I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. The last time I saw her was nearly 6 weeks ago. Not a lot has changed since then in regards to my knee. I can’t do much of anything aside from walking. I generally don’t have much pain from walking unless I’ve aggravated it, but stairs are definitely something I try to avoid. I’m hoping more than anything that when I see her tomorrow I can persuade her to take the screws out of my knees on Friday. If she will I can leave for NJ sometime next week. I’m so excited to spend more time exploring NYC and having a new and different experience for a while. It’s even more exciting since I was just there for a couple weeks and met some really cool people I plan on hanging out with once I’m finally back.

It’s late now. I stopped in St. Cloud on the way to my parents’ house earlier tonight. I went to my older brother’s house and hung out with him for a bit. It was really nice. My older brother and I were constantly fighting growing up. Now that we are adults we get along much better and have a mutual respect for each other we never had, but I wouldn’t say we are close. We sat around his house for a little while and talked and then decided to meet a friend of mine at a restaurant to get some dinner. We went to this all you can eat place and the waitress taunted me when I was done eating. I ate 3 full bowls of food and she said the most she’d ever seen someone eat was 4. I’m pretty sure I could have taught her a lesson and jammed down 2 more bowls of food right then and there, but I knew it was a bad idea so I didn’t. After dinner we went to a place in St. Cloud I had never been to and played pool for quite a while. My brother joined us for that, too, as did a couple other people. I don’t remember the last time I just hung out with my brother for any length of time and I’m not sure we’ve ever hung out and actually talked before. Hopefully we can start doing it more in the future. We’ve both had our struggles and could learn a lot from each other – not to mention help each other out. SPICY TUNA met us for dinner and pool. She’s one of my most favorite people in the world. Probably because I’m basically a little Asian girl at heart.

My knees hurt. I’m sick of them hurting. I’m certain the left one isn’t going to get better until I have the screws removed. I’m determined to do that on Friday. My orthopedic surgeon is not aware of this… yet.

Back in MN. Brrrrrr.

I had my chakras balanced today. I think that’s what happened anyway. I’ll have to see if I feel any changes over the next few days.

Hopefully back out to NJ soon. Very, very soon.

Today was great! I got up and had a very relaxing morning and got all packed up for my trip home. I then went into the city and went to an art museum. The museum was awesome. They have so much great stuff there and they had a Charles Burchfield painting I love on display. I’m so grateful I got to see that! I sat on the bench positioned near it and just took it in for a while.

After the museum I met some friends in the village and we went out. I’m super bummed this is my last night in NYC again, but hopefully I’ll be able to come back in just a couple weeks after having had all the screws removed from my knees. I love this place and want to call it my home. I’m certain there are a ridiculous amount of fun things I’ll be able to do, find and experience. I’ve only been here for two weeks and I’ve already made so many fun friends in the city. I can’t wait to get back here so I can get to know them better!

What a wonderful past week I’ve had in NYC. I’ve really enjoyed this reiki class I took. It’s been great to have had a focus these past few days and I met so many wonderful people in the class. I got together with a couple of them before class today and we practiced on each other. I definitely can see myself keeping in touch with the two of them. And, when I do move out here in just a couple weeks, I’ve already made some fun friends in the city!

The past few days I’ve felt less like myself, but today I got my mojo back. I think it was just all the changes and then being back in the city from the perspective of someone who now resides on the East Coast. When I met my friend for the movie yesterday I felt totally boring. Both my sense of humor and my personality were muted. There’s nothing more that I hate than feeling boring – because I’m so not boring. It also reminds me of all those years I lost my sense of humor. I don’t ever want to lose it again. I’m very lucky to have it and I can’t imagine living life without it. It’s definitely a gift.

Gratitude List:
My sense of humor
Opportunities to improve
My higher power placing things in my path that I need.

