Letter to a Bipolar II Friend.

Dearest friend, dearest Henning Alexander,

You said I woke up your poetic side but what if your poetic side has been there all along? We have to use our gifts and be proud of them.

The greatest gift one human being can give another is the gift of hope. Seldom we know what gives hope to others when their suffering is not visible, when they are perhaps afraid and lost in the wrong place looking for hope. To my understanding, you being lost only led you to find a friend in me. This friend of yours knows some things about feeling lost, about feeling a foreigner in the land of human beings that don’t act and think like one does. I know about pain and loneliness when you are in fact surrounded by smiles. This friend of yours has fallen all her life but has stood up over and over again, my sufferings are not similar to yours, but as you, I have lost the compass of my sane direction by circumstances more accepted than your diagnosis. Regardless, the inner feelings are not controllable at first, and in the healing process, one gets better with the pass of time, and the hope that others bring to us. 

Sometimes prayers take years to be heard by God, his timing is never our timing, trying to understand his way is as you and I know impossible. To surrender to this fact is one of the most difficult things in the world. The why’s, the questions about our misfortunes always come first than accepting something that is already part of our life, our history. Acceptance, what a difficult word, but we know that there are things that inevitable will happen and that nothing can change those trials life puts us through. The unfairness of it all will reach the shores of everyone in our lifetime.

So what then? There is much more than suffering when it comes to healing our souls of the pain, even if the body will never be the same. Your soul Henning Alexander is a fountain of health, hope, love, kindness, prosperity, peace, happiness, smiles and all the wonderful feelings in the world. How do we reach into our souls when our brain, heart and body betray us, others don’t understand us and when we feel we lost the battles?  We reach out, because we humans are instruments of God to help others who need help to cross the bridges of their life, we are angels sometimes in practice.

Sometimes we give hope and carry our fellow travelers, sometimes you will be held, sometimes you will hold another. Both actions are necessary to connect with our soul, both actions are necessary to feel hope, to feel God or the Universal meaning of life. Keep your hands open, and reach out, there is hope in being Henning Alexander with, despite and even in favor of being bipolar II.  You need to reach a place where you can have acceptance from you and from others, those who will accept you as Henning regardless of the rest; but don’t fool yourself, you need to do the effort to reach a place that when you are with others it is easy for them as well to accept you. Be strong, be brave, be kind, be you color man. May you find many hopeful moments and words to write more pages further in your life, may you find in your sickness a greater meaning to share hope with others, may you find God or meaning in each step of the way, and find friends that will understand and walk with you, next to you, far or near. May hope comes in words, reach out and they will be there.

With love.

Paula Robles Nettel

February 2010

PS Take your medicines. 

(Far away, I'm still walking with you. Sørlyset)