This shirt may be the best part of my day

When your damn hip injury seems to be creeping up into your lower back so you still can't run and it's a cool overcast day which is your favorite running weather but it's still your favorite weather for anything and your candidate won the Democratic gubernatorial primary last night and you found a totally cool stretch-cotton batik-print paisley polo this morning that you'd forgotten you had and your car is so totally clean and free of clutter that you can actually take a wide-view selfie to show off the back seat and even though you're a little bit bipolar-foggy today you're still functional enough to write a staggeringly long run-on sentence that technically has neither a subject nor a predicate but you're a writer and you can get away with such brazen linguistic abominationness plus you make up words with shameless abandon plus you end blog posts with needless prepositions at.

Why is the hold music at my psychiatrist’s office playing “Send in the Clowns”?

 Making my entrance again with my usual flair ...

Well, shit

When you get home from an amazingly awesome vacation and you set down your painstakingly-filled-by-your-mother container of bipolar meds divided into an entire week of morning and evening handfuls of pills and it slips and lands face-down on the carpet and pops open and basically her worst nightmare explodes right before your eyes ...

I seem to be having a bit of a bipolar depressive episode today

I’m functional enough that I’m at work, but I’m dysfunctional enough that I. CAN’T. FUCKING. SIT. STILL. Being bipolar is weird.

Plus my boyfriend won’t even talk to me.

I just had my six-week checkup

(I'm still crazypants biploar but things continue to be stable and we're not altering my meds this time, thanks for asking) and when my psychiatrist met me in the waiting room she asked me if it was OK if a residency doctor observed my visit and of course I said yes because I'm clearly not a hide-my-crazypants-biploarness person and when we got to her office and she opened the door and he was politely standing there waiting to shake hands and introduce himself OH MY GOD HE WAS TALL AND HANDSOME AND LET'S NOT MINCE WORDS HERE HOT HOT HOT and we sat down for my visit but I kept looking over at his let's still not mince words here sexy forearms because that's all I could see besides his face because he rudely wasn't wearing a Speedo and WHY ARE YOU SO HOT STOP DISTRACTING ME and we talked about all the usual stuff like my moods and my appetite and my feelings of control and my ability to concen OH MY GOD I CAN'T CONCENTRATE BECAUSE JUST LOOK AT HIM HE'S TOO HOT TO WALK THIS EARTH trate and any side effects of my meds (still lingering exhaustion, but thankfully it's not 24 hours a day like it has been) and is there anything else I think would be relevant to tell her WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO ME HAVE YOU EVEN NOTICED THE LET'S AGAIN NOT MINCE WORDS HERE HOT HOT HOT MAN WHO'S ABOUT TO BE A DOCTOR AND I THINK WE CAN ALL AGREE IT WOULD BE A VERY GOOD THING FOR ME TO MARRY A DOCTOR AND HE'S SITTING IN THAT CHAIR RIGHT THERE SO CLOSE I COULD STARE AT HIM FOR HOURS WHOOPS I JUST DID and I said that I've actually ramped up the activities in my life like Follies rehearsals and editing a massive book pro bono and making my bedroom renovation finally really start to happen and cleaning out the storage room in our basement AND WHY WHY WHY DOES THIS INSANELY HANDSOME MAN HAVE TO KNOW I'M CRAZYPANTS BIPOLAR PLUS NOW HAVE A DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP WITH ME BECAUSE THAT PRETTY MUCH GUARANTEES THAT'S THE ONLY KIND OF RELATIONSHIP WE'LL EVER HAVE BUT HOLY SHIT WE'D LOOK HANDSOME IN OUR WEDDING PHOTOS and she gave me some more free samples of my really expensive medication and we scheduled my next six-week visit AND FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS GOOD AND HOLY MAKE SURE HE'S STILL RESIDENTING WITH YOU WHEN I GET BACK IN SIX WEEKS and I think we had a really productive visit.

I’ve had a couple am/pm mixups in the fistfuls of bipolar meds I choke down twice a day

Mom has now ever-so-subtly tried to fix my absent-mindedness:

Mom keeps a pencil on my box of meds

I take the pencil off after I've choked down my fistful of pills every morning and every night so if she's not there she'll know I've taken them. Then she puts the pencil back to remind me to take my next fistful 12 hours later. So I get a dose of love with my pills twice a day.

Mom can be smart that way.

I've had another bipolar depressive episode

Another [STRING OF BLISTERING EXPLETIVES] bipolar depressive episode. It was bad enough to make me miss work and stay in bed all morning. That's two in six days. Usually they're more than a month apart. Usually I can fight my way through more than half of them.

Usually I come out of them with a hopeful attitude that each one makes me stronger and teaches me how to better manage the next one.

Two episodes in six days. I know intellectually that things like this can happen when the dosages of my meds get changed. But emotionally I feel so defeated. And scared that I'll lose control like I did three years ago.

I'm not always brave about this. Not right now.

New magnetic poles

I tell myself I always know when a bipolar depressive episode is hitting me. I get achingly tired, but I also get TIRED. Despondent. Hoarse. Blurry. I can feel myself teetering off the precipice, but once I gauge the velocity of the free-fall, I know whether I can at least fight it or if I just have to give in, hide under the pillows and wait out the drenching storm. But at least I KNOW.

