The cyclothymia collective

I forgot all about you. Well, not entirely, but I have had no interest in posting. I've gone from the Mixed State of ten days ago to a subdued, but anxious and tired, BLAH. I cling to the present and can't think of the past. The recent past was painful. While I no longer feel shame at having lost control (diagnosis helped this tremendously) I feel it is best not to look back but to concentrate on the present, which I can handle, and a tiny bit of the future.

I am fortunate to have a job that I am able to do (editing) not matter what my state. When I am hypomanic it can be a bit tedious, but when I am like this, it is my life preserver. The mechanical checking of each sentence for accuracy and meaning, and the information enclosed in each one, is calming, and reassuring. After I completed the final draft of the manuscript of an academic journal I have been editing for 8 years and was delivering it to my boss, however, my general level of anxiety turned into a slight and constant feeling of panic...when I had no reason to feel so. My work is solid. My boss (a woman) loves me, we are a good team. It may have been that after having focused intensely to finish the draft, I set off a bit of hypomania, which ramped up the anxiety.

I am also editing the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). This has been interesting on a few different levels. This was my first NaNoWriMo attempt, and I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. I hadn't written any fiction in about 25 years. I could never finish anything. I credit Lithium entirely for making creativity possible for me. I had no idea how it would go, but it really flowed and I found the 1663 word daily minimum to be easy to reach. I was not clearly hypomanic during that time. I had been planning to write about a cholera epidemic in Istanbul in the 19th century, but a huge pile of work arrived the last week of October and I considered not doing it at all. Then my daughter said, "Write Harry Potter fan fiction!" and that seemed like comforting escapism,so I wrote about the HP world, but set in a school in Istanbul.

So now I am revising. This was fun while I was in a Mixed State-- I think I liked the escapism of it-- but now I feel it's tedious, which is a shame since my characters deserve better.

This is an account of how my attention ebbs and flows with my mood swings. As I said above, Lithium has made it possible for me to do this. Just the fact that I am editing my own work-- I have never been able to do that (besides web writing) because I was never able to finish anything. It is great fun, tweaking the sentences, adding nuance. I now see what writing is, where the craftsmanship comes in. Before, I thought writing was about riding the hypomanic beast, waiting for "inspiration" to guide me. The process was mysterious and...well, I produced nothing. Now it seems I can write when I like, with only small ups and downs. It's very exciting. Editing the manuscript is engrossing, not in the way the writing was, but in the process of fixing holes in logic and trying to give life to the dialogues.

Next year I want to write something all my own. When I tell people I wrote a novel, they go "Oooooh, wonderful!" and when I explain that it is HP fan fiction, the go blank. I'm taking notes on the epidemic (actually my MA thesis was about contagious diseases in the 19th century Ottoman Empire).

So, you see, I am fine, just turned inwards. At this point in the game, maintaining my friendships is very difficult because I don't think of my friends at all, or if I do, it is with anxiety, worrying that I have ignored them for too long, worrying that I am not attentive enough, which makes me feel like throwing in the towel on everything. I feel the same way about blogging.
Right now I am debating whether I should go riding. I agreed with a friend to take our horses out into the hills for a couple of hours today, but I am feeling so indifferent, which shows my state of mind because I LOVE riding outdoors. Maybe the air would do me good. My anti-social impulses never involves animals. Unless it is my Siamese cat trying to climb into my shirt while I am trying to type. We've started leaving the heat off except for the evenings, so she she views me as the next available heating system.