Planning gets hammered by bipolar. Where there used to be an overabundance of resolutions and schemes often there’s suddenly nothing. An emptiness that feels like depression even when you’re out of it, the depression, and renders your life aimless. You see the aimlessness and you panic. This is the danger of coming out of a depression: seeing things for how they have ended up. They say that depressives see the world more clearly, but I can’t think of a time when the world’s more sharp that when I’ve just come out of a depression. Depression is illusion, all the time illusion, and reacting to that for months and months builds up bad habits, like never planning, never making a plan.

The lifting of spirits coming at the end of a long summer, when Fall is all around, is always a surprise. It comes, it comes on like a gust of light wind with a bite in it. Rusted iron in New York City, some of these early fall smells, the rain that isn’t really a rain, the cradling darkness of early evening. My moods always lift during this time. And they’ve absolutely lifted higher than I hoped for. I’m not just feeling good, I’m feeling better. Better as in, a better person than I used to be, having come out of a nervous breakdown and learned something about myself. I’m thinking that you only really learn about yourself until after you’ve gone through something intense, and my intense experience was going dark.

Now I’m back but not completely. I’ve got a lot of the habits I had back then (not so long ago – one, two months) that are adapted to life in a depression. You see, all my muscle memory is wrapped up in depression. I’m keyed into it, it’s the way I work now. That has to be stripped away in the same way the depression itself needed to be swept away. It’s in the way.

I don’t know how to unlearn habits. I stopped smoking, but that was a more physical battle, not like this one in front of me at all. This one is about learning a new way of thinking.