This morning I woke up profoundly exhausted. So I did my usual things that help pull me out of a rough morning fog: talk to my parents, eat something sweet, play on Facebook, start the momentum of my day by getting dressed for the gym and packing up my clothes for work. But ... nothing. I didn't feel like I was depressed, but I just couldn't un-tired myself.

My doctors have been making minute changes to the dosages of my psych meds since early summer (and if you've never had a cut-up fourth of a tiny, chalky little pill completely short-circuit your brain, you look like you're frolicking in the warm sunshine from the foggy window I've been peering through off and on for the last few months) and I've had plenty of exhausted mornings because of it. Again, in those instances either I've tried to push through and wander about the motions of my day or turn off the lights and hope I can sleep without the bipolar-attendant nightmares.

Today I gave in. I emailed my boss, I set my alarm for noon on the off chance all I needed was a half day of sleep and curled up in a ball. I could tell I was on the upswing when my alarm saved me from the amorphous demons prowling around in my dreams, but -- as is becoming the new pattern -- I couldn't gauge when or even how I was going to arrive back at normal. I just didn't KNOW.

Depression is not sadness. It's not a lack of happiness. The verbs choose and decide and control don't have anything to do with making it happen or making it go away. Depression is misfiring synapses and out-of-code wiring and we're still learning what else that cause fog and blur and despondency and sandbags and wet wool blankets wrapped around our heads and emotive responses that are completely unrelated to and sometimes completely inappropriate for the situations and environments and world around us. It's stupid. It's destructive. It's embarrassing. It's time-wasting and pain-causing and life-destroying.

It's exhausting. I'm exhausted. I'm STILL exhausted.

And the compass I've been using to steer my ship out of my exhaustion is suddenly fixed to new magnetic poles. And I don't know where they are. I can search for them only when I'm having a depressive episode, and I haven't located them yet. I. Just. Can't. Find. Them.

My life is pretty awesome right now. I'm surrounded by family and friends who love and support me. I have a job I love working for an understanding boss and a company I respect. I'm taking on writing projects that are big and small and fun and high-profile and just-because and I'm relishing every word of them. I'm not just doing tons of really awesome theater, but I also finally feel confident that I'm actually contributing to what's making it good. The city I grew up in and just came back to and will always love is rising from the destruction of a catastrophic flood to experience a full-on renaissance in everything from architecture to culture to public amenities to recreation to community redevelopment, and I love taking small detours and out-of-the-way routes and the time to stop and take pictures just so I can try to see and learn about it all. Plus I keep getting told I don't look anywhere near my age. Which when you're my age is HUGE.

Like all bipolar depressives past, present and hopefully not much longer into the future, I tell myself that I won't let my depression control me, that I won't allow it to interfere with my life, that I'm better and stronger and more willful than it is, that I'll never let it win. And through pharmaceutical powers whose lingering uncertainties and dartboard guesswork sometimes feel almost Medieval, through a potent mix of hope and willpower and sometimes desperation, through the immeasurably therapeutic benefits of broadcasting all my battles on social media and my blog, through the light that eventually pierces the fog to remind me about the wondrous life that awaits me when I get back to my normal—and especially through the tireless and certifiably saintly effort and devotion and support of my mom and the rest of my family—I've learned and I'm going to keep re-learning as the poles change how to manage this ... if not beat it.

After years and years of bipolar episodes that left me hidden in my bed, I still always feel guilty when I miss a day of work because of one. But it happens. And it's going to keep happening. And it happened today. Even though as of this writing the fog has cleared enough for me to write ten (and counting!) paragraphs about it, I'm still not sure what exactly happened today or where it falls on the exhaustion-depression continuum or what I was able to learn from it that I can use when the time comes to fight my way out of or give in to or maybe just try to manage the next episode.

But I have that awesome life to live. And I have that wonderful, fun, creative, educational job to go to. And I have lines to learn and music to memorize and tap classes to take and show tunes to listen to. And I have people counting on me. And I want to be there for them, for whatever it is they're counting on me for. So even though I'm still foggy and still trying to suss out a viable coping mechanism from today's episode, I'm up and moving and participating as hard as I can so I don't miss a moment of anything.

And this one-sentence closing paragraph takes the count to twelve.

Carpe diem

I was supposed to leave this morning for my annual summer vacation to visit friends in D.C. and stay at their best-porch-on-the-planet beach house in Rehoboth, DE, but I had to cancel a few weeks ago due to work issues. A lot of cool things have popped up on my calendar here in Cedar Rapids this weekend though, so I'm more or less OK with missing my trip.

But I still missed work this morning thanks to a rough descent into a bipolar depressive episode that started last night. I talk a lot about being bipolar, and every time I think I should stop someone messages me out of the blue to thank me for being so open and honest about it. Enough people have confided in me the stories of their struggles with mental illness that I sometimes worry I won't remember everyone in my mental checklist of kindred, struggling spirits. I've developed close, supportive friendships with a lot of these people though, and our check-ins and conversations and even drives across town just to give hugs are so dear and so valuable to me that I'll probably never stop talking about my own struggles.

