There is joy in the dark

Let me tell you a story.

I awake early. I walk over an interstate highway to a cafe nominated for a design award; you can sit at the counter and look into the roastery through cathedral style windows I have a cortado and read a graphic novel cover-to-cover. I go home, then to the library. I have three or four books to return, and about that many on the hold shelves. Most of the early afternoon is writing - a short story outline and research, yet more poetry, and essays for an imagined audience. I read a second graphic novel in the late afternoon. I turn on my little galaxy projector, and turn my LED lights to blue, then red. I lie on my bed sideways and look at the lights. I go to bed.

I haven't talked in person to someone I know in the past week, besides Travis the barista. I have rarely been happier.

While there are other parts of my bipolar experience that are more frightening, the inability to sit and pass time is the most trying. Insomnia means I'm up sometimes for 20 hours a day. I get so tired but cannot sleep, but also cannot do any activity that gets me closer to night, and trying a do-over on sleep.

Medication has done what it can, but even in concert it is not a dashing groom to carry me over the threshold. I still have akathesia (clinical restlessness) and a body where my heart beats fast and heavy. This year has been about seeing whether the right hobbies can reduce this.

So I dive into old and new pursuits. Writing, drawing, plunging into endless romances that I read and my heart years and twists. I cry every day.

My ketamine clinic director told me over a year ago when I was starting regular treatments, that ketamine does not prevent people from being sad. It allows people to rebound quickly: people are given the gift and power that comes with resiliency. After years of my emotions grinding me into ash from the tomb of what might be, I have pulled the sword from the stone. The tables are turned and I am not the one being interrogated: I get to ask the fucking questions here.

Trauma lives in the body, it constricts the organs and pierces the chambers of the heart. Bipolar disorder lives in the body, it makes every cell want make a break for it in their impatience.

I have learned that with some friends to send memes to and a 38 song playlist that has the exact tempo that makes me a higher, more serene kind of productive. I lie in the dark, I think of what I read that day that touched me. I work on 2,000 word outlines for therapy.

I feel at peace with my own body that does few things other than wound me.

Artemis