Oh, hi there Hypomania.

 The magical merry-go-round of moods has landed on hypomania after spending a few days spinning through the mixed part of the cycle. I'm not having the happy, giddy filled with tons of ideas and feeling like I could burst out singing form of hypomania. I'm having the anxious, grumpy, irritable one. You know that feeling when you wake up on the 'wrong side of the bed' and the whole day is viewed through a filter of just sour mood and anxiety? It's like that but I can't sit still or focus for very long. 

I'm doing my best to listen to music to try to ignore the sound of my kids talking. It's driving me batty. They're not loud. They're actually behaving pretty well. But they keep being repetitive and interrupting themselves and each other. It's aggravating. Most days, I'm just mildly annoyed and I can ignore it. Right now it's like nails on a chalkboard. I am restraining the urge to start cleaning the entire kitchen. 

I've been restraining that urge since I woke up at 4:30 this morning. I spent some time writing in my journal. It is surprisingly legible considering my brain state right now. I am torn between three different writing projects that are waiting for attention. I have an almost finished gift for someone that I just have to make handles for (or buy them).

I want to get out of the house. A part of me says I should go for a run. I haven't gone running since high school. I sucked at it then, I would suck at it even more. And the temperature outside right now is fuck you degrees. (A highly technical term used by familial meteorologists for a while now. That's worse than cold as balls.) Because I can't run, I've been pacing. But I am getting bored pacing. So I wander around the house feeling twitchy because of all the cleaning that needs to be done.

My house isn't  disaster. I have kids and they leave toys in their wake. It's frustrating. Again, typically a minor annoyance but right now it is making my brain itch. The thing is, I can hyperfocus on stuff when I am like this. It's hard to figure out what that will be. Sometimes it is something craft related. Sometimes it is something writing related. Or it's cleaning and reorganizing everything in the whole place.

But, this is the first hypomanic episode in the last year. It is an improvement, sort of, over being in the grey fog of mild depression since last April. I'm trying to avoid social media so that I don't say or do something stupid. But I am updating friends on how my brain is behaving. I just am trying to break the stigma of silence and get myself back to being social again. Still, when my brain's going a million miles a minute with the attention span of a butterfly and my word filter off line, that's not the time to go online and chat with people.

Fuck my bipolar with a chainsaw.