So here's this morning's report: I woke up at 6:00 in a motivational black hole with a fiery headache and enough disorientation that I knew enough to skip the gym—which is huge because some days working out is the only thing that keeps me human—and to let my boss know that I'd come in after lunch, if at all today. Then I went back to the kind of non-sleep that feels like you're staying awake getting more and more exhausted compounded by the stress of feeling worried about getting more and more exhausted. But when I woke up around 11:00 my head was clear enough that I could look at the episode objectively and summon the coping and pushing-through skills I've learned over the last decade and I showered and ate and made it to work, where I've been surprisingly productive ... albeit profoundly exhausted.

So to all the people I know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the people I don't know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the rest of you curious enough about my struggles today to have read this far: You will fight this battle all your life. You will get meds that don't work, you will get meds that actually make things worse and you will find meds that you'll notice start to make improvements ... though you'll spend ages waiting cynically for them to fail you. In the mean time, learn what helps you stabilize yourself and what helps you push your way out of the wet wool blankets and the rolling fogs that trap you. As soon as I felt coherent this morning, I texted one friend who right now is in a bottomless depressive episode so we could both not feel alone in our struggles and I texted another friend who as far as I know is not having an episode just so I'd know that someone who deeply understands what I'm going through is at the very least thinking about me. And then I picked out a shirt that says Carpe Diem on it and I know that it's totally goofy bordering on stupid, but if I'm wearing a shirt that means something to me on a certain day or in a certain situation, I feel compelled to go out in the world and show it to everybody.

And after what my head put me through this morning, I need everyone to know—no, I need to SHOW everyone—that I'm seizing the hell out of the rest of my today.

In which I am a damn drama queen

I woke up in a mild bipolar crash that was still bad enough that it gave me a powerful headache and what felt like a fever. I decided to skip the gym to sleep so now I feel fat. Then I decided to take the morning off to sleep so now I feel guilty for missing work. Then I got a raspberry seed wedged in my teeth when I finally ate something. Then I somehow nicked the top of my ear while shaving the side of my face. Because WHO DOES THAT? Now I'm at work and I'm groggy but functional and here's a funny cat picture.

I hate it when the bottom drops out

and I have a sudden-onset bipolar depressive episode that abruptly shuts down my night and robs me of the opportunity to spend time with my friends and cast members.

I hate it that I sat immobilized in my car for 30 minutes tonight before I was able to summon the presence of mind to drive home.

I hate it that I keep getting crushes on straight guys.

I hate it that the arrogance and corruption and immaturity and willful ignorance and daily manifestations of ineptitude coming from trump and his vile, insular orbit are so pervasive and so ubiquitous and now so normalized that we all just roll our eyes after each bombshell and wait a day for the next bombshell, which somehow STILL doesn't land them all in prison.

I hate that I'll read this in the morning and be embarrassed that I posted it. But it's what's in my head, it's why I'm sitting at home in the dark right now instead of enjoying a late cast party, and it's my free therapy. And somehow I feel less bottled up and alone when I dump my thoughts and troubles out in the universe so I can sleep.

Good night.

Darkness and peace

I'm sitting in the half-dark watching and listening to my mom as she struggles to find a peaceful, restful balance between gasp-inducing pain and the loopy uncertainties of prescription pain medication 36 hours after undergoing shoulder surgery. She was told she'll probably need to sleep in a recliner for 6-8 weeks as she recovers, so she's now wrapped in an almost structural configuration of blankets and pillows arranged to keep her comfortable and stabilized and not too hot and not too cold on a borrowed electric recliner in our living room as I sleep on the nearby couch with a three-hour alarm set in perpetuity on my phone to ensure I give her her pain medications consistently on time.

This woman spearheaded a full-family battle for my health and my very sanity for years as my escalating bipolar depression clashed with a literally bewildering array of ramp-up and withdrawal side effects from increasingly desperate attempts to find the right cocktail of psych medications for me. My parents have helplessly watched me twitch and yell in my sleep, crawl like a blinded animal up the stairs from a drug-onset migraine, lie gray and unmoving in a hell of despondency in my bed, land in the ER after a blackout and a crash to the floor that was so catastrophic that the nurses assumed I was the victim of a violent assault, and stare emptily but gratefully back at them as they admitted me to a locked psych ward for what ended up being an eight-day stay. They've fought for me, they've stood by me, they've repatriated me ... and now it's my turn to start paying them back.

Mom seemed to be doing remarkably well in the first 24 hours after her surgery, but then the last of the nerve block wore off and waves of breathtaking pain started surging through her reawakened nerve channels, and we've watched helplessly as she's whimpered and cried and tried to keep a brave face through her pain and confusion and unsure self-awareness. But she knows she's loved and being cared for and watched over with the attentiveness she's given my whole family over the years. And she seems to be sleeping comfortably and productively at the moment.

