Author: ishtar39

New Name: Life Uncalculated

Back in November, I talked about wanting to change the name of the blog. I didn’t get any response through here (probably because not many people read it), but I did get some responses on the other forum.

As you can see, I decided to go with “Life Uncalculated” (Thanks, LQu!)

This is a nod to my math-teacher-ness as well as to the chaotic nature of being bipolar.

Also, while I’m working on becoming more disciplined, I’m not by nature disciplined, so the name captures that, too.

I was going back and forth between just going for the change or being stuck in my rut. But the old name no longer inspired me, and as I was working through Goddess Leonie’s Incredible Year Workbook,  realized that I want things around that inspire me.  So, I’m rebooting this blog with a new name, renewed focus.

My posting is likely to still be sporadic, but one of my goals is to become more consistent. I also want to start promoting the blog, but want a few more good posts on here first.

I am starting to create a calendar for the next quarter to help me plan my posts.

What are your goals for the next few months?

  .

Here’s to a better year: 2013

I’ve been reading Goddess Leone’s emails and posts for a long time, but I never took action on anything. I just read them, nodded in agreement and then went on doing whatever I was doing.

But:

“If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got.”

  —  W. L. Bateman

Something about this year feels different.

I feel more optimistic about everything than I have in a long time. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I’m going with it.It feels good, but it doesn’t feel out-of-control-manic.

So, I pulled the trigger and bought  2013 Create Your Incredible Year Calendar & Workbook.

I’m working through it now. I’m still somewhat stuck on some of it, but I’m feeling good about the parts I’ve done so far. 

One of the things I’ve put on my “100 Things To Do in 2013” list is: 52 blog posts.

That would be one per week. 

I didn’t specify WHICH blog, so as long as I write on one of the blogs every week, I’ll meet my goal.

But there’s a LOT I’d really like to do this year. When my list is done, I’ll post some of it here.

I’m enjoying this process so much that I became an affiliate for Leonie’s products. If you see some of her colorful banners popping up here, I strongly recommend the product. For disclosure, I will receive 50% of anything bought through the links on this page.

Buying them will help us both out! You’ll get a process to analyze and implement your goals and I’ll get a bit of money.


Goddess Leonie is a hippy, dippy, new-agey, dreamy type person, but she’s also a Let’s get shit DONE!” person.
Her process contains a little meditation, a little ritual, a little dreaming and quite a bit of “What’s the next step to make that happen?”

It’s only $9.95 for the “Life” edition.

Try it!


So, before the month is up, before your resolutions are in the trash can, sign up and try this out.



New name for the blog?

I’ve been contemplating changing the name of this blog, but I’d like some input from others.

The name was chosen to acknowledge the role my late stepfather tried to fill in my life. He and I had many conflicts while I was growing up, but I know now that he was trying to instill some important life skills in me, skills that I still lack.

That is still true, but I don’t know if the name of the blog really conveys what I’m trying to accomplish.

I’d like this to turn into a self-help place, like Zen Habits or becoming a happier, emotionally healthier person, like the Happiness Project.

The name doesn’t say that. The subtitle sort of does, and I’m trying to create tags that will. But I don’t know even where to start.

I’m thinking something like, “Creating a better me”?

I’d sort of like something cute and funny, but I have a hard time coming up with cute and funny.

So, I’m crowd-sourcing here. Anyone have any ideas? Please comment or reply to ishtar_diana at hotmail.com.

Current happenings

Lots of different things going on in my head at the moment, so this might take the form of a disorganized list.

