[erpal]

I started new medication about a week ago, and I'm feeling weird. I started feeling really depressed in the evenings, desperate. Then I noticed that in the mornings I wake up easier and feel good. It's been four days now that I wake up before 9.30 a.m. and that's a huge accomplishment for me (my usual wake up time has been for months between 13:00 and 16:00.) So I feel good for about an hour, then I feel exhausted like I want to just collapse, then I try to pull myself together, maybe I can concetrate for half hour to whatever I have to do and then I get either very hyperactive or feel desperate and start crying. And all this goes on all day. Yesterday I felt so tired after all this that I went to bed around 19:00, I felt really bad. Then I woke up at 21:30 but I didn't manage to do much studying. Thankfully, I didn't stay up late and I woke up early today, but it's the same again. Can't work like that. I was thinking that I can't make the deadline for a project I have for school and I should go talk to the professor if I could turn it in later. But I don't know if I want to expose my problems, then I don't know if they matter at all and I expose them for nothing and I also don't think it's fair for the rest of the students, everybody has issues but they try and manage. I still have four days. Let's hope I get it done.

Erpal, I feel the same way. I'm good in the morning, but around 2 in the afternoon, I start that down hill slide. And I just started a new stabilizer 3 weeks ago.

Only thing that I find helps me is to just keep doing things. Usually little things b/c I can't concentrate long enough to do big things, but just the small things.

[erpal]

When I feel tired and want to stop studying I say to myself, ok, 20 minutes and then you take a break. Or ten minutes. If I even thing that I have days of studying ahead of me I think I'll break down. So I take it slow, not even day by day, but by the hour. If I stick to it, I think I'm gonna get there.

Then just take it in short bursts. To be honest, that's what i have to do. Just little steps.

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[intergalactictraveler]

Gertrude Stein said, "When you get there, there is no there there." Bipolar illness is more like an umbrella term for an illness that manifests itself in large and small ways, like a dam that has large leaks, small leaks and tiny leaks. You can't possibly stop all those leaks.

As soon as it seems you've got one symptom under control, it's as if something in you mutates and now you've got some new symptom, maybe physical, maybe mental, but if the symptom is bothersome, it might have to be dealt with but...as soon as you deal with it, it seems to generate another manifestation. It is endless, frustrating, and baffling.

I read an article in Esquire, August, 2011, about a group of ex- US Marines who suffer from PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury and a Lieutenant Colonel, who suffered traumatic brain injury said something applicable to all of us, "Like many wounded vets, Maxwell has discovered that what's broken can never really be fixed." Ain't that the truth. Like men and women military veterans with PTSD/traumatic brain injury, the best we can do is soldier on. If we get hung up on questioning every little change, set back, flare up we experience, we'll make ourselves more unstable than we already are. All we can do is roll with it. It rains. Why? Because it rains. Theodore Roosevelt said, "You do the best you can, with what you've got, where you are."