Trying hard to be easier on myself. I’m still smoking the weed, but I will be out in a couple days and will decide if I will get more then not now.
I’ve been up feeling like shit physically and it’s dragging me down. So I decided to put on some music and see if that would help. Funnily enough it did. I always forget the positive effect that music has in my life.
I put on some up beat dance music and even danced a little as I sang my favorites at the top of my lungs. It definitely helped some of my anxiety, well until I thought about it too much.
Trying hard to be easier on myself. I’m still smoking the weed, but I will be out in a couple days and will decide if I will get more then not now.
I’ve been up feeling like shit physically and it’s dragging me down. So I decided to put on some music and see if that would help. Funnily enough it did. I always forget the positive effect that music has in my life.
I put on some up beat dance music and even danced a little as I sang my favorites at the top of my lungs. It definitely helped some of my anxiety, well until I thought about it too much.
Life is really great right now. Like, really great.
I deserve a little bit (or a lot of) goodness right about now. The last three years were rough for me. I was hospitalized for mania every Spring for the last three years. Yup. You read that right. Three hospital stays in three years. However, it's even worse than it sounds. Because after the hospital stay is the recovery window, which can last months to years. For instance, I was hospitalized for 10 days in March 2015. I didn't feel like my whole self until August 2015.
But I made it through this past March with no manic episode! I just gotta get through April and May.
As I said, life is great right now. In the last two weeks I had four interviews for summer employment (like camps and enrichment programs for high school students). I didn't get one, still waiting to hear from the other three. Today I had an interview for my Fall internship for graduate school. It was at my first choice placement. Thankfully, the interview went well; just have to interview with the Director of the department I would be interning with. And graduate school is going well. One of my professors praised my midterm paper in front of the class and declared that I should be in a PhD program. He wants me to present my paper at a conference in the Fall at a college in Pennsylvania.
More importantly, life is going great without the mania. In the past, the mania has given me energy, creativity, and productivity. But I don't need it to be energetic, creative, or productive.
As much as I am pleased to have survived March, I am also not ignorant of my recent track record regarding Spring. So if the mania makes a return, I will deal with it as I have the previous four times. I can't change my disorder, but I can learn to live with it, when I'm in crisis and when I'm in recovery.
Today there is an effort to get #imnotashamed trending on Twitter. I've tried to do my part by tweeting. Not sure if multiple tweets by the same user really gets a trend going.
I've been thinking whether I am completely without shame. What would that mean? I've tried to break it down into as many social areas where I could feel shame.
Internal - I don't feel shame when I think about myself. I feel strongly that having bipolar is nothing to be ashamed of. It is just as much an illness as any physical illness. It has been described online as an invisible illness and I agree (mostly… perhaps another blog post lurks there). Given its near invisibility and how it is wrapped up with one's very thoughts, it is difficult to be unashamed. If only one could think oneself out of the horrible highs and lows. But someone with diabetes can't think their pancreas into producing insulin.
Family - I am proud of my efforts as a father and husband. I have more or less been the only provider since my wife was pregnant with our first son. I have held down the same job despite three hospitalizations. Finding out your child has autism is a huge emotional stress... it's an additional daily stress getting through the day. I am there for my kids. Could I do more? Sure. I could educate myself on autism, become a better advocate, and get closer with my neurotypical son. But I do think most of the time I'm doing my best.
Close friendships - I have about three close friends and they all know I am bipolar. Granted I called all of them when I was manic and something clearly was not right with me. That behavior could have been swept under the rug as sleep deprivation (maybe). But I was open with them. Luckily they all accepted it openly and we remained close friends. I still worry that one of them doubts it as a "real" illness and that maybe I could overcome it just through willpower.
Acquaintances - Perhaps I feel shame here. There are lots of other parents I have been acquainted with for some time. None of them know. I am afraid how they would react, which I guess is a kind of shame. Their children are friends with my son and I don't want to jeopardize that based on any prejudices they may have. Lately I've questioned whether I need to keep silent, but these are casual friends. The context usually doesn't come up for us to share our internal struggles etc.
Work - I telecommute. I don't interact with people face to face. Letting someone know remotely that I have bipolar just doesn't come up. Unless someone has difficulty working with me, I don't see why they need to know. When I needed to go to the hospital I did impulsively let my supervisor know. That was a huge risk, but it turned out fine.
Public - I don't feel any differently in public because I have bipolar. However, I'm not going to sport a shirt that says "Bipolar" on it. My town is not necessarily the most tolerant or forward thinking. I can't foresee wanting to do that. It's a bit "in your face" for me. It shouldn't affect how I interact with a random stranger so why have the shirt?
Online - It takes actions and not just talk to show the lack of shame. I like to think that my blog, Twitter, and Instagram are some form of evidence. I've got pictures of myself with clear indicators that I have bipolar (I almost just wrote 'I am bipolar' but changed it). I'm trying to be candid about my daily struggles on this blog. Is that enough or is it just too easy? I can vouch that from a technical perspective having a Blogger blog couldn't be much easier. It doesn't seem like I'm much of an advocate if all this social media is the equivalent of talking to myself since I have no readers. At least from my primitive understanding of Google Analytics the only reader appears to be me. Nevertheless, all this content is out there. I have no plans of taking it down, so if anyone stumbles across it, they'll find yet one more person out there in the world coping with having a mental illness.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the time I tried to poison someone. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was five years old. There was a girl in our cul-de-sac, her name was Jennifer Joslin. Jennifer was a bully and was always mean to me. I didn’t like her and I was afraid of her. Well I had some little-girl perfume, and I remember my parents’ stern warnings not to DRINK the perfume, as it was POISON! Hmmmm…. My little mind wondered…poison? I tried mixing some of my perfume with water, and what a lovely milky color it turned! Problem solved. The next afternoon when Jennifer was out in the cul-de-sac, I mixed up my little potion of perfume and water in a drinking glass and walked out to Jennifer. “Hi Jennifer, ya want some milk?” I offered innocently. Jennifer took a swig and then spat it out angrily. “What IS this, POISON?” she shouted. I grabbed the glass and scurried home, certain I was in trouble. So much for murdering my nemesis. I was in for a spanking with Dad’s fraternity paddle!
