bipolar adventures

Hats! (or, ‘Tis the Season to be Knitting)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I haven’t posted much about it on this blog, but I happen to be a knitter.

My partner is also a knitter (and a knitting designer). Knitting was actually how we met. It’s a really important part of our lives. My partner is a much more dedicated knitter than I am, though. As part of an effort to decrease the amount of yarn we have stashed in our apartment, he’s been tracking how many yards he knits each month, and let me tell you, those numbers are impressive (over 16,000 yards for the year, he tells me). Particularly when compared to what my numbers would be, if I kept track. (I have finished a total of six projects this year. He’s finished at least forty-two. And no, I’m not exaggerating.)

See, I have this problem where I want to knit all the things. So I cast on one thing that I’m excited about, and within days (or hours…), I get excited about something new, and cast that on…which basically means I currently have about ten projects in varying states of completion on different sets of needles scattered about the house. I also knit a lot less in the summer (because we don’t have air conditioning, and it’s hard to get my easily overheated self excited about working with wool when it’s 90°F outside). The last project I finished was a super quick project in July that I finished in under 24 hours. Before that, it was a pair of socks in April. (This problem is not really isolated to just knitting. I have attention span issues with most creative things I pick up. Some of it has to do with Bipolar cycles, but a lot of it is just the fact that I want to do ALL THE THINGS, and I don’t have time to do them all.)

I am an extraordinarily selfish knitter. I can count on one hand the number of people aside from myself that I am willing to knit for. One of those people is my seven-month-old nephew. I decided before he was born that for his first Halloween, I would knit him a Yoda hat. After he was born, someone else brought that idea to my brother and sister-in-law (whose wedding was Star Wars themed), and I promised them it would happen.

Halloween is fast-approaching, and we have a quick trip to Minnesota planned in the next couple of weeks. I decided last Thursday (which is the day of the weekly knit night at our local yarn store, which I have not been going to nearly as often as I’d like) that I needed to get cracking on this hat. So I bought the yarn, cast on at knit night, got about halfway to the crown…and realized that the hat was not only going to be big enough for my nephew (who was easily fitting into 9 month hats at 6 months), but it would be big enough for me. (Possibly for me AND my nephew at the same time.) I ripped it all back and started over.

And then I got distracted. My partner had been worked on this great hat that’s made out of sock yarn, and as I was working on the baby hat, I realized I had the perfect skein of sock yarn for a hat of my own: purple and black stripes, in a fiber blend that I felt was too nice to use for something that would go on my feet, that was part of the boatload of yarn that came into our lives after one of our knitting friends passed away last year. And I got excited about the idea of a stripy hat for myself. So I put down the baby hat, pulled out the sock yarn, and cast on.

The great part about knitting something with stripes is that it’s easy to find motivated to do “one more stripe,” and therefore finish the whole hat. Long story short, I started the hat on Saturday, and finished about 1am this morning. And it looks great:

Hat!

(I don’t have a picture of me wearing it yet, because the friend I inherited the yarn from had a cat at some point, and I am allergic to cats, and since just working on the project made me very sniffly, I decided to give it a bit of a wash before putting it on my head. It’s drying as I’m writing this; I’ll try to get another picture up later today.)

Thankfully, I have today and tomorrow off from work (hooray, Jewish holidays!), and tonight is knit night, so I’ve got plenty of time to get the Yoda hat for my nephew cranked out. And now that I’ve satisfied my selfish knitting impulse with a nearly-instant gratification project, I’ll be able to focus on the thing that has an actual deadline…right?

