Okay so backstory for those of you who are new: though I’ve never been professionally diagnosed, my life experience so closely matches descriptions of what’s called “type II bipolar” that I take them as a useful guide. And spurred in part by a satisfying vacation and then the experience of successfully clearing up a pretty severe bout of choking, I had a pretty strong up period at the beginning of July that I basically liveblogged on here.

So I think I’ve completed the cycle back to down, and if I was so feverishly documenting and sharing the up period I may as well explain the rest. I think the final straw was I did something dumb and screwed something up the other night, but it was honestly something well within normal, functional human experience and I had noticed it coming on before that. And I had to scramble a bit to get by it and meet up with someone today, and usually a sense of pressure gets me going and social contact renews my batteries, but it was kind of a weary slog and while I’ll truthfully say I was glad I could have the meeting and enjoyed it, it didn’t really lift my mood.

One interesting thing is that the period in between was one of the longest and most distinct periods of not-up but not-down. One of the reasons I think “type II” matches my experience is that the up periods are very strong but ultimately not overwhelming into psychosis or delusion; another is that the counterbalance isn’t occasional equivalent jags into real despair, but a baseline that’s more depressive realism, a Daria-esque “what’s the point” anhedonia. At its worst it’s not even suicidal but insomniac not cause my mind is racing (like in up periods) but because I can’t be arsed to go to sleep, same as I can’t be arsed to do anything else.

But after like a week of really firing on all cylinders, I had a month or so still distinct from the norm, feeling more productive, more positive, better executive function for a while, but without insomnia or a racing mind or anything. In particular I noticed put more effort into pursuing romantic partners because I had a higher (but not hypersexual) libido, was more social and outgoing, estimated my own desirability higher, and was more confident in the expectation that putting myself out there would pay off.

So that’s interesting. I think I’ve dismissed the idea of treatment ‘cause this works for me, but maybe when I picture mood stabilizers I picture the baseline they’d stabilize to as the depressive realism one, but if this is what they promise…

At the same time, if I didn’t have to arrange my life in a way that accommodated both a baseline cynical distancing AND occasional bursts of hyperintensity, if I found myself finding more joy and satisfaction in the everyday and quotidian, what’s the thing that prevents me from becoming family-career-network TV go-along-to-get-along type? Part of my VERY 90s sensibility is a fear that psychopharmaceuticals just snuff out your creative spark and turn you into a boring normie.

Okay that’s the stuff that went in and out with the tides, but the shift also helped me notice what wasn’t just a function of changing moods.

For a while I had been lamenting that Portland wasn’t what it used to be, it wasn’t being kept weird, that once it seemed like everyone I met was a potential friend or lover and every “scene” was a tangential interest of mine blown up into a full-scale subculture that I could join if I wanted but no longer. But after I came back from the LA trip it felt like a switch had flipped somewhere and that was back.

That I actually expected was mostly in my head - that the things I saw made me predict positive cultural shifts coming in the next few years where I had been seeing negative ones, and I had been and was “pricing in” this expected future in my assessments of the state of things. Or I was just more upbeat, seeing things more positively, fixating more on the positive things I did see than the negative. I had noticed I had more positive feelings about particular buildings’ architecture, which I knew damn well hadn’t changed in the interim.

So I was kind of expecting that to fade when I hit a down period and to my surprise it didn’t. I can think up hypotheses about why it’s not a “real”, fundamental turnaround - it’s all about summer, it’s really just my particular neighborhood hitting that stage of gentrification where there’s starting to be interesting stuff around but the boring stuff hasn’t shown up yet, the economic boom’s gone on long enough that low-end income is finally catching up with the rising costs of Portland living but it’ll pop soon.

And for all that this new Portland is still less Cascadian, lacks that healthy-society, country-in-the-city, aggressively reasonable, organically-fucked-up-not-put-on-as-a-costume-paid-for-with-tech-salaries weird and that makes it more fragile, so. If it’s still a draw for young people it’s no longer as the place where they go “to retire” but to start careers. But the turnaround is nice.

Also I think I’ve gone up maybe one to two thirds of a point on the Kinsey scale, which is odd cause I haven’t even tried to bihack myself in decades, I don’t know if that’s part of a general disinhibition or what.