It’s nature plus nurture, it’s genes expressing themselves within a particular environment, it’s ending up like your parents. We’ve both got something that’s gone wrong with our heads, my mom and I, and have each shuffled through several medications to squash it, whatever it is (something on the bipolar spectrum). In the meantime, something must be done to have a reasonably good time.

My mom taught me to shop.

Shopping takes the down mood and turns it around, initially … a little bit. All our trips to the mall together, to buy me school clothes? A little grim for me, because I always felt guilty over making my mom spend all this money, and I was something of a preppy little shit, and my mom must have broken the budget a few times to keep me in Alexander Julian. But for both of us, a chance to get outside our selves for a while, to stop being so quiet all the time, and to engage in the world. Left to our own devices, we’d be holed up somewhere in the house with our books. (but these were the days before Amazon, so we did have to actually go out to buy books.)

Some of my fondest memories are of going out to eat at any restaurant connected to a mall, with my mom and stepfather, bringing along a book because when you’re 11, your parents are boring when compared with reading The Sword of Shannara series. After dinner, we’d shop a little, wander the lanes of the mall. Bookstores, computer software stores. These were formative times. I was forged in retail. And so I have trouble understanding people who don’t like to shop. Shopping is sanity!

And it just happens to be something I’m impelled to do when I’m hypomanic, which I’m starting to be again, after about a month of lows and exhaustion. I’m waking up early again, usually around 4am. I find myself opening up Amazon just to see what they’ve recommended to me. (Always either something I already have, or something so close to it I don’t know why they think I’d buy the blue one, too.)

I used to get spendy only at the end of a freelance assignment. I thought back then it was leaving the job, and the fun of knowing it had been a job well done, that triggered the money spending. Now, looking back through these manic-depressive glasses, I can see that finishing a stressful assignment and heading off into the land called freelancer’s vacation (unemployment) triggered hypomania. Never knew what it was at the time, and had I been in therapy – and had a good shrink – I would have recognized what my up times and their split decisions were about, and my life might have turned out very very differently. But that’s for another post.

Happy end-of-January.

Wow but am I on a roller coaster these days. I fly into fits of interest in things and then not only abandon them a day or two later, I even forget all about them. I’ll come across a profusion of bookmarks and possibly even books on the subject and think, now did I really get into that? Or, did I really do that? And I’ll haven’t the slightest memory of it all.

Obviously I need to talk to my mental health care professional, but he’s outta town tomorrow. And there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Getting away from work stress over the holidays will soothe everything.

All right, I’m hypomanic. I spent $950 on stocks today before 10am. I bought an SSD drive for my computer that I totally did not need for $400 over the weekend. Thank god it is the start of a new month, and I can set some limits. And thank God that Mint is working again, so I can keep track of myself. Spendy is back! “I can write it off on my business taxes,” I say, knowing nothing about how that works.

I’ve taken about 5 milligrams of clonazepam. Apparently, this being unemployed isn’t working out so far. I hope I can get a little more used to it, because it looks like it’s going to last another 2 months. Knocking my unemployment fund back to 3 months, a uncomfortable level. So I’ll naturally be even more anxious at work, anxious to please because I’m in student debt.

There’s part of my fucked up thinking. Pessimistic.

Must. Fight. Pessimism.

Day One of my unemployment. I’m freelance, working usually 7 weeks to 6 months at a stretch. Then it’s out into the jungle again to look for work. It’s exhausting, and has made me wonder whether I was smart when I chose my profession. Back then I didn’t know this bipolar time bomb lay in wait for me. It came late, which caused me to question its authenticity, but of course there have been enough stacks of examples, reams of examples of my bipolar behavior published in the family scrapbook of everyones’ familial memory. Most of which I’d love to erase.

So — now this blog is being given over not to just one guy’s occasional posts that get a little abstract, annoying and pretentious, but to a periodical on my job hunt and how it toys with my little different mind.

I’m already up to 2 milligrams of klonopin, and it’s only 1:00pm. Margaritaville!

My highly keyed-up, observant but pedantic shrink wants me to get a neuropsychological exam for ADD. I haven’t looked it up yet, can barely type it, don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to read what I know is out there — yet. I’ve read Addy Bell’s post and I feel like that’s all I need to know. It still makes me nervous thinking about it, for no reason I can ascertain.

But then I think it sounds like something out of Asimov, “neuropsychology,” and suddenly I want to do it. Especially if it means learning whether ADD is all just in my head.

I’m starting to fall out of contact with friends in my apathy-that-isn’t. I do care, I just don’t do anything. But on the past two nights I forced myself away from the computer and toward the TV, where I was able to watch a few episodes of a favorite show and actually enjoy myself. So I know it’s not impossible. I just want enjoyable things to stop being such a chore, and unenjoyable nothingness to stop holding my attention and focus hostage.