OhJoySexToy

Book Release Party Tonight and also a Thing I Wrote About Being Bipolar

Added 2017-11-01 22:22:05 +0000 UTC

Ok, so FIRST OFF:

Volume 4 Book Release Party Tonight!!!!
November 1, 7-9pm
Books with Pictures
1100 SE Division Street,
Portland, Oregon 97202

And, SECOND OFF:

I meant to just link to the article Lux Alptraum wrote for SELF about mental illness, but then I wound up spouting off on Twitter about my own bipolar diagnosis (as I am wont to do) and I thought, hey, this is almost coherent, maybe you guys'd wanna read this too? So here it is reformatted from Tweets into a regular, readable configuration!

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You Would Never Know That I Have OCD

Lux Alptraum wrote a really human article about getting a mental illness diagnosis when it doesn't match your image of it, I relate so much and I'm really touched she even interviewed me for a bit of it, to talk about my Bipolar diagnosis.

My idea of what Bipolar looks like was so cartoonishly exaggerated, I knee-jerk rejected the suggestion I may have it. But the more I learned about it, the more familiar I became with the spectrum of behavior it covers, the more it made sense, it fit.

Just... just KNOWING what my set of behaviors and thought patterns are, it makes it so much more manageable for me to deal with them.

Oh, and the Lithium. That helps a lot.

The meds have kept my moods more even-keeled, to be sure, but the most valuable tool has been learning to separate my symptoms from ME. Like, I felt like I was this little wooden ship that would be overrun with rabid weasels and everything was chaos and I couldn't do anything.

And now it's like, I'm still that little wooden ship and I still have those rabid weasels, but we're learning how to live with each other. My little boat can keep sailing and the weasels live over in their own little section. They're there, but they're not scrambling over everything and running amok.

I am a Boat Full of Weasels: The Erika Moen Story