  • For my birthday, I received a Kindle Fire HD. I’m really, really excited about this, I can’t even describe. 
    • I’ve downloaded almost 100 books for FREE so far. 
    • For productivity and organizational help, I’ve got List Master, Evernote and Connected Mind (a mind map program).
    • For mindless entertainment, there’s Netflix, Hulu Plus, Andoku Sudoku 2,Mahjong Deluxe, and a zillion other games. 
    • For music, I can stream Pandora or store stuff on Amazon Cloud to download. The Cloud offers up to 250 songs for free. If you need more than that, you can pay a small annual fee for virtually unlimited space.
    • Email: I can sync ALL my hotmail and gmail accounts (as well as yahoo, exchange or “other” email accounts) and access them all from one screen. That is so much cooler than switching identities in hotmail or logging out and logging back in for gmail on a web browser.
  • We’re getting down to the wire for C’s college applications. She’s got the most important one in, but is dragging her feet on the others. But she’s got the next week off of school, so she’ll have time to finish. She also needs to work on her senior project.
  • I’m still not working and there’s only a few weeks until unemployment runs out. I’ve got to find something NOW and I’ve been dragging my feet. Look for a fear of success post soon.
  • I’m still talking to M. The conversation has really mellowed, but I still get a flutter whenever I see that he’s responded. Damn, it’s so easy to turn me into an incoherent, lovesick teenager. How do I feel? I don’t know. There are obstacles, and I don’t know if it would be possible to work something out, nor do I know if he’d want to, but things are mellowing into pleasant conversation for the most part. I did journal about some boundaries I need for my sanity, and as long as things remain within those boundaries, I’d like to keep talking, see where things end up.
  • Mentally/emotionally I’m all over the map. Good, almost great, days, but also too many days where I’m doing a lot of nothing. It’s annoying, but I’m trying to remain consistent with my meds. 

    Emotion vs. Logic

    I am often of two minds about a lot of things.

    I call these “Emotion Brain” and “Logic Brain”.

    They are quite often at odds.

    My first pdoc told me that I was smart, I knew all the right things to do, and if I just listened to my mind instead of my heart I’d be just fine.

    That flies in the face of all my spiritual training, which is all about “following your instincts” and “letting your heart guide you.”
    But as I came to accept the bipolar diagnosis, I also had to accept that my emotions are totally fucked up and divorced from reality.
    Logic Brain must reassert itself. Logic Brain must be in charge.
    I realized last night that my emotions were running away with me, and I was allowing myself to just ride the tide.
    But I can’t allow that to happen.
    That way lies madness and I know it. That direction leads to unhealthy obsession and stupid decisions.
    And much like what happened earlier in the year with my obsessive fantasies about J, I have to let go of the scenarios running in my head about M. 
    I know that the reason I can’t be friends with J is that I can’t talk to him or anything without wanting to be with him. 
    I’m hoping that I can reach a point where M and I are friends, or rather that I can just let a friendship happen without feeling the pressure of “what might have been?”. We knew each other when we were both emotionally vulnerable and just starting to figure out who we were. So, we have a real bond. It’s just not the magical, mystical, unreal “soul mate” bond I once thought it was.
    It’s good to have friends that knew you then, or that knew a side of you that you no longer display to the world.
    Much like talking to my BFF from high school, or Jerry, can help give me a better perspective on who I was, being friends with M could help me figure out who I want to be.
    So, I did some journal writing last night, and some meditation, trying to inform Emotional Brain what Logic Brain has come up with. That usually takes awhile, though; Emotional Brain needs a lot of time to accept things.

    About that, um, yeah. . .

    So, I’m still talking to this ex, M, from when we were 18.

    And I have no idea how I’m feeling about it.

    It’s strange.

    On the one hand, maybe I was a bit hasty in saying I’m completely over him.

    No, I didn’t have the strong reaction that I had to the one in the spring, but as we’ve been talking, things have come up.

    Something is there, though I don’t know how to define it.

    We always had chemistry, explosive chemistry.

    We didn’t always have good communication.

    Once I got over being angry at rehashing the same old shit, we started talking about stuff we had NOT discussed before.

    And I discovered that he did not have a critical piece of information about the beginning of our relationship.

    I swear I told him this thing, more than once, at the beginning, but if he really didn’t know this, it puts some of his behavior in a different (better) light.

    We started talking about meeting up “someday” in the amorphous future.

    Which, as always with us, led to discussion of sex.

    So now that’s in my head. And like I said, we always had chemistry, and that is still there. And now I can’t get it out of my head – an indication of my obsessive nature.

