There’s an intermediate stage, a step before the first step that gets wiped away by depression. The trying to try. The memory that things can get better and had better be done by a certain point in time. Time flies while you’re depressed. I’m talking about the long-range look at time, the month-by-month passage, not the minute-by-minute, which can be, of course, an eternity. So, an eternity in a day, but months that fly by. You’re expecting the world to stop along with you. Then, when you get better, God willing, you poke your head up and look around and see that time has passed you by and that the world has not stopped but rather it has sped up, as the world always does.

Never stop trying to try, trying to take that first step toward keeping up with time’s arrow as it flies through space unendingly.

My medication is preventing crying jags.  The move from our old neighborhood to our new one is preventing them, too.  Normally, (normally meaning unmedicated and living back in the old hood — which was the norm for three years) I would be crying or going into irritable flights of hypomania, obsessing over something I or my wife did.  My god, the last one, when I was obsessed over her  getting online to read blogs in her career path, was a bit over the top.  I’m so much better off now than I was back then, and yet… and yet I can’t get much pleasure out of this knowledge because I want so much more for myself.

Here’s my point for going back over this stuff again and again.  I was sick for a long time, and now I’m a lot better.  But I’ve been better for only a short period of time and I need to remind myself of this fact daily.

It’s so easy to see yourself defined by your illness.  And it’s so hard to keep track of the progress.  When I get a little bit better, I expect my whole life, the whole world, to open up and the clouds to part and I expect myself to be fully functioning again.  Forgetting, as I always do, that recovery takes a long time.  If I was sick for going on 10 years (and I think that’s the minimum), then how can I expect the past three months to bring me back entirely from the dead?  And yet there are things I miss from those days when I was sick — those productive times when my mood and the hypomania aligned perfectly to make me both happy and energetic at the same time.   More often than not, though, they wouldn’t align nicely, wouldn’t play well with one another, and I’d end up with a nasty case of agitated depression, irritability and incredible impatience.  I’m still capable of being incredibly impatient, and I’m irritated with myself most of the time.  So the habits of mind persist.

Remember when sleep was normal?  High school, maybe, when going to bed at midnight or later and waking up at 6:30 was OK?  Sure, you wanted more sleep.  You slept like a goddam rock on the weekends, didn’t emerge from your bedroom until noon.  But during the week those 6 hours got you through a high school day.

Now, depressive bipolar has thrown my rhythm off to the point that I need 8, sometimes 9 hours of sleep each night.  And it’s not as if I wake up refreshed from those long slumbers, either: I need multiple cups of coffee to get myself moving in the morning.

These days I’m forcing myself awake at 6:30 am to write.  This means I crash at 10 pm each night — barely enough time to get home from work, eat some dinner and do a couple of things before dropping off in the middle of whatever it is I’m doing.  The doctor says I shouldn’t need this much sleep, that 8-9 hours are excessive.  I’d love to join the rest of America in its 6-hour slumber, but it just won’t work. The big D wins again.

Last year, when I first started taking Abilify for depression, I’d wake up at 4 am ready to go.  Wide awake, full-on like bright headlights.  I didn’t even seem to have bedhead when I woke up in the middle of the dark night; it was as if I hadn’t gone to bed at all, yet I was refreshed and alert.  This mania subsided after about two or three months.  I miss it.  If I could go off Abilify then go back on again and feel that way, I’d do it.  But I know it doesn’t work that way.

The most frustrating thing about my illness is how little I’m able to rely on myself.  I don’t know what my mental state will be from day to day.  Will I be sleepy-headed and cottony today or sharp and anxious?  Those are my poles and the swing rate is about one week.  One week on, one week off.  But day to day variations sneak in to baffle my predictions and my plans for myself.

At least the illness spared me my high school years.

It’s been one week since I lowered my Abilify (its chemical structure is the mascot of this blog) to 15 mg from 20 mg at the urging of my psychiatrist.  He feels that 20 mg is too large a dose.  So I took him at his word, figured why not?  Lower it, and see what happens.  What happens is a collapse, a deflation of mood the likes of which I haven’t seen in about a half-year.  Were those 5 mg so important?  I had a terrible week: would the week have been less terrible had I been taking those 5 extra milligrams?  That’s something I can’t answer.  I’ll have to go another week at least, monitoring my moods (how boring!) until I can get an answer.  Time will tell, and other cliches.  Going down on meds isn’t half as fun as going up on them.  The hope, the glimmer, that this time the meds are really going to make everything better, when you’re upping the dose, is intoxicating.  The waiting for them to “kick in.”  The excitement as the side effects begin — “something must be working!”  No, going down isn’t much fun at all.  There’s no hopeful side of things.  I’m not trying to reduce some current side effects, just the long-terms ones that the psychiatrist suggested, darkly, may be lurking in my future.  Didn’t even want to ask what those were.  I should have asked, and will ask next time.  No, going down holds no promise.  Can you tell I’m a pharma addict?  My mother just started Abilify and I haven’t heard her voice over the phone sound so clear, so full of life, in years.  We share 50% of our genes, after all.  There’s something in that stuff that works magic on our lives.

What other people have, how frequently I think about this —  the plain vanilla moods, the smooth socializing, the senses of humor.  Everything that bipolar depression takes away from you.  A two-day dip in mood — does that qualify as something bipolar, or is that just life staring back at you, challenging you?  The bad habits continue, the self-degredation, the self-hatred, the envy of other peoples’ lives.  But not their lives, exactly, just their emotional centeredness.   Going out with them, other people, and I fall into a private despair, wishing I were more like them.  And every moment spent envying someone is a moment not being yourself, betraying who you are, replacing yourself with a kind of demon.

So, a resolution: don’t covet what other people have, because doing so only makes the pain worse.