I’m 30 years old. This is not my first time at the rodeo. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten much better at trusting my intuition about men and different situations in regards to dating, even when it pains me to cut myself off from people. I know in the end I’ll be better off and avoid more heartbreak if I stop chatting with guys when I first get the impression they are jerking me around.

I’ve been chatting with quite a few different guys on scruff and grindr which are apps on my phone. Only one has really gotten under my skin and by that I mean someone I start to fantasize about meeting, how great they are and how great it would be to fall in love with them. We had plans to get together tonight after my reiki class, but I’d already gotten the impression it wasn’t going to work out yesterday. I was really looking forward to meeting him. He was cute, we seemed to have things in common, and unlike most gay men he also appeared to have a soul. How wrong I was.

We were texting back and forth yesterday in the early afternoon. I was really excited to meet him and go on a date tonight. It’s been quite a while since I went on a date. We didn’t send each other any texts throughout the evening and when I got back to my friends’ last night I went on scruff and saw he’d looked at my profile about 15 minutes earlier. I sent him a text asking him how the rest of his day was. No response. Now this was the first big, blazing neon sign proclaiming something was wrong. Since I have a habit of jumping to conclusions when it comes to men and dating, I decided I’d be best to wait it out and to start treading more cautiously. Around 2 pm this afternoon I sent a text asking if he was still available to get together tonight. Again, no response. A couple hours later I logged into scruff and saw that he’d checked my profile earlier that morning. This confused me. I mean really, if he had no interest in meeting me I couldn’t really figure out why he would be checking my profile (or looking at my picture). Now when I get excited about meeting a guy and he ultimately blows me off there is a pretty specific grieving process I go through. On the one hand I’m mad, but more than anything I’m usually just really disappointed that yet again a guy that looked pretty promising had fallen through. So throughout the day, or a few hours, I go through this whole grieving process and then get to the point where I’m usually over it. Not that it doesn’t still hurt when I think about it, but I’m not obsessed with it and the bulk of the emotions I’ve processed. Normally when this happens I just let it go. I don’t ever reach out again to the guy. If there is one thing I won’t do it’s come across as desperate. As I was in my reiki class tonight I realized I should really send him a message. Not a message to pick a fight, but rather that I should tell him that he really did hurt me so that he knows that although he may not have had any consequences of his actions I was affected by them. As jaded as I am about dating and the gay community, I have to believe that most gay men aren’t inherently evil. I also think most of them could probably use a reality check that the tactics they are using have consequences for some of us who don’t have as thick skin as others. The text message I decided to send while sitting in class was this: There’s a reason I don’t try to go on dates often and it’s guys like you. Guys who masquerade as something different. Something better. Something to remain hopeful for. Yet, it’s always the same.

I didn’t actually send the message. By the time I checked my phone after class he had sent me a message. The message said that work was a nightmare, his phone had died and could we get dinner tomorrow evening before my class instead. Now I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after I’ve gone through the entire grieving process it’s hard to open up more than a sliver of opportunity again. I didn’t have plans before my class, yet, but had decided to ask a couple people if they’d be interested in getting together before hand, which I ultimately did. I texted him back saying that after class might work, but not before. I haven’t heard back from him which really means that had I told him I could get dinner before class he would have just bailed on me (probably without even letting me know) and I would have wasted an opportunity to meet fun people from class outside of class. I opened up scruff an hour or two after sending him the text and saw that he’d been online since I sent it. I took the opportunity to block him on the app. I don’t need that bullshit in my life. And really, it’s this kind of thing that I can sort of let roll off me once or twice, but more than that and I’m cutting myself off from the opportunity to meet any new gay men for dating because I simply can’t handle having my heart jerked around like that anymore and need a break. It’s very disheartening.

Gratitude list:
Reiki class
Making new friends
A good nights rest

I started a reiki class today. It’s 3 evenings in a row and it’s designed to teach me how to practice reiki on myself. I really enjoyed being in the class. It’s held at the instructor’s home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I like how she’s decorated the interior and she has all sorts of huge stones around. There were 11 of us in the class and everyone seemed interesting in their own way. I almost wish I could get to know them all individually on a one on one basis.

