Ugh. Hear that. I had a boss that would take me aside and put me on special projects, then later come out and proclaim, “Drop everything you’re working on!” To give me a new, stupider project in front of someone he wanted to impress. Later, “Why isn’t that special project done yet?”

Baseline. I got 8+hrs sleep (and I wasn’t in bed for 20hrs to get it). I want to go outside and am not immediately worried that I’m not invisible.

ty

I also wanted to share the following:

I skimmed the stickied posts, including the common medications one. At first, I was going to post a comment about one particular med I saw on the list that absolutely kills me and my wife, but then I saw the top-voted comment sort of covered it.

Trazadone. This med is awful for me. I’ve been given it three times as a sleep aid. Nope. It’s more of a chemical torture instead. It makes me tired. So tired I beg for sleep. But I am also restless and my thoughts are racing. I will crawl into bed, barely able to stand, dizzy and groggy. But once I am in bed and try to sleep, I just can’t stop moving or thinking. I can’t even be sure if I am really moving, but the entire time I am dosed with Trazadone, I am incapable of sleep.

Temazepam 15mg is what works for me. I still only get about 4hrs of sleep, but I can at least sleep.

I hear about Trazadone being used a lot in a hospital setting, and the feedback from nursing staff is that it is very unreliable and patients seem more agitated on it than not, but it keeps being prescribed as a sleep aid. Maybe my experience is really rare, but I suspect it isn’t.

I already forgot where I got this, but… Yeah.

Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals, because you will end up talking for longer than you had hoped, hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even what she’s planted in her spring garden and then lost with the early frost.

And be sure to use AI when planning that next camping trip, the last one you will take with this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail, because you might end up texting back and forth for the rest of the day or even meeting up late for a beer and hearing how he has ended each recent night black-out drunk, or perhaps you’ll hear how his cousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe just that he repaired his own washing machine and is pretty damn proud of that.

And be sure to use AI when your next child gets married, so that you can write them the perfect toast or poem or speech or song because no one wants to hear your words, the actual poorly written words of a parent (you) who changed hundreds of diapers for said child or fed them in the middle of the night from your actual body. Or cried when they were late home because you were positive they were dead. We don’t want those words—we’d prefer the sterile words of a machine that never lived, never had an original thought, never felt the pain of miscarriage or broken relationships or the joy of a friendship restored or of seeing spring’s first robin dancing on frost.

And be sure to use AI when working on your next book or essay or piece of art or photography, and then smile or even laugh at your own cleverness when you see how good it is, and how easy, because who the hell has time to work at something, to give time to craft, to create with their own minds, to spend years being mediocre. Why do that when mastery, or at least competency is so simple only a good prompt away?

How magnificent the funeral song our children or contemporaries will write for us, a song they will make by taking our obituary and Facebook posts, plus random quotes from our algorithm, and feeding them into Chat or Gemini or Claude. The tears that will fall in the face of such sanitary sweetness!

Be sure to use AI

and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest, my arm falling asleep because I dare not move lest I scare away this moment, lying here melancholy about my older children moving out and my middle children no longer needing me, at least not like they used to, weary about this body that fails me now in ever increasing ways that will never be restored. Sighing over stories I tried to write but never hit the page the way they felt in my mind.

But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend, the natural order of things?

the longing for something that could always be a bit better

or the way that anything worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful, especially at first

or hearing another human voice and somehow realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these subtle imperfections

The more I talk to my wife, the more things she remembers that point to me having bipolar. It’s surreal that I am not aware of most of this stuff. Not just like, “Oh, yeah. I remember that. That does seem like a hypo episode.” More like, “What? I was just feeling creative and I didn’t want to sleep for that week in case I lost that feeling… oh, now that I say it out loud…”

Thing is, for the past decade, I’ve related to bipolar as the partner of my wife, who has bipolar 1. I look for signs in her, and I collect things that cheer her up or bring her to reality (I have some interesting stories on this topic, but not fitting for this post). In short, I work hard to be her most dependable support system, as a matter of survival. I don’t know how to look for the signs in myself yet.

Thank you for your reply! Wall of text incoming!

I can’t imagine I would ever even get diagnosed without my wife’s insistence. We are really good for each other, and that’s simply one of the ways she’s really good for me. She is also the one who prodded me to go get my ADHD dx. We had been together about a month, and we were driving to a park with my son. I was telling a story, and I kept getting sidetracked by details. You know, like I would mention something, then think I have to explain it or give back story before moving on. So it took me like… twenty minutes to tell a one minute story. She said something like, “You’ve just hit the seventh level of inception on your story, honey.” Other times, we would be talking and I caught a funny expression on her face, like she was scared or overwhelmed. “What’s wrong? Why do you look like that?” … “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble keeping up with your pressured speech and racing thoughts. I think you might have ADHD. That is if you don’t have bipolar.” I got dx’d about a month later.

So back in 2017, she was aware that I exhibited signs of Bipolar. She also pointed out then that my sister likely has it, and my father (who she only met last June) almost certainly has it, based on conversations with my mother, so it could be familial for me. I think I remember stories of my father’s grandmother being kind of moody and unpredictable, but I never met her. In my wife’s family, her mom has depression, and all the girls in her generation (or family tree branch) have it. Five of them. Their grandmother and her sister had it too, though I think they didn’t call it Bipolar then if it was even fully-diagnosed.

