The shiny new gadgets — they’re always referred to as shiny — seduce in times of boredom. Not to say that all who love gadgetry are bored or boring people, but, like sports, electronics fill in life’s smaller gaps. Shopping for them as entertainment. I go to the tech section of the newspaper first, after the front page, because its news is so neutral. I always want something, a newer version of what I already have that works just fine. The blogs don’t help matters, and I say “help” because it’s an addiction like any other, concerning myself with tech well out of my needs. A harmless addiction, except when I’m hypomanic, as I’m trending now, and I spend hours on the internet, shopping for gadgets, reading reviews. They’re so full of promises of a more productive, smoother life. They promise an end to boredom, and boredom is the first sign that I’m getting hypomanic. That, and writing too much in my journal. Is 1200 words per day too much? I think so. So I look at the new Mac mouse, and buy it in my imagination over and over again. Juicy rationalizations bounce around my head like electrons circling the nucleus of my rational brain, clouding it, fuzzying the picture of reality. I want, I need.

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 my wife did.  My god, the last one, when I was obsessed over her  getting online to read blogs in her career path, was a bit over the top.  I’m so much better off now than I was back then, and yet… and yet I can’t get much pleasure out of this knowledge because I want so much more for myself.

Here’s my point for going back over this stuff again and again.  I was sick for a long time, and now I’m a lot better.  But I’ve been better for only a short period of time and I need to remind myself of this fact daily.

It’s so easy to see yourself defined by your illness.  And it’s so hard to keep track of the progress.  When I get a little bit better, I expect my whole life, the whole world, to open up and the clouds to part and I expect myself to be fully functioning again.  Forgetting, as I always do, that recovery takes a long time.  If I was sick for going on 10 years (and I think that’s the minimum), then how can I expect the past three months to bring me back entirely from the dead?  And yet there are things I miss from those days when I was sick — those productive times when my mood and the hypomania aligned perfectly to make me both happy and energetic at the same time.   More often than not, though, they wouldn’t align nicely, wouldn’t play well with one another, and I’d end up with a nasty case of agitated depression, irritability and incredible impatience.  I’m still capable of being incredibly impatient, and I’m irritated with myself most of the time.  So the habits of mind persist.