Double time writing

Keeping up on two journals is a bit of a juggling act. Livejournal is my home and has been for nearly a decade. I carve out an hour - bare minimum - of my morning to write. I have done this for for most of my life. But to keep the subjects separate is a trick. I could copy and paste my morning entry over. And while that's not technically plagiarizing (you can't really plagiarize yourself) it's generally frowned upon to present old work as new.

The only time I've managed to write with any volume in two journals was while I was on Abilify, an antipsychotic medication that kicked my bipolar into a nasty mixed episode. (A state where you combine all of the frenzy of mania with the terrifying world of depression.) I created a word document file on my laptop to save my friends list on Livejournal from being overwhelmed.

I usually write one or two pages in my journal. I wound up with 100 pages of material on my second journal, on top of the roughly 12 pages a day I was putting on Livejournal. Very little of it was substantial or even coherent.

It was a messy situation. It lasted months. And while it wasn't the first time writing had ever frustrated me, it was the first time writing tormented me. It was far more of a compulsion than an act of will. Writing is a sacred art to me and it was maddening to have it feel like an addiction.

After four or five months of being on Abilify, I finally asked my psychiatrist to discontinue the medication. I was having massive side effects. Psychomotor agitation, which is a fancy way of saying "every muscle is going to twitch involuntarily", insomnia that kept me up for 24 hours or more sometimes, a tightening of the jaw that sometimes made it difficult to speak, drooling, and a markedly deteriorated eyesight. While I was immensely grateful to have those side effects go away, returning to coherency in my writing was the thing I was most grateful for.

I haven't had a manic break since late 2011. Not the kind that presents psychosis, at least. Nothing that has needed any stop-gap medication in order to apply the brakes. I am grateful for this. My writing is grateful for this.

And my friends on Livejournal, who were kind enough to wade through the written insanity of that time with me, are also grateful for this.

So maybe keeping up on two journals isn't bad. At least this time you can mostly figure out what I'm trying to say.