Writing through tears.

Dear Reader,

I'm clawing my way up out of a depressive episode. It's been brutal for the last month. I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I hit the bottom of this low. I was laying in bed last Thursday night, wanting to cry but just not having the energy to do it. As I was there, Beloved was reminding me how I wasn't a failure, a disappointment, or a bad human being. I lay there thinking, "Wow, I am really depressed." I didn't feel much shock through the numbness of the depression.

But, I laid there in bed thinking about how much I wanted to write. And how hard it had been to write because the imposter syndrome had me around the throat. Because when I get into delusional thinking due to depression, I have delusions of being not good enough for anything. It's pretty rough. And finding the dividing line between imposter syndrome and mental illness is really tricky.

Now that I am coming up out of that morass of misery, I can recognize imposter syndrome a mile off. It's that annoying thing that nips at my ankles daily telling me I'm not qualified to do any of this stuff. It's a daily irritation that wears me down just as much as a couple of kids who're having a bad day does. Can I work through it? Yeah. It's not fun, but I can force it aside and work.

Depression, that's a whole other ball of wax. That sucks the creative energy out of my head and spins it up into nightmares, waking existential horror, and endless worry. It is really hard to reclaim your creative energy when you've spent it all on other things decidedly more unpleasant due to malfunctioning brain chemistry.

Depression is one of my limits. It is a brick wall that I can't force my way through. I just have to wait and do the mental yoga of journal writing until it decides to go away.

On the flip side, there's hypomania. I can write about a book in a week when I'm hypomanic and I don't have distractions. The problem is, I have the attention span of a squirrel on a metric ton of coffee and that squirrel outside the window will be a distraction. Except for organizing things. Hypomania makes me super organized. I get so organized that I clean and stuff. I put EVERYTHING away.

The problem is, when I come down out of hypomania, I don't remember where it is. It's nice to have a spotless kitchen. It's tough when you can't find the measuring spoons or the ingredient you need to measure to make dinner. I'm currently moving towards hypomania. That means you'll see more posts soon. Some of it may be a bit weird. Life with bipolar it weird with bouts of normalcy.