Surfacing

In 2008, when I was a new blogger, I would find a few blogs that I liked and read them for a few months, and then the blogger would stop blogging. Their last post would be a fairly typical post for them, with no indication that they were going to stop blogging or needed to take a break from it. So I would keep checking back and wonder where they were. And after a few months I remember thinking, if they were going to stop blogging, whether for a while or permanently, why didn’t they write a post to that effect? Why leave us hanging? What gives?

Of course, since last year I did that very thing, I now know the reason. It isn’t because they wanted to leave anybody hanging. It isn’t because they were trying to encourage anticipation or garner attention. It’s simply because they didn’t expect to stop blogging. And probably because of a lot of other things they didn’t expect.

For instance, they might not have expected their site to have been hacked, as mine was shortly after my last post (I must have garnered some attention). Nobody expects that. Neither did I expect my feed to be invalidated (and as bloggers know, having your feed invalidated is a bad thing – cost me $150 to have it fixed). But the upside was getting to rebuild my site and deciding to add some new features and a revised About page (less about events, more about what I believe in). It’s been time consuming to rebuild, but also therapeutic.

And boy, did I need therapy. I suppose that was something I did expect. But I didn’t expect that it wouldn’t make everything all better. (Does that make sense?) I somehow thought that with all the time (and expense) I put into psychiatric care and therapy that by now I could go on my merry, well-adjusted way. I didn’t expect that my medication would make me feel dull, uncreative, and sluggish. I didn’t expect that I wouldn’t be able to write for over six months.

I didn’t expect that when I would try to sell my house again, after owning it for nine years, that it would not only be worth less than when I bought it, but less than what I still owed on it. And so, one stress-filled short sale later, I downsized to an apartment less than half the size of my house. I had thought my year of letting go was over, but I found out that I had a lot more letting go to do! My Goodwill tax deduction is going to be pretty substantial, for one thing. But we are settled in our new place, and Neil can still ride his bike to school, which is important for him.

Neil. I did not expect Neil to continue to have seizures. I also didn’t expect that increasing his medication would cause severe aggression, necessitating police involvement. I didn’t expect that my sweet, funny, gentle son would be replaced by an angry, volatile, downright mean stranger. Thank God the worst of it subsided after about a month. But it was a month of stress-filled phone calls and appointments with doctors and counselors, visits to police stations, and being on pins and needles in my own home. Now that Neil has adjusted to his medication increase, I would like to say that since doubling it he has not had any seizures, but unfortunately he has. And I don’t know what to do. As much as I hate saying this, it feels like epilepsy has the upper hand. I didn’t expect that.

It’s not so much what we don’t expect in itself; the hard part is learning to accept it, to acknowledge that it’s now part of our identity, and ultimately deal with it. Constantly kicking our ribs to move forward, to not crawl into bed and cry (and when you’re wrestling with bipolar, that’s a tall order). But ultimately, curling up on the couch to watch Netflix every night – escape – became a greater risk than turning the computer back on and doing what I believe I was put on this earth to do.

It got to a point where something in me couldn’t stay down any longer. I am surfacing. For one thing, I have a book to finish. It’s always been in the forefront of my mind, waiting for me to dive back in. And blogging, well, what can I say? I might need to take an unexpected break now and again, but for me it’s definitely a case of once a blogger, always a blogger. I’m a bit rusty, but I’m back.