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My Life in a Monday

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s not often that a single day provides a snapshot of the kind of life I have, but this Monday sort of did just that:

  1. Monday morning, I took the last pills in my existing bottles of psych meds. I had placed a refill order last week, and knew that both my prescriptions were ready for pickup, and I knew I needed to collect them on my way home from work. Unfortunately, my pharmacy is in no way, shape, or form on the way home: in fact, I have to pass home to get there, and go twice as far in the opposite direction. I spent the entire day at work trying to talk myself into going. Finally, as I walked the half mile to the bus (which would take me to the train, which would get me within a block of the pharmacy), I realized the solution: I would allow myself a silly indulgence if I otherwise behaved like a responsible adult and picked up my meds (more on that in #2). Long story short, for the first time in many, many months, I picked up my prescriptions on time and didn’t miss a single dose of anything.
  2. The silly indulgence? While I was out running my post-work errands, I swung up to Barnes & Noble and picked up a copy of the newest Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. I had been kicking around the idea anyway, because starting the end of this month I’ll be joining a D&D game run by someone my partner met in college (who happens to be a minister and is doing this game as part of an independent study for a class he’s taking at Loyola), and we were planning to meet Monday night to work on creating a character for me to play. The more I researched the newest edition of the game online over the weekend, the more excited I got, and so I went for it. It was very helpful to have a copy of the book for each of us to look at while we rolled up my character (a dwarf sorcerer – this would probably prove to my family that I am a godless heathen) that evening, and now I’m all set for the future games I’m sure I’ll be playing. Nerdery abounds!
  3. And then Monday night happened, and I laid down to go to sleep…and waited…and waited…and waited…and my brain just wouldn’t shut down. I wasn’t even perseverating over anything in particular; the gears just wouldn’t stop turning. Thanks to the insomnia and the fact that I needed to go in to work early, I ended up running through my Tuesday on approximately 3.5 hours of sleep and two shots of espresso and crashing by 8pm.

This is my life: learning to be a (sort of) responsible adult, discovering new and exciting depths to my capacity for nerdiness (and probably disappointing my relatives in the process), and never knowing exactly what to expect from my brain. It’s an adventure, and not always grand…but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Gratitude

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A friend of mine nominated me on Saturday via Facebook to come up with three moments of gratitude a day for five days. Well, that was about five days ago, and I haven’t done it yet, but that seemed like a good direction for the blog this week. So Amanda, here’s my list; thanks for the inspiration.

  1. A partner who will join me on silly, spontaneous adventures. Last Thursday, I had the wild idea that we should rent a car over the weekend and drive to Cedar Falls, IA to catch Joe Stevens in concert. The conversation went something like this:

    A: We should go on a road trip and see Joe Stevens!
    E: But it’s Iowa.
    A: But concert!
    E: But IOWA.

    I acknowledged it was a pretty ridiculous idea, but I was a little sad…until I got off work and was greeted by a text to the effect of, “So, about that concert…”

