I call him Spendy. This is what I feel like on some of those mornings when I wake up at 4:30 am, wired and hypomanic. The urge to spend is strong, and my mind is wired for acquisition. When I played World of Warcraft years ago, I’d spend most of my time in the auction houses, browsing the market on Swords of the Monkey, or whatever, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t buying anything real, it took care of the urges. Now that I’m not playing WoW, I have to watch myself more carefully.

And Spendy is art from this article.

Going months at my current job, still fairly new even though I’m freelance, and several months as a freelancer can be like forever — but I feel new to it still. All the more today, because I came to an understanding about office life that I’d never had before.

I normally work in an editing room with a producer or director, but now I’m in an open plan office, using headphones. Isolated and exposed at the same time, it really fucks with my paranoia. But that’s under control, for most of the day.

God, I drink a lot of coffee.

Anyway, I realized that people in the office don’t like to talk to each other about what needs doing. I asked someone for a DVD of a show I’d worked on, and he looked at me like I was a massive burden. Then, at least he took the moment to explain something to me. “Email me,” he said. “That way it’ll be on my list.” Ok, got it.

In the realm of the possible, this isn’t much. But it’s something. After my breakdown a few years ago, I didn’t think work was possible. I would watch people heading off to work and didn’t know the first fucking thing about how to join their ranks ever again. My shrink at the time was not a help, which is practically criminal negligence. Eventually, I stumbled across a job through a crappy little website, and worked my way away from that crappy little company into something better. And it was only today that I realized people would much much rather you don’t ask them for anything face-to-face.

I can’t believe I spent so much time maintaining my computer a few years ago, when I owned a Windows XP box. I got pretty good at it. And I wasn’t medicated for bipolar at the time. Anything I got done before medication I consider now to be something of a feat. Even today, with most of my bipolar symptoms managed, I will still occasionally marvel at how I’m able to pull anything off, do anything.

And here’s the problem (because there just had to be a problem coming!). I’m not doing anything. People ask me what I’m doing this weekend, and I make shit up. Yep, I just lie about my weekend. And then if they ask me, “Hey, how was _______?” I will lie again, saying I wasn’t able to do ________ for one reason or another.

Not that I don’t want to do anything. Not that I’m not interested – I’m so interested that I’ve got several pages’ worth of Amazon Wish List books arranged in the reverse order of my promising myself that I would read them. I keep up with books, though I can barely get through a book review. It’s mostly blogs. Same with my DVR: stuffed with cool interesting TV, but I don’t watch it. I appreciate the fun I’d have, but I don’t act on it.

Now what the hell is this? I don’t remember reading anything in any of my psychology books and time online about feeling fine but not being able to do anything. My depression’s in remission, I’m even a little hypomanic, but all I do is plan, not do.