Blog: A Big Deal? by Jessie Close

The air is filled with smoke from our summer fires.  Sixty fires are burning in the west!  I just drove to town for groceries and couldn’t believe how thick the smoke is.  The mountains were all but obscured, the smoke lay among the trees by the river.  Now the wind is blowing; not a good omen for these fires.  My TV is on in the background as it’s been promised we would get an overview of these fires.  The commentator doesn’t seem to think these fires are too important as he just started covering the election.  Now there’s a fire with a lot of smoke!

This brings me to wondering what’s a big deal and what’s not.  You may have heard that Representative Jesse Jackson has been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder.  His colleague, retired Representative Patrick Kennedy, also suffers from bipolar disorder.  It’s been written that the two are getting together on the 16th.  This is a big deal.  Patrick Kennedy is already a force behind the national movement to eradicate stigma and find better medications for those of us who suffer from bipolar disorder.  Perhaps the two of them, Kennedy and Jackson, can push hard on the common misconceptions and prejudice that plague mental disorders.  Perhaps they will be able to help eradicate the secretiveness that surrounds mental disorders in the work place.

Now, so far, three things stand out as big deals:  fires, smoke and bipolar disorder in the news.  I know one big deal:  if you must go to a hospital, be able to pay your bills.  So much of the good that happened to me when I was hospitalized for bipolar disorder evaporated when I got home.  I had a stack of bills probably eight inches tall.  Many were overdue, many had rude comments attached.  Stress and anxiety hit me like a brick.  I cried, I screamed but nothing made those damned bills go away except for me sitting down and tackling each one.  I was introduced to the fact that many creditors thought I was lying when I told them I’d been in a psychiatric hospital.  They didn’t care even when they did believe me.  It would be great if we could all afford to have bills taken automatically out of our accounts but that’s risky when you juggle your income the way I do.  My advice to anyone who needs to go into a hospital of any kind is appoint someone in your life to pay your bills!  You might need to put their name on your account but do it before you leave.  Creditors don’t care what’s wrong – it’s their job to make you miserable until you pay up.

I’ll conclude by quoting my eldest sister, Tina.  I asked her what she considered a big deal and she wrote me the following:

“What’s a big deal to one person isn’t to another.  It’s a matter of perspective and, since everyone is in their own little world, if it bugs you badly or interferes with your life, it’s a big deal!”

Tina is a bird person.  She has the most amazing collection of feathers you’ve ever seen.  She writes:

“I have hundreds and hundreds of birds coming to my feeders and now they’re molting.  It bugs me not to pick up the feathers because there are so many of them and they make my lawn look like there’s been a feather-pillow fight!  Other people would leave them and mow over them.  So, that is my current big deal.  I have to pick up the feathers!”

So, Tina is right.  What to some is a big deal isn’t to others.  I think a good mental exercise is to sit quietly and think about what’s a big deal to you, or not, what you want to accomplish soon, or not.

We’re expecting a thunderstorm tonight.  I certainly hope the weather man has that right!  We need rain as do so many states right now.  And yes, that’s a big deal!