I was pondering things a little bit in class. I have been meditation for about 6 months now and that’s going well. I feel calmer and more in control of things. I’m hoping this reiki will give me a better connection to my body. The meditation is all very focused in my mind right now, but I’d like to work on bridging the gap between my mind and body.

Ok, I guess it’s story time.

When I went through my first and second manic episodes at 20 and 21 one of the things I remember about being manic was how my mind and body were connected. It almost felt like the two were one. The connection was nearly flawless and there were a number of things that attested to that fact. As I was driving to the Twin Cities one day that summer I stopped in at a random gas station. At the gas station they had one of those dunk tanks set up to raise money for charity. The guy in the dunk tank was cute (and shirtless) which immediately got my attention. I bought a couple balls to throw. Now I’ve never been very athletic, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t knock him into the water with 2 out of the first 3 balls I threw. I then got a few more balls and moved further back. Again and again I hit the target and he fell into the tank. I kept getting more balls and moving further and further back. It was uncanny the way I was able to look at the target and hit it with such accuracy. I’ve never been good at throwing balls of any kind, but my mind and my body worked together so well I was able to make it happen. I also grew up with a pool table in my basement. I’m ok at playing pool, but only because I grew up getting my ass kicked by my brothers who were always much better than me. When I was manic I could play pool way better than normal. I remember going to the bar and making shot after shot. I didn’t even really need to line them up very well. I would just look at the shot for a second and know where I had to hit the ball to make it go in – and then I would. It was creepy. It was also during that time that I realized I could take out my contacts (I’m pretty blind) and continue to shoot pool. Once I took them off everything turned into this fuzzy haze, but somehow I was still able to line the shots up and make them. I’m certain I would never be able to do that now.

The other aspect to the mind-body connection I remember was trying to figure out how the two worked together. I could tell that my body and mind were processing things differently than they had been only a couple months before, but I could never pin down what the exact changes were. I couldn’t tell if my mind was sped up and my body slowed down, or vice versa. Or perhaps my mind was slowed down so much it felt like it was really sped up. Or maybe my body had sped up so much my mind just felt like it had slowed down. Regardless, I could never come to a conclusion on it, but spent quite a bit of time trying to figure it out.

I’m hoping if I combine reiki with my meditation that I’ll be able to achieve a parity between my mind and my body. I’m sure it won’t feel the same way it did while I was manic because everything was concerted then, but it was also all on overdrive. I’m just hoping to get closer to that connection again where the two are working together. I don’t feel like they are working apart at this point, but I do still feel like they are disjointed. Wow, I’m glad I was able to bang this post out very quickly. Now I can lay down in bed and practice my reiki as I fall asleep.

Gratitude List:
Looking forward to dates with cute guys.
Learning new tools to help me become a better, more centered person.
Meeting new, interesting people.

I got a call from my dad today. My dad doesn’t call me very often so when he does I always try to answer or call him back right away. I have a good relationship with him, but my go-to parent is my mom. It’s just how it is.

So my dad called me because my older brother apparently, as my dad put it, ‘went off’ his medication. Now the problem with stating he ‘went off’ his medication is that it implies there is a need for him to be on it in the first place. I’m not so sure there is.

I get where my parents are coming from. I really do. They have had to watch 3 children fall down – sometimes over and over again, when it comes to this “bipolar” issue we have. We’ve had to be put in hospitals, we’ve spent tons of money we don’t have, acted recklessly and fought with them incessantly while doing these things. From their perspective, it’s much easier not to rock the boat. The manic episodes were as much a nightmare for them as they were for us. Nobody wants to live through another one. And it’s possible someone wouldn’t live through another one. Or would have such life changing consequences as a result that things would never be able to return to normal.

