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.

What made me do that? I imagine people (and by people I mean me) with a less-than-life-destroying case of bipolar have complicated memories of the time before they knew they were bipolar, when it seemed normal to be a little off, when it was your personality, not your diagnosis.

I don’t think it even enters into it whether or not you were miserable during that time. There’s a pre and post-diagnosis life, two lives in one, good or bad, and it’s useful to think about the world on the other side, before the diagnosis, before the veil fell.

But you can’t go home again. I’m thinking about my teen years, before this crazy really got started up, when it was mild. The thing you can do is try to remember: through the years, scrapbook moments when the crazy took hold in a — what other way to put it — more innocent way. When depression was shyness and hypomania was excitement.

Nostalgia settles into me. Remember adolescent dark spells deeper than everyone else’s, sometimes fascinating me with their blacker-than-black mood. Or then the way staying up all night felt like an interesting way to reset the wildly spinning mechanisms in my head, like a watch you quickly wind 12 hours ahead just to set one minute back.

Oh yeah, that’s what made me do that.

Many nights in the past few weeks with less that 4 hours of sleep. I guess …

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

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 greedy: But I could be feeling so much better than this, I reason. Because getting better always involves a gaining of perspective, it invariably follows that, getting better, you look around yourself, see the devastation that the disease has caused, and think, I have to run from this as fast as possible. That’s when you start questioning your medication choices. Are they doing enough? How happy am I supposed to be? What’s my baseline? Am I getting better quickly enough to gain some ground, to gain some momentum to get me over the next hurdle? Because getting better isn’t good enough. What’s well? Greedy thoughts again. It can only be measured by time, how much time you get to feel better. Quality of life questions come into play — is my life so much better than when I was depressed, or am I just fooling myself into feeling better about things? I tend to forget about stressful questions, like how I’m going to do my taxes now that I’ve set myself up as an LLC, and just begin to float, so thankful that I’ve Gotten Better. It’s like a vacation: don’t bother me with the tricky stuff, I’m feeling better and I’m going to hold onto this sensation for as long as possible. Sensation. That’s what it feels like, like a strange sensation, a rare emotion, this smoothness of mood, and I’m so sensitive to it that it only takes a good morning to make me think — hope — that it’s going to be the way I’m going to feel for the rest of my life, or at least for the rest of the day. And I start to wonder, again, is this the best I can possibly be? I make resolutions, plans, for how to maximize my time feeling this way. I’m going to start this and that good habit, I’m going to be like a better person from now on, I’m going to show myself a better time. Better and better. I suppose this is hypomania expressing itself again, or I’ve drunk just the right amount of coffee this morning, who can tell? I just want more. Now I’m thinking that I should be more self-sufficient. Wait — that’s not the word. I’m just thinking that I shouldn’t be mentally challenged, mentally ill, whatever you want to call it. I’m just tired of it, so I’m not going to be that way today. I’m going to be well today, and get some work done and be happy, or at least normal, average, level, sane.

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.