How do you know what’s working is working in the highest degree possible? You can’t know absolutely that the medication you’re taking for major depression or bipolar disorder is the best for you, and that drives me nuts. Whenever I’m feeling better — right now, for instance — I tend to get [...]
I’ve not been one to divulge much about my identity on this blog, fearful that people who know me and may employ me might find it. But this time I’ll give a little hint about what I’ve been going through. I used to live in Los Angeles, unmedicated and untreated. It got [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]