Back on tracks
The good thing when you have to start things over again is maybe that you can do things differently. That’s a lesson I have learned through the years, the hard way I must say because, instead of learning it from somebody else experience, I had to experience it myself to learn it. After I stupidly repeated the same schemas a few times.
When you have as much free time as I have now, you find occupations. First things I have done when I was diagnosed, I have looked for information about my illness. I’ve read in books, on the internet, that bipolar affected peoples benefit from a stable schedule, a fixed routine.
I was scared by that very word, routine! For me, it symbolised the boredom in a relationship, the obligations you can’t avoid, it reminded me the medication I have to take regularly and the appointments to the doctors I have also on a regular basis, the manic me wouldn’t let life become stable, boring, and the depressed me would be even more depressed by the regularity of the days all looking the same.
I was a wild one like the song says, craved for liberty and spontaneity. That made me avoid the regular life, that and my manic periods that definitively didn’t want stability. I really had a problem with that concept. Until recently…
I was scared by that very word, routine! For me, it symbolised the boredom in a relationship, the obligations you can’t avoid, it reminded me the medication(…), the manic me wouldn’t let life become stable, boring, and the depressed me would be even more depressed by the regularity of the days all looking the same.
I decided to change a few habits, following some tips I grabbed from the wonderful knowledge source that is the Internet, and Medium. Amongst the things I wanted to change, these were my top priorities :
- wake up much earlier in the morning
- reinforce my appreciation of the morning
- sleep just enough, not too little, not too much
- stick to my newly chosen writing goals
- make my overall days more productive, more useful
The first item on the list wasn’t really obvious, even not so long ago, I thought I « wasn’t a morning person » period. My Mom told me that I was as a child. I had forgotten and couldn’t relate to that, but accidentally a week ago, during a few days, I woke up at 4am. It shifted my schedule almost naturally and I felt much more energised when I woke up in the morning, although I didn’t sleep more, my nights looked the same (that is I wake up several times a night, smoke a cigaret, drink something, visit the bathroom and go back to bed. Yeah I know, tobacco sucks… It’s a habit I want to quit but let’s stick to the current topic!).
It’s not easy to define what that shifted schedule does to me, or rather I see the effects but can’t understand why. I’ll accept it that way for the moment, use it to improve myself and reach my goals.
The second item on the list is a way to ease the persistence of my efforts. I chose music, a routine walk, and inspiring blogs reading as my nice way of beginning the day.
The third item, enough sleep, is more about the discipline of sticking with a sleep schedule, and it became easier for me the moment I started following what seems to be my natural schedule. Making the morning a (more) enjoyable moment helps a lot, and I feel like I’m more and more looking forward to it.
The fourth item, writing goals, is almost a no error success for now, although I don’t expect it to be like that all the time. That would be wonderful, but resilience and some fault tolerance are definitively part of the persistence.
The fifth item, more productive days, is something I think has more to do with the feeling I have about my days, and that is highly related to the four previous points, and I want to be useful, because it makes me happy (I have read an inspiring post Darius Foroux has written about it). There is still progress to be done, but some are accomplished already and it’s stimulating.
The way to go for getting back on tracks is sure to give oneself a chance to succeed, stop self-sabotage and embrace a more positive You like I’ll try to do every day, from now on.
