bipolar adventures

Allergies and Optimism

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I think I’m finally coming down from my most recent swing into mania. The frenetic activity in my brain has slowed (it never really ceases), and my anxiety has dropped from One Step Below Panic Attack back to Background Hum, at least most of the time.

This week, it really feels like spring is here and summer is right around the corner. I know it’s still spring because even though it’s been quite warm, there is pollen everywhere, which is making my head feel fuzzy and my sinuses cranky. But it’s hard to be too mad when everything’s finally leafing and blooming and alive.

I’m still planning to meet with a psychiatrist next week about a potential med adjustment. I’m still nervous, but I’m also glad I’ve gotten to the point where I’m doing something about the anxiety instead of just drowning in it.

All in all, even though it’s been a weird week, I think things are looking up. The weather has me feeling optimistic. I’ve had lots of reminders that I’ve built a really solid support network, and I’m so grateful for all the awesome people in my life that make the good times better and the hard times livable.

Anxious All the Time

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

My brain, at its best moments, could be described as “quirky.” Generally speaking, I know how to work with my mental quirks. I have systems in place to keep them from turning into anything more serious.

Possibly my least favorite of these quirks is the ever-present hum of anxiety in my head. I’ve frequently described mania as feeling like I have a head full of bees. They’re generally very busy, and sometimes something happens to make them particularly agitated, and they sting. That descriptor applies double for anxiety, really. Except instead of generally peaceful regular honey bees, anxiety bees are like killer bees, which will follow whatever upset them for an absurd distance compared with most other bees.

Metaphors aside, I’ve been really struggling to keep my anxiety under control lately. My usual coping mechanisms are falling short. Nothing seems to make much of a difference anymore.

This isn’t a new problem, exactly: I’ve noticed the frequency and severity of my anxiety increasing over the past couple of years. But I think we’ve finally hit critical mass for what I can reasonably manage on my own.

At the advice of my therapist, I got a referral to a psychiatrist from my doctor. I’ve been on the same doses of the same medications for about nine years; maybe it’s time for a change.

I was supposed to have an appointment today, but unfortunately, the doctor had to reschedule. Thankfully, I only have to wait a couple more weeks. I am nervous – messing around with meds can be a traumatizing process. But I’m hopeful that it’ll be worth it in the end.

Sleep Deprived

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a long week.

I am manic, and have been for a couple of weeks now. The first week or so was fun – I got excited about a lot of things and felt connected in ways I hadn’t in a while. The second week was not so fun. I was super anxious, and struggled to keep panic attacks at bay.

This week has also been less fun. The worst of the anxiety has waned, although it’s still buzzing beneath the surface. The bigger problem this week has been around sleep.

There have been a lot of late nights this week, for a variety of reasons. They’ve left me completely exhausted. However, when I’m finally able to lay down to sleep, my brain decides to kick it into high gear. It just. Won’t. Stop.

Rarely is it buzzing about anything of consequence. It just starts shouting about whatever random shit pops up as I’m attempting to drift off. I try to focus on breathing, but so far that hasn’t been especially successful. Even when I do sleep, I have really weird, vivid dreams that don’t leave me feeling rested; as soon as I wake up, my brain is back to running in circles.

As a result, it’s now Thursday and I feel like I’m just barely holding it together. I know this is a temporary state, and I’m talking with my therapist and doctor to see if there’s anything further I can be doing. But right now in the thick of it, I am not having a great time.

At least the weekend is almost here!

Winter Blahs

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I am having a very blah sort of week. I’m not sad, exactly. I just feel very unmotivated, and tired, and nothing sounds like very much fun or like anything I want to do. All I really want to do is hibernate.

It wasn’t until I was on my way to therapy on Monday that I realized that this is probably a weird instance of the depressive side of my Bipolar cycle sneaking up on me. Usually when I’m heading into a depressive episode, I can tell – I feel really down. But “down” doesn’t feel like the right word for this. It’s just…blah.

