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, [...]
I don’t mean to say that I’m a loser. I mean to say that I feel like one most of the time. Losers are those who give up trying, and I haven’t given up trying yet. It’s on those weeks, though, when I don’t do any writing, that I feel worse about [...]
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 [...]
Not knowing how I’m doing at work right now. Not sure of anything right now, the bipolar having taken from me my ability to know real from imagined. What’s imagined is that I’m doing a horrible job at work, that others are only tolerating my presence. This feeling neatly coincides with my [...]
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 [...]
I use a program for Mac called Journler. I can tag a post “medication” if I’ve blathered in an entry about my meds. This way, I can go back and read what’s up with the pills, when I’ve changed them, and how they’ve made me feel. It’s a funny thing to say “made me [...]
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 [...]
A certain certain level of hell, losing touch with your friends and trying to make new ones. Especially during a downturn (which is most of the time), the chances of falling out of touch with a friend turbine upwards and the friends begin to spin off into the distance. You can still see them out [...]
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 [...]
Am I taking medication simply because everyone else is, because I’m just caught up in a fad, a decades-long fad, or because I really need them? Had I been born in a different time, would I be considered mentally unwell? I think so, yes, but that doesn’t stop me wondering what life would [...]