Tomorrow night will mark the first time I meet a group of people expressly for the purpose of going over being Bipolar.  I have no idea how this is going to go.  Will report back later.

“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.

“Although it is a cliche to claim that creativity is connected to dour moods and a grey outlook on life, all the best stuff is written by some grim-faced pencil chewer with a heart pumped by angst. Richard Yates, whose novel Revolutionary Road is about to win an Oscar, has written seven novels and two collections of short stories, each more hopelessly miserable than the last. After years of chronicling the impossibility of his toothless, drunken mother, his experiences in the second world war, his TB and divorces, Yates finally rounds things off in Disturbing the Peace by fictionalising how a cocktail of alcoholism and psychotropic drugs had him take off his clothes and wander the streets of LA, giving all his money to beggars and prostitutes, convinced that he was Jesus. It is relentless – but so readable.”

From The Guardian

Don’t know how I’d be able to fully explain the way a wintery snowy and icy night in New York City smells to me, how it makes me feel to smell those nights. The longing, the thinking about drinking, the standing in the cold, maybe, outside the bar smoking the cigarettes, maybe, but maybe something more than that, too. Maybe something more pure than that, something that I can hold onto as I get older and use and not feel ashamed of, don’t you think that that’s possible? It should be, there should be something possible about that. There should be a way to take what’s aching inside you and make it take you through your time here, rather than weigh you down with longing that you can’t fulfill anymore. Can’t fulfill it, something inside me I can’t fulfill, can’t get around or over. I’m so sorry and so sad about this, this smell in the snowy night air, and I’m sorry that I don’t know if other people feel it the same way I do. It says something to me that little else has, it tugs at me. It’s telling me there’s something out there, some fun to be had, yes, but something more than that as well, something that will fulfill my longing, will make me more whole. This is what I’m chasing with the drinking on those winter nights. Because that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? The longing – not for the drinking but for the things you were chasing while you were drinking. All those things you wanted out of life, all those possibilities, the banality of this is a bit much, but nonetheless, here it is, plain faced and open. I stood on my balcony this evening and smelled the city snow and felt something so strong pulse through me, something I’ve not felt in some time. Perhaps something is happening to me, there have been more ups lately than downs, so perhaps something is happening to me. I don’t know, don’t have any way of knowing until it’s completely upon me, until it’s almost passed, in fact. The Christmas cold, the New Years cold, the ice and the snow in the parking lot, the smell of the air, the longing, the drinking through all this. How to write about this? How to make someone smell that snow, and more importantly, smell that longing? How to make that work? It seems impossible, like something I would have moved from LA to NYC to learn how to do, to spend so much money learning how to do. And it’s still there, waiting for me.

It’s as though I haven’t aged a bit, though I’m older. My old friends, do they feel this way, or is this the sign of someone who’s not been able to grow up, who’s stunted and frustrated with his life, with where he is in life? What else is there, he’s asking himself all the time. He’s full of banalities, but he’s got something living inside him still, some core of self-hatred, standards set so high he’d rather destroy himself rather than face up to it. It’s a fucking shame it hasn’t blossomed into something better than this after all these years, but there’s not a better time than now to change myself. I don’t know, though, how to change myself, how to become more than what I am — a sad person who’s fighting a mental illness. Lots of words I could wrap around that one, but they’d have to be in better sentences first. They’d have to be in the best sentences for me, the sentences I would write. The sentences I would want to write, to be the writer of. It’s worse than I could have imagined, the slide from when I was in school. But you could say that I feel just as bad about it this time as I did feel bad about something else that other time. To think that I used to walk into the room with my writing and talk to them about it, what a fucking think to have done. To think that I walked into the room and let them look at it, wanted them to look at it — I was proud most of the time, most of the time I thought what I had was pretty good, that what I was doing was worth something. Then I stopped thinking that. Then I started thinking that I was the biggest piece of shit I’d ever seen. And it’s been downhill since then, force of will keeping me going and keeping me going in something like forward direction. The level, the high level skill of self-hatred, the subtleties of the practice, the fine-boned skeleton coming down to my shoulders, swinging up in the air, then coming down again, swinging like its having a decent time of it. Downhill, I can’t tell you what I make of myself when I’m at work, the shit I feel about myself when I’m sitting there, the loserdom and the pain.

Seeing old people and feeling new. Seeing old friends and feeling new from the experience and looking at my life again in a new way and wondering why I’m not doing more reading and writing. Maybe I’d enjoy life a bit more and actually be a bit more productive if I simply did more reading and writing.

And that’s all it is. Coming up with one thing that will help and moving toward it. This is like the path the milligrams take: without pause, they head toward their goal and plug up those receptors (the SSRIs) and otherwise keep things relatively calm up there (I don’t know how the anti-convulsants I’m taking work). All these pills are meant to regulate electro-chemical misfiring in the brain. That’s their big idea. They mean it. You can’t even stop them once you’ve swallowed them. They’re tenacious and they don’t stop for a break until they run out. And they help a lot.

And then there’s the way we try to help ourselves. Not as direct, in my case. Bordering on scattershot, really. Never tenacious, never single-minded or committed. Hardly ever thought out, and easily distracted from its goal.

It’s time to make the outside world cures as focused and automatic as the inside world cures. What’s first?