It was a struggle to get anything done at work last week. It was a struggle to write my song for songwriting class (and my goal was actually to write TWO songs last week). It was a struggle to get myself to show up for my volunteer shift and for the social things I’d committed to doing (even though all of those things ended up being fine). I had a minor breakdown last Thursday evening, because I got home at the end of a long day, and even though I’d made a plan and knew what I should get done, none of those things actually happened. I got things done, but none of them were things on my to do list, and I felt like an enormous failure.

Since I was able to identify this as depression on Monday, it’s been a little easier – if not to find motivation or give-a-damn, at least to sit quietly with the blah-ness of it all and recognize that this, too, shall pass. Yesterday the sun was out, and I had the same revelation I do every time we get through a cloudy spate of days and come out the other side into sunlight – I am incredibly affected by the weather. I should probably definitely be taking vitamin D.

In the meantime, I’m finding ways to cope. I’m listening to a lot of Dar Williams (even when I’m not listening to Dar Williams, my brain’s playing The Christians and the Pagans or The Babysitter’s Here or When I Was A Boy). I’m taking time to write down what I’m anxious about. I’m thinking a lot about the Starfinder game I’m going to start playing soon. I’m dreaming up new tattoos (even though I can’t afford a new tattoo right now). I’m celebrating the fact that I pushed my credit card debt down under the next $1000 since making a payment last week and getting a disputed charge taken care of. (I’m trying not to be disappointed that I haven’t gotten farther in the process of paying it off.) I’m trying to remind myself that while yes, I probably should be reading and knitting and writing more, the fact that I’m not doing it right now does not mean that this is what my life is going to be like forever. Once again: this, too, shall pass.

Anxious Days

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m having an anxious week, and I don’t really know why.

It might be the regular stress of the upcoming holidays.

It might be the minor (but still stressful) drama and health issues happening with my team at work.

It might also just be my brain.

In any case, my body decided yesterday that it was a great time to develop an eye twitch. And not just one eye, but both, sporadically, all day. Obviously I’m a huge fan of this development.

There have been bright spots this week, mostly revolving around music – a songwriting classmate’s concert, meeting new musician friends, having the new song I’d talked myself out of liking go over okay in class on Tuesday. Unfortunately, all of it has been underpinned by this frantic activity in my brain.

It’s not even that I’m anxious about some specific, concrete thing. (I guess that’s why they call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder.) I just can’t get my brain to shut off.

I’m also really, really tired. These two things are probably related.

I feel like I’ve been drinking excessive amounts of coffee – I’m jittery, my eyes are twitching, I feel wired and like I’m crashing simultaneously. Only, I drink decaf coffee these days. This appears to be entirely fabricated within the confines of my brain.

Making Mental Space

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

First, a quick mental health update: I am still wading my way through this latest depressive swing in my Bipolar cycle, but I feel like I’m starting to move out of it. I haven’t been feeling great physically this week, so it’s been a little hard to tell, but I seem to be reaching the point where I have more energy. Whether that’s due solely to the cyclical nature of my moods, or due in part to some other work I’ve been doing, I don’t know, but I’m feeling better overall than I was last week.

I mentioned last week that I’ve been trying to establish some new, healthier routines for myself. Over the past several months I’ve noticed I tend to go to bed pretty early and I still have trouble getting up in the morning. I’ve felt like I’m tired all the time, regardless of how much sleep I get. I’ve had to accept the fact that I am no longer really a night owl. As I’ve been examining this pattern, I’ve realized I actually want to become a morning person. This is the first time in my life that that’s been true. So I’ve been getting up at what I would formerly have referred to as an ungodly hour in the morning  (or “stupid o’clock”), writing my morning pages (I’m on week two of The Artist’s Way), and giving myself time to start the day off more slowly, rather than rolling out of bed twenty minutes before I need to leave and dragging myself out the door.

