It's getting better????

Last week I was in bed at 6 each evening. So far this week I'm staying up to a normal bedtime and I feel good. I've made it through half my week now. I have tomorrow off.

I feel much better today because I was assertive about some things and got some changes to be made, or at least worked on. Some things are ridiculously hard. For example, my assistants don't quite seem to get that they can't dump everything on me. Both of them called off yesterday and left me doing parts of all 3 of our jobs, except that my job isn't really to do anything but paperwork right now so my job didn't get done at all. I think that will be ending. I hope that will be ending, because my ability to do this job depends on these things.

I am amazed at how slowly I'm doing things. I still seem to think slowly, and I write slowly and move slowly and after years of doing the same job I seem out of my groove on the automatic parts. Sometimes technical words don't come to me and this is highly frustrating.

But I'm doing it. I wasn't sure I could and I am. It's helping my mood heal. I think also being back WHERE I work is healing me. It helps to see that losing my ability to do what I do (ok, fine, I'm a therapist. Not the talking kind, one of the other kinds. I'm tired of trying to hide that word) still would leave me so far above where my patients are. It reminds me to be so grateful that I live now and not 40 years ago when there wasn't an effective treatment for bipolars. Many of my bipolar patients fall into that category and they are so damaged from too much ECT or thorazine or other ugly drugs that did not really help. One woman who is elderly and has been bipolar for 50 years or more suffers so badly because even now her moods are uncontrollable. She is the sweetest thing one minute, singing and hugging the pizza delivery man and dancing in the hall, and attacking someone entering the building for a meeting the next and needing 3 people to "take her down", to use the language. Sometimes I see myself in her and wish she had had the chance to benefit from my meds. Every time I see her I stop feeling sorry for myself.

I'm also getting so many reminders about love. Last week when I walked into the building I felt so very strange. It was weirder than walking in there for the first time a few years ago and not knowing it was a psychiatric facility for a few hours. We have a huge lobby area with couches and tables and stuff and the patients hang out there a lot. When I walked in immediately a woman jumped up from the couch and ran over to me (and this woman has trouble walking) to give me a huge hug. Every time I've seen her she's been thrilled. This is amazing because for a long time she had an extreme paranoia about me, so much that I hid from her. It is also amazing because she is so impaired by illness and meds that I never thought she'd remember me after 4 months. Over and over I've had people so happy to see me, and often I did not think they would remember or care. I love the people I work with, and now I know I am loved back.

Anyway, I am now pushing my bedtime. I'm trying to be so strict with this because it is really nice to get off work "early". Early is in quote because my change to a 4 day full-time week means that I will be working 9 hours the other days. This is absolutely standard for me anyway, but it means that if I start late I will have to stay very late. Which just messes up my sleep cycle more and ultimately will mean disability time under the new rules.