  2. Friends with whom I can escape reality for a while. Saturday was Dungeons & Dragons & Knitting, which is the monthly Pathfinder game with some folks in our knitting circle (the original idea was to play D&D, but Pathfinder ended up happening instead…we just never changed the name). Four of us have an adventure in group storytelling while our partners hang out in the other room and knit and make fun of us. It’s consistently one of the highlights of every month.
  3. Open spaces. We did end up renting a car this weekend and going on a road trip into Iowa, taking a detour on our way to Cedar Falls so that I could show Ethan some of the northeast corner of the state, which is not entirely flat and very, very pretty. The farther we got from Chicago, the more I relaxed. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in Chicago. But wide open spaces do wonders for my soul.
  4. People who choose to love me because of who I am, not in spite of it. The reason I know that there is a pretty part of Iowa (the aforementioned northeast corner) is that my grandparents live there, on a farm in a valley surrounded by trees and bluffs and wildlife and gardens. I remain convinced at age 26 that their farm is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. We were close enough on Sunday that, had I so chosen, we could have stopped by for a surprise visit. But I didn’t. I love my grandparents very much. They love their grandchildren very much. But when I came out to them as Alyx in a letter two years ago, their response (also in a letter) was that they would never call me Alyx, because Alyx was “an imaginary person.” I am almost entirely certain that they don’t know that I started any sort of physical transition. I haven’t seen them in over two years, and I haven’t been on their farm in at least three, and I don’t know when (or if) either of those things will happen again, which is heart-wrenching whenever I think of it. But it also reminds me that I have a whole bunch of people in my life who not only accept that I am Alyx but actually celebrate my life with me, and that is a great comfort.
  5. Those moments of recognition by others in our communities. Visibility is such a huge thing, both for those of us who are still frequently misgendered, and those in our community who pass so well that no one believes they’re trans. There were a handful of those moments this weekend.
  6. Approachable heroes. Meeting Joe Stevens was great: he’s one of our songwriting idols, and is just a fantastic person. But even better than meeting Joe was the fact that we got to actually talk with him. By the end of the night, we were giving each other hugs goodbye. We’re now friends on Facebook. This is still blowing my mind.
  7. Adventures that lead to more adventures. When we got to Cedar Falls and started talking with Joe (and River Glen, who’s touring the Midwest with him), we mentioned we’d road tripped it from Chicago, at which point they told us they were actually going to be playing a house concert in Chicago on Monday night. Throughout the night they told us several times that we should come. We got in touch on Facebook and got the details, and despite the fact that my partner had only slept about 45 minutes and had worked a full day, and the fact that we’d returned the rental car and weren’t entire sure how we were going to get home after transit stopped running, Monday night we found ourselves in the very humid basement of a hippie couple we’d never met, sweating with strangers (and new friends, and someone we met at a karaoke bar three-and-a-half years ago), enjoying more music.
  8. Music that inspires me to create more music. I felt two things in regard to the music at both shows: first, that my songwriting is totally inadequate, and second, that I want to write more songs. There are times when I get the first feeling but not the second one; this was one of the beautiful moments where my feelings of inadequacy were outweighed by inspiration.
  9. New friends. We met some awesome people on Sunday and Monday.
  10. Thinking about the future. My partner and I have been doing a lot of talking about our future together, and it’s really wonderful not only to have a partner I want to have a future with, but to be able to think about the future at all. There was a long time when I could barely see past tomorrow. I’m learning to dream again.
  11. Air conditioning. This is a silly one, but it’s been ridiculously humid in Chicago this week. We don’t have AC at home, but I have it at the office, and I’m grateful for the times I can spend in places where everything does not feel soggy.
  12. Comfort in my skin. This isn’t a constant, but I’ve been feeling fairly centered and okay within myself this week. I was able to go to both concerts without feeling more than momentary social anxiety, and a lot of that had to do with being comfortable being myself. I spent a lot of years stuck in self-loathing, and while I’m not my biggest fan, I’ve at least reached the point where I feel a sort of benevolent indifference toward myself, which is unbelievably better for my mental health.
  13. Fresh perspective. I’m not sure exactly how to explain this one, because it’s been a largely internal thing. Mostly, there have been tiny things happening in the past few weeks that have helped me to look at the world in new (or old but forgotten) ways, and it’s been refreshing.
  14. A (mostly) calm brain. There have been a lot of storms here in the past week. My brain tends to get really uncomfortable when the weather is shifting back and forth rapidly. I’ve felt surprisingly stable in the midst of all of it.
  15. Concrete future plans. I alluded to this in last week’s post, and now that I’ve told my family, I can announce it to all of you: at the end of September I will be filing the requisite paperwork for a court date to legally change my name. By the end of the year I will legally be Alyxander James! There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world to express how excited I am.

Five Happy Things

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

This week has been relatively drama-free (woohoo!), so I think it’s time for a positive post, don’t you?

  1. I’m finally getting away from DepressedBrain. Cyclical highs and lows are just part of life for me, but this latest low spot lasted longer than any I’d had in at least six months. While ManicBrain has its disadvantages as well, it at least comes with the feeling that I have enough energy to sometimes be a productive human being.
  2. With the extra energy, I’m finding a renewed passion to create. It’s hard to focus on any one project for any length of time, but at least I want to try.
  3. I officially have a new job title: I’ve gone from being an Administrative Aide to an IT Support Specialist, which sounds a lot more like what I’ve been doing for the past year. It also comes with more money. Yay!
  4. Over the course of the past week or so, I’ve been making a little bit of time each day to meditate. This has been really helpful and centering for me. My brain is constantly working on numerous levels, and I’m not always paying much attention to what’s going on beneath the surface. Meditation (even when it only lasts about ten minutes) is helping me to get back in touch with those deeper thought processes.
  5. Next weekend, my partner and I are taking a road trip to Minnesota. Planned highlights include seeing my nephew, going up north and getting away from the city for a day, getting a massage, and seeing Paul McCartney in concert. Admittedly, it is very hard to focus on the present with so much fun in the imminent future!