It’s been going…surprisingly well. I think it makes a difference knowing that the first thing I have to do when I get up is write, rather than get ready for work. Intentionally planning non-work things into my morning means that I don’t fight to stay in bed as long. I’ve actually gotten up at my first alarm every morning for the past ten days – prior to that, I was setting five, six, seven alarms at intervals in the morning, because I knew I’d turn off one or two in my sleep, and while I always had the thought of “well, maybe I’ll get up earlier,” when I knew I had an alarm letting me know that I could no longer stay in bed if I wanted to make it to work on time, I let myself off the hook too easily. The fact that I’ve managed to be awake and doing something within five minutes of my first (and only) alarm for over a week feels like a huge accomplishment. Granted, I write my morning pages sitting up in bed, so I’m not up and moving about, really, but I’m still awake!

My partner and I are continuing to do a weekly meal plan (which is getting easier by the week, because now we know how much time and effort we save plotting it all out at the beginning of the week rather than getting to each evening and playing the “I don’t know, what do you want to eat?” game), and we’re also getting better at keeping up on routine housework. I feel like our space has never looked as consistently nice as it has for the past couple of months. I’m really proud of us.

In the end, what I’m trying to do is give myself more mental space. My mind is busy all the time. I lay down to go to sleep, and my brain goes racing down rabbit holes, trying to make sense of something that happened today, or last week, or ten years ago. I wake up, and it’s doing the same thing. I get songs stuck in my head. I’m easily distracted. I am almost never not thinking. But if my physical space is clean/less visually cluttered, and I don’t have to worry about what’s for lunch or dinner, and I’ve taken time in the morning to dump some of my brain out onto paper…hopefully, in the end, I’ll find that my mind settles down more often. Ideally, I’d like to be at a point where racing thoughts are just ideas, not anxiety – where the routines I’ve established allow me to let go of some of the worry so I can focus on more interesting (and maybe even productive) things.

What about you, friends? What do you do to create mental space for yourself?

Down Days

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It has, objectively, been a pretty good week I got to spend some quality time with friends, enjoy a comedy show, a theatre show, and a concert, and I’ve had some quality alone time, too. 

But because my Bipolar brain doesn’t always or only react to outside circumstances, the objective positivity of the week hasn’t translated to an equal level of emotional positivity. 

I’m in a bit of a depressed downswing, is what it comes down to. 

Now, this is nowhere near the worst I’ve felt, and I know that eventually I’ll be fine. But it’s still a struggle. 

At the same time that this downswing has been happening, I’ve been working really hard to establish more routine in my life. My partner and I have started meal planning over the weekend for the whole upcoming week. I’m getting back into the habit of using my planner and writing down my to do lists instead of trying to keep it all in my head. And I started working through The Artist’s Way this week, so I’m getting up early to do morning pages (three pages written longhand as a brain dump first thing in the morning) every day.

Establishing new routines is a challenge at the best of times, but it’s especially hard when depression hits and leaves you with no motivation. 

Still, I’m managing okay. I’ve done a better job than I was expecting myself to do. And I think it’s helping. Having a routine and a schedule to stick to saves energy, because I’m not wasting time figuring out what I need to be doing in the moment. 

So life doesn’t feel especially easy right now, but I think I can say that I’m doing okay. 

Grateful, Centered

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

My first thought when I sat down to write this week’s blog was to whine, at length, about the horrible day I had on Tuesday trying to get to and from jury duty in the suburbs without a car. But I am trying to be a more grateful, centered person, so I’m not going to do that.

I’ve been feeling…a little off, lately. Not grateful or centered. I’ve been feeling frazzled about work, questioning if this is really where I want to be, or if I’m just staying here because of the good boss and good health insurance, and whether that actually matters. I’ve been having a lot of complicated feelings about gender and identity and privilege and what that all means (I regret none of the decisions I have made, but living in a world married to the concept of binary gender is frustrating). I’m trying to balance long-term planning (I’ve charted out how to pay off my credit card by 2020) and living in the moment. To be stable and flexible. And I feel like I’m not doing a very good job of any of it, like I’m just hanging on as the world spins, desperately wishing it would stop for a few minutes (or days) and let me catch my breath and figure out where I am and where I’m going.