I should be asleep right now too. The couch is all made up next to me and it's quite comfortable; this I know from endless days into nights into days that I spent on it as I fought my way back to sanity while sleeping as close to my parents as I could if I needed anything. But I'm rather enjoying sitting here with her in the dark, post-midnight quiet. The war-zone explosions of fireworks that kept alarming her and waking her up a few hours ago have died down, I just woke her to give her her midnight pain meds and a popsicle, she seems to finally be sleeping comfortably and restfully ... and her partial helplessness and need for me have me thinking that there will soon be more medical problems and more nights like this for both my parents ... until they simply won't have any more medical problems ever again. And I want to remember and savor these moments where I can care for and love them the way they have done for me.

When I got out of the hospital two and a half years ago and spent the next two years fighting to regain my own sense of normal, it became clear that I was going to spend this newest chapter of my life under their care. In return, I've promised them that I'll do everything in my power to keep them in their—our—home as long as I can as they get older. Because I can't imagine taking care of them any other way.

So here I sit. Watching the mother who showed me without fear or reservation how to love me and all my psychoses unconditionally as she suffers through what by all accounts will be a painful but successful healing process. But it is undeniably a harbinger of the future in our home. Which is scary in the abstract. But right now it's a present and a future managed with love and commitment and a deep, profound honor that I am able—in no small part from the lessons and examples my parents have provided for me all throughout their selfless lives—to care for them in the way they cared for me.

And it's all very peaceful.

So when there's suddenly a handsome new pharmacist at the drive-through

and he sees your tattoo and asks you tons and tons and tons of questions about it even though there's a HUGE line of cars waiting behind you and then he makes what you hope is more-than-just-chatty small talk as he rings up your four prescriptions and then he proceeds to ask you the perfunctory questions about each prescription that you and he both know only get asked when your dosages change which you and he both know they haven't and as he finally puts the bags of your meds in that little drawer that slides out to your car he brings up the tattoo again and you look and he doesn't have a ring but he does have a pretty spectacular smile and wow does he have a cheerful buoyant personality and you think if he just trimmed his beard a little he'd look great in the wedding pictures and he clearly already has all the information he needs to figure out you're bipolar so he'd know what he's getting into and then you're both totally out of things to say short of one of you awkwardly blurting out an invitation to dinner so you have to drive away and you have no reason to hopefully see him for another month, would you go get back in line for the drive-through and throw caution and possibly even dignity to the wind and awkwardly blurt out that invitation to dinner? Because I sat in my car in the parking lot for a while seriously thinking about it.

But instead I came home and took a shamelessly flexy selfie of the tattoo that started the conversation that got me all aflutter because I don't know why because I didn't know what to do. Sigh.

Timber!

75 days ago, just hours into starting a new bipolar med, I stood up, blacked out, fell Timber! onto the tile floor (which I cracked with my face because GO BIG OR GO HOME), shredded my face on my shattered glasses, bit most of the way through my lip, loosened some teeth, got a concussion, landed in the ER, came home covered in stitches and glue and filled eyeballs-to-spine with a not-for-amateurs headache, and still found a way to take time out of my busy schedule to take a selfie.

Fast-forward 75 days to today, where I still have scars on my cheek and under my eyebrow and the right side of my upper lip is still so thick with scar tissue that I have a hard time drinking without drooling. And I clearly still need to get in the regular habit of shaving my neck. But I'd do it all over again instead of putting myself through the last hour I spent trying to find a way to put these two photos side by side with reasonably matching head sizes for a single before-and-after image. After googling and clicking and uploading and downloading and iPhotoing with absolutely zero success, I finally just opened the pix side by side in Finder and took a picture of my screen. I might as well have just drawn it all with ox blood and soot on a cave wall.

Ironically, that new black-out-go-boom bipolar drug seems to be the magic bullet I've been looking for since forever; after the requisite miserable ramp-up period, I've had over a month of overwhelmingly good days. Minus a few blips here or there. And that hasn't happened in probably four years. So if you're so inclined, raise a glass and yell Timber! in my scab-reduced honor today. I'm going to the gym. Because for the first month in many years, I'm able to do so. 

Timber!

I have a preexisting condition. Rick Santorum doesn't care.

Scamming?

I'm bipolar depressive, and I've been bipolar depressive since long before I was finally diagnosed as such seven years ago. So I definitely, unquestionably have a preexisting condition. And when I learned years ago that because of this I was de facto uninsurable if I lost my job, it terrified me.

And then I lost my job.

Scamming? Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I can get insurance despite my preexisting condition. My insurance is not subsidized through the ACA marketplace; I pay the hundreds and hundreds of dollars in monthly premiums, the thousand-plus-dollar deductible and the chokingly high co-pays entirely with my own money. I'm on four medications that cost over $1,000 a month. I see a psychiatrist once a month to regulate my meds. I see a kidney specialist every few months to monitor the potentially fatal side effects of my meds.

Scamming? Despite your 9-months-of-payments accusations, Rick, I am faithfully making a full 12 months of payments for a full 12 months of coverage. I SPEND ALMOST HALF MY SALARY FOR COVERAGE ON THE COMBINED ELEMENTS OF MY MEDICAL CARE, WHICH WOULD PROMPTLY BANKRUPT ME AND THEN FORCE TAXPAYERS TO PAY FOR MY EXORBITANT MEDICAL EXPENSES IF YOUR CONGRESSIONAL ILK REPEALED THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT FOR NO QUANTIFIABLE-AS-OF-YET REASON BEYOND YOUR PARTISAN GRANDSTANDING.