The thing is, I just figured she had confirmation bias. Maybe I’m not using that term correctly, but I thought that maybe she just wanted to see these things so we had more in common, as silly as that sounds now. It wasn’t until my recent mixed episode that lasted a little over a week that I began to accept that I may have a mood dysregulation disorder and impulse control issues. Especially, the symptoms seem to be worsening not that I am treating my depression with Bupropion for the past year and a half.

I still may not have Bipolar, but after going through my mood journal* that covers the past 19 months, and listening objectively to my wife telling her side of the story, I am starting to believe it – even accept it. I put together a document that I’ll bring with me to the doctor. In it, I document everything I can remember from my recent episode. Things like how long I was awake without sleep, things I was doing with my time, and how I felt about it. I also listed some instances of functional impairment, impulsivity, etc. I sometimes have difficulty verbalizing complex emotions, so I have to focus more on what my body was doing instead. I shared the document with my wife and she thinks the doctor is going to love it. I know that ADHD symptoms are sometimes mistaken for bipolar symptoms, so I’ll leave the differential diagnosis to my doctor. The thing I want to hear most from my doctor is something like, “Yes. What you are experiencing is real. It has been studied. We have a framework for it.”

As for meds, like you, my wife also takes Lamictal, and she swears by it. She was on lots of others before she got here. She and I (before I considered I may also have bipolar) used to lurk the reddit bpso sub, and almost weekly, there would be a non-SO there talking about not needing meds, all while exhibiting delusions of grandeur, paranoia and psychosis. She was like, “Yeah, when I was young I thought maybe I didn’t need the meds, too. But you take them so you can stay out of the hospital, keep money in your bank account and your friends stay friends.” She has also mentioned the degenerative nature often. She worries she will leave me caring for her when she “loses it.” That is just to say, she doesn’t miss a dose, ever. I am a little scared to try lamictal and seroquel or anything like them, just because of fear of the unknown, and worrying that it may “change who I am,” but, I think I need a change. I also don’t know if my doctor will want to treat many symptoms at once or begin meds one by one. I wonder if I will get something for my anxiety, and also a mood stabilizer possibly with anti-psychotics. I guess I 'll see. One thing is for sure: I won’t be doing 90-day intervals of tele-health for the next year or so. I have a feeling my doctor will want me in the office every month.

Ha! I replied to your comment only after skimming it, and now I see that you mentioned how it runs in families. I have seen evidence to support this too. I think three out of four of my immediate family have it (counting me), and nine in my wife’s family.

I’ll close by saying that I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. One doctor somewhat ruled out bipolar when I went in for my ADHD consult in 2017, but now I think I may recognize more signs than before. Even if I don’t end up with a “label” of Bipolar Spectrum Disorder, I am confident that my doctor will still treat my symptoms. It’s a spectrum, after all.

Thanks for letting me expound.

*I journal my medications, moods, outside influences like news and social media, motivation levels, meditation, sleep hours and restfulness, etc., and I also keep a written “free” journal for my thoughts.

Final disorganized thought on meds: I am worried to have to take multipl medications that I should never miss a dose of when pharmacies can be so adversarial. I know that Lamictal especially is one that you cannot go off cold. That’s all. Take care.

Thx

I’m not into sports. Now I wonder if I was supposed to write it as 7-0.

Thanks. She really likes that we have so much in common. I guess I do too.

Thx! She’s the best. We are good for each other. She tells me that before me, her psychotic episodes would require hospitalization. Now, I’m 7-7 talking her back to reality. We know it may not always be like that, but for now, we like that I get to be her “magic man” who brings her out of psychosis in seconds. I think we’ll keep one another.

Ty for your comment. ❤️ I’m hoping my wife’s experience can help, but yes, our doctor is good. My wife found her cocktail of meds within three years of her DX, so about 2003. She said many doctors had her in various things that didn’t help her, and some also refused certain meds because of her past dependency on opioids. This doctor listens and works through treatments in a very collaborative way.

I just hope it’s easy for me. I have two cousins with Bipolar and they don’t treat because they don’t like the meds. I don’t see treatment as optional though, so I’ll slog through it if needed.

Oh, shit! My bad. In my sleepy mind, it looked hopeful.

My family (but not my wife; she rocks) tells me that I need to want to be better. I need to choose to be happy and want to not be anxious. See? Its just my own fault I have mental illness. The meds are just a crutch, and until I decide to find my willpower and pull myself up by my bootstraps, I’ll never be “cured.”

No wonder it took me this long to accept who I am. They think the goal is to be med-free someday, and that if I rely on the meds, I’ll never “want” to be “cured,” so I’ll just keep taking “a pill” to feel better.

Eta: “Stop making yourself depressed. You have so much to be happy about!”

I’m not qualified to give advice or interpret meaning of words exchanged, but I’m pleased to see that you went on the ‘date’. Feels good, right?

Fair. It’s still weird to me. Not unusual.

Never thought I’d see a day when news outlets reported on tweets.

And there is no cost at all, ever, for this “assistant” that has full access to every aspect of our life. Free and without consequences forever!

Ironfox with noscript

We are friends in another life. Ty.