Starayo

Wallet supported paypal??

Oh, in the US.

My new pebble cannot come fast enough. I am so fucking sick of modern smartwatches. Loaded with features I don’t want, the features I do want don’t work reliably, and I have to charge it daily.

It’s worth exploring different medications to see if there are less side effects, it took my friend a few tries to find one that was effective without intolerable side effects.

Whoops, I knew that, but I typed this just after waking up. I’ll edit that.

There are multiple types of bipolar disorder with various features, so take any advice from strangers with a grain of salt, as they probably don’t know the specifics. I have a couple of personal experiences with bipolar disorder in general.

First, a close friend of mine - his manic episodes would usually involve him staying awake for days at a time, and his depressive episodes were pretty bad. Before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder he had some pretty bad experiences with therapy from a “therapist” that clearly didn’t know anything about depression or bipolar disorder, since being diagnosed and settling on a medication he has been much, much more stable. I used to lie awake unable to sleep from the stress of worrying about him, I don’t anymore. He still has depressive and manic periods but they are much, much less severe.

Secondly, an aunt. She had one of the more severe types, but we didn’t know it. She always had bad depressive episodes (and there was apparently an early bad episode of mania that was written off as a one-off mental episode from stress or something) but it wasn’t until she suddenly left my uncle and their children to run off with a married man she barely knew that it became more apparent something else was wrong. I suggested - stressing that I am not an expert in the matter - that it kind of sounded a lot like some of the self-destructive manic episodes I had heard about, not from my friend but from Stephen Fry. I had heard him talk about his bipolar disorder at one of his shows in Sydney, and his past involved a lot more trouble than you’d expect. He has a couple of documentaries about it, but I can’t speak on how helpful they would be. Anyway, I turned out to be right, and so far she seems to be doing better, but it’s still early days.

The main takeaway is there is hope. One thing I took away from Stephen Fry’s talks in particular was that it is vital to keep taking the medication and not to decide, after a period of stability, that you don’t need it anymore, that’s a recipe for disaster.

The bobiverse series (about a guy who is hit by a car right after signing up for a cryogenics thing and then wakes in the future to find out he’s basically been legislated to have no rights and is stuck into a self-replicating drone for space exploration, it’s pretty good) kind of starts off setting the backstory like it. The christofascism just started a bit later.

Obviously it’s not one to one but given Trump’s performative Christianity it was all I could think about around the failed coup on Jan 6.