These days it’s been a premonition, a dread creeping in that things aren’t going to be okay. Not depression, no, but something like it. Fear of depression. I thought that when my depression went into remission two months ago I’d be free to think my own thoughts again. I was wrong. Because depression cuts deep grooves in the mind and the mind plays itself out over those grooves, being the easiest of all options, I’m having depressive thoughts even though I don’t feel depressed. The mind is nothing if not efficient. So I’ve become excellent at worrying a problem into something larger than it needs to be, excellent at exacerbating my problems by thinking about them so frequently and with such self-hatred at the core of each of these thoughts. Where this ends, I have no idea. I thought I was out of the woods, but they’re still all around me and might be forever.

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.

Going dark is bad. Going dark is counterproductive. The thoughts that bubble to the surface seem to be all negative all the time, even when I’m up, hypomanic. Eternal damnable pessimism. It gets dull. Always the same responses – in the negative: going dark.

Unlike some other bloggers, I don’t have a 10-point step-by-step for avoiding going dark. I can’t offer advice on this habit; I am in its cage. It’s what we’re best at, bipolars, I believe: accessing the dark side and bringing back into the world a little for others to oggle. I’ve brought much darkness on myself and my family, moments I’ve gone cold in shock over how I’ve acted. How not-myself I can become. And how not-myself I can write and imagine.

Down with 10-point steps for recovery, blog chaff that leaves you mourning the time spent reading them. Who have they ever helped? Perhaps the new-to-bipolar use some of those tips, but for the rest of us, those who’ve lived with BP for at least a year, have already read what’s in those entries in books and on other websites so many times – and have heard the advice from our doctors – these lists are less than helpful.

This doesn’t mean I don’t still read them.