Some thoughts for this new year. During the novel “Light Fixtures”, Aurora has no sense that she feels differently than most teens her age in NW Louisiana in 1963. She knows that she adores her grandparents, loves fried chicken, sliced tomatoes fresh from the garden and pecan pie. But she doesn’t know she is also feeling the onset of teen bipolar, or as it’s called at the time: teen manic depression.
All right, so she’s zipping around, feeling sure of herself and often frustrated with everyone else’s seemingly slow actions and ideas, but she has no idea that that incessant zipping is teen bipolar mania and she’s the one a bit askew. And that reminds me that sometimes friends and family don’t notice this fast side of a teen, with so much going on in one’s life, as the beginning of the teen mood disorder even today. As the sage Mr. Hematite would say to Aurora, sometimes we are not always who we think we are, for imbalance can seem so benign…and even normal!More on Aurora’s learning coming up.
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