Brain on bipolar

I've been pretty stable for quite a few months, actually an extemely long time for me.  Vicodin is stabilizing for me so taking it quite a bit for the early part of the summer was probably good. Sleep has sucked but I can't use my weighted blanket because it is too heavy and I could hurt myself kicking it and I'm not willing to take anything more sedating for fear of falling so that is really on me.  There are solutions and I am too afraid to try them.  Perhaps when I get a brace next week I can manage to sleep in it and a slipper of some kind and get up and walk as needed, once I reach that point.  But for now it's out of the question.

My mood has been drifting.  It's probably partly SAD but as often happens with SAD for me the depression triggers everything else and so I am mixed which means it's not a good time to start using my light.  Increasing the activation is not good.  Usually I don't get the light going until about November because of exactly this situation.

I'm really struggling with things.  I thought yesterday was going to be the day I euthanized my cat.  I was pretty sure for a number of hours during the night because she was suffering.  But then she turned it around, again.  How many times she'll do that is unknown; at 19 she is living on borrowed time no matter what. But losing her is going to hurt so much.  She's been my best friend for half my life.  Nobody else has let me cry on them hundreds of times, ignored me when I was sceaming or sat on my lap and purred through the entire writing and revision of a thesis.  Nobody else has moved to Michigan and back to Ohio and then several times around Ohio with me.  Nobody else has the ability to sense when I am losing it and no matter how old and sick they are come to comfort me.  Her loss will be huge.

My brother's situation is getting to me.  I am so angry at him and yet anger at him is pointless.  Because of his Asperger's he simply doesn't get it.  I did not know this until this week but I don't think I have ever once just had a real fight with him because it is pointless.  He doesn't see other sides to any situation.  Never has, never will.  We all adapted to that.  It's like my mom and I were talking about today, he is so hyperfocused on things that don't matter that I timed him at 7 minutes talking about something that was so egotistical that it was only funny because it was so pointless and another probably 5 on something involving the word "grammarian".  He has this egotistical laugh when he gets going with this stuff. He gets so focused on one thing that he doesn't change what he is doing.  For example instead of filling out food stamps application yesterday he spent an entire day crushing cans.  Most people would intermittently do that while doing other things.  He crushed something like 15 bags of them in a day.  His hyperfocus led to so much of this.  He has ALWAYS had a "thing"-dinosaurs, comic books, Mash, rocks (I swear this is true: he has boxes of rocks from all over the country.  They are just rocks, not anything special.  He can pick up a piece of sandstone and tell you where it came from---state, location, which trip he was on and what campground they stayed at.  And those rocks have been moved with him since he collected them from age maybe 8 on.  He's almost 50.)  So his hyperfocus just changed to things that were criminal and also to alcoholism.  It's like his motto is "do everything to extremes".  In 2011 on vacation I noticed how much he was drinking and talked to my mom about it.  She thought I was miscalculating but by the end of the trip it was hard to deny how much beer had been consumed and how much of it was the cheap stuff he brought in a huge box and then re-stocked.  In 2012 I went outside at night for a minute and on the way out found him in the basement den on his phone with 7 bottles of beer in front of him.  My room was above the trash cans and later that night I heard him take them out.  I mentioned this to my mom who said no way, she'd cleaned up 7 bottles in that room in the morning.  He had just handily covered up the fact he'd had 14 bottles of beer after everyone went to bed about 9 or 10 and he'd had one in hand all day.  Now it's easy to see.  Then it was easy to make excuses.  But the truth is confronting him about it wouldn't have worked.  Nothing like that ever has with him.

I get that this is out of his control (the Asperger's).  But I also believe that you work with what you have and that you are responsible for yourself. At some point you have to look at your life and see that what others are saying has value.  My mom is having to treat him like a small child. 

I don't know what else to say.  I just feel like there is so much I need to feel and think and say and I can't say it to the person who should hear it.  I'm scared of how this will go.  I made it through the beginning of this part of my life mainly because of shock.  But this time there won't be shock and I'm scared that it will be like the last time things happened in my life that I didn't know how to handle and I'll wind up in the hospital. 

I just want to know how to feel and act.  And nobody writes guidebooks for this.  And if they do I don't want to read it because I don't want to read someone telling me how to feel when I don't really know myself.

I hate this.