And YOU accuse ME of scamming the system—without a shred of evidence to support your lies, no less. You have a staggering amount of nerve, Rick. A staggering amount of repulsive, hypocritical, selfish, hateful, lying nerve.

YOU are the one who is scamming. You're scamming the religious community with your "faith-based" campaigns to destroy the families of gay people, immigrants and now sick people with preexisting conditions. You're scamming your vast low-information base that looks to you for moral and political guidance on matters regarding public policy, the common good, witnessing for Christ and basic human decency. You're scamming Trump's all-caps FAKE NEWS with your insistence that you bring value to the public dialogue on anything beyond your self-righteous narcissism.

You are a catastrophic moral and intellectual failure as a human being. And that fact is compounded by your desperate attempt to distract the country from your ethical bankruptcy by condemning me and every other taxpaying citizen who is dutifully and faithfully and responsibly managing preexisting conditions through the financially essential and morally right Affordable Care Act, which you—again, without even hinting that you have or are willing to supply a shred of supporting evidence—dismiss in blanket-statement Trump style as "a failure."

There is a reason you have been publicly vilified for well over a decade, Rick. And no feigned persecution complex can exonerate you. You are beyond contempt. You are beyond pillory. You are beyond malice.

And you'd better pray you're never beyond uninsurable.

It's a pole new world when you're on psych meds that finally work

Oh, yes. I totally went there. And the trip was a lot of pun. Yup. Nothing but pun and games. The pole damn time.

I drink the mountains

It's the breakfast of bipolar stability and OHMYGODLETMELIFTSOMEWEIGHTSNOWNOWNOW pre-workout energy.

I swear this new C4 formulation is made with witchcraft and cheetahs. And maybe a few chemicals. Delicious, delicious chemicals. All in an addictive—oops, I mean refreshing ... sorry, typo—cherry-lime flavor. It puts you in a freakishly productive turbo-workout mode in seconds. But bring a towel; it makes you flop-sweat for hours afterward.

Tra-la-la!

Sorry about last night's Greek-tragedy pity party, for those of you who had the intestinal fortitude to read it. After a whopping 12 hours of sleep—as Ratbert clearly illustrates here—I'm back to my burst-into-song-with-no-warning-but-always-with-context-because-I'm-not-a-monster-like-Ratbert ways.

Plus I'm going to get my tires rotated today! And I'm going to try again to get my phone fixed! But not at 7:01! Because 7:01 is now and forever The Hour of Minute-Long Heartbreak. Never again. Always remember. The struggle is real. And so are my wobbly-feeling tires. And so is my shattered iPhone screen.

And so is this glorious new day.

In which I whine like an entitled first-world child

(Self-indulgent navel gazing ahead. Plus words. Lots and lots of words. With a tinge of judgey misanthropy. Plus some legitimate stuff so I don't come off as some asshole judgey misanthrope. If I've already bored you by this point, you're gonna be hating my by the time I get to the closing parenthesis. Assuming I ever get there. I'm clearly in a cranky mood though, so I can't help you. Or is it won't? Anyway, abandon hope all ye who read from here. You've been warned.)

• Everyone at Kohl's tonight was either moving too slowly, chatting in front of the extra-large clearance shirts so I couldn't get to them or stupidly looking in the wrong direction as they bumped their carts into me.
• Stupidly.
• Plus Kohl's didn't have anything I wanted. At least that I could get to.
• The cute guy who waited to hold the door for me at Barnes & Noble and circled the CD racks with me and ended up right in front of me at the checkout told the clerk that the CD he was buying was for his wife.
• Dinner at Cheddar's was accompanied by a full 30 minutes of bloody-murder baby screams to my right and a bellowing right-wing redneck hawking up gallons of phlegm and emitting an almost visible effluvium of cigarette stench in the booth behind me.
• I got a Facebook memory reminder this morning with my dismayed post about just having shattered my iPhone screen. Which means I've been using and squinting through and whining about my shattered screen for a whole year. The Verizon guy tonight told me I had to get the screen fixed before he could do anything related to my warranty, so I let out a long dramatic sigh and reluctantly decided to suck it up and give up my phone for 24+ hours to finally get it fixed and I drove over to the fully lit screen-fix-it store just as my phone clock ticked over to 7:01 pm. Guess why I'm telling you this. Just guess.
• Aside from a few blips, I've had at least three full weeks of good and engaged and productive and present and functional and relatively happy days. Which is an almost unprecedented record over the last 4-5 years. So the new bipolar med cocktail that initially made me black out and sent me lacerated and bloody to the ER seems to be actually working. But the uncomfortable and frustrating and embarrassing side effects have steadfastly dug in their heels, and I spent the morning wiping miles of spider webs off my face and loudly chomping on invisible gum. And trying everything in my power to sit the goddamn fuck still like a normal fucking adult.
• Plus I seem to have stopped peeing. Both in frequency and volume. Plus I just told you about my pee problems. Which just compounds the embarrassment. Nice going, me.
• Our lying, petulant, willfully ignorant man-boy of a horrifying national embarrassment of a president gave a morally and intellectually infuriating press conference packed with accusations and excuses and insults and tantrums and laughably implausible generalizations yesterday that continues to send shockwaves through the media and the educated class and the reasonable voices that he's well into his second year of attacking relentlessly with a conspicuous and alarming and desperately pre-emptive level of defensiveness. The last four weeks have made my family and my ex and many of my friends almost physically ill with worry and discouragement and deep, profound concern. And yesterday—when I heard a staunch man-boy supporter sum up the press conference with a thoughtfully nuanced "he sure told 'em"—it finally broke me too.
• I have so many shoes and shirts and shorts and pants and belts and socks and probably layers of flattened desiccated cats piled up in my bedroom that I don't even know how or where to begin sorting and inventorying and letting go of any of it. Sometimes it makes me feel all cozy when I climb into bed surrounded by jumbled mountains of all my stuff. But mostly it makes me feel paralyzed with panic and shame.
• All my real-life and Facebook crushes are pairing up and getting engaged and getting married and are mostly straight anyway. Fuck.
• When I blacked out and cracked the tile floor with my face last December, I bit most of the way through my lip. It's still swollen and hard like it's healed as scar tissue and I have a difficult time drinking through a straw or eating without getting food all over my lips.
• Hey, paired-up and engaged and married and mostly straight anyway crushes who've been bored enough to read this far! How ravishingly sexy am I right now? You should date me! It'd be fun!
• Actually, dumping all this whiny shit out of my head and posting it here after everybody's bedtime where it probably won't be seen has alleviated most of my crankiness. Thanks, Internet!
• Except I'm still furious and incredulous and devastated about the petulant, inarticulate man-boy.
• And frustrated and embarrassed by the spider webs and invisible gum and whatever fresh indignities tomorrow has in store for me.
• Plus Bitch Kitty will sleep contentedly on my clean laundry but won't exist in the same room with me unless she can draw blood or crush spirit. And sometimes it just quietly destroys a little bit of me.

