I think I’m in pretty seri­ous trouble.

Used to be that I knew the depths of the sad­ness, the depression.

But lately, it’s been coun­tered by up phases. I don’t know how to describe that. Best anal­ogy is when you’ve had too much caf­feine, I guess.

They swing back and forth. In a stan­dard cal­en­dar month I feel about right for maybe five days. The rest…

When I’m down I know it and can deal with it. Just my phases, my sad­ness. It’s the up times that I can’t…

They’re hap­pen­ing at the same time.

This is way beyond my con­trol. How can I be both recessed, dropped into the dark­ness — and, at the same time, feel like I can take on the world?

Something is seri­ously wrong here.

You ever see a sine wave?

Up, down, up down. Like that.

You see the cen­ter axis?

Well, so do I. Up, down, up, down. Bad days. good days. The cat shat in the kid’s back­pack. Finished pay­ing off that note. Boss is being a turd. Lover is very nice one night. Up, down. But usu­ally near a base­line. Right?

What does it feel like to live there? On that cen­ter axis. Because I don’t know, and I don’t think I ever have.

That’s not the prob­lem. The prob­lem is that it’s not a sine wave any more. It’s a scrib­ble. And that fuck­ing scrib­ble is shoot­ing high, and it really, really scares me. Because when I’m high, I really am high. Far bet­ter than any cof­fee buzz you ever had, way, way more than sugar. Six thou­sand ideas spark through my head in one minute, and they all seem achiev­able, and the part, the worst part, is that I know I will crash, crash hard, and all those things will just dis­solve into ran­dom embers in the dark coal black of … of what­ever hap­pens to me when I implode.

I am writ­ing this from inside one of those scribbles.

I can live with the sad­ness. It’s life. What I can­not tol­er­ate any more is how the glas­sine tow­ers of pos­si­bil­ity that I make are just shat­tered, destroyed, lost. I hate the depths not because they are deep; I hate them because I know that I will be high again. And I don’t want that buzz. I don’t want that high.

I have a char­ac­ter, Cock, whose story is slowly unfold­ing in a long nar­ra­tive. You might have met him. He is bipo­lar and schiz­o­phrenic. When I was describ­ing him once to some­one, I was asked, “but how do you know what it’s like to live that way?”

It is not lis­ten­ing to angels. It is just wrong, off tilt, off axis, off … sane.

This blog is not and never has been about my issues. But this is a big thing, and if you’re a psych major, you might want to tune in about … oh, about now.