Sunday, June 28, 2020

A Mysterious Magical Quality

Song 518: This week the playlist recognizes Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by The Police, written by Sting, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. A few months before this tune hit the airwaves near the end of 1981, I had moved over from a place in Oakland, CA, into a friend's house in Berkeley. During that stretch, I had a romantic obsession with another Berkeley resident, which had begun two years earlier and would continue for about another year, so the lyrics of this hit sounded like an appropriate expression of my own personal emotions at the time. My buddy and new housemate had had his own short-lived affair with the woman who had lit my flame, and when I told him about my feelings for her, he advised me to disregard them, but I did not follow his advice. Back then, I felt like Every little thing she did was magic, Everything she did just turned me on, and my love for her would go on, even though I couldn't exactly identify the mysterious quality that made her so special. Well, about seven years ago, I finally pinpointed the match that lit her charisma (and plenty of others), and when I release the second edition of my book shortly, its subtitle will have an added third term. In the first edition of Expecting the Broken Brain to Do Mental Pushups, I focused on the psychiatric conditions of schizophrenia and depression, but in the updated volume, I also outline a third one which I now see much more clearly - bipolar disorder.

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