I have a disorder called bi-polar. It is often described as a condition in which your moods swing uncontrollably. Sometimes the cycles can be months long, other times hours. Sometimes they are mild, barely noticable, like waves at low tide. Other times they are violent and intense, blotting out the sun, blotting out love, blotting out everything.

When I am up, at my 'best', I feel powerful, intelligent, talented, supportive, sure of a wonderful future. resilient.

When I am down I feel utterly worthless, without purpose or meaning, without ability, without insight or intelligence, without the capacity to love, or to give. unworthy of pleasure. brittle. When I am down I can't concentrate, can't focus on any single thing, and can't stop the tape that plays in my head that says, "you're worthless, pathetic, everything you do is pointless, and a failure... spiraling down into nothing."

These seem like trite words, the words you've heard before, words easily dismissed as false, demented... but when it is your own voice, and the continuous flow of thought inside your head is screaming them, biting them, snarling them, taunting you with them, knifing them into your tenderest vulnerabilities -- the soft places that you know so well -- and the stream is tireless, relentless, it waits in the night to come and murmer and shriek and stab. Hope becomes a stranger, Love a memory, and Joy a cynical trick and a lie.

It's an illness of the mind, or of the heart, or of the spirit.. or of all three for all I know. If not an illness, then a defect.

I believe that the cycles of my depressions and manias coincide with the cycles of the moon. The moon up on the banner is there to let me check in when I am feeling low, or feeling high -- either extreme. nine times out of ten the moon is either new or full when I do that. not to say that every full moon will necessarily bring a peak or a valley, but the peaks and the valleys, when they come, come at the extremes of the lunar phase.

I went to see a new doctor today. I left my family in February and stopped taking my medicines -- Lithium and Welbuterin -- because I thought I was pretty stable, and I wanted to get back to the old way I was, the "real me" ...I thought I could learn to contend with the problem in my own strength, train myself to learn to live with it, to supercede the tempest with my willpower and stout-hearted earnest fortitude. It took six months to bring me to my knees, when it did, it didn't stop with my knees, it brought my shoulders down as well. put me flat on my face.

I haven't slept more than four hours a night in a month, and I hadn't slept in two days -- not sleeping regularly or enough makes you significantly more prone to losing control of your emotional state. what does that mean? Imagine you are driving your car down the driveway and you see a squirrel sitting in the road, it looks up and sees you and high tails it for the woods. Nothing there of any significance, right? it's just a thing that happens. Last time that happend to me when I was in the pit, i wept for fifteen minutes, the acid pang of the senslessness of existence, the arbitraryness of life, the power of fear... they overwhelmed me.

It's clear that none of that has anyting to do with the squirrel, and I know that. It's also clear that it doesn't have anything to do with what's outside my head; it's all inside there, trying to get out, trying to find a trigger that will make it blossom. these things are unrealities and they assert primacy over reality. And they teach me to distrust my emotions, even as I swirl in the whirlpool of their power. And they give me a little piece of candy every now and then -- the good times -- as a way of keeping me in line, as a way of ensuring that they have a loyal customer. a lonely customer, a tortured customer, a source of blood.

The doctor listened to me, he talked about other things, other people's experiences, told me about the difference between anxiety and depression, and how alcohol is a tricky bastard because it relieves the anxiety while it's in your system, quickly and effectively, but it contributes to making the depression worse by depleting the effectiveness of the neurotransmitters in your brain. in your heart. He told me a story about his brother who had spent seven years building a 30,000 square foot house (my house is about 1200 square feet (4% as large)) a very successful guy, except his kidneys have failed from overwork, stress and neglect. He gave me some medicine, Lamictal to reduce the extremes of the low moods, Lithium to help with that as well as to lower the extremes of the highs. And something called Clonozapam for anxiety. And I promised to eliminate the alcohol from my diet, other than an occasional glass of wine with dinner.

And we're going to meet again in a couple weeks and see what's doing, check out the bloodwork, check out the progress, see if there are any tweaks that are advisable. and again a week later. I'm looking foreward to it, looking ahead to some healthy days, some refreshing sleeps, and maybe, mabye a vacation to somewhere far away.

My old blog, second person, singular, was my attempt to write for the reader, for one reader in particular (you of course), to write engagingly and thoughtfully. Letters from the Moon is an attempt to write for myself, to write about what make me laugh, or cry, or sing, or squeeze my eyes closed. or open them as wide as they go.

It's never been easy for me to ask for help, to portray myself as weak or inadequate for anything. I have pride that is made from titanium and diamonds, strong and unyielding, unsubmissive, stiff and inflexible. To understand bipolar, you would have to understand that the the strength of my pride was nothing -- nothing in the face of the tempest that swept through me. It was like trying to stop an aircraft carrier with a sheet of newspaper.

If you think you have this, or know somebody who does, and they're tempted to discard all their medicines and wing it on their own... watch them, they'll need somebody to help put the pieces back together when they fall.

full moon up here. like clockwork.