I blame the computer. I almost wrote the internet, but it’s not only that. It’s also writing in a journal that keeps me from reading, from concentrating. I can spend hours in my journal, not making anything at all. Just writing compulsively. Writing about writing. But it’s certainly also the internet. (See Is Google Making Us Stupid?) All these distractions. I used to love to read, and I think my reading dropped off just as I started getting depressed and using the computer more — about 5 years ago (it feels like yesterday). It’s so hard to untangle these things from one another. What created what? What caused the reading deficit? Is it the medication, the depression, the computer use? The safe answer is “yes.” Yes to all three if they’re keeping one from concentrating.

On lithium I couldn’t concentrate. On Trileptal I was a joke — totally stoned out. Seroquel killed my ability to stand up straight, and gave me severe akathesia as well. I thought that Abilify was helping me to concentrate, but it’s not. I’m having a hell of a time concentrating for any length of time, and this pains me to no end. But maybe my doctor’s right: this is a good kind of pain, the pain of coming out of deep depression. Quoting Mary Karr, “If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling.”

Planning gets hammered by bipolar. Where there used to be an overabundance of resolutions and schemes often there’s suddenly nothing. An emptiness that feels like depression even when you’re out of it, the depression, and renders your life aimless. You see the aimlessness and you panic. This is the danger of coming out of a depression: seeing things for how they have ended up. They say that depressives see the world more clearly, but I can’t think of a time when the world’s more sharp that when I’ve just come out of a depression. Depression is illusion, all the time illusion, and reacting to that for months and months builds up bad habits, like never planning, never making a plan.

The lifting of spirits coming at the end of a long summer, when Fall is all around, is always a surprise. It comes, it comes on like a gust of light wind with a bite in it. Rusted iron in New York City, some of these early fall smells, the rain that isn’t really a rain, the cradling darkness of early evening. My moods always lift during this time. And they’ve absolutely lifted higher than I hoped for. I’m not just feeling good, I’m feeling better. Better as in, a better person than I used to be, having come out of a nervous breakdown and learned something about myself. I’m thinking that you only really learn about yourself until after you’ve gone through something intense, and my intense experience was going dark.

Now I’m back but not completely. I’ve got a lot of the habits I had back then (not so long ago – one, two months) that are adapted to life in a depression. You see, all my muscle memory is wrapped up in depression. I’m keyed into it, it’s the way I work now. That has to be stripped away in the same way the depression itself needed to be swept away. It’s in the way.

I don’t know how to unlearn habits. I stopped smoking, but that was a more physical battle, not like this one in front of me at all. This one is about learning a new way of thinking.

The almost-cry. Coming close to weeping. Maybe even a little heave of the chest. Anxiety about coming so close, even. A closing off of certain abilities to feel, in any way, good. The coming on of the cry will put you into your place, nail you to where you are and strip away all your defenses, the ones you didn’t know you had. A life review. A stock-taking comes into sharp focus – I really should get down to brass tacks – and you descend on yourself with a ferocity unmatched by the ferocity with which you could ever come down on any other person. Just squeezing words about it out takes a too much effort.

“This is how your sleep shapes up during an acute depression episode:

Prolonged sleep latency, reduced total sleep time, reduced sleep efficiency (characterized by intrusions of wakefulness), reduced three and four (deep) sleep, reduced REM latency, and increased REM density. Also – increased body temperature, increased ACTH, cortisol, and cerebral metabolism (in non REM sleep), as well as decreased growth hormone TSH, prolactin, testosterone, and possibly melatonin.

I do not profess to understand exactly what all that means, but if my mechanic ever handed over a clipboard with something like that on it I would know it was time to get rid of my car.”

Excellent advice.