The Eye of the Storm
2025-09-22
I feel that it's important to give this update: my sprints here are now 20 minutes instead of 15. I felt like 15 minutes was really easy and so now I'm trying to progressively make them longer and increase the strength of my writing muscles. Like I've been saying, the whole goal here is to reduce the friction between my thoughts and my fingertips as much as I can. I'm thankful that I've been getting better at this and feel that I have finally adjusted to the reality of this diary being a public-facing corpus. I think I have a better understanding of the boundaries I want to put in place with this medium, so my writing flows much more easily now. I would say that making the diary public-facing has improved my writing quite a bit because the pressure of performing has helped inspire me to stay on top of curating and presenting meaningful ideas. This diary has served as a nice garden full of idea seeds and I feel that I can always have a good repository of ideas as I keep up the habit of writing here.
In other news, I started trying to get CPAP compliant again after a long time without using it due to frustration. I found out that the best thing for me to do was increase the humidity on the machine. My nose was getting plugged up while using the CPAP because the air in the mask was too dry. Now that I increased the humidity, I actually feel a lot more comfortable falling asleep with it. I fell asleep with the mask on last night (it felt like a miracle) and I was really happy when I woke up in the morning—except for the fact that my mask was off my face and on the floor. I looked at the statistics the machine's software gives me and saw that once I had my first apnea, it seemed that I unconsciously flung the mask off my face. I don't really know how to fix that since I can't really control what I do in my sleep, but it should be a matter of keeping the habit up. Fingers crossed.
One thing that has been really exciting for me lately is how well I've been doing regarding chores. I used to struggle quite a bit with them because of the overwhelm and not really knowing what to do for certain ones, but recently I've gotten a lot better at keeping my areas clean and tidy. I think that I have become much more mentally fragile compared to when I was younger, but this fragility hasn't always been a bad thing. I think that it's fundamentally true that one's environment is a reflection of their mental state and so for me, I wanted to improve my mental state by improving my environment and hey, it worked.
I think a big thing that I am wanting to improve on is figuring out how to operate during my depressive episodes so that I don't take as big of a step back in life. Depression is like a natural disaster for me: it comes in and wrecks a bunch of things and forces me to start over and get back to baseline. I understand now after dealing with it for so long that I can't stop the storm, so I have to do what it takes to build a shelter. The main way that I've been doing that is by anchoring my days with good habits and getting to a point where they feel second nature so that I can lean on those habits and do them even when I'm depressed so that I don't feel like I'm completely slipping off base. I'd say that this year so far has been a major improvement compared to previous ones. I have decided to stop waiting for the day that the depression will go away—it will never come. Instead, I just need to work with it rather than against it and build the scaffolding when I'm not depressed so that when I do get depressed, I can survive the storm.
So yeah, I'm trying my best to live with my malady and not let it consume my identity and self-esteem. I know that there will be many days that I won't do well, but I know that I have to keep trying and living with it instead of seeing it as this unmanageable force. People with bipolar disorder can live their lives just fine as long as they focus on treating it. The main catch with that statement is this: the treatment is entirely up to me. There's not a pill or a doctor or a therapist that is going to fix it. There's no 'magic combination' that will make it go away. No, it will always be there. I have to figure out what life looks like with bipolar, not without it.