Blank Bow Tie o’ the Day accurately expresses what I accomplished with the third week of my unintentional sabbatical. That week was very much like the second week, but without the obsessive Touched By An Angel fugue state that overcame me—which I wrote about in this morning’s post. I seemed to be physically handling my newest medication much better, but I think I had been somewhat zombie-fied by the altered states of the previous two weeks. I was wrung out.
I will forever refer to that third week as My Week O’ “I Don’t Know.” Suzanne would routinely ask me how I was feeling each day, and I would pause for a minute to really think about it and truly assess my physical and mental states of being, and my answer to her was consistently, “I don’t know.” My psyche wasn’t swinging around wildly on my bipolar pendulum. Nor was it improving by leaps and bounds or Mother-May-I-scissor-hops. I was simply hanging around while breathing—alive, but with no real urge to go anywhere or do anything. Neither did I have an urge to do nothing. I was urgeless. I just was.
The writer in me was not blocked. I merely glanced upon my extensive stash of cool notebooks and writing instruments, and I felt nary an urge to create even a sentence. I ordered a couple of books (or a dozen, if I’m honest), but couldn’t muster up the inclination to open any of the covers after they were delivered to my front door. I did not pine away for words—not my own or anybody else’s. “I don’t know,” was my mantra, my soundtrack, my gist. As a longtime pro at being bipolar, I did not panic at merely existing. I did not fight the non-feeling. I knew that waiting it out, if I could, would be my best shot.
Unfortunately, as the third week of my sudden and involuntary online absence from TIE O’ THE DAY turned into an entire month—as I was caught in my own personal “I dunno”— a damaging metaphorical nugget of poison was growing somewhere inside of me. It wasn’t going to be pretty, and y’all won’t want to miss how it all played out. Tune in tomorrow for more of my navel-gazing.