a curse of sorts?

*i am quite pre-occupied with school deadlines, having three in a span of just as many weeks. i have almost reached the end of deadline purgatory ... then i shall return to participating more fully in the blogosphere. missing you all, if you still bother to visit this site ... know i'm thinking of y'all ... here's something i wrote in may and never published ...*

a family curse, perhaps? perhaps. mental illness, thy name spells mystery ... and cursed, searing pain. not the simple, physical kind. oh, no ... i speak of the more elusive, the insidious, mental, spiritual, emotional sort of pain -- anguish. desperate anguish. the type of interior sensation that will eat you alive ... the type over which a vulnerable, frail psyche has no control.

a maternal uncle had a labotomy in the 1940s. that's what the course of treatment consisted of, for the ills of emotions and the psyche, in those days. just cut out a piece of their brains - they don't need that part anyhow. of course, i don't have to tell you that it only exacerbated the problem.

my maternal grandmother had the curse, too. i recall her energy as feeling quite morose, quite 'heavy' of spirit. i do not recall ever seeing her smile. a soul in torment, i believe. mother speaks of grandmother simply having these times when she 'took to the bed,' leaving grandfather to tend to the household and the five kids. recall, this is @ in the late 1920s, the 30s, 40s and 50s. not typically an era in which men did anything domestic.

in fact ... all of her children have the curse ... the darkness ... the beast that feeds on souls. lifestyle - a cummulative manifestion of choices and attitude taken through out the course of one's life - appears to influence the severity of the beast's affect upon daily living. in my humble opinion ... i'm sure those of whom i speak would vehemently disagree. of course ... of course they would.

my mother. waged life-long struggles with the beast. some she won. many she lost. and her children ... all touched by this darkness. in some manner of speaking. and ... history repeats itself. lifestyle remains strongly related to the beast's strength and his influence on daily living. how does this pattern get disrupted? can we disrupt it? i wrote in an email to a dear friend recently that i believe mental illness/imbalance has a spiritual original, in addition to a physiologic origin. if we change our spiritual behaviour patterns, can we shrink the beast?

EDIT:
can the spirit provoke changes in physiology? do some of us require chemical assistance, to tame the beast? or, to tame those external visions - (i.e. = pathological awareness/channeling of external energies)? i summarize my eccentric Self by writing, 'i know things and i don't know how i know them.' this knowledge frightens me sometimes ... sometimes thrusts me in deep black pools of despair ... sometimes compels me to drown my spirit in comfortable numbness. and still, as a stoner the sense remained. though the visions had less clarity and intensity.