Okay so backstory for those of you who are new: though I\u2019ve never been professionally diagnosed, my life experience so closely matches descriptions of what\u2019s called \u201ctype II bipolar\u201d 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\u2019ve 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\u2019ll truthfully say I was glad I could have the meeting and enjoyed it, it didn\u2019t 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 \u201ctype II\u201d 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\u2019t occasional equivalent jags into real despair, but a baseline that\u2019s more depressive realism, a Daria-esque \u201cwhat\u2019s the point\u201d anhedonia. At its worst it\u2019s not even suicidal but insomniac not cause my mind is racing (like in up periods) but because I can\u2019t be arsed to go to sleep, same as I can\u2019t 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\u2019s interesting. I think I\u2019ve dismissed the idea of treatment \u2018cause this works for me, but maybe when I picture mood stabilizers I picture the baseline they\u2019d stabilize to as the depressive realism one, but if this is what they promise\u2026
At the same time, if I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s the stuff that went in and out with the tides, but the shift also helped me notice what wasn\u2019t just a function of changing moods.
For a while I had been lamenting that Portland wasn\u2019t what it used to be, it wasn\u2019t being kept weird, that once it seemed like everyone I met was a potential friend or lover and every \u201cscene\u201d 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 \u201cpricing in\u201d 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\u2019 architecture, which I knew damn well hadn\u2019t 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\u2019t. I can think up hypotheses about why it\u2019s not a \u201creal\u201d, fundamental turnaround - it\u2019s all about summer, it\u2019s really just my particular neighborhood hitting that stage of gentrification where there\u2019s starting to be interesting stuff around but the boring stuff hasn\u2019t shown up yet, the economic boom\u2019s gone on long enough that low-end income is finally catching up with the rising costs of Portland living but it\u2019ll 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\u2019s still a draw for young people it\u2019s no longer as the place where they go \u201cto retire\u201d but to start careers. But the turnaround is nice.
Also I think I\u2019ve gone up maybe one to two thirds of a point on the Kinsey scale, which is odd cause I haven\u2019t even tried to bihack myself in decades, I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s part of a general disinhibition or what.