“Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth.” Jean Houston, PhD
Twenty-five years ago, these words flowed out of me: “Balanced within exultation and despair is the state of mind called reality.” The words were written above the title, States of Mind, and beneath the title was the author’s name: Leslie D’Angelo. The self-publisher? Resources for Living. And what was States of Mind? The chaos in my mind. The yearning in my heart. An embodied voice that needed more than anything else to feel, to write, to speak, and be heard.
My name is Diane Kaufman. What experiences have I had and how do I allow them to define me? Or do I dare to define myself? Here goes….
I am a suicide survivor. I am a poet, artist, child psychiatrist, humanism in medicine awardee, and founder of Arts Medicine for Hope & Healing, ARTS for Living, and Creative Life Lines.
I am still becoming who I am.
I am a hurt little girl who grew into a sensitive and brave woman. I have Bipolar II Disorder. I am a mother, a grandmother, a sister, Aunt, and friend.
Most of all I want to be a humane human being and I don’t want to stop growing. I want to cultivate and share the gifts I was born to give – just as we all are born with special gifts to help illuminate the world from human inflicted darkness.
Who was this Leslie D’Angelo? My middle name is Leslie. Perhaps I wanted to be an angel. D is first initial of my first name. Diane. Was I distorting, destroying, bending, shaping, and/or creating reality? Did I know who I was? What reality was? Was there a reality beyond the jumbled thoughts in my mind?
We live the questions and in that living we may come upon answers when we are ripe and ready to understand them, to paraphrase the poet Rilke. We are all on a journey whether we know it or not. That journey is our life and all its experiences and what we have created from them. What we have learned.
My mother Rebecca named me after her one and only doll. Actually, my chosen name was Sarah, but I was sick at birth and had to remain in the hospital. My mother, fearing I would die, felt the name Sarah, evoked the Yiddish “tsuris,” meaning “trouble and distress” from Hebrew, ??r?h, and so instead I was named Diane. The Roman Goddess Diana, Greek Goddess Artemis, Huntress, and Goddess of the Moon. Her twin brother is Apollo – Greek God of Medicine and Poetry. And so, I became upon a few days birth Diane, and as a little girl my older brother called me the diminutive Dianey. I was a doll who wanted to become real.
Decades upon decades later, I spiritually named myself, Miadyanah. Mia for I am. Dhyana, the Sanskrit word for meditation and creativity. Creative Intelligence. Does Miadyanah travel from the infinity of stars? All I know is that she was an idea that popped into my head one day. Not MD – Medical Doctor but MD – Miadyanah. I wanted to make her real.
An excerpt from the opening poem of States of Mind:
What do you see when you see me
A face
A body
Skin covering bones
When you look in my eyes
Do you see your own reflection
Or perhaps me
Hidden in the shadow
Somewhere in that eye
Hovering in a corner
Looing out cautiously
Waiting so patiently
Afraid of what I might see
Afraid of being seen
How did that poem come to be? Was I gazing into a physical mirror trying to catch a glimpse of myself? Was I hoping to find myself in another’s eyes and heart? Were my eyes turning inward trying to empower and release my spirit? The poem’s ending is a wish for freedom:
I have courage
I know I exist
But not yet throughout the body
Only pressed up against a corner
Of the eye
Anticipating freedom
Waiting in eternity
What do you see when you see me
A face
A body
Skin covering bones
It can be hard to live in this world. Yes, there is beauty but there is also so much pain and cruelty. There is love but also so much hate. How do we sustain hope and trust in goodness? Especially now with the ever-loudening painfilled cries for social justice in a violent, brutal, and uncaring world where power is meant to dominate and does not seek to serve the people.
There is so much to learn and so much that needs to be left behind. Where are the teachers? Can we teach ourselves to keep opening our hearts again and again so that we may learn from what can nourish us? These words from Anaïs Nin come into mind “And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
When I wrote “What do you see when you see me” what a difference it would have made in my life if I could have heard the words of Jean Houston beckoning to me, “You are not an encapsulated bag of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. You are an evolutionary wonder, a trillion cells singing together in a vast chorale, an organism – environment, a symbiosis of cell and soul.”
The great scientist Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand. While imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
The poet Emily Dickinson wrote:
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
Possibility of what can be – who I can become and be – what our world can be – inspires infinite hope in me.
In cruel contrast is the toxicity of shame. “Shame is an especially painful emotion because one’s core self, not simply one’s behavior, is the issue. Shame involves a painful scrutiny of the entire self, a feeling that “I am an unworthy, incompetent, or bad person.” People in the midst of a shame experience often report a sense of shrinking, of being small. They feel worthless and powerless. And they feel exposed.” (iresearchnet.com)
I know of shame. The poem “Who I Am” is also part of States of Mind:
I can’t show you who I am
I’m ugly
I’m worthless
I’m nothing
You can’t love who I am
No one can love who I am
No one has ever loved who I am
If I show you who I am
I will have to kill myself
Because being dead will be the
Only way I can hide once more.
I read this poem now, knowing that Bipolar II Disorder depression intensified all my feelings and distorted my thinking. I am sure I was going through an emotional time and there most likely were triggers, but this suicidal outpouring was also a part of a psychiatric illness that I did not know I had.
I am thankful for being able to write my experience in the most accurate way I could. These words upon paper were a safe way for me to express my anguish. I am forever thankful I did not end my life.
In the States of Mind, “I Must Purify My Heart” speaks of transformation from self to Self:
To break the glass
Of my reflection
Fist would bleed
But not the heart
These eyes do yearn
To see inside themselves
I must purify this heart
I must learn
To love and live
Again
I have learned and I am learning to renew myself in life and in love. Who am I? I am life’s energy flowing through time. And life is inherently creative. Life is resilient. That is the reality I want to live and share.
“Yesterday My Heart Cracked Open” is the final poem in Cracking Up and Back Again: Transformation Through Poetry. This book was self-published in 2007 which is twelve years of living beyond my 1995’s States of Mind. May this poem be a blessing and gift to you.
Yesterday
My heart cracked open
All birds in the sky
Flew within
Yesterday
My heart cracked open
There was thunder
Lightening
Downpour rain
My thirsty earth drank it
Flowers again
Yesterday
My heart cracked open
There was you and I
There was nothing
Different between us
We were just
The same
Yesterday
My heart cracked open
There was I
There was nothing
That was not different
I will never
Be the same
Friend
I pray for you
Your heart to crack
Wide open
Be not afraid
Be free instead
Yesterday
My heart cracked open
All birds in the sky
Flew within
And I like they
Have wings
Diane Kaufman, MD
September 5, 2020
Diane Kaufman, MD is a child & adolescent psychiatrist, artist, poet and ASHA Storyteller.