I’m not sure what attempted murder at the age of five says about my character, but that’s honestly the last time I tried to kill someone. I think it’s kinda cute, though, how solution-oriented I was at five years old! See a problem, solve a problem. Very linear! Who knows, if I’d been successful, maybe I would have grown up to be a hit (wo)man! Oh well, what could have been. Instead, I went into IT. Go figure.
Woohoo. Additionally, I don’t like the inability to use HTML (or, in the case of forums, BBCode) because that makes it difficult to have any control over the way you refer to things outside of Facebook. But that’s neither here nor there. I think a good way to go would be just to unsubscribe from all the humans and only see stuff from groups. I’d like FB if it was just, say, the 60s/70s vintage advertisement group and the David Bowie group (which migrated from an actual website). It’s the real people posting random, unpredictable stuff that I don’t like. I like to see things posted in categories, and this doesn’t happen on Facebook.
I have been trying to move to other places on the internet. It’s nice to interact with people sometimes, but it’s too difficult for me to do that on Facebook. Anytime I try, usually by commenting on people’s posts, I am ignored. This often leads to me deleting the person because I don’t see any point in being FB “friends” with people who completely refuse to talk to me.
I also enjoy that forums, in addition to usually being based on a specific topic, feel less like a popularity contest. There are usually fewer people posting photos of themselves, fishing for compliments, etc. (Posting photos of myself is extremely terrifying for me, and bad for my self-esteem. Another reason I don’t leave the house is because people often think it’s ok to just take/post photos without asking me.)
This has been a terrible month for a number of reasons. I seem to have forgotten that it’s not necessary to be drunk or otherwise intoxicated every day. There is just sort of a cloud of despair that follows me around. I’ve been having anxiety-type nightmares. Yesterday I dreamed I was just standing in the kitchen, screaming as loud as I could. Not out of fear, just from being fed up with life and everything in it.
Ready. Set. Sail! 3rd times the charm as they say! Well gang, it’s time for another edition of Jess’s bpHope rants. Hope ya’ll are excited for another round! Let’s do-si-do and all that other horse manure and put our cowboy hats on and stuff….I don’t know. It’s early! And I’m in my car in the… More BpHope Post #3
This weeks Throwback Thursday was originally posted in August 2008. I think it speaks for itself. Everything’s Coming Up Roses Being a teenager who was gay and not ready to come out of the closet was extremely difficult. It meant that I frequently went through the motions to try and convince others and myself that […]
This weeks Throwback Thursday was originally posted in August 2008. I think it speaks for itself. Everything’s Coming Up Roses Being a teenager who was gay and not ready to come out of the closet was extremely difficult. It meant that I frequently went through the motions to try and convince others and myself that […]
Mill Valley, CA (9:30AM) to Golden Valley, AZ (9:10 PM). 623 miles.
Tunes: The California Mix (Eagles, Linda Ronstadt & Jackson Browne)
Audiobook: The Number One Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
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I forgot that today was going to be my longest day on the road, so I really kicked myself for getting a late start. I texted my host in Golden Valley along the way to update her on my ETA. Unlike other AirBNB hosts, she was totally cool with a late arrival. So, then, I just relaxed into the day.
John navigated us smoothly through the Bay area snarl (maybe it was a good thing to have missed rush hour) and got us headed in the direction of Stockton. This excited me to no end as visions of Jared, Nick, Heath and Audra danced like sugar plum fairies in my memory. The Big Valley (or The Pig Valley, as I called it, starring Miss Barbara Stan-pig) played a seminal role in developing my fan-girl. What is it about middle-school girls and horses?
However, we turned south towards L.A. before getting to Stockton. Sigh. I tipped my proverbial hat in the Barkleys’ direction.
Freeway signs warned that the ticket for texting while driving was $161. As I am now a reformed seatbelt-wearer, I kept my phone in my purse and hoped fiddling with my GPS didn’t count.
The highlight of yesterdays trek down most of California was entering the Mojave desert at dusk. The mountains there were a completely different kind of animal as compared to their cousins up north; bare, tumbled rock stacked like the spines of prehistoric lizards. At first the landscape seemed stark, but it owned every color of brown (slate, white sand, bloody rust). Sage, scrub and Joshua trees dotted the sear plains. I rolled down my window in the 93° heat to get a whiff of the parched, pure air. And as darkness crept out from the rocky shadows, the thrill of it–me in the desert with nothing but stars and a few trucks trundling beside me–snapped me awake with joy.
To get to Melanie and Mel’s place, I had to take a twisty, two-lane highway through a tip of Nevada (instant Casino-land) and into Arizona. We didn’t get lost once. Melanie ran out of the house with her arms wide in greeting. How lovely to have this funny, caring stranger waiting for me!I got a big basement room, complete with kitchenette and composting toilet, with a walk-out onto a fabulous garden. Very cool art on the walls, too.
I’m sorry I can’t stay and enjoy the desert ambiance. It’s 7:14 and I’ve got to shower and get going. Today I go to Durango and meet another bloggy friend, Robert.
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