Well, I'm in the final days of my time off work. This is Tuesday and I go back Monday.

When I look back at how I felt when I was sitting at my desk at work before this leave began, and what I thought I would do if I have 5 weeks away from work, I have not done what I thought I would do.

I was sidetracked by lithium sucking the creativity right out of me.

I was also sidetracked by being hit by another car a couple of weeks ago. No serious injury, but I'm still sore. Just ran out of muscle relaxers last night. Dealing with insurance, totalling my vehicle, finding another one, etc., was quite time-consuming.

Now that I've been off of lithium for several days, I feel like I'm not quite myself yet.

Did I get as much writing done as I had hoped? No. But I did get some reformatting done on one of my manuscripts that I've been working on for quite a while, in preparation of putting it up for sale online as an ebook.

I set up a couple of blogs, and I loaded a lot of content to one of them. That's good. But I didn't spend as much time as I had hoped on either of them.

But that's a start, right? They are up and live and ready for me to laod more content and ads so I can start making money from them.

Did I spend time working on finding more clients for my writing biz? No, but I'm working on that this week.

So what did I do?

I had several appointments with my regular MD, my new therapist, and my new psychiatrist.

We changed my meds, let me adjust, changed my meds, let me adjust...

I slept without setting an alarm, so I woke up on my own. This was a big deal since I've felt like I've had sleep deprivation for so long.

I start walking in my neighborhood. I'm up to 15 minutes of walking without a break. This may not seem like a big deal to most people, but I'm 100 lbs. overweight so this was a big deal for me.

I've cut way back on eating out. Partially by necessity, since my short-term disability pays 75% of my salary. Partially as an effort to be healthy.

Monday is the big day. I've only been in contact with one person from work, and it is the person who has helped me so much along the way, sometimes doing my work for me because I simply don't understand the techy aspects of the job that I was hired to do.

No, I'm not excited about going back to work.

I'm not sure how long I'll last there.

I'm sure that my supervisor (who gave me a REALLY bad annual review a few weeks before I left on short-term leave) will give me a set period of time to make improvements and, if I don't measure up, I'll be out of there.

So I'm focusing on reaching out to more potential customers to boost the freelancing that I've done for several years. My thought pattern is that I can:

• Go back to work now to keep the steady pay coming
• Focus on the job while I'm there and try not to do my usual daydreaming of what I would be doing if I wasn't there
• See how well I do now that I'm not in the hypomania that my psychiatrist thinks was brought on by the anti-depressants
• Continue to reach out to potential freelance customers
• Do the jobs for freelance customers as they come
• Work on building the freelancing so that I can quit the full-time job
• Provide myself with some structure so that when I do quit the job, I will be less likely to stray
• Continue seeing the therapist and psychiatrist so I can learn to deal with bipolar

I'm so much happier when I'm doing my own thing, working from home.

I'm off lithium and the only med the psychiatrist has me on right now is Ambien so I can get some sleep. He thinks that will make a big difference.

Meanwhile, he said to call as soon as I start to feel depressed and we'll try Wellbutrin.

Sorry this is so long.

Thanks for all of the support along the way. I appreciate you guys and gals!