Hypomania is so weird

I am in a weird place today. I'm mixed and definitely more up than down. Last night I barely slept and the little sleep I did get was really broken up. Now I feel sick; I've got a cold or sinus infection or something. So I went to therapy and came home instead of staying for support group tonight.

I got home and pulled up facebook and the little news section headline was that Jimmy Fallon is drinking too much. You have to understand: I do not have television. I don't follow celebrity news. I enjoy watching clips on youtube of Jimmy Fallon sometimes but I am hardly emotionally invested in the man; I have never seen his show. Yet I gasped loudly enough that it startled my cat. I'm strangely horrified. To my brain at the moment he is not allowed to be anything but what I've thought he was: just funny. When I go to the real news and something terrible has happened I won't react nearly as much.

Apparently fairly random celebrity information is something my manic brain takes personally. Why??????? So weird.

Hiya rainbow, are you feeling anxious? This sounds a lot like anxiety?

Not really anxious. I had my first easy therapy session in a long time and came home and took a walk with the dog. Now I'm giving in to my fever. But then again I could list several reasons I could/should feel anxious. So who knows? Just the mixed thing is actually triggering some;it's changing my treatment needs and probably deciding for me that I'm going to be starting clozaril. I've been in bad shape since last January; I really want to not have to go IP to do that until after Christmas so that I don't spend another Christmas IP. And while all this just came to me last night it's probably not helping anything because the whole thing does make me anxious. The word clozaril still makes me anxious even though I've come to terms with it. I think any new drug at this point is going to do that. I don't know. I need sleep. So little last night and being sick is not so good. But if I sleep now I won't sleep tonight.

Maybe it's easier to obsess about someone else's problems, especially with my mind going faster than it should and a fever. I really don't know.

I hope you can get some rest so that you feel better. It's no good to be physically ill with everything else you have going on.

((((((((((((((HUG)))))))))))))))

Yeah, getting sick wasn't the best idea. We took my nieces to a Halloween thing and I apparently got close to the wrong kid (my nieces for once seem to not be the germ providers). It's so much fun to be agitated and feverish/cold at the same time. But I use a weighted blanket for calming so I'd probably be trying to sit under it anyway. I just really would like to have gotten some cleaning done.

This is pretty consistent with strep for me (oddly I feel sick to my stomach and get headaches but don't get a sore throat; small children apparently do this and I must have never grown up or something) so I'll give it a couple days and then probably go in to see if that's the problem again.

Definitely going to take my hydroxyzine tonight and hope it knocks me out. I still can't believe it has been doing that but it has. It never has before except when I had lamictal rash and was on a high dose. I've had it a bunch of times since and never was sleepy but this time around even 10 mg knocks me out sometimes. So strange but so handy. Last night I couldn't take it because I didn't think I was going to have trouble falling asleep and by the time I knew I needed it I would have slept through therapy. My therapist is probably going to wish I had slept through therapy......but we've shared germs before.

Ugh. Tomorrow I have to go vote. I am going to really be tempted to skip it even though it is so important.

For someone who has been in therapy for half my life I really lack insight sometimes (ok, the fever doesn't help).........I have continued to be bothered by this ridiculous Jimmy Fallon thing. A good 7 hours later I finally realized that 4 years ago I started saying that my brother was drinking too much on vacation, like WAY, WAY, WAY too much. And 3 years ago nearly exactly on another trip I was horrified when I found out how much he was drinking and trying to hide it and nobody believed me. 2 years ago I think the drinking was at least recognized but not discussed. We didn't try to help him, didn't know how to confront it. (Needless to say probably our father was constantly drinking, never drunk, just like my brother and my mom's father was an alcoholic too. We're not well-equipped to handle that in this family). And he wound up in serious trouble that has torn my family into 2 parts that can't be together and there is no chance that will ever change because of the nature of what he did.

I guess this hit a lot closer to home than I realized. I didn't realize that I now fear someone drinking the way I saw drinking in my family.

Now I know.

Yeah, things like that can be triggering even when one has been in therapy. I've been in for years and I'm still finding stuff.

That was definitely one little PTSD thing mixed with apparently being very manic (according to my mom) yesterday. We had just discussed 2 weeks ago in therapy that my PTSD has remained pretty controlled through all this. (I did a very intensive PTSD therapy 3 years ago and it made an enormous difference in my life and now I'm not used to having it pop up very often. But what happened in the last year and a half with my brother is a whole new thing, related to the old PTSD but also different and I guess this is going to be something I need to watch and talk to my therapist about. My brother didn't do what he did because he was drinking but it certainly didn't help. I have no idea if he is drinking now; I imagine he is but it no longer is done around us except for once or twice. The whole thing is still beyond my ability to really understand and there's a lot going on right now; there was just a plea bargain and now we're awaiting sentencing. So I'm also sensitive b/c it is on my mind a lot.

Oh well. I guess it will give us something new to do in therapy. Like there wasn't enough already .