I spent a very long time on my journal from 2007 to just the other month, June or July. I was a daily, heavy journaler, going on sometimes into 2000 words about any old thing going on in my brain. The long entries were always written when I felt rotten, at the bottom of the tunnel.

Over the years, it got to the point where I said to myself that it’d be fun to look back at this date a year, two, three ago and see what I was up to. Doing this many times, I see an arc from stark raving ignorance of the true cause of all my crazy thoughts (for example, thinking that people on the street knew what I was thinking), to where I am now. My thoughts don’t run amok any more. And I’ve stopped journaling cold turkey. Not because I wanted to stop but because I never think about it. I love journals, I think they keep many many people sane and happier. So why I’ve stopped is a total mystery to me. I start and stop things continually.

I know about this stuff that’s wrong with my brain, but I don’t think I’ll ever know how it works. Maybe if I could live long enough to reach the point in the future when doctors are able to reverse the effects of aging, maybe by then will they have also figured this mess bipolar out?

A certain certain level of hell, losing touch with your friends and trying to make new ones.  Especially during a downturn (which is most of the time), the chances of falling out of touch with a friend turbine upwards and the friends begin to spin off into the distance.  You can still see them out there, and you can still meet up with them now and again, but there’s a breach between you and the rest of the world, a disregulation of your emotions that puts you at odds with everything around you.  And this means friends are seen through a scrim, mistrusted at times, shrunk from while feeling like an insect.  Don’t step on me or my powerful emotions, I’ll just stand over here in this corner of my own room inside my head and stop reaching out.  But I’ll take any reciprocation, any evidence that my friends are ignoring me in kind, as an indication that I’m lower than an insect, that I’m worthless.  This weakness corrodes; it starts  as a symptom of the illness and is capable of withering your spirit.  And there’s no medication for this habit of thought — I am worthless.  Long after the worst of the depression is gone, the thoughts remain the same.  And I have no thoughts on a cure.

Going dark is bad. Going dark is counterproductive. The thoughts that bubble to the surface seem to be all negative all the time, even when I’m up, hypomanic. Eternal damnable pessimism. It gets dull. Always the same responses – in the negative: going dark.

Unlike some other bloggers, I don’t have a 10-point step-by-step for avoiding going dark. I can’t offer advice on this habit; I am in its cage. It’s what we’re best at, bipolars, I believe: accessing the dark side and bringing back into the world a little for others to oggle. I’ve brought much darkness on myself and my family, moments I’ve gone cold in shock over how I’ve acted. How not-myself I can become. And how not-myself I can write and imagine.

Down with 10-point steps for recovery, blog chaff that leaves you mourning the time spent reading them. Who have they ever helped? Perhaps the new-to-bipolar use some of those tips, but for the rest of us, those who’ve lived with BP for at least a year, have already read what’s in those entries in books and on other websites so many times – and have heard the advice from our doctors – these lists are less than helpful.

This doesn’t mean I don’t still read them.