How you take it in the ribs, in the ribcage, day in, day out. How the darkness engulfs you like a heavy rubber suit, squeezing the life out. How when it’s 80 degrees out and people are ecstatic, you’re lifeless. How when you think you’re peering over the wall at the world, you get vertigo. How far you’ve gone. How you talk to yourself about yourself, how you self-regard, and how that’s working out for you. How you stare at your arm and sometimes both arms, legs, feet, your reflection, the whole of your face, and how it looks so much like a stranger.

I’m doing Pilates about two days per week and that’s it. Nothing cardiovascular, nothing aerobic. I walk 15-20 minutes per day. I’m about 10-20 pounds overweight, some might say a bit more than that. I don’t weigh what men in the 1940′s weighed at my height, that’s for certain. Someone my height might have weighed in the 150′s and I’m in the 170′s.

All this is to say that I’ve been on both sides of the debate, does exercise help bipolar depression? Three years ago, I lost 40 pounds quickly through biking and severe dieting. I lost an average of 2 pounds every week by pedaling and eating steamed broccoli in huge portions with a side of chicken breast, no oils. During this time, my depression remained constant. I did get relief, though it was only for an hour or two after the exercise – the afterglow.

Now that I’m not exercising, my depression has gotten worse. It has gotten worse the longer I’ve been away from the time when I was in shape. At that time, I thought it wasn’t helping, but it was: there, in the background, saving me from a worsening depression, keeping me afloat and stable. I never imagined that stopping exercising would drop the floor out from under me.

Exercise doesn’t cure one of depression and I don’t think it even makes one feel better for any appreciable length of time. What it does do is prevent you from getting even more depressed as time goes on. It’s a dark thought that most of us don’t want to face, but the evidence is out there, should you want to check into it: depression worsens with age. Exercise may be the only thing besides than meds that can stop this acceleration.

When a friend asks to do my star chart, I oblidge then promptly forget what the results say. I find all horoscopes of the newspaper variety nearly useless, except for the excellent Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology, which always prompts me to think a little about where I am and where I want to go. I never read it to actually find out what my future holds.

But there is one source I return to day after day for inspiration – Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

Originally published as a deck of cards in 1975, the ruminative epigrams have undergone 5 new editions and are now available on the web and as an iPhone application.

From the official (?) website:

The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt (a British painter whose works grace the cover of “Evening Star” and whose watercolours decorated the back LP cover of Eno’s “Before and After Science” and also appeared as full-size prints in a small number of the original releases) tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure – either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you’re running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking – to jog the mind.

Brian Eno had this to say by way of explanation:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

I use the iPhone app as a kind of reverse horoscope. Each morning I fire up the app and let it randomly pick a card. Today’s, for example, says, “Disciplined self-indulgence.” So today I will attempt to understand what exactly that can mean and then use it in my writing and coping with the day.

Acting like a man means not being so irritable with my wife. Saturday, Independence Day, I reacted so strongly against her telling me that the dishes needed doing that I started a fight. It was to be our day of getting out and seeing Brooklyn, shopping for a neighborhood. And although we did get out, the trip was hugely compromised by the bad mood cloud I created that hung over the day. I’m so bad on weekends, so unsure of myself on weekend mornings when I don’t have any structure.

And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Structure. Creating and maintaining. I can create, but maintaining has been a bit of a problem, especially on the days when in the past I’d have no structure – in other words, on the weekend days when I used to be able to tolerate a complete lack of structure and kind of glaze my eyes over and loaf through the day. Now I need a work schedule for the weekend days. Also, the presence of my wife makes me feel shiftless and worthless. I’ve been out of a job for about 4 weeks now, and although I’ll be starting a new one in about two weeks, I still feel like a layabout heel. My structure during the week isn’t as hard to define: wake up around 5:30 a.m., write until around 7, get ready with my wife to go to work, walk her to the subway station, then come home and surf the internet without direction for about two hours. Then, a mega nap, then take care of some daily life paperwork and then video games. What a day, what progress. Then, the weekend comes around and I’m forced to see for myself how little I’ve accomplished, how little fulfillment of my goals is going on, and I cave. I collapse.

Facebook is a tough one, too. Those pages designed to inspire a kind of envy in others. Those boastful updates and home pages where people present a kind of all-partying all-joy version of themselves. Whenever a person has any kind of success, up it goes onto Facebook. I watch the world pass me by on those pages, my friends’, my acquaintances’ successes slowly grinding me down and making me pity myself. It all comes back to self-actualization and how hard mental illness makes that.

This is what I’ve been thinking about. Maslow’s heirarchy of self-actualization. Quoting from Wikipedia (always a good idea):

Maslow explicitly defines self-actualization to be “the desire for self-fulfillment, namely the tendency for him [the individual] to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”

Let’s see… Physiologial needs.. do they include the need for pure sanity, a mind working without compromises? And what about Esteem? Where does bipolar leave you there? There seem to be so many impediments to climbing this pyramid thrown up by mental illness.

I begin to think in these terms when I’m in the middle of an uptick, the beginnings of a hypomania. You could say it started on Saturday with the irritability. Today, I bought a pair of sunglasses I can’t afford. But I’m not entirely without reason: I made sure there was a solid return policy at the store, should I come to realize that they were an impulse buy and totally not for me.

That’s the search for the Physiological — impulse buying. Looking for Physiological and Safety needs in purchasing things. Trying to make up for the large hole in my life that bipolar has blown, like a shotgun, I buy things sometimes that I do not need in a kind of attempt at the pyramid. And the Facebook rant? That’s me seeing other people seemingly self-actualizing, boasting about their Safety, Esteem, Belonging. Hell, those traits are there in the very act of posting about ones self, advertising one’s own life. This must be the reason I never post on Facebook and sometimes break down into tears when I read the updates of others – I just don’t have the mastery of the triangle down. I’m trying to be a man, trying to climb that slope the best I can.

An interesting thought from McManamy:

All our current psychiatric meds are the result of serendipitous discovery, based on old technologies. They get some of the people somewhat better some of the time, and we have no idea why. The drug industry made vast sums of money essentially putting old pills in new bottles. That era is just about over.

The new era would involve finding the precise illness pathways that cause specific mental illness symptoms and figuring out which gene variations are involved. Forget about a treatment for all of depression. Rather, it might be more productive to uncover the underlying mechanisms to, say, lack of motivation. Maybe only a small percentage of depressions involve lack of motivation. But maybe such a drug would get a lot of these people a lot better a lot of the time.

I wonder whether this dovetails with brain enhancement drugs such as Progivil and Adderall, because those two drugs certainly treat “lack of motivation,” although not sustainably. In any case, an intriguing idea about the future of medication. I suspect, however, that we’ll remain in the Dark Ages of “serendipitous discovery” for a little while longer…