I love this song. I’ve posted before about the link I feel between homosexuality and bipolar disorder and I just feel like this song encapsulates the struggle of being an outsider and the desire to find meaningful connections.
A bipolar Mormon with fibromyalgia. I'm a special flower in a cruel, cruel world.
I love this song. I’ve posted before about the link I feel between homosexuality and bipolar disorder and I just feel like this song encapsulates the struggle of being an outsider and the desire to find meaningful connections.
Yesterday, after I posted about slicing and dicing, the children's song, “I Love to See the Temple,” got lodged in my head.
Here’s a link for it if you’re not already familiar: I Love to See the Temple
There’s a lot of talk in my church about bodies being temples. It’s not a weird Mormon idea, because I googled and saw all kinds of other Christian links to the scripture in Corinthians (which I believe I’m supposed to have memorized). Strangely, associating cutting with the idea of my body as a temple wasn’t particularly upsetting (i.e. I should feel guilt for defiling my “temple”).
Instead of feeling guilty, I started thinking about what it’s like to be in the temple and participate in its ordinances, and how relieved I am to be endowed and to know more about God’s plan for us.
I know I’m messed up, and sometimes it makes me feel unworthy to enter the temple, but at the same time, I know that God loves me, even when I do stupid and harmful things.
Anyway, I didn’t want to get too far into the saccharine, but having the thoughts of cutting replaced by a song about the temple was an instant blessing and a good reminder of God’s daily role in our lives.
Unless they are for food, you cannot show them to me. Immediately my brain goes to thoughts of cutting. It’s irrational; it’s absurd; it’s OCD and bipolar of me.
It’s not necessarily that I WANT to cut, it’s that the IDEA of cutting is lodged in my head the rest of the day. I can’t stop thinking about how it feels and what it looks like. And my gut gets all twisted and I want to cry, but I STILL can’t stop thinking about it.
It helps that I have a four-inch scar on my thigh. I can tame things a little by thinking about how awful the night was when cutting finally sent me to the ER. I never want to feel the way I did on that exam table, with my sister crying in one of those stupid chairs and the doctor trying to help me by telling me it’s a first-world problem. I just lay there feeling broken and wrong; I don’t want to feel that way again.
The thoughts still come, but I can CBT them a little by thinking about my thigh.