Another Week in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Sorry for the late post today, folks; it’s been a bit of a nutty week, and I kind of lost track of what day it was.

  1. New England was great. The weather was beautiful, the scenery was lovely, I bought some gorgeous local yarn, I got to eat a lobster for the first time in my life, and I checked three new states off my list of places I’ve visited. There were a few hiccups along the way (including a horrifying moment where I brushed something off my cheek only to discover that IT WAS A JUMPING SPIDER), but for the most part, it was a really nice weekend away.
  2. I’m pretty annoyed with my country right now. Yeah, tomorrow is Independence Day and patriotism abounds, but the recent SCOTUS decisions allowing corporations to deny women’s health coverage on religious grounds and overturning the abortion clinic buffer zone law in Massachusetts are beyond maddening. The Hobby Lobby case in particular is causing all sorts of problems, and is going to keep causing them: If a corporation can deny health coverage on religious grounds, it’s not a great leap to allow them to discriminate against certain groups of people in their hiring practices, either.
  3. Aside from that frustration, though, I’m getting back to a better mental place. I’m still on the low end of this Bipolar cycle, but I’m not struggling as much to focus as I was last week. I feel like I’m actually accomplishing things at work. Things feel a little less hopeless than they did two weeks ago.
  4. On Monday, there were some pretty outrageous storms in Chicago. At one point, we had an enormous flash of lightning and immediate crash of thunder directly over our building (there was a lot of jumping and swearing in our apartment, and a car alarm outside started going off, it was that loud). Our internet went out. It’s not back yet. After two calls to our ISP, it looked like the problem was the router, so I ordered a new one and had it rushed to our house. I discovered when attempting to set it up last night, however, that it’s actually the modem that’s not working: the ISP can see the modem is connected, and they can reset it, but nothing comes through on our end. It is a little embarrassing how frustrating this has been. Being limited to internet just on my phone makes me cranky, apparently.
  5. Due to an unexpected change in her plans, my best friend will now be visiting us this weekend! I am unbelievably excited. We don’t see nearly enough of this human, and in fact yesterday we were bemoaning the fact that it had been too long since the last time we hung out with her. It is rare to find a friend I can have over without feeling pressured to entertain, and I am excited for a weekend of low-pressure hangouts with one of my favorite people in all the world.

DepressedBrain in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a bit of a rough week, between the return of DepressedBrain and the fact that all the cottonwood fluff flying around Chicago has me wheezing. So I’m keeping it simple for the blog today.

  1. Everything is overwhelming. I’ve been giving myself a pretty packed schedule (particularly for the introverted homebody that I am), and while I was manic, I was handling everything fine. Now, though…I’m recognizing that this might be part of the reason I’ve been more anxious the past couple of weeks. DepressedBrain is easily overwhelmed.
  2. It’s really hard to focus. I’ve been finding myself forgetting things a lot. I’ll walk into a room and not remember why I was headed in that direction. Today I got a support request call at work, and after I took the notes and assured the caller I would take a look at it, I hung up and promptly forgot that there was something that needed looking at. Imagine my embarrassment when they called back later to ask if I’d been able to make any progress, and I had to tell them I had been sidetracked and hadn’t gotten there yet. (Thankfully, they were extremely gracious, and I was able to knuckle down and deal with the issue once I hung up from that call.)
  3. Nothing is particularly exciting. I am a passionate person. It rarely takes much to get me excited about things, and when I get excited, I am like a small child: I bounce around a lot and I don’t shut up. But my passions are often intimately tied to my mania. New things that I know I was excited about two weeks ago have lost their luster. Even things that I’ve been excited about for years aren’t doing much to raise my energy level. I feel trapped in this perpetual state of “meh.”
  4. All I want to do is sleep. This is often the case: I’ve been particularly sleepy since diving into the whole second puberty thing. But it’s harder to wake up now than it has been in a long time. I also have this sinking feeling that I should be expecting a visit from the insomnia monster sometime soon, which never helps.
  5. Everything hurts. This is a pretty common state of being for me (I have back and knee problems, and chronic pain is so normalized by my experience that I forget that not everyone deals with it), but between the dampness outside, feeble attempts at Aikido, and the fact that those “depression hurts” commercials really weren’t lying…yeah. It hasn’t been fun. (The silver lining of this is that last week I discovered the miracle that is Tiger Balm. As someone who has a rather ridiculous tolerance for things like ibuprofen or aspirin, finding something that makes my knees feel like they might not explode when I go up and down stairs is a pretty huge deal. So that’s been nice.)