High five!

So the night I finally vow to everyone from my mother to the straining-to-be polite fitting and training technician lady that I'm FINALLY going to unpack and figure out and actually use my month-plus-old CPAP machine, my eight-good-day streak on the psychotropic that initially made me black out and rip up my face has ended.

Fuck.

I'm heartened that I haven't fallen into depression or anxiety, though those are things I know how to handle. Tonight I'm in a weird, unprecedented, floaty, dizzy, skin-hurty, face-touchy, eye-rolly, pig-grunty, unfocusy, shivery otherworld where gravity feels crooked and it's freezing hot and I should be asleep and I promised myself I'd limit my whiny bipolar shit on here but posting from the middle of the hurricane somehow helps me center myself and give me a record to look back on when I'm good to maybe help me to better anticipate and and ride out when I'm bad and even though my parents are upstairs and my sister's family is a mile and a half away and all of that is profoundly comforting and strengthening, talking about all of it in rambling detail in a public post—where friends and strangers can read it or not read it or like it or ignore it or block it—actually quells the confusion and fear and loneliness. I know it sounds dumb. I know it sounds Munchausen syndromy. But I also know it helps.

So in addition to my yes-I'm-still-wearing-it ulnar neuropathy arm splint and my perpetually bloody, Jell-O-y face scars and now my who-knows-what's-gonna-happen CPAP machine, I'm piling on my floaty, dizzy, skin-hurty, face-touchy, eye-rolly, pig-grunty, unfocusy, shivery, otherworldly, I-truly-feel-better-for-posting-about-ity psychotropic side effects and taking the best possible left-handed fight-the-man selfie I can with my compromised superpowers and crawling into bed.

Scars and haircuts

One month ago right now I'd just completed my signature black-out-and-fall-Timber!-and-crack-the-tile-floor-with-my-head-and-lacerate-my-face-with-my-shattered-glasses-and-bite-mostly-through-my-lip-and-get-a-concussion-that-hurt-like-hell trick and I was finally back awake and reasonably coherent as the emergency room doctor sewed up my face with anesthesia that totally didn't work. But I was a big boy and I whimpered only 37 times. Before I lost count.

Anyway! I sure can prattle on and on and never get to the point sometimes. OK, all the time. Like right now. I mean really. How tedious.

Anyway again! I've had stitches and protective stitches glue and scabs and oozy gross stuff all over my face and in my beard since my visit to the anesthesia-resistant emergency room sewing circle and since I looked like a moldy desiccated cat anyway I kinda stopped caring that my gooey beard was scraggling down over my neck and my hair was blossoming into a luxurious, full-bodied thneed.

But! As of this week my beard goo has finally disappeared and nearby children have stopped spraying me with Zombie-B-Gone and since it's actually been one month to the day I finally went and got a haircut and a beard trim and five new shirts at Target but don't tell my mom that last part because she keeps saying I'm finally handsome again and if she found out I'd gone recreational shopping it would totally harsh her buzz as the kids say. Or the drug addicts. Whatever.

Whew! So I finally got to the point and I feel human again and my mom says I look handsome and I'm kinda hoping when everything is totally healed I still end up with a badass scar on my cheek so when I'm in the nursing home and little schoolchildren come visit me through their scary-old-people-need-love-and-poorly-drawn-crayon-art program and they ask me about my battle scar I can regale them with the epic tale of that one time I passed out from standing up too fast to change the laundry.

