hmm
Hey kids.
Maybe let's try this again. our maybe I should jump ship to another platform. Tumblr, WordPress or some such. Not blogger. Been there, done that. I've heard it's mostly dead here and most of the people on my f list have likely moved on. I'm partly annoyed that I stopped writing because it was therapeutic to one extent or another. Eh, whatever.
I took a break from grad school in the fall because... well, as we know mental health has never been my forte, and things were bad enough that I just couldn't go forward anymore. I was actually going to quit, because I couldn't see any other option at the time, but was convinced to take a leave first by my supervisor.
The fall was all about recovery and recharging. This winter is getting back on my feet. This spring, being functional. This summer, excelling. Sounds reasonable but my plans rarely work out.
Things are obviously better else I wouldn't be heading back (yet). I still have a long road ahead of me to learn to manage this - turns out I have bipolar disorder, either Type II or a somewhat similar phenotype that falls under "Not Otherwise Specified" - a DSMIV catch-all subcategory for variants that don't fit neatly into the classical type I or type II.
Turns out that I inherited this from my mother's side, as my uncle, grandmother and likely great-grandfather are bipolar in one way or another. Yay genetics. Yay batshit crazy relatives making a bit more sense.
The worst part of all this is that being diagnosed with a chronic mental illness like this made me do a lot of introspection (quel surprise!) and suddenly deal with the fact that so much of my life and behaviours and even personality can be explained through the lens of bipolar disorder that is difficult to not feel like my identity has been erased. That is maybe a difficult thing to explain. I'll write on that some other time.
I've learned a lot about myself in the last while. Despite almost taking a complete break from life and accomplishing virtually nothing to advance my career (if I indeed can still salvage an academic career at this point), there has been some worth in this.
Time for bed. Until next time.
M
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