Accidental Fudge Episode 32: AnxietyBrain Strikes Back

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

It’s been one of those weeks.

Being Bipolar means that my brain has multiple modes of existence. The two big ones are ManicBrain and DepressedBrain, but there are others that can manifest themselves in different ways depending on which end of a cycle I’m on. The worst of them, the one that causes days when my brain and I just don’t get along, is AnxietyBrain.

I was first diagnosed as Bipolar II five years ago. I’d been wrestling with cyclical mood changes for several years at that point, and finally having a name to attach to the thing that was happening made it all a lot easier to manage. I am medicated enough that I don’t go flying off too far to either extreme, and I have a host of coping mechanisms that work well for me about ninety percent of the time.

The other ten percent of the time, I am just barely hanging on. Nine times out of ten, this is because I’m being visited by AnxietyBrain.

This week has been full of AnxietyBrain. For the most part, it’s just been generalized, unfocused nervousness. I get a little twitchy. I feel vaguely unsettled. But then Monday rolled around, and as I was waiting for a bus and trying to talk myself into going somewhere and doing something intimidating, I nearly blacked out. In the end, I admitted defeat and went home feeling like a failure, because I’m not supposed to be the sort of person who gets so overwhelmed by such trivial things.

I wish there was some sort of descriptor for the state between generalized, low-grade worry and the sort of panic that causes a person to think they’re having a heart attack. I worry that applying the label of “panic attack” to the seemingly endless stretches of heart-pounding, trembling, dizzying time that I spend trying not to hyperventilate, trying not to let anyone else see how completely unhinged I feel is too extreme, because I never think my heart is going to stop…I just don’t know how long I can handle hearing its racing staccato before I scream. It’s probably a useless thing to worry about, but hey, that’s what AnxietyBrain is best at: taking trivial, mundane things and fixating on them in such a way that they gnaw at the fabric of sanity until the vague feelings of unease compound and snowball and turn into something monstrous.

On top of the AnxietyBrain, I think I’m heading into a bit of a down swing. My depressive episodes have been unbelievably mild and unexpectedly brief for the past seven months or so (whether this is tied to the fact that I started on testosterone around that time, I don’t know for sure). This has been nice. However, past experience has taught me not to trust that this will last, so every time I feel myself slipping down from ManicBrain in the direction of DepressedBrain, I am apprehensive. DepressedBrain has significantly less energy than its partner, and that makes it hard to keep up with life. I have a lot of activities packed into my life these days, and I am not confident that DepressedBrain has the horsepower to handle all of that. This, of course, makes the AnxietyBrain that much worse.

I’m not entirely certain what the point of this particular post is, other than to say sometimes, brains are frustrating, and no matter how much we might know, from a rational standpoint, that the current state of things will probably not last forever, it doesn’t really make what’s happening NOW any easier…and there’s always that lingering doubt. What if this is the way things are now? What if I’m stuck being an anxious ball of sad forever? It sucks.

