Dear friends,
Somehow, I burned myself out to the point that I am now sick with a bad cold. I don’t normally get so sick unless I am also psychologically drained. I didn’t think that I had exerted myself very much, but somehow after a day of accompanying my mother on errands and taking a long walk at a local park, I felt very fatigued and tearily depressed. I hadn’t even gone with her into the stores that she needed to visit, just stayed in the car. She has been trying to get me to acclimate more to stimulating environments, but right now it doesn’t seem healthy for me to do so. I spent a lot of time last week trying to rest and ended up turning in some assignments several days late — which was fine with my professors, who urged me to take care of myself — but somehow it has not been enough to let me recover.
Probably it has been a slow burn. I don’t feel that my coursework is what’s causing the stress, but it is a responsibility I’m having to uphold, while the changes of spring wreck havoc on my system and U.S. politics looms in the background. For some reason, my father has been long convinced that it is winter that affects my moods the most, a common pattern for people who have seasonal affective disorder, but I feel that spring is worse for me — and it is for many who have bipolar. The beautiful awakening of nature both intensifies mania and painfully contrasts with depression, and combined with outdoor allergies, it makes me feel like my whole bodymind is inflamed.
At this point I’m taking the maximum dosage of both my bipolar meds, but I am still struggling with mood fluctuations, a sign that maybe the meds are not working as well as before, or perhaps I’m just being subjected to more stress than before. Because of some breakthrough instability, I was recently made to take a benzodiazepine daily, which I had initially refused because benzos pose a risk of difficult withdrawal. But after a worrisome incident at a local library in which I got so disoriented by the rumbling heater that I fell down and the library staff almost called emergency services, I needed to do something to stabilize myself.
I’m mostly okay now, having tapered off of the benzo. Just trying to be gentler with myself, which is hard at the end of the semester when I have projects to complete and my curiosity and ambition can lead me to overdo things. But I also have some music activities to prepare for. The Pennsylvania Youth Chorale (PYC), which I accompany, not only has its spring concert in mid-May, but also trips to Ocean City and New York City (the latter in early June) as well as a recording session. And I am performing a solo piano concert at Friends Home in Kennett Square on Saturday, May 24th. I’m not overly anxious about the performing, but I do need to be careful to preserve my energy.
To help with pacing, I’m trying out the health app Visible, which is designed for people with energy-limiting illnesses like Long COVID, ME/CFS, and POTS, but may be helpful for other people as well. Their flagship product is an armband that tracks your physical state and warns you if you are overly exerting yourself. I don’t have any of the listed physical conditions, but it occurred to me that my mental health/neurodivergence, especially my tendency towards autistic shutdowns and burnout, does act as an energy-limiting condition. I asked their help team about whether the product would help with autistic burnout, and they suggested that I could use their free app to test it out and decide if it’s helpful for me before considering the armband addition. The app measures your heart rate variability (HRV) each morning using your phone camera, as HRV has been shown to be related to your body’s adaptability and thus your health. You also can track various symptoms and your sleep quality in the app. Here is Visible’s website, where you can find more information if you’re curious. The HRV measurements do so far seem to be correlating a bit with my health while I have been facing some depressive symptoms and a bad cold.
Now, in other news:
I played for a Good Friday church service — the first time I played for a church, other than the time when the PYC sang for a service. It went pretty well. The pastor told me that Good Friday services are different from typical services and are harder to play for, and he seemed impressed that I was able to match the mood. I have found that I enjoy religious music even if I do not subscribe to a particular doctrine. I think in a society that frequently avoids thoughts of grief and death, a ritual like one that retells the death of a religious figure might feed the soul in a much needed way.
Since the craft store chain JoAnn is having its closing sales, my mother and I went to see if there was anything we wanted. She bought some yarn for herself to use in crochet projects, while I got a high-quality oil pastel set. In the psych hospital, I discovered a love for oil pastels because of the beautiful results of smudging and blending, even though it is messy on your fingers. I’m practicing my skills by copying from images that I find online or around the house. Here’s a drawing that I made, copying from an online image (I forgot to save the image):
My mother has already completed several crochet projects, and I am so glad that she now has a creative hobby that she enjoys. She’s definitely much better than I am at it.
I have also been experimenting with makeup. I like a genderqueer approach in which I combine masculine contouring and penciled facial hair with colorful eyeshadow and lips. But I can’t do that when my mother’s at home, so I mostly do regular “feminine” makeup for practice. Even with that, my mother’s criticizes my approach, as I like bright colors and a more dramatic look, whereas she prefers a closer-to-natural look. I also just don’t have strong skills yet with makeup, having rarely used it in my life, so some of her critiques are quite valid. (One would think that I have steady hands as a pianist, but I am currently terrible at applying eyeliner without smudging it all over.) I have a bit of a shy dream of being a transmasculine drag queen, or otherwise a genderqueer drag artist. The world of drag though is frequently overstimulating, so I’d want to find ways of exploring it that are more accessible to me — but this is not for anytime soon.
I didn’t get to write any essays for Substack this month because of how hectic things have been and how unwell I’ve been in the last week and a half, but I do have some things to share, including a song I wrote for my arts course! Stay tuned.
Featured Creator
Joseph Ahmed (he/they) is a mixed-race Asian theater artist and arts administrator whose work spans theater, circus, dance, and interactive performance. They are a co-founder of the nationally-recognized worker-owned cooperative Obvious Agency, which creates interactive performances and advocates for democratic practices within the arts ecosystem. As a playwright and solo artist (Half Magic, Philly Fringe 2023) he creates dynamically physical and genre-defying work, often infused with nerd culture and fantasy, to explore how the world sculpts us with stories and how we can use stories to sculpt it right back. They are a major collaborator with Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists, a former company member with the Barrymore Award-winning Tribe of Fools (2018-2020) and of Almanac Dance Circus Theatre (2016-2018). He co-directed ikantkoan’s Chaos Theory which won Immersive Nation’s Best Social Immersion award in 2019. As a performer and director he has worked throughout Philadelphia with companies such as the Arden Theatre Company, Theater Exile, Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, and Asian Arts Initiative. He has toured nationally as a teaching artist, and is a former youth circus coach at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts. They hold a BFA in Theater Arts from Boston University.
A Contemplative Offering
How is your relationship with the weather and the seasons? My mother said that the spring tends to make her drowsy. Or maybe it’s her allergies, but either way, it contrasts with my tendency to get energetically feverish from the warm, fragrant air. Funny how Merriam Webster defines “spring fever” as “a lazy or restless feeling often associated with the onset of spring.”
What aspects of nature are you most craving to connect with? How might you do so?