into this world for hours upon hours. Every little bit was its own little universe.

As I got older, something as simple as a tuft of grass could be its own world and I could stare at it for stretched-out moments on end. Now that I have kids, I see some of this in them:They can stare and take in the world indefinitely.

How much of this is bipolar? I don't know. But I always felt like I was special for the way I saw the world. As a teen, I would write poetry, some of which was noteworthy. Now, I still see the world differently- especially when manic. I'm not sure that I ever was what you'd call manic as a kid, but I know that my perception of the world was very different. I know that I was distraught a lot of times and was told I maybe depressed- or maybe "just a teenager". Yet I know that I was different. Always had been. I was "an alien castrato" (an earlier post here). I was different than most people and always had been.

I still feel like I see little things- little things to make up the big things. I can get lost in the little things for ages, just like the Fisher Price toy. My mother always told me that I could play for hours in my playpen as a baby. I believe it. I would just get facinated by objects. Anything. As a child, I'd stare at a glass ball, for example, and become fixated at the reflextions of light and of me. My paternal grandmother always yelled at me to stop touching things. I had to! I had to know what everything was about! When I get more manic now, its in how things feel- the details of the mortar between bricks, or how smooth a table-top feels. Its how cold the air is blowing across my face, or how the voices in a restaurant irritate me to no end. Its all about how turned-up the volume is. The older I get, the more this happens. I just think its always been there.