Yes, you've nailed the hypomania. But I'm having such short 'manic' episodes, swinging from a manic high to a can't stop crying spell in less than a couple of hours. Let me find and quote what the DSM5 had to say about one of the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder:

But I'm not only dysphoric in these few how's but also euphoric, hypersexual, spending money again. And each mood "usually last(s) a few hours" only. There's a 15-20 lull in which the new mood overtakes me and - wham - I'm back to something new. The anger - irritability- is so new to me. If it was a healthy kind of anger, it wouldn't bother me. If it were anger towards myself it wouldn't bother me. And they're two distinct feelings: I'm angry that AT&T has been lying to me (or that 7 of their employees have been lying to me). I exhibit my irratibility when I use words to belittle them, not by raising my voice, but in using particular words or sentiments that implies that they are beyond incompetent.

But the lack of ability to sleep, certainly, I think contributes to my episodic, and fleeting, hypomania.

When you write of the need to "talk" at length, do you mean my lengthy writing? I don't think that's an anger/irratibility issue because I've been hypergraphic long before feel this anger and irratibility.

My therapist is saying that this is a new sort of reaction to GAD and panic disorder: maybe he's right. I don't know what to think any longer. I could probably go through the DSM5 and come up with pages of diagnostic criteria but never enough under one disorder to warrant a disorder. That's troubling because I want to know that my diagnoses are X and that I can be treated by Y and Z.

I can't do any sort of volunteer work. Beyond the most obvious (I haven't been trained, yet, to try to us a transfer board from wheelchair to automobile) I have a deathly fear of leaving my apartment. And of having people, other than my caregiver, enter my apartment. At one time, and until recently, I was simply frightened of others, feeling that I was safe here but unsafe around others.

Now it doesn't seem so much like fear as getting irritated with others. Today, for example, I was talking on the phone to FedEx in re a package slated for delivery tomorrow. During my 5 minute conversation, my neighbor called 5 times and left 5 messages with my answering service. Before I checked the messages, I called him back, thinking that his call must be of some importance. He answered and asked what I was doing. I told him that I had been on the phone. With whom? I told him FedEx. Why? Because I needed to verify a package delivery for tomorrow. What was I receiving? I nearly lost it. I told him I would call him back, that I had another call coming in.

Those are the types of things that drive me from irratibility to anger and back to irratibility again and 'cause' me to be rude. He has the type of temper where he gets mad at, for example, at the power company and throws his cell phone to the ground. Destroying it and having to buy a new one.

He stayed angry at me for months and months for not coming up to his (nauseatingly smoke filled) apartment to 'fix' his computer. When the cable guy was here earlier this week to 'fix' his Internet connection, he did what I had been asking Tom to do for months; check to make certain that the computer was plugged into an electrical outlet or a power strip. It wasn't. I don't know if he's just too fat to look under his desk or if he just wants someone else to do everything 'technical' for him. But the FedEx inquiry coming so quickly from the 'power problem of today infuriated me. The only way that I can describe it is to say that I have lost all patience with people who not only put their stupidity and ignorance on display but, such as was the case of my nurse practitioner, lie
rather than admit fault.

It gives me another reason to isolate, really. I don't mean, at all, people who are just uneducated; not in the least. I had a number of friends who barely finished high school, but they were kind and good and honest people. I would never equate those lacking degrees with being stupid… I know too many well-educated people who are stupid. It's when I talk to or read of those who speak of/write of things with suriity and yet who know nothing about the subject or, people like my neighbor, who won't bend over to see if an electrical plug is in an outlet or who thinks that he has to be aware of every minute detail of a package that I'm to receive; it's that type of stupidity that brings out the worst in me.

But I wasn't always this way: this is something new, something within the past year, within the past 8 months, really. I don't like feeling anger or annoyance. It makes me feel just as nauseated as cigarette smoke. A dangerous rather than health self-deprecation.

The daily tears are new, too. I found that my favorite priest, my long-time confessor, will be back for good in May. I cried in pure joy when I heard.

I'm going to close but I'll leave you one image as an example of something that outrages me that I've seen here: usually a first or fourth message in the new members introductions or perhaps the other mental health forums. I know that I am overly empathetic and I don't believe that there's anything good or healthy in that. But when I read a message full of grief and pain and suffering and I see someone post an animated GIF of a fairy spelling out WELCOME with a sparkling wand, I feel something beyond anger; I feel a furious outrage. But, as I've been reminded a couple of times, this site has seen enormous growth in the 20+ years of being online and I suppose that animated fairies can be better than shared grief early on.

I live in a confused state. None ever more than at this time. The only support that I can offer anyone is a kind of over-sentimentalized empathy and that does not seem worth anything. I want to embrace and accept and live as my outer bobbit worm. That's my body-image. How could it be differently? I've always loved the beach and I slither rather than walk.

Some of my disgust with others is, I know, a reflection of the disgust that I feel for myself. That may be true of the anger and annoyance, too. I know that I often use the word stupid to descibe my behavior lately.

My therapist doesn't understand that you can "go crazy" without becoming a raging lunatic. The last time that I went crazy I became silent. It was a progression and there was a 'snap' phase of several days and then I was completely silence. I've often said that I could probably have spoken if I felt anything that I thought worth saying but I'm not sure of that.

I think that I had a small 'snap,' a minor snap but that instead of just letting go, as I did last time, I pulled myself back somehow. It could have been my imagination. I loved this quote from Borderline Personality Disorder:

I love that. I love it because I feel that way for several seconds hours a least once every two days. It's more complex than it may appear. You no longer think of yourself as "being." You "are not" and you "cannot be." You can "be" a character in someone's dream (maybe that's the highest level of being) or, higher than that, I guess, is "being" a character that inhabits the mind of someone you know or once, somehow, knew. Dead, or never having been born, but a fantasy of a lover, a fantasy lover that you've never known as other than existing in her head. Never have existing, never having been born, but "being" a kind of neural community conglomerate.

Not being able to slip into the silliness of "I think so I am," but looking beyond the "I am." I may have once been in some sentient form. I don't mean reincarnation at all. I may have been a portion of a sentient form, merged with others. An explanation, or on a path to explanation, of how to lose all "being," all surity of "existence" and yet having a déjà vu that's not real. Nothing that could be remembered because you've never existed to experience a memory.

I can no more explain my non-existence or my possible existence. There isn't any evidence for one or the other.

I'd best go. Maybe try to sleep some time before midnight. That would be great.