I hate it when people think that a person should be “over” grieving for a lost loved one by a certain time. There is no limit on grief. It lasts as long as it lasts, and there’s no speeding it up.
In years past, women were expected to wear mourning clothing and have limited social engagements for a year after the death of their husbands. It was an attempt to codify grief. Going back to regular, if still somber, clothing (“half-mourning”), I suppose, was a way to signal that the woman was again “on the market.”
Even back then, it…
Bipolar disorder is a funny thing. Mine leaves me alone part of the time. Until it doesn’t.
I have had full-blown depressive episodes, with the sobbing and the immobility and the wretchedness and everything else associated with it. I have had one major episode that lasted for three years straight, plus everything else from minor breakdowns to that vague, lingering miasma that comes when you’re untreated and you don’t know that what is really happening to you is clinical depression.
I have also had full-blown anxiety attacks, the sort that leave you twitching all over, feeling like you’re about to…
One day, years ago, I saw a friend outside a function room in a hotel, trying to master bar chords on his guitar for a song he had been working on. I’m not sure if he got them figured out that day, but he has since mastered them thoroughly. He is now in great demand at music festivals.
Years ago, a friend of mine was studying art in high school. Many of her paintings were reproductions of record album covers. Now she teaches art, has had her paintings in gallery shows, and takes commissions for her artwork. …
The university I went to had something called “distribution requirements.” That meant that everyone had to take at least two courses that were outside their major. I was an English major, so I took History of Science in Western Civilization and Beekeeping (which turned out to be a horrible mistake).
I think Cornell had the right idea. It’s a good idea to step outside your comfort zone and expand your mind. Of course, many students side-stepped the requirement, choosing a course that most resembled their major. Science students took economics, on the theory, I guess, that they both dealt with…
I am blessed with many friends, online and off, who are as dear to me as anyone can be. We have laughed together, cried together, eaten together, danced together, sung together, joked together, mourned together, and loved together.
Now that I’m back in my cycles of depression and hypomania, hurtling around like a marble in a shoebox, I haven’t heard from any of them.
A lot of the contact I have with friends is on Facebook, and I have almost entirely stopped posting or replying, or otherwise interacting there. No one seems to have noticed. …
I’ve done so much. I should feel exhausted. I do feel exhausted. Why do I keep doing so much?
The answer, of course is hypomania, or maybe a mixed state.
I had been thoroughly depressed over my writing, as I sent out query after query to agents, and getting back rejections or the horrifying limbo of “no response means no.” I kept doing this for nearly four months, until I had apparently run out of agents to query. (I know that can’t be literally true. There are thousands of agents in New York alone, but I had been through all…
Why did the man have a hundred-dollar bill tattooed on his wing-wing?
A woman I know was telling a joke, but I lost it before she ever got to the punchline. “Wing-wing?” I fell over laughing. I knew the joke and I knew the punchline (Because he heard that women love to blow money). But what was funny to me was that she could tell a joke about oral sex, but couldn’t even say “penis.”
I asked her what she called women’s genitals. “Their tutu,” she replied. (This must have mightily confused her kids the first time they saw a…
There’s nothing funny about bipolar disorder. In fact, one of the ways that I know I’m having a spell of bipolar depression is that my sense of humor flies out the window. Nothing brings a smile or a laugh — not my husband’s awful jokes. Not my friend Tom’s silly songs. Not a funny movie like Arsenic and Old Lace.
I have been in a spell of depression for a little while now. As I mentioned last week, part of it may be reactive depression. But here’s the thing. Reactive depression feels the same as bipolar depression. You have the…
No, this isn’t going to be a post about me and my husband, although it’s true that we’re growing older (every day) and we’re still together (after nearly 40 years).
Instead, I’m going to write about growing older with my cat, Dushenka. (Dushenka, incidentally, is Russian for “Little Soul” and is used colloquially to mean “Sweetheart” or “Darling.”)
I once had a cat (Louise) who lived to be 21. That’s rather old for a cat. I had her with me since she was a kitten. While she wasn’t mine for all of my life, I was hers for all of…
I had a blog post all written and ready to go. It was about my fluctuating moods and my writing, and how they affected each other. Some of what I wrote is still true. The depression I suffered during my early years and the exceedingly depressive poetry I wrote during that time allowed me to learn something about how poetry works and something more about how depression works.
I wrote about how hypomania affects my writing, and that is still true. Hypomania pushes me to do my writing, even when I don’t feel like it. In fact, at times it…
Janet Coburn
Author of Bipolar Me and Bipolar Us, Janet Coburn is a writer, editor, and blogger at butidigress.blog and bipolarme.blog.