What does help, though, is the knowledge that my life is full of extraordinary people, people who love me and will not stop loving me even if I am an anxious ball of sad forever. They will let me be anxious and sad, if that is what I need to be, but they will also comfort and cheer me, and I know that if anything or anyone has the power to get me out of a slump, it’s the incredible people I am blessed to call friends and family.

Bipolar Adventures in Transition

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

So I’m Bipolar. Specifically, I am diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder, which means I deal cyclically with highs and lows, but not quite to the extreme that someone with Bipolar I would deal with. I take an anti-depressant to help the lows from getting unbearable and a mood stabilizer to keep the highs from getting dangerous, but the meds do not erase the highs and lows completely. They’re still there; they’re just more manageable: it’s still a challenge to function during the lows, but function is possible, and it’s hard to hang onto money during the highs, but again, it’s possible.

One of my personal Bipolar quirks is that sometimes, my brain will be plodding along, and I’ll think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on — after all, I’m a pretty introspective and self-aware person. But then I’ll hit a particularly intense bout of mania, and my brain speeds up, and suddenly all of these things that were just vague notions and disconnected pieces before click together all at once into something much more concrete (and often overwhelming).

Specifically, this has a tendency to happen with thoughts related to my gender identity.

At first, I refused to trust these thoughts. After all, mania has a way of making absurd, unwise, and/or otherwise misguided ideas seem like great ones. But I’ve noticed in the past several years that there is a difference between my harebrained manic schemes and these moments of introspective epiphany.

It happened when I decided to try out the name Alyx. I was idly pondering what I would change my name to if I ever transitioned (which was a pretty big “if” at the time, as it was so impractical that I didn’t even consider it as a possibility). Alexander James was the name that immediately popped into my head, and before I knew it I found myself asking my partner if ze thought Alyx could be a reasonable nickname/derivative of my given name. I never had that period of adjustment where I didn’t always respond right away to my new name. My brain had made the shift before I even realized it was happening.

It happened when I decided to start on testosterone. I came to the conclusion that I needed to make a change before I even realized that I was really thinking about it. I held back. I waited and thought and was much more mindful about what was going on in my head, and I conferred with my partner and with friends. I didn’t trust that gut impulse that I got when everything suddenly shifted into place. But in the end, it was right.

And over this past weekend, it happened again. Once again, my identity is shifting, not in a totally different direction, but in a more focused one. My single greatest hesitation with physical transition was the fact that I am convinced that the world does not need another white man running around. It’s been hard to reconcile this with the fact that I am profoundly uncomfortable being read as a woman. I can’t get around it: I am becoming a man. Whether I identify as a man to my core doesn’t really matter: this is how the world is going to start to see me. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really do identify as solidly masculine, and that I can be a man without being a “Men’s Rights Activist”, that being a man doesn’t have to mean being oblivious to my privilege but can actually be a place from which I can (I hope) use what privilege I have to try to make other dudes aware of their privilege.

And as all of that clicked into place, I started pondering pronouns. My team at work (and a handful of other folks in the office who have caught on) refer to me with he, him and his. Friends generally refer to me using singular they, which I’ve been claiming as my preference for a couple of years now. It’s equal parts hard and terrifying and exciting, but I’m realizing that the more I hear myself called “he”, the more I like it. It’s increasingly comfortable, and while I certainly prefer “they” over “she” (and, truly, don’t mind the gender neutral variants), I’m realizing that my preferences are changing.

I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever have a truly stable identity. I’m fairly certain that the only part of my identity that’s remained consistent over the past four years is the part that claims “queer” as a label. In the past five years, I have been many things: a straight, cisgender woman; a queer, cisgender woman; a queer, genderqueer individual; and now, a queer, transmasculine dude…a trans man. My current identity doesn’t invalidate any of my previous identities. Who I am now is real; who I was then was real, too. And I think this is the hardest thing for people to grasp: it would be so much simpler if my identity was black and white, or even greyscale. But it’s not. It’s an entire fucking rainbow of nuances and experiences and even if that makes it harder to understand, I wouldn’t have it any other way.