So my dad calls and we talk. He tells me that my older brother ‘went off’ his medication, but didn’t give me much insight into how my older brother is doing. With my dad it’s an alarmist thing. He sees the future filled with hospitals, more fights and more problems. My mom sees the same thing. And really, why shouldn’t they? He went off his medication a couple years ago around Christmas time and things got really ugly for them. My mom apparently had to take a week off work to babysit him before my brother went into the hospital. I was in the cities then, but it wasn’t a fun time around my house. So all in all, for my parents sanity, it’s definitely best to keep us medicated.

The problem with staying medicated, especially if you don’t absolutely have to, is that it keeps you sick. Swallowing those pills every day as a constant reminder that there is something wrong with you. Feeling like you are nothing more than a construct of the medication you are taking. That’s really no way to live. In my opinion, psychiatry is basically voodoo, but much more expensive. Although I’ve never tried voodoo. I’m just guessing it’s cheaper.

I ended up texting my brother tonight. We don’t text or talk that often. I see him for Christmas, but we’re not close. Though he is still my brother and I care about him very much. Apparently he’s been off his medication for about 3 months. That’s quite a long time. And I’m guessing, in my not-a-psychiatrist opinion, that if he quit cold turkey and was going to experience a jolt from going off his medication it would have already happened. I just saw my brother a couple weeks ago for Christmas and he seems alright. Maybe even a little better than normal. I do remember seeing him smile, so that was good. And to be honest, I was kind of surprised that he even answered my text.

I’m going back to Minnesota on Saturday and am hoping to stop by my brother’s house and talk to him for a little while. It’s not something I’ve ever done in my entire life, but I really want to have this conversation. I’d love to learn what his experience has been going off the medication, but also with the bipolar thing in general. After my second manic episode I crashed and was so depressed. I thought about killing myself non-stop for 8 months and could barely leave my parents’ house. My older brother had done the same thing a few years earlier. Basically holed up in the basement for an entire winter. Well, more than the entire winter.

I’m also completely convinced the reason I experienced any manic episodes was because I was smoking marijuana. Lots and lots of marijuana, to be exact. From my perspective it seems like the same is true with my brothers. Once you take away the marijuana, the manic episodes seem to stop. I’m not sure my brother has that figured out. I also know my parents are worried about it. I’ll definitely need to drop that into the conversation.

So my brother is now medication free, but he doesn’t seem to really be that happy. He decided to go off his, from what I understand, because he felt depressed on it. I did it the other way around – worked super hard to get myself to a happy, comfortable place and then went off my medication, but if he can make it work good for him. I’ll have to see if I can help my brother in any way get out of the rut he’s in. Lord knows it took me forever to deal with my problems and get myself to a place where I was happy. Hopefully he can chip away at it and get there himself.

One brother down, one to go. What an unexpected, but totally lovely surprise.

Gratitude List:
The ability, ambition and drive to improve.
Cute guys who seem to be swirling all around me. I will be catching one….even if only to release some time later.
Meetings. I’m really grateful to have meetings to go to out here.

I liked the meditation I went to yesterday. It was a guided meditation which was nice. I don’t normally do meditations that are guided. The woman teaches a class on the Upper West Side that is free. I plan on going more often when I live in the city.

After the meditation I wandered around the Upper West Side for a while. I ate soup at a vegan restaurant that was suggested. It was pretty good. The soup was suggested to me by the meditation teacher, but when I got to the restaurant I did what I always do and started scanning the menu for meat options. Yep, not happening there. And although I enjoyed the soup, I don’t plan on becoming a vegan anytime soon. I’m happy with the food camp I’m currently in. Basically the ‘eat as much meat as possible’ camp. Yum.

I’m updating this in the morning as opposed to my usual nightly ritual of doing it right before bed. Right after I’d thrown away my contacts last night I remembered that I still had to update this. I was tired and decided it could wait until morning. Today could be pretty fun. I’m meeting this guy I met at a meeting a few days ago. We might go to a movie and we’ll probably get something to eat. He was really nice.