Once again, doing nothing with myself. I think I’m depressed. Not emotionally, but intellectually. I’m apathetic, deeply apathetic. Is it possible to be depressed without the emotional component? For me, it’s all about getting something done – I’m off work this week, and rather than starting a staycation, I’m sitting around, staring at the computer, doing nothing. I should be writing, reading, watching good movies and TV, going out to explore the city, but I’m not. I don’t want to do any of those things, and I nearly don’t care if I don’t. The couch calls out to me for naps. I wake up early, raring to go – but go where, and do what then? Motivation is something the meds do not provide. They’ve got my sadness, loneliness, hopelessness covered very well. Those horrible emotions are squashed. But the get up and go? Nowhere, nothing.

I think real depression, the keep-you-in-bed-weeping kind, when it leaves, leaves you with some bad habits of mind. In my case, it’s a torpor. My previous therapist could only say, “just do it,” not realizing that he was quoting the Nike ads. He almost uttered the phrase, “baby steps.” I could tell he wanted to say it.

I know what the solution is. Take on one small project per day, give myself a gold star for doing it, then move on to the next day, and the next, and before I know it, I’ll be moving and doing. But the initial inertia is so difficult, the habit of mind so ingrained, I don’t care about making the first step.

Perhaps a sunny self-help book? First, I gotta get up the motivation to go to the book store and read the fucking thing…

Looking back a few years, to journal entries from December 2007, I see someone with bipolar who doesn’t know he’s got it and who’s floundering, trying to make sense of the emotional turmoil. I had to make lists like, “Things I’m not doing that I should,” and “Things I should be doing to make things better,” and “Things I have not been doing that previously worked.”

I went through months of irritable mania and despairing depressions searching for the reason why things should feel so terrible all the time, and why I should feel like doing nothing all the time. It ate up all my attention – I journaled for thousands of words on this topic, always looking for the answer to the question, “Why?” Why am I feeling the way I do right now, as opposed to just a few days ago when I felt completely differently? Why do the depressions come on so fast and saddle me with unclear reasoning and paralysis? Why are my responses to normal events heightened in a very negative way? What’s the mechanism for this?

I came up with theory after theory. The investigations came up with unsatisfying answers, like loneliness, bad upbringing, leaving grad school, paired with descriptions of the minute-by-minute of my “spirals,” which was the word I used to name my paranoid depressions. “The spiral has me today and I feel like hell,” or, “I’m not in a spiral and thank god for that.” The spiral. I had no better word for it at the time. But the word’s bipolar, and I’m glad I know it now.

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 into my head, after taking a couple of writing classes at UCLA, that I should be able to make it into Columbia’s MFA program. I applied and got in. I left behind a burgeoning career. I was really on track to make great strides early in life — I was something of a prodigy in a field I don’t feel comfortable divulging right now. Suffice it to say, I was doing well.

But I didn’t see any of that. All I saw was the escape toward a writing life. I didn’t listen to others’ advice, their knitted brows when I described what I was about to do. I didn’t think about the insanity of throwing away my young career for writing school. In fact, it seemed kind of cool — there I was, succeeding, and I wanted more for myself in some other area so there I went, off into the wild blue with nary a plan or an idea of what was going to happen to me. This, to me, is hypomania in its purest form. I simply would not listen to the practical voices in my own head. I took a major chance.

I haven’t found any work writing — haven’t looked for any, in fact. So I’m back to doing what I used to as prodigy at in LA, several years later and several rungs lower on the ladder. I’m no longer that young, and the stuff I’m working on, in a word, sucks. This leaves me little time to write, so it’s the worst of both worlds. Throw in student loans and you’ve got world-class stress building up. Sometimes I wonder whether my diagnosis of Bipolar II has more to do with my situation and less to do with biology. My doctors have always scoffed at the idea that there’s a difference — they’re there to treat both, and consider both reasonable causes for the disorder. Stress-induced madness, I guess you could call it.

Daily, I try to get back into that headspace I had before I left Los Angeles: heady, self-confident beyond all belief, willing to throw caution to the winds. I could use some of that right now. Music and light drug use are the best I seem to be able to do. Oh yeah — and the milligrams.

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 myself. I’ve found something out. The weeks when I wasn’t writing neatly coincide with the time when I was doing badly at my work. Almost as though I needed to write in order to have a good life in the other things that I did. I think that’s a truth I can go on. Should I want to have a healthy relationship to my paying work during the week, I should write during the week as well. That’ll give me the space I need between myself and the rest of the fucking world that I kind of fucking hate right now.

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 high school day.

Now, depressive bipolar has thrown my rhythm off to the point that I need 8, sometimes 9 hours of sleep each night.  And it’s not as if I wake up refreshed from those long slumbers, either: I need multiple cups of coffee to get myself moving in the morning.

These days I’m forcing myself awake at 6:30 am to write.  This means I crash at 10 pm each night — barely enough time to get home from work, eat some dinner and do a couple of things before dropping off in the middle of whatever it is I’m doing.  The doctor says I shouldn’t need this much sleep, that 8-9 hours are excessive.  I’d love to join the rest of America in its 6-hour slumber, but it just won’t work. The big D wins again.

Last year, when I first started taking Abilify for depression, I’d wake up at 4 am ready to go.  Wide awake, full-on like bright headlights.  I didn’t even seem to have bedhead when I woke up in the middle of the dark night; it was as if I hadn’t gone to bed at all, yet I was refreshed and alert.  This mania subsided after about two or three months.  I miss it.  If I could go off Abilify then go back on again and feel that way, I’d do it.  But I know it doesn’t work that way.

The most frustrating thing about my illness is how little I’m able to rely on myself.  I don’t know what my mental state will be from day to day.  Will I be sleepy-headed and cottony today or sharp and anxious?  Those are my poles and the swing rate is about one week.  One week on, one week off.  But day to day variations sneak in to baffle my predictions and my plans for myself.

At least the illness spared me my high school years.