Hypomanic

I've been cross-stitching for years and I just started learning other forms of embroidery. I've been drawing these abstract pattern doodles for quite awhile but it somehow never occurred to me to combine my hobbies until recently. So I tried it! This is what I came up with. I'm quite happy with it for my very first embroidery project.

I find that when I hit a (hypo)manic phase I'm far more creative than when I'm "normal" and obviously far more than when I hit a depression phase. I find that I genuinely enjoy the creativity that my hypomania brings but there are so many challenges that go with it. I have a tendency to overspend when I go hypomanic and curbing my urge to spend money on things I don't need is difficult. Thankfully I've gotten better at recognizing the signs of mania before my spending gets out of control. This time I only bought a few inexpensive craft supplies a few days in a row before I realized that I was in danger of getting out of control. I started bringing just one credit/debit card with me to work or to run errands and I started making sure I didn't start running errands without first making a  list of what I needed. Most importantly I told my husband to watch me. To pay attention to the money that I'm spending. Because while I know that ultimately I am responsible for my behavior I also know that I truly have a partner in my husband and that I can depend on him to help me when I need it. This is a first for me. We've been together eight years now but it still amazes me when I think about how lucky I am (even when he is driving me insane).

Another challenge is sleeping. Suddenly I need far less sleep than usual. I am normally a 10 hour a day sleeper (whenever possible) but suddenly I only need 3-4 hours. I know it's not healthy but if I try to force it I just stare at the ceiling. Unfortunately I've been filling those hours with facebook and crafts instead of grown up things like cleaning and meal prep and writing one of the three fucking books in my head. I find that concentrating definitely gets harder, which is really frustrating. I haven't found a fix for that yet so get ready for a month or so of random updates with no pattern and expect them to come all at once or not at all.

Here's another recently completed cross-stitch. This one was a gift for a coworker who was moving out of state.

And here's an old picture of me just for the hell of it.

I scanned a few old pictures last time I was home to visit. 

c. 1994