Manic Pixie June Girl
Imaginary Living Room
Imagine a living room. There's a couch and a TV on the wall. On the coffee table is whatever book(s) I've been reading recently. There's whatever cold or hot beverage you want on a coaster on the table because in this imaginary living room we use coasters. It's good to see you, friend.
Today I am coming down from a long trip up Mania Mountain.
Before I really understood my bipolar diagnosis, I didn’t really think of my seemingly random periods of obsession as problematic in any way. In fact, it felt like those moments of complete devotion were the times I could do my best work. People often marvel at all the hobbies I’ve tried or things I’ve done and most of those things started with me getting so obsessed about them that I would invest a ton of time and money into the tools and books needed to learn to do the thing. A lot of times those hobbies didn’t pan out (old roommates might remember my ill-fated attempts to fix old turntables in my basement). Most of those things haven’t panned out, or haven’t lasted beyond that initial flare of interest that would pull me in for a week or a month or so. But I always figured that was just a personal failing to not maintain my interest. I assumed the issue was a lack of discipline. These feelings have always been bittersweet, but I had never considered them as somehow “disordered”.
Now, however, I feel more aware of myself when I’m on the upswing of my mood disorder. Here’s how my most recent manic episode happened. I had a depressive episode on Sunday the 16th that was triggered by just a bad vibe/feeling I had while out with friends. I spent about 8 hours in bed that day hitting the “Random Subreddit” button on Reddit on my phone before eventually going to sleep (not reading the contents of the Random Subreddit, mind you. Just rolling subreddits like a slot machine. I think my eyes were glazed over and I couldn’t actually read any of the text on screen). Literally the next day I was instantly all the way back up in my mania, I opened up my phone at 5am, saw the last random subreddit I rolled into was for Kobo E-Readers, and my brain went, “that’s it, we’re buying a Kobo today bitch” (the slot machine paid out). I went on offerUp, I found a guy in Kent who was selling a pretty nice Kobo Sage with all the fixings, I drove to Kent at 6:30am because this dude happened to be awake and willing to sell this thing to me at his kitchen linoleum and tile supplier storefront, and then I went home, got The Broken Earth trilogy on my new device, and proceeded to read all three books in the span of a single week.
It’s obviously bad to have depressive episodes. When I feel suicidal and experience urges towards self-harm, it’s obvious that I need help and that there’s something wrong. It’s fucked up to me that it’s also bad when I am feeling at my most focused and most creative and most experimental. I basically read these books through all my work days this past week and got very little actual work done (I’m not full-time because of the aforementioned intensive therapy program I’m in). I lost a ton of sleep. I have been eating a lot less in the last week because I have just been spending every waking minute obsessively reading these books. When I finished I hit up my street dealer ArchiveOfOurOwn for fanfiction of the books I just finished reading because I am sick in the head. I’m ramping up on my lithium dosage and I can’t wait to tell my psych person next week that the dosage I’m currently on did nothing to blunt my crazy brain from taking over my entire life to read these books. Which are good books! I have been wanting to read them for years! I have been wanting to read anything for years! This is the most I’ve read since maybe college?? I never finished The Fifth Season after trying to read it multiple times, even after recommending it to multiple friends many years ago! But like, I finished The Stone Sky last night at 1am and today I feel like I am waking up from a fugue state. I’ve neglected everything else in my life and now I am looking regretfully at the piles of clothes and the dusty shelves and my empty fridge and it sucks that mental illness is coloring what should be a positive experience of enjoying the process of reading a good book.
Part of me is irrationally afraid that by getting on a medication like lithium, I will lose my ability to have any creativity at all, or to have any focus at all. When I’m not manically obsessed with some new hotness I feel like I really struggle to force myself to focus on my work, my home, my space. My office is an unmitigated disaster and I am so intimidated from cleaning it that I just let it wallow in the clutter of dozens of pages of paper and random cables and plates where I ate snacks at my desk. All around me are the remnants of these fleeting obsessions and hobbies. My mania takes up so much space in my life and it bothers me so much. At least I didn’t buy the physical copies of these books this time.
Seriously, The Broken Earth Trilogy is great though. I think there’s more SFF books in my future. I’m really glad I read them even though I’m many years late to the party on them. I just hope my future endeavors into reading are more balanced.
All my love,
June