I have been busy reviewing my life history with all the mistakes I have made, major and minor, and what came out of all of this is frighteningly simple - had I trusted the gut feeling, I would not have made many if not all major mistakes. And when I trust the gut instinct, things are just fine.

Let me give you an example. In summer of last year, when I was without insurance and suffered from horrible migraines that I could not properly treat (the medication costs 300 dollars a month without insurance - now, luckily, I get it from the county), I discovered that driving and listening to music while having a migraine attack helped me cope.

So I was doing that and found myself in Santa Cruz mountains near the coast, late in the evening, on Sunday. I was listening to the songs of edith Piaf on a CD and was immersed in thoughts. Somebody flagged the car (nobody around - mountains, a coastal road, away from civilization, a 2+ hr drive to San Francisco). From the corner of my eye, I saw a really obese, tall Black kid. I stopped the car and invited him in. After awhile I realized that normally, women who drive on deserted roads away from civilization on a sunday night do not invite men into their cars for fear of rape, but I thought that he was just a kid. So I asked him a few questions, and his answers confirmed that he was a kid - just very big. His facial expression was so childish... and did not go together with his size. I felt that it was impolite to have him listen to French songs he would be unlikely to understand, but I wanted to continue listening, so I decided that my giving him a ride would be polite enough. I let him use my phone, and when we ultimately reached civilization, I found enough quarters for him to take the BART (= sort of subway that connects suburbs with San Francisco). He told me some story about how he had found himself along on the coast, but, tbh, I was only half-listening to him while still listening to Edith Piaf. But we certainly parted as friends, and he was appreciative.

Next day at work I told one of my colleagues, and she went: "What? You picked up a stranger in Santa Cruz mountains?"

The thing is, I did not pick up a complete stranger - I must have very quickly determined, from the look of his face which I saw for a split second out of the corner of my eyes and while being in pain, that he was a kid. A big kid, but still a kid, and a lost one, and so that is why I picked him up. What would he have done there, alone without a cell phone, had I not picked him up? He might have had to wait a whole hour for the next car, and, if the driver in that car were like my colleague, she would not have picked him up.

I have plenty of stories like that, and no, I do not think that I have special abilities, but somehow things that have very low probability of happening do happen to me. But when I trust my intuition, I never fail. I have reviewed my life history very carefully, and literally cannot find a single example of doing what the gut feeling told me and being wrong. No, it was always because something - most notably, guilt guilt guilt and guilt once again - overrode the gut feeling.

And now I am thinking that the heightened sensitivity and perceptiveness that seem to come with bipolar are the cause of such stellar intuition.

Anybody with me on this?