After years of avoiding the dentist, I have finally come round to sitting in the scooped-out chair to have my pearly whites poked and prodded (and scored and drilled) back into some form of palliative health. I (like so many others) don’t like the dentist—but I do like the gas. Thus far, with the aid of the nitrous, I have had two root canals, two fillings, and some sort of all-round scraping/scaling rigmarole that I had wished to be unconscious for, but wasn’t, all in the last three weeks. Today I go for another filling, and then we get to talk about having what’s left of my wisdom teeth removed. Oh, joy. Oh, bliss.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have left so long between visits.

It doesn’t stop, you realize: the vigilance, the surveillance of your day to day, from inside your private little chamber to out—out and about—it doesn’t stop. The mood disorder is not over even though it’s suppressed. The pills, even though you take them, are not it, not the final answer. It really doesn’t stop. You continue to be bipolar. You continue to travel all the way to extremes without moving a muscle.

It’s just better. Better than it was before the pills; better than before you knew what you were grappling with, that fighting shape all elbows, knees and knobby bits in the dark; better than bending back to wrestle with it and try to hold it’s indefiniteness away. The unknown is still capable of throwing you off. What you can’t see can hurt you. What you don’t see coming can unplug your senses from the battery of life. And what you still don’t know is when; what you never will know is why.

I spent 12 weeks working on something called integrated social rhythms therapy with a psychiatrist over  a year ago, trying to map out what triggers my emotions move like mercury in a candy thermometer. Where are the stresses that take you too far? What encounters make your mind start thinking not just outside the box, but as boxes inverted, set aside and upside down? I still don’t know, exactly, though I have some vague ideas better than what I started with. Too much catabolic stimulation is bad. As is too much gregarious stress. Too much manifested excitement. Too much worry. Too much life.

Even it all out to a reliable hum, a predictable wave-pattern, and you should be okay. Get everything down to a minimum and your chances of relapse, of “episodes” are diminished.

But I still have a life I’d like to be part of. I would still like to be present where the pulse of the world beats heavily in the human throng. My days must be full of something. I don’t know how to sit everything out. It’s hard enough to be slower. You can’t ask me to stand still.

Someone I used to work a couple of years ago committed suicide at the end of the summer. He was handsome. He was fit. He was at the beginning of his life’s success. He didn’t make it for whatever reason. I didn’t know him well, but I saw the 21st century aftermath: RIP messages scrawled on his Facebook wall. Well wishes. Well passing. Well over.

I was unplugged from the battery for a few days there; just there; just now. A week or so. Maybe a little more. I was erratic, did some funny things, and then I stopped. I stopped writing. I stopped waking up. I stopped moving without some monumental herculean shifts of willpower to place one foot in front of the other. I was bad again. When it happens you don’t know how long it’s come to stay, and after the time off, after not feeling it for a while, it’s very frightening indeed. You don’t know how long you can cope, or how long your regular (tidy, incremental, superbly reasoned) existence can bear your absence—because certainly you’re not an active participant with your surroundings when it happens, the cord dangling limp, cold prongs hanging diffused in open air; and a motor barely whirring; internal cogs scarcely moving the wheel. It’s scary enough when you don’t know if you’ll ever be attatched again—that you might not make it back. I’m reasonable enough to know that these things are cyclical, and that that is part of the disorder too; but it’s exhausting; and I still feel as if I’m relearning how to live.

Depression is all the ends. Mania is too many beginnings. In the middle are all these continuities that have to be maintained, re-found and re-connected after falling off, losing track.

It’s a fucking lot of work; even with the pills.

Sometimes you want to get off.

A friend came over to watch a movie. As he has recently quit smoking (again) he brought with him packages of two-bite cupcakes and butter tarts. So we had a chat, ate manageably sized sugary snacks, and I put in a DVD.

Then my friend looked over at me and was all “Are you sleeping?”

And I was, like, “No.”

And he went, “You are totally sleeping!”

And so he left. But he left the cupcakes.

Bastard.

Restless in my skin and unmotivated to move. It’s a bit like I’m hangover; but I’m not. This may have more to do with the time change and the weather than my mental state: grey pall drawn down over the city streets, sun suddenly banished to a different hour of the clock. There’s so little day left, now. It’s harder to feel invigorated.

I also got my arm stuck with that bloody H1N1 pin last Saturday, and the vaccine knocked me flat out for a couple of days. No flu-like symptoms, just some vision-swimming light-headed exhaustion. It might be some of that still—a weakened immune system jacking up its forces to develop antibodies against a possible threat.

Any way you slice it, I’m not at my best. I missed my Halloween plans by sleeping through them.

But speaking of which, I’m sleeping better! Psychiatrist has given me yet another pill, this one to be used in conjunction with my newly adored ziprasidone. This one makes me sleep for extended period of time to wake up refreshed rather than jacked or spacey. So far so good.

I never would have imagined taking this many pills on a daily basis even just one year ago. Now I have a cupboard full of them. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own life.

Sleep is a bitter, fickle mistress: first she visits too much, then she comes too little. After all this time, she is still—ultimately—irregular. It’s amazing I put up with her at all. What I wouldn’t give for a proper bedtime and a stable stretch of slumber.

Besides that, things seem quite reasonable. Not too high, not too low; in fact, I’m plodding along at a respectable pace. If it weren’t for the two root canals I’ve had in the past week, my life would be rigidly boring; somehow instead it’s almost stable. It’s what I imagine normal people live like, day to day. How very, very odd.

Things on the agenda for the next few days:

• Write.
• Read.
• Plan next week’s class.
• Carve a Jack-o-lantern.
• Enjoy Halloween by watching scary movies and eating smoked-paprika-spiced popcorn.

That’s all.

You can tell because of the glasses.

[Via Bill In Exile.]

After a lively discussion surrounding the issue of disclosing one’s positive status to friends, family and possible sexual partners, the group was drawing to its close. Our leader spoke following a pregnant pause; we had been ruminating in silence over the last shared sentiment.

“But we all have our demons, don’t we?”

Rhetorical or not, a very clear image sprang to my mind in response: each of us standing behind a little round table,  with a large handkerchief draped over an irregular object. Then, with a flourish, everyone removing the fabric. “Voilà! Our demons!” Exposed, the vile little creatures, rendered in cartoon monstrosity, capered back and forth on the wooden surfaces with grasping little claws, mewing fangs, and rolling, red-pebble eyes.

“Why does yours have a lawnmower?”

I laughed, of course.