Archive for the ‘ writing ’ Category
I thought I’d lost all my MacJournal entries, and at first I wasn’t disappointed or depressed, then I realized that the power of looking back a year, two years, and more is invaluable. Now I just have to figure out a way of integrating my Journlr (the program I used to use before it ceased development and support).Journaling has already made things better.
So, since the almost-lost-data scare, I’m looking for a new Mac journaling program. Any suggestions?
The passing away of Steve Jobs saddened me with an intensity I didn’t expect. I walked around the apartment feeling like a distant but old friend had died.
As a kid, I was lucky enough to have a stepfather who bought Apple computers when they first came out. A laser printer, too! I can trace many of my first attempts at writing to a typewriter I was given at 13 – a machine that tried really hard to be a word processor. I could delete an entire line, if I wanted to, by pressing a single button and then watch the correcting ribbon dash back through the offending words and bang them back into the white paper.
When the Apple II came into our house, along with the laser printer, I could see my words in a whole new way: as if they were published, written by someone else, or written by me, as a published author. Inspired, I wrote more. So Steve Jobs was partly responsible for my life-long dreams of writing.
Gadgets have become an anchor for me when life gets low. I obsess over my computer, phone, whatever, instead of spiraling down into depression. Well, sometimes it works, and for that I’m grateful.
Only 56 years old.
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?
That’s the number of milligrams of Lamictal I’ve been taking, like a human pill bottle tipped upside down. The titration up to 150 took weeks, then I felt that I needed more. I seem to have a pretty good instinct for the dosage of medications I need, according to my psychiatrist — a sort of compliment, I guess. So I jumped to 300 milligrams from 150. And whoo, did I respond.
Waking up at 3:00 am every night wide awake, ready for the day and hungry to do something. Namely, to buy something. And so I did: a $400 camera for one. But the strange thing came before the camera.
I’ve always been obsessed with writing instruments. As a kid, I’d spend long stretches at a downtown office supply store that catered to executives who wanted the fanciest pens and pencils. I lusted after those fountain pens, those complicated mechanical pencils. Flash-forward to today and naturally the obsession has transferred to computer keyboards. Apple’s slim keyboard looked good, but in the long run I didn’t like it. MacAlly’s keyboard the same: pretty, but the keys didn’t click just right, didn’t feel the way I wanted them to. This see-sawing has been going on for about 3 years, but it flew into manic gear after I increased the Lamictal.
Over a week of crazed nights I bought 5 keyboards. The one I was after is out of production, so I scoured eBay and other resellers for my model. I bought the wrong one, then a right one arrived with faulty “a-s-d” keys. The next? Bad space bar. I was able to return all these glitchy keyboards and eventually ended up with the right one, the alpha and omega of computer keyboards. For a few days there, I had at least two keyboards on hand at any given time. Crazy-time.
But at the same time I was becoming happier and happier. At first, I mistook my rabid consumerism for the spring of that contentedness, but now I realize that it was the power of Lamictal that lifted me from a malaise, and it was a side-effect of the drug that threw me into the spending spree.
I was vaguely aware that the massive jump in milligrams was responsible. Like a middling middle manager of my moods, I was responsible and ultimately failed to keep watch over what the 3 a.m. version of myself was up to.
So, a warning: Lamictal, a mood stabilizer purportedly good at preventing relapses into depression, has the potential to trigger the crazy. I’m over it now. But I’m still drawn to those luscious pens and pencils and keyboards.
You can take the boy out of the office supply store…
This can kill a writer’s – or this writer’s – ability to come up with anything new to say. I want to write about my mental illness, but sometimes the illness itself keeps me from finding the right words. I write obsessively in my journal, recording sometimes every thought that passes through my head, like talking to myself. But I don’t want to do that here. How much of the rambling can a blog take? Blog posts are supposed to be short and to the point. They’re not supposed to show evidence of mental illness, of indecision, of self-doubt. But I’m here to say, I have self-doubt like a hammer hitting my back. I’m not put together, I’m not smug about writing in a blog. I’m keenly aware that I have no readers (yet?) and I’m struggling to keep this thing going. I want to reach out and meet people through this effort. And I want to be lyrical again. This is why I’ve reduced the amount of Lamictal I’ve been taking by 100 mg down to 300 mg. It’s not always better living through chemistry, I think. I think some medications can keep one down, can suppress the minor highs of bipolar that can get one through the week.
I’m about to check out – or have already checked out, because it’s currently running – a piece of software that disconnects you from the internets for an amount of time of your choosing.
I’m an internet addict. I have an addictive personality to begin with: cigarettes being the worst. But the internet comes in a close second. In fact, while I was on the Freedom webpage (can’t link to it because, obviously, I’m not online right now (I’m using MarsEdit to create this post offline)) I got sucked into reading all their links to the press they’ve gotten. And so, ten online minutes had passed without my noticing them, just after the moment I’d decided to go offline. That’s addiction.
I want to be a writer again, so I’m using Freedom. Let’s hope it works.