I guess I’m in the midst of a minor existential crisis?

How irritating.

But back to the original point I think I was trying to make…I want to be a more grateful, centered person. I’m not doing a great job of it. But I do feel like the Universe is gently nudging me in the direction, despite the fact that I’ve felt like a cranky mess for the past few weeks. From my no-longer-daily-but-I’m-trying tarot meditations to sweet messages from friends to cute pictures of puppies on the internet, I run into reminders pretty regularly that really, I am okay. Even if I feel off-kilter, even if my allergies are driving me crazy and fogging my brain, even if I feel overwhelmed by a lot of things, even if I don’t know what (or possibly who) I want to be when I grow up, even if there’s plenty in the world at large to be terrified of right now, right now, in this moment, I am okay. And that’s really all I can ask for.

 

Getting Organized

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m still struggling a bit to get back into the swing of things post-vacation, but I’m finding that I’m in an organizing sort of mood. Back in the spring I definitely felt a strong spring cleaning urge (which has not always been the case in past years), but I’m feeling a similar urge now that fall is approaching. Which is probably a good thing, because there’s a lot of junk (both physically and mentally) that can build up in half a year.

Personally, I find the changing of the seasons at the solstices and equinoxes good times to check in with myself about how the year is going. We’re not quite at the autumn equinox yet, but it’s fast approaching, and I’m thinking about how I want to get my life in order heading into the cooler months.

One of the classes I took at Song School was about time management for creative people. I need to pull my notes back out and find other ways to integrate what I learned, but a couple of the big takeaways were to use a physical, paper planner (which I was sort of doing, but inconsistently), and color-coding it (which I had not tried before, and which I think will be a big improvement). I’m still going to be using my Google calendar, too (I would often be lost without those reminders coming up on my phone), but the physical act of writing things in my planner by hand means that they stick in my head a lot better.

Another thing that was stressed in that class was the importance of scheduling creative time. I have never been great at this, and it’s something I want to get better at. Next week I start a new guitar class at the Old Town School of Folk Music, so sometime this weekend I want to sit down and figure out a practice schedule for that, as well as slotting in some time for writing. I’m resistant to structure, but I know in the end it’s better for me.

I’m also starting to think more about knitting projects, after not knitting much all summer (which is pretty normal for me). I have a few sweater and vest projects lined up, and I’m starting to look at my yarn stash with a more critical eye. I have a lot of yarn, much of which was inherited from a friend who passed away a handful of years ago, so it has a lot of sentimental value…but I’m aware of the fact that the yarn I have doesn’t often line up with the projects I want to knit. So that’s something I’m going to need to deal with soon, too.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to spend a fair amount of time in the next few weeks getting my mental space in order, which will set me up to get my physical space in order, as well. I am finally in a place where I feel like I can start making some plans for what I want my life to look like in three to five years, instead of focusing so hard on the next handful of months.

A Handful of Happy Thoughts

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a week. Work is overwhelming (my first big project of my still-newish project management job launches into our live environment on Monday, and I’m scrambling to get the last-minute details nailed down). I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water. In theory, things will lighten up next week, but that doesn’t really make me feel less overwhelmed right now. 

Still, the past week has brought with it some happy moments. A lot of what’s kept me relatively sane has been music. 

Last Thursday we saw Minnesota duo The Home Fires. It was a great show. 

Friday we saw another musical group hailing from Minnesota: The New Standards. My partner’s parents bought us tickets for my birthday, and it was so much fun!

Tuesday my partner and I set aside time to play music together. It was fun to work on some songs and start to get a feel for how our voices work together. 

I’m taking this session off from classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music, because I knew I’d have to miss the last couple of classes. In August, my partner and I are going to Song School, a week-long songwriting summer camp for adults out in Colorado. Knowing that trip is coming up is a large part of why I’m managing to hold it together at work. Just a month and a half until a creative vacation!

One of my short term goals is to start setting aside regular time each week to work on music. Particularly when other areas of my life feel unmanageable, music is a really great grounding activity.