    There are a million little reasons and a few big ones why rekindling a relationship with him would be a bad idea, and I’m self-aware enough to know it.

    But I also know that we never gave each other a real chance – there was always something hanging over our heads. My issues, his issues, other relationships getting in the way. . .Always something. And we were 18/19/20 and had to make everything 10 times more dramatic than it needed to be.

    I know that he’s showing more maturity and introspection than he has in the past. And I’m enjoying talking to him. And I’m looking forward to the possibility of seeing him next year.

    I’m trying to not think beyond that (but my obsessive nature is making that difficult).

    Out of the woodwork. . .

    Apparently, this is a year for reminiscing.

    Another ex has popped up.

    The one in the spring was my #1 most influential relationship. This one is #2.

    And he’s writing a book.

    About most of the women in his life.

    And I play a prominent role, I guess.

    And he wanted a few of my memories to add to the book.

    Um, yeah.

    So, we’re talking, via email, and he tip-toes around a couple of the big issues. But he hones in on issues I thought we’d resolved ages ago. We have talked several times over the years. After our last encounter, where I literally told him he shouldn’t be looking up old girlfriends when his wife was about to have a baby, I pretty much was done with him. I think I got as much resolution as I was ever going to have with that relationship.

    But what he wants is for me to just write, randomly, about some of my memories.

    And I don’t want to.

    So, I tell him I’ll answer specific questions, but not randomly write.

    And the things he brings up are things we talked about back in 92 and 2004. I’ve apologized for the things I did wrong, and told him some of the things he could work on for future relationships.

    In fact, I went back and found some posts on the Fool from when he contacted me back in 2004 and verified that we did indeed talk about this shit before.

    Anyway, there was a point in my life when I thought I’d never get over this one and now, I’m thinking, “Thank the Gods that we didn’t stay together!” We probably would have killed each other.

    To the good, this is not sending me on the roller-coaster that the other one sent me on. Just pissing me off a bit.

    Some books on Mental Illness

    In keeping with Mental Illness Awareness Week, here are some books and a blog that have information for the lay person about various illnesses.

    Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is considered a definitive work on Bipolar (which she still calls manic-depressive illness). The author is a psychologist who also has the disorder. I read this shortly after I was diagnosed, and I feel like maybe I should read it again now, since my perspective may have changed. 

    The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R. Saks is on my list of books to read (no, I haven’t read it yet). Saks is a law professor who has schizophrenia.

    Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson (a.k.a The Bloggess) is a very funny (and fast) read. While it isn’t about mental illness directly, Ms. Lawson suffers from depression and severe social anxiety, which made doing a book tour and other related things very difficult. And if you aren’t familiar with The Bloggess, check out her blog. Some things to make sure you don’t miss:

    Beyonce the 6 foot metal chicken
    Wil Wheaton collating paper
    The video ad for the book (featuring several big name stars)
    The traveling red dress revisited (and read all the links)
    A confession about depression and self-harm (insert trigger warning here)

    I’ll post more tomorrow.



    Mental Health Awareness Week

    October 7-13 is national Mental Health Awareness Week, according to the National Alliance on Mental Health.

    I sometimes casually mention being depressed or having volatile moods or taking medication, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about it more in-depth.

    I have bipolar 2 disorder.

    One of the best places to find out about the differences between “classic” manic/depressive bipolar (or bipolar 1) and bipolar 2 is PsychEducation.org. The author of that page is a researcher in the field and an advocate for helping people with bipolar 2.


    The best visualization I’ve seen for defining mood disorders comes from the PsychEducation website. Dr. Phelps sees bipolar and mood disorders as a spectrum disorder (much like autism). While his opinion is not expressed in the DSM-IV (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association), his descriptions fit so well with my experience, I tend to go with it.



    “Unipolar” refers to unipolar depression – clinical depression, major depression. Point A refers to people with depression who respond well to traditional medication. Point B is a point where:

     there is some sort of threshold where these approaches are no longer completely or continuously effective: either they don’t work at all, offer only partial relief, or help for a while then “stop working” (which may account for some or much of “Prozac poop-out”, now regarded as a “soft sign” of bipolar disorder, described below).  