Pre-existing conditions and the ACA

Before the Affordable Care Act, I was completely uninsurable—no special considerations, no gray areas—if I was unemployed, which I was for over a year before the ACA was enacted ... though I did qualify for relatively expensive COBRA coverage through my former employer that very fortunately filled that time gap.

But COBRA eligibility expires after a fixed time, and without the ACA—and until I could get stabilized enough to hold a job—my expanding schedule of doctor visits and my compounding and perpetually evolving psychotropic prescriptions and my surprise hospital visits would rapidly drain me to bankruptcy and eventually relegate me to living on expensive federal disability coverage.

I now have a job but I'm staying with my ACA-sanctioned plan because it specifically covers the entire network of doctors and specialists and pharmacies and hospitals I've managed to assemble and sign release forms for and ensure are thoroughly and reciprocally sharing my complete medical history. Plus I'm not 100% stable and I'm still—and definitely not without precedent—spooked about becoming unemployed again, and my ACA-sanctioned plan gives me tremendous peace of mind about maintaining a reliable continuation of coverage.

Let me clarify for the sake of precluding any tedious welfare-state arguments that might arise that I am paying the full premiums and co-pays and deductibles for my coverage and am receiving no federal subsidies. U.S. households with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible to receive federal subsidies for policies purchased through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, as they should be. For me, the ACA simply allows me to purchase coverage through a broker or directly from an insurer just like anyone else, with no restrictions or refusals for having a pre-existing condition.

Four weeks ago, I started taking a powerful psychotropic that within a day caused me to black out, slam my head into a tile floor, shred my face with my shattered glasses, bite deep into my upper lip, suffer a concussion and not fully come to until I was holding the side of my face together with a bloody cloth in my sister's car on the way to the emergency room.

We just got the bill for that little adventure, which if I'd still been uninsurable would have struck an immense financial blow. And it doesn't even include the cost of an ambulance since my sister drove me to the hospital. But as this photo shows, my ACA-sanctioned insurance helped save my face, my brain and my finances.

The Affordable Care Act is a vital, grossly overdue federal program that provides medical care and financial protection for millions of citizens in a spectrum of medically and economically challenging situations. Our new president and our newly Republican-controlled congress continue to work noisily and patronizingly and almost belligerently to repeal or dismantle or destroy—or whatever the spin-certified verb du jour is—the Affordable Care Act without providing a consistent or sometimes even plausible justification for their efforts and after months and years of chain-rattling still failing to provide even a shadow of a shred of a consensus—much less a foundational set of proposals over which to negotiate—on what to enact or not to enact in its absence.

The whole exercise stinks of political theater and desperate partisan grandstanding and manipulative demagoguery that cruelly continues to waste time and resources and patience while the health and solvency and even dignity of millions of sometimes desperate citizens and their families and dependents hang in the balance.

And I can personally attest that it's costing our country immeasurably more than just money.

Despite what your lying eyes might tell you ...

I am not an internationally famous pout model. I'm a PERSON. And I deserve to be treated as such. Except for apparently a few more weeks while what remains of my stand-up-and-black-out-and-crack-the-floor-tile-with-my-face scars continue to dig in their little scar heels and slow the healing process to a glacial pace. Fortunately after three weeks they continue to itch and sting an creep creepily and all spidery into my visual periphery. But now they're also—and I swear I'm selecting my words judiciously so I don't get all graphic and horrifying here—more stickey-outey on my face and tiny sections of them are clearly starting to follow gravity but with a stated mission to never let go—how am I doing so far?—but I still can't be a big boy and bravely pull them off like a band-aid because—and I'm sorry but there's really no delicate way to put this—my absorbable stitches haven't finished (or even started?) absorbing and the damn things are still stitched to my face. 

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done writing about gross things. I think.

So I'm trying not to be all-bipolar-all-the-time because despite my long and verbose and thoroughly documented history of being all bipolar all the time I'm actually fucking sick of it: the free-falls to despondency, the impermanent triumvirates of normalcy and clarity and energy, the endless and clearly more and more arbitrary attempts at changing meds that eventually and predictably fail one after another after another, the new wrinkle that I'm apparently apt to stand up too fast and black out and crack the tile floor with my face, and the endless worry and frustration and exacerbation I cause my family and friends as I cycle through all of the above and ultimately end up sleeping through life. So I'm actively trying not to think about it. But while we're here ... speaking of all of the above, I'm (I hope) finally emerging from a rough four days of hairpin ups and downs and canceled plans and missed uncling and a weekend where I've barely left my bed and never left the house all as a prelude to point out my soaring bedhead. Honest! I just broke my promise to myself to drastically minimize my bipolar talk with the honest intention of providing a few words of context beyond "I haven't showered all weekend" to help you laugh at my lofty locks with a more informed sense of derision. You're welcome.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done wallowing in emotional and tonsorial self-pity. I think.

