Feature image by Pixabay
HOF — It’s been thirty-four days since I stopped taking medication.
The first three weeks of October were an abyss—days of heavy silence, a depression so deep it seemed to absorb light. Then, around October 21, something shifted. I began to swing between two poles: one day happy and open to everything around me—people, nature, even strangers on the street—and the next, emptied out again.
In the midst of this turbulence, I read Karen’s How to Suffer Gracefully (link below), which helped me see pain not as punishment but as part of a design—a feedback loop through which the laws of the universe test and teach us.
Sometimes I think bipolarity isn’t a malfunction at all but a kind of internal mechanism, a pressure system that compresses experience until it can be understood. When I’m low, everything collapses inward; I absorb the noise and contradictions of the world. When the cycle releases, meaning emerges—not because I search for it, but because compression makes it visible.
It’s as if the mind, like a star, must contract before it can shine again.
This autumn I began to see beauty in decay. The red and gold of the leaves felt like a collective exhale—the earth shedding its skin to begin again. I realized that I, too, had been through the same process: grieving my former selves, burying them gently, preparing for renewal. After years of psychological pressure, I felt almost clean again—not untouched, but clarified.
Damascus, my city, mirrors that cycle. It is the world’s oldest living capital, yet it has been destroyed and rebuilt so often that it has become a geography of resurrection. It belongs to both East and West, though each often rejects it. It carries empires in its dust, religions in its stones, contradictions in its heart.
Perhaps I am no different.
I grew up in Arab-nationalist, later Islamist Syria, studied English and American literature, and crossed into Europe seeking truth in another language. I live between worlds, never fully claimed by any. Maybe that is what it means to be Damascene.
I used to see this as conflict; now I see it as dialogue.
When I began taking Venlafaxine in August, only for ten days, I felt myself falling through a black hole. Everything—marriage, citizenship, degrees, work, even my name—collapsed into singularity. But somewhere inside that darkness, pressure became light. I was pushed outward, through what felt like a white hole, and emerged weightless, detached from all human-made bindings, connected only by gravity—the invisible pull between people and nature.
We orbit each other not by contract but by resonance.
I felt like a planet learning its path, searching for a constellation.
Until recently, I believed the universe was a mad, restless thing—always expanding, always falling apart—while humans tried to hold small pieces of it together. I thought we feared change because we feared failure, until change inevitably came and left us no choice.
But I see it differently now.
The universe was once dense, compressed—perhaps inside a black hole—before it cracked open, hurling everything into free motion so it could discover itself. Galaxies formed, collided, gave birth to moons and planets. Chaos gave way to rhythm, and from that rhythm, life emerged.
People on Earth repeat that process in miniature—generation after generation—reenacting the universe’s journey from compression to creation.
This is the physics civilization has always followed. Villages, cities, and nations begin as small relational networks—nomads gathering under one sky. Over time they grow dense, draw in more mass, until gravity turns destructive. Like stars, they implode under their own perfection. But from the collapse, fragments scatter, carrying condensed knowledge outward, seeding new beginnings.
That is how humanity breathes: compression and release, black hole and white hole.
Damascus, a city that refuses to die, has performed that dance for thousands of years. Each collapse compresses its memory; each rebirth releases new possibility. My own “bipolar” cycles echo the same pattern. When I fall, I gather; when I rise, I scatter. The city’s heartbeat and my own have always been synchronized.
What I’ve learned is simple: when society begins to fracture, the sensitive are the first to feel it. They’re not the problem; they’re the early-warning system. People with fragile minds often register the cracks before anyone else. They break first so that others might notice what’s collapsing.
And when they return, they carry back a kind of knowledge — the universe’s quiet signal that a system has reached its limit, that it’s time for everyone to move, to find new constellations and orbits.
Pressure and release, suffering and renewal — they are not opposites, but stages of the same cosmic pulse that keeps the world alive.
Relevant links
How to Suffer Gracefully
Forged by Fire
Roumani Line 