I can’t believe I spent so much time maintaining my computer a few years ago, when I owned a Windows XP box. I got pretty good at it. And I wasn’t medicated for bipolar at the time. Anything I got done before medication I consider now to be something of a feat. Even today, with most of my bipolar symptoms managed, I will still occasionally marvel at how I’m able to pull anything off, do anything.

And here’s the problem (because there just had to be a problem coming!). I’m not doing anything. People ask me what I’m doing this weekend, and I make shit up. Yep, I just lie about my weekend. And then if they ask me, “Hey, how was _______?” I will lie again, saying I wasn’t able to do ________ for one reason or another.

Not that I don’t want to do anything. Not that I’m not interested – I’m so interested that I’ve got several pages’ worth of Amazon Wish List books arranged in the reverse order of my promising myself that I would read them. I keep up with books, though I can barely get through a book review. It’s mostly blogs. Same with my DVR: stuffed with cool interesting TV, but I don’t watch it. I appreciate the fun I’d have, but I don’t act on it.

Now what the hell is this? I don’t remember reading anything in any of my psychology books and time online about feeling fine but not being able to do anything. My depression’s in remission, I’m even a little hypomanic, but all I do is plan, not do.

Learning how to view my own work has been one of the biggest challenges lately. It’s so, so easy to slide into self criticism, self loathing, especially in my writing. Both my day job and my writing early in the mornings and in the evenings have been feeling like insurmountable challenges. These two days off have given me a chance to crash. I feel helpless in the face of despair right now, but I’m able to go on through habit. I want to add the phrase “right now” to the end of every sentence in this post, because that’s what’s going on — something is going wrong right now, not forever. That famous Beckett line, “fail better,” has become my mantra. Just getting better at failing seems to be the best thing to shoot for. A habit: getting up early. Getting up early is said to help. Getting up at the same time of day, every day, is supposed to be one key to happiness. Mindfulness of my impatience when I get like this helps, too. Things will take as long as they will take, I must remember. I just have to fight the urge to lie down and go to sleep wherever I am. A rambling post, it’s true, but all I’m capable of… 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.

A couple of years ago my wife and I played a lot of World of Warcraft. We’d both just turned in our Masters Theses and were looking for some major recuperation. Major recuperation turned into major addiction for her, minor addiction for me. My fascination with WoW started with the maps, the geography of the game, and the auction house. I could spend an hour auctioning off gloves and swords and the like, watching prices go up and down with supply and demand in this totally unreal environment. But it was the geography that has stuck with me.

Now, many months out of the game, both of us have flashbacks to spaces within the game. For me, it was the original march to Ironforge from the new character spawning ground for dwarves. There was something magical about discovering that those blue hazy mountains in the distance were actually, up close, places to explore far, far away from my untreated bipolar symptoms.

My wife had a WoW flashback just the other week at PS1, an arts museum in Long Island City. (It was a flashback to the Tauren huts, if you’re up on your WoW). A new exhibit was being constructed and it triggered those paths laid down so deeply in her brain from months of playing the game.

I flash back during dull moments at work more frequently now that I’m on medication. Last year, when I was meds free, I had fewer flashbacks. So something in my meds is digging up these geographic pathways and displaying them to me at the odd downtime. Suddenly I’m walking down a computer-generated valley path – but it’s total immersion: I don’t see the edges of my Mac, I simply see that world.

I also have flashbacks to real-life scenes more often. So, more flashbacks in general. Scenes popping up like Spring lillies. They’re almost always pleasant, or at least neutral, and they’re entirely due to the meds – Abilify, Lamictal, Wellbutrin, whichever you are, you’re doing something very strange but a little bit wonderful too.

It’s not that time passes slowly but that time passes emptily. Empty of thoughts other than the self-lacerating kind, the mind passes the time quickly, preoccupied as it is with itself.

Quick: how do other people pass their time on a Sunday afternoon? Errands, trips to the park and the movies? Are they lacerating themselves or entertaining themselves to death? How many emails are they catching up on?

Depression pushes people away. They don’t go off on their own accord. You push them away. By not responding, by not calling back, by acting as if you don’t care about anyone but yourself because, really, let’s look at it face value, open-faced, like a kind of sandwich — you don’t care about other people while you’re depressed. You’re just curious about them, and that’s different than empathy. Psychotic depression. Sociopathic depression.

But you’re good at hiding it. You must act as though you’re not a sociopath today. It’s Sunday and you must not succumb. Your birthday might be coming up and it’s time you grew up and grew out of this.

Quick: what do other people feel?