     BP NOS is “bipolar not otherwise specified”. 


    The main difference between bipolar 1 and bipolar 2 is the level of mania.

    A person with bipolar 1 has had at least one fully manic episode. Mania is defined as:

    a manic episode is defined by a distinct period of persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood lasting at least one week (or less if hospitalization is required). The mood is also accompanied by additional symptoms, such as inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, a decreased need for sleep, pressured speech, flight of ideas, distractibility, increased involvement in goal-directed activities or psychomotor agitation, and excessive involvement in pleasurable and high-risk activities. from http://www.manicdepressive.org/dsm.html    

    People with bipolar 2 have “hypomania” (aka “little” mania) with the elevated mood, grandiosity, pressured speech, flight of ideas, and many of the manic symptoms, but only lasting a few days (4-7) and  is “not severe enough to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning or to require hospitalization.”

    Except that for me, it can cause problems. I’m too impulsive at work, or I can’t stop saying what I really think, which can get me into trouble with friends and bosses.

    As I’m beginning to write this, on October 5 at about 1:30 a.m., I’m hypomanic. I’m doing all kinds of making plans and organizing. I downloaded multiple “blogging plan” pages and set up a binder. I bought new binders and other office supplies (that I WANT but don’t need and should be spending my money elsewhere). I’ve been reading blogs that have tips on making better blogs. Like, I swear, I read over 40 entries at Problogger tonight alone. I wrote posts for two of my other blogs, after almost a month of not writing at all.

    It’s now the 5th at 6:30 a.m. I slept for about 4 hours and now I’m wide awake. I’ve opened about 15 tabs on Chrome looking for inspiration to start jotting down notes for my blogs, while watching a show on Hulu.

    It’s really hard to hold onto a job when this happens. On the one hand, I’m more productive than ever, but on the other, I can’t concentrate on one thing for more than a couple of minutes. While I’m writing this, I’m thinking about the knitting I want to do, writing patterns, how to make my math blog better, how to get more money coming in, helping my daughter with a Greek costume for homecoming spirit week, and how the heck we’re going to finish making this dress she wants to make by tomorrow night (homecoming dance) and a few other things that keep escaping before I can get them written down.

    While this state is much preferable to a state where I’m so depressed I can’t do ANYTHING for weeks or months at a time, it feels like I try to live my life in the brief few days of these hypomanic episodes, because I spend so much of my life depressed and unable to function.

    According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 2.6 percent of Americans have bipolar disorder – that’s about 5.7 million adults.

    There’s a lot of us out there, and many are functioning well in society. You may know someone with this problem, but not even know it.

    Because there is still a strong stigma about mental disorders, the person you know may never tell you. Like people with unipolar depression, they suffer in silence. But as we do more research on the brain with PET scans and the like and we begin to figure out how brain chemicals work, it becomes clear that there is a physical component to this and other “mental illnesses”.

    For me, one of the things that is important about Mental Illness Awareness is about accepting that there should be no difference in how we treat “mental” illnesses and how we treat “physical” ones.

    Do you know someone with a mental illness? Do YOU have a mental illness? How does it affect your/their ability to hold a job? To maintain relationships? To “have a life”?

    Do you Pinterest?

    Some of my friends got into Pinterest a few months back, and I pretty much ignored it.

    With too much time on my hands now, I started playing with it.

    For me, it’s better than bookmarks. My bookmarks can get crowded and annoying very quickly, and I can’t always remember why I bookmarked a page from the page title.

    With Pinterest, it’s on the cloud, so there’s no losing my interests. I know why I pinned it, because it has a picture that shows me what it is. I’d kinda like to be able to make sub-boards (like folders inside folders), but I think I can keep it fairly organized.

    The only thing is I keep pinning stuff to the wrong board and then having to move it, but that’s not hard.

    You can follow me on Pinterest here.

    Follow my blog with Bloglovin