Relax

 Well good morning dear reader(s), hope you, too, got your morning off to a good start with Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” plus their other assorted tunes (including “Maximum Joy”). I’ve been trying this new thing where I’m attempting to get in touch with my feelings blunted by the Risperdal, utilizing music to somehow reach some higher plane…it’s tough, I’m kinda numb most of the time, but I’m not going to give up. I do know I can feel fear, and some anger and frustration, but what I want more than ever is to laugh. Oh, how I miss laughter, you know, the kind you feel in your belly. I haven’t had that in so very long. I can smile sometimes, particularly if mom asks me to, which she does do often. So you see I’ve kinda constructed this “game” I’m playing with the AI at YouTube to try and feel, feel real, like the Velveteen Rabbit. Call me crazy, It’s just what I’m doing right now, as I bide my time on this high dose of Risperdal for the time being.

I did get a chuckle yesterday when I collected the mail and there was a piece from Lazy Boy furniture addressed to Michael (or current resident). Oh, how I want to use this in an artwork, but I’m worried about offending my husband too much. Not that offending people has stopped me before—oh, on the contrary, I’ve constructed several in-your-face pieces and had quite a lot of fun making them. So perhaps I will retrieve this letter from the stack and put it with my other collected pieces of stuff I’m finding around here. I was wise and left the extremely dirty blue bottle cap in the alley yesterday. I mean, there are limits to my collecting, gotta be choosy, even when pickins are sparse, as they’ve been as of late.

Oh, am I crazy, dear reader(s), or is it like my mom says, that everyone is crazy (or as Seal puts it, we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy)? Do I simply have too much time on my hands, or am I living the life that’s just right for me? I know if I keep my stress very, very low, stay relaxed, I tend to do very well. Stress is the big troublemaker for me, tips me into hypomania, which in my case always leads to a quick ramp up into psychotic mania. I didn’t use to be this way, long ago I thrived on stress, it was intoxicating to me, but then the bipolar blew out in 2002 and things forever changed. It took me 20 years to figure out I needed a life of relaxing, which does make me feel useless, lacking purpose, lost sometimes, you know how I feel. 

But is relaxing really that bad? I can listen to music, do my writing, drive the back roads here, work on my art, go grocery shopping and cook, troll alleys with Lily. I do find these things fulfilling, entertaining at times actually, so I guess that makes me happy. Sure, I wish Michael and I could take a trip somewhere, but he recently revealed that he’s concerned I might get sick from travel, which has happened in the past whenever we left the state. Yes, upon return I eventually ended up in the nut hut, but that doesn’t take into account that I relapsed during every trip and tinkered with my meds too. It would be different this time. But then again, aren’t vacations stressful? Maybe so…

It’s funny, I think when you’re working, you wanna be relaxing, when you’re relaxing, you wanna be working. I think technology is amplifying this relationship, stoking stress and anxiety, but hey, what do I know, I still haven’t figured out how to do a screen shot on my iPhone. Forever behind the 8-ball, that’s me, but I’m comfortable in my recliner, as always, which has done terrible things for my posture (call the chiropractor!) but I’m de-stressed. Which is a win. OK, time to call mom and do my grocery list. Onward! Into the sun!