4:30 am, buds, and you know what that means. Electric fire on the brain. Not just awake but really really awake – but not aware that this is very out of whack. I think I’ll make it all day on less than 5 hours of sleep, every time. I guess not this time. I almost bought some clothes online that I can’t afford atm.

I do the most insane things. I drink coffee almost every time, without sanity. Sometimes somehow pot gets involved, without sanity. Things are bought, etc.

So I’m beginning to have almost daily cycles – up and ecstatic in the early morning, fucked by anxiety and paranoia the rest of the day. The real kind, not the loopy pot kind. There’s a major difference. The real kind has always been here before.

And the shrink says, Why do you think you call it the “real” kind, making those quotation marks with his voice and eyebrows rising.

So I’m learning After Effects instead of sleeping or spending. Seems a relatively manicky thing to do, but safe. Nobody gets hurt except for design and aesthetics – I mess them up pretty regularly.

It’s the other kind – not the one where you can’t fall asleep, but the deal where you wake too early. I started out slowly: wake up just before the alarm, day after day, then a half-hour, then an hour before the alarm. Then I just stopped with alarms altogether. And all my life I’ve been an alarm guy, you could say. A guy who needed prodding to wake up no matter what time of morning. I’d sleep in by three hours, if I could.

The massive rift cut through my life by bipolar disease has separated from that time. Time is something I have plenty of now that I’ve gone earlier and earlier to the point at which my insomnia becomes something transcendent. I’m now waking up at 2am regularly, completely awake, totally all there. I crash in the mid-morning hours of 8-10. I’m going to bed around 10:30 and face-planting, falling immediately to sleep. And then I essentially take a nap. Wake up 4 hours before dawn.

This is why my insomnia is such an ass-kicker, ninja, street fighter. I’m timing the meds to reduce it, but I always have breakthroughs. I can break through clonazepam. When take it and still break through I’m a ghostly mess, drugged out of my mind by the clonazepam and sleeplessness combined with hypomania. I’ll leave the burner on after making tea. I’ll eat way too much. One time I sleepwalked out of the apartment, and woke up to the ding of the elevator.

I don’t know how to end this post, probably because it’s 5:30 and I’m beginning to feel the first effects of the coming crash. Sunrises can either be inspiring or deadly to your outlook. There’s one coming. Let’s hope it’s the former.

@milligramsblog

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I’ve had long stretches of inactivity, writing this blog. This may make me like many who start blogs: tapering-off writers. Titrating down on the word count until there’s nothing there, a flat silence. I start to forget about the blog altogether. Then a comment will come in and I’ll feel like writing again. So thank you, you who commented — you got me back on track.

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.