It’s been a month and a day since my VISTA term started.  Today was one of the few days I’ve actually felt like I was getting things accomplished.  Maybe the upswing has started; I certainly hope so.  I really like my site and my supervisors.  My only issue has been knowing where to start and coming up with work to do.  As it turns out, I may have just found more work than I will be able to keep up with.  That’s not a bad, thing, though.

My moods have been fairly even-keel, but I’m eating everything in sight and not exercising.  I think I’ve been to the gym once this month.  That’s an expensive workout!  I’m within 5 pounds of my heaviest ever, from when I was pregnant with Sprout.  That part’s depressing but people keep looking kind of incredulous when I tell them I’m at my heaviest, so I must not look that bad.  No more wedding weight, but I do want to lose about 12 pounds or so.

This is going to sound absolutely silly…so I sleep every night with this rock that I got when I graduated from my last outpatient hospitalization.  Like somehow clinging to this rock is going to help me keep my sanity.  It’s just a run-of-the-mill worry stone.  It got washed so it’s not as smooth around the edges as it was when I first got it.  But I don’t sleep very well without it.  It reminds me of the friends I made there.

I actually got up the nerve, to ask my Dr. at my last appt. if the episodes can actually be stopped, and he said that manic episodes are much easier to treat than depression.  It’s hard to believe; my reality gets so skewed and the filters in my brain get so turned off that it’s hard to imagine a little pill doing something to help it.  So he reassured me a little bit.  He also said that he thinks I’m doing fabulously well, that it’s okay if I feel like staying in the bed some days but as long as I’m fighting it and getting up then I’m winning the battle.

It’s been very interesting over the past seven months or so to see who my real friends are and who wants nothing to do with me anymore.  And perhaps, who’s scared of me.  Maybe people think it’s catching?  Most of my social circle has disappeared.  I’m coming to be okay with that, but it’s been a very rough and lonely road.  A few folks surprised me with their disappearance.  Some, with their closed minds, not so much so.  The healthy attitude is to remember that I’m better off knowing who my true friends are, but it still hurts to know that someone wouldn’t want to associate with me just because I have an illness that can be embarrassingly public at times.  Bipolar disorder has created social nightmares in my life more than once.  Maybe it will again, I don’t know.  Maybe I need to be more careful in who I choose as friends.

I recently read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison.  It’s the first time I’ve heard of someone besides myself who gets psychotic when they’re manic.  And she’s a very successful professional, no less.  It made me feel much better about my setbacks.