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.

Going months at my current job, still fairly new even though I’m freelance, and several months as a freelancer can be like forever — but I feel new to it still. All the more today, because I came to an understanding about office life that I’d never had before.

I normally work in an editing room with a producer or director, but now I’m in an open plan office, using headphones. Isolated and exposed at the same time, it really fucks with my paranoia. But that’s under control, for most of the day.

God, I drink a lot of coffee.

Anyway, I realized that people in the office don’t like to talk to each other about what needs doing. I asked someone for a DVD of a show I’d worked on, and he looked at me like I was a massive burden. Then, at least he took the moment to explain something to me. “Email me,” he said. “That way it’ll be on my list.” Ok, got it.

In the realm of the possible, this isn’t much. But it’s something. After my breakdown a few years ago, I didn’t think work was possible. I would watch people heading off to work and didn’t know the first fucking thing about how to join their ranks ever again. My shrink at the time was not a help, which is practically criminal negligence. Eventually, I stumbled across a job through a crappy little website, and worked my way away from that crappy little company into something better. And it was only today that I realized people would much much rather you don’t ask them for anything face-to-face.

It underlines many ideas discovered through your development as a sentient, self-regarding animal that knows it’s going to one day die.

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…

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?