the new arts and sciences magazine came today; i was surprised, and slightly self-conscious, to find a double-length feature on mental illnesses on grounds and student initiatives to spread awareness about depression. looking back, it is clearer than ever that the betrayals, grief, self-enforced muteness, guilt, repressed anger, unknowingness and heartsickness in my final two years at virginia had sent me down this road. i wonder, as i read, if perhaps the university-wide initiatives would not have helped me if it had happened during my time, but then again at that time i could not give tongue to my troubles, would not as long as i was still there, for more was at stake than myself. but then it is possible too that this would have happened anyway. when i was discussing this with people recently d. said he always thought i was bipolar. i suppose it's because while most people recognise depressive episodes in me - especially those who have come up with me through my school years, and to whom i turn when i'm unhappy - he has experienced most of my hypomanic phases. but it was only until the many destructive events of my final years at virginia that they became foregrounded, enough to be actually debilitating. "eat this and you eat the light it gives, a lantern in the gut of man to read himself thereby."