Actually, no. In the last few months, four—four!—guys I've had long-ago, too-shy-to-ever-tell-them, clearly unrequited crushes on have announced their happy gay marriages on here. I haven't seen or even thought about some of these guys in over a decade. I didn't even realize we were Facebook friends. And I'm not sure what to do with all these weird, long dormant emotions these four rapid-fire revelations have awakened. And I'm not sure why I'm being all Duckie and weighing down this already ponderous post with this information except to get it out of my head. Which I guess I've done.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done brain-dumping all the vaguely whiny, I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-all-of-this emotional noise in my head. For realz.

So it's a relatively quiet night here at the Stigers Home for Bitchy Cats. Mom is reading, sometimes aloud to my mostly blind dad; Sibelius' watery, disciplined, asymmetrical, shamelessly triumphant Second Symphony is on repeat in the background; Dad just accidentally stepped on the cat, an incident I will be neither amused nor disquieted by; I downloaded a Gaither Vocal Band southern gospel song for my folks and now iTunes is trying to sell me all the desperate tatters of the inauguration entertainment lineup; we're all waiting for the dire-warninged but now rudely late snowpocalypse that has kept everyone pre-emptively hiding in our houses all day; and one of us is obsessively typing a seven-mile Facebook post on his shattered iPhone screen. But I won't say who.

And you can open your eyes now. Or close them with me; I'm going to bed now so I can get up at six for a much-needed ass-whupping by my trainer. And I'm not taming my hair for her.

My little New Year's Eve gathering fell through tonight

So I'm sitting home alone (well, my parents are snoring contentedly in their bedroom down the hall) by the light of the tree with Bitch Kitty glaring at me from across the room and a LOT of oh-my-god-these-are-AMAZING Hy-Vee fudge brownies on the counter. And if you don't live in a Hy-Vee state, it pains me to tell you this but you have wasted your entire life eating really shitty brownies.

But from my safe, cozy—albeit admittedly lonely—perch on our extremely comfortable couch in these last hours of an emotionally contentious year where our country seems to have lost a disproportionately high number of beloved celebrities but I landed a job I love in practically every way and where I have continued to ramp up and ramp down and suffer side effects and endure withdrawal effects of countless psychotropics in my ongoing struggle to beat bipolar depression but in the process my love and appreciation and respect for my family have grown stronger and deeper and more joyous and hopefully more reciprocal, I can't help but harbor grave concerns about the coming year.

I'm concerned to the point of being terrified of the pending horrors wrought from the blind nationalism and the arrogant ignorance of the inchoate and yet already alarmingly destructive Trump kakistocracy. I worry that the gloriously revolutionary American Experiment will fall way too early in its young life at the hands of a predatory, self-serving demagogue who stupidly let himself become a political puppet in a game of nuclear chicken that could precipitate national, international or global destruction. I also worry greatly that our educational systems and standards and our national and local infrastructures and our economy and our safety and even our civility will collapse in the process or the aftermath.

On a personal scale, I worry that friendships will end and loved ones will die and control will collapse and accidents will cripple and ideologies will interfere and dreams will fail and fortunes both monetary and emotional will fall and I know these worries are universal and though they can easily isolate us they can also unite and inspire and ultimately augment us, but they still compel me to hold my family and friends close and keep my guard up and my emotions girded and my world as calm and controlled and constant as I humanly can.

So much can change in 365 days. Three years ago I wrote international ad campaigns for a prestigious agency in Chicago. Two years ago I was in a locked psych ward, so pharmaceutically emotionless I couldn't even cry. One year ago I was somehow holding onto a job I wasn't even good at but I was apparently charming or earnest or possibly overlookable enough that I survived months of staff reductions. Now I'm proudly living with—and providing reciprocal care for—my septuagenarian parents, working happily as an online product copywriter for a gloriously high-end international retailer, regularly singing and dancing and acting and sometimes just smiling and waving in shows for three different theater companies, discovering the unimaginable joy and love and pride of playing uncle to two intelligent and kind and talented and responsible and remarkably tall young adults who thankfully possess an inherent and reciprocal and mutually straight-faced understanding of my meandering and maybe-just-a-little-bit-perhaps-over-the-line sense of humor, and still clinging confidently to the hope that I will soon find the right psychotropic cocktail to regulate my bipolar depression plus find a boyfriend who loves theater and Hy-Vee brownies and running and tattoos and underpants jokes and freakishly conspicuously indulgently long sentences and living in Cedar Rapids where hopefully our entire families are.

So I face this new year with great but guarded trepidation tempered by a glorious spectrum of hope and joy and gratitude and love and oh-my-god too many shoes and a fervent hope that the coming months are filled with peace and diplomacy and respect and common sense and a governance guided by a deep, profound, nuanced, reciprocal knowledge and understanding of who we are, what is fair, how we're responsible, and the selfish and bellicose and irreversible and potentially catastrophic options we should never even pursue.

And—you're welcome—to end this post and start this year on a far less cataclysmic note, I can report with complete confidence that (at the very least) the first months of 2017 will be filled with staggeringly long, shamelessly self-indulgent, thesaurusly verbose, hopefully thoughtful, possibly funny, relentlessly selfie-enhanced posts.

And since tonight's get-together didn't happen, the dawn of our new year will also be filled with Hy-Vee brownies. Lots and lots of Hy-Vee brownies.

Happy New Year, everyone.