Category: Annals of Bipolar Recovery

Being Open about Bipolar Disorder

I’m sometimes asked how I can be so open about my bipolar disorder. I announce my diagnosis in classes. I tell strangers. I have this blog. Why?

A first reason is that I hope to combat, in my own little way, the stigma that even in 2025 attaches to mental illness. In my openness, I normalize not being normal. (Heck, someone who was “mentally normal” in every respect would be a massive outlier!) I show that I’m not ashamed of my illness, and thereby suggest that others needn’t be either. Relatedly, I serve as an instance of what may seem a surprising compatibility: success in one’s career and private life is compatible with having a severe and chronic mental illness.

Second, talking about my bipolar, and especially announcing it in the classroom, allows other sufferers – or the friends and family of sufferers – to approach me freely and without undue shyness. Because I tell pretty much anyone who’ll listen that I have bipolar, folks realize that I’ll get what they are going through; that I won’t judge them; and that they needn’t be embarrassed around me about their own mental health struggles. This has led, in particular, to many students coming to speak with me. Of course, I can’t take on the role of psychotherapist with those who approach me, lacking as I do the proper training and certification. Nonetheless, I can comfort them, reassure them, and point them in the right direction when it comes to coping with depression, anxiety, memory and concentration issues, manic symptoms, etc.

To sum up so far, my openness is partly motivated by the general public, and changing how they perceive bipolar disorder. It’s also motivated by the fact that it encourages strangers, including students, to approach me about the topic.

This makes it sound, however, as if I myself get nothing out of blogging, conversing about mental health, etc. That’s not so. To the contrary, openness benefits me in several ways. Warning people in advance of my disability sometimes makes life easier for me. Most people readily accept that I may need more patience, more reminders, more assistance than a neurotypical person might, and they treat me accordingly. I’ve frequently felt grateful for that. What’s more, if I start to cry, or shake, or… people know why. That is, it’s helpful to me to make people aware of my otherwise weird potential symptoms. I think of it this way: sharing my diagnosis is like wearing my own personal Medicalert bracelet. Besides, frankness about bipolar disorder helps me help others; and such social interactions and the pursuit of meaningful activities is essential to me keeping well. Helping you, helps me!

All that said, I completely understand why others might prefer to maintain their privacy when it comes to their mental health symptoms. For one thing, a lot of what I say above applies to a middle aged, white, professional male like me, but might not hold true for less privileged groups. Well, and not everybody is as extroverted as I can be.

Revised Return to Work Plan

I have exciting news about work stuff.

Some background history. I have been working less than full time for years now. After my Electroconvulsive Therapy treatments, I started working at 50% at Western, and I began getting long term disability (LTD) from Manulife Insurance. The latter were topping me off to achieve a total of 85% of my usual salary. Manulife unilaterally cut me off a year and a half ago, based on their assumption that I’d be fully recovered by then. It was downright absurd to suppose, at that moment, that I could actually do 100% of my job at the university, so I continued at 50% — but now without insurance support for about eight months. Thankfully, I successfully appealed — after paying many thousands of dollars for an independent psychiatric assessment and legal fees — and have been on LTD plus 50% of my UWO salary ever since.

In January, given how my condition had improved on Nortriptyline, I happily moved to 65% workload. Specifically, I increased my research and service duties at the university. (My teaching remained the same, because I am not doing any in-class teaching during the winter term. My teaching duties right now all involve supervision of graduate students.) The plan was to increase to 85% in April, if I continued to do well.

This had no impact on my income, unfortunately. It just meant that Manulife was paying a smaller proportion of salary-minus-15% and Western was paying more.

Now for the good news. I have been working so effectively this winter, what with the warmth and sunshine and stimulating academic environments, that I thought even 65% didn’t reflect how many hours I was actually putting in. I thus sought approval to increase to 75% effective immediately, and both Manulife and Western have agreed. You won’t be surprised to hear that it was nearly effortless to convince Manulife to reduce my benefits! No lawyers required; just an email from my psychiatrist. Kudos to Western, however, for not standing in the way, even though the amount they are paying me will increase yet again. Western is now on the hook for 75% of my income.

What’s more, whereas we had been hoping that I could return to full time work on July 1st, when the new academic year begins, we’ve also accelerated that plan to have me move to 100% workload (and a full salary!) when my classes begin again, i.e., on May 5th, 2025.

I never imagined that I’d be able to work full time ever again. I thought my Bipolar had become permanently out of control, and that I’d just get worse and worse as the years passed. I can’t begin to say how pleased I am that the unthinkable — teaching, research and service full time — may well come to pass in just a few short months!

Doing Pretty Well

Faithful readers will remember how scared I was about winter coming on. And, in a way, my fear was justified: London, Ontario has experienced an “old-fashioned Canadian winter” this time, with lots of snow and very low temperatures. We haven’t had a winter like that for several years. (My university has declared snow days four times already, and we’re still in the middle of February.)

The good news is that I have skirted most of it. My plan of doing work and family travel in December-March has been going very well so far. What with the warm and sunny weather and the great company, I am not depressed, I am hardly anxious at all, and I am getting a ton of university-related work done. True, I’m not teaching undergrads this term. But I’m very busy with various departmental and faculty-level service tasks (e.g., grad admissions, comprehensive exams, strategic planning, grad education council…) And I’m even busier when it comes to research and scholarship, with a good half dozen writing projects under way at the same time.

I have been doing so well that I am considering accelerating my return to work plan. The idea had been to move to 65% in January, 85% in April and 100% in July. More than on track, I think I might be ready to move to 85% already. I’m consulting with my insurer, my “bosses” at Western, and with my medical practitioners to see what they think. I never thought that I’d return to work full-time, and I feel very grateful that I’m on this track.

As for remaining symptoms, it’s not that I’m free of them. Nonetheless, I am coping with them much better. I am learning to accept my suicidal ideations, letting them just be there several times a day. I think that I’m slowly getting better at dealing with petty frustrations, without getting overly flustered. My nervous ticks persist, but I am trying to “radically accept” those too.

In brief, I’m doing pretty well!

Effective Rethinking

I wrote recently about getting terribly flustered on the basis of tiny irritants. I said I would ask my mental health team about it, and so I have. The advice I received was to try effective rethinking when I get into a flustered state. I’ll try my best to explain that here.

Looking backwards, my homework has been to identify what thoughts pop into my mind when I encounter a minor problem and then overreact. Looking forwards, my job is to develop some self-talk techniques, to replace the unhelpful thoughts with better ones.

Here’s a recent example. Saima and I were making our way home from Madrid to Canada. We took a cab from our downtown hotel out to the airport at 5:30 a.m., with our flight departing at 8:45 that morning. When we got to Barajas airport, we looked on the board for our flight to Dublin, and it wasn’t there! I panicked. My heart raced, my breathing quickened, I started shaking.

The first step in my effective rethinking homework, applied to this example, involves sorting out what came to mind that raised my emotional state from minor annoyance (which might have been appropriate) to full-blown breakdown (which wasn’t called for, and certainly wasn’t helpful). So, what were those thoughts in this instance? I recall thinking that I might have brought us to the wrong airport. That led to the thought that we’d have to rush to another Madrid airport to avoid missing our flight. I already imagined how much all that would cost: another cab ride, potentially another airline ticket. All of these thoughts were premature, a matter of jumping to conclusions. The worst ineffective thought, however, was: “I have made a mistake. I’m not so competent after all. I am going to fall apart again”. I think that’s the one which may have really precipitated the near-panic.

The second homework step is to think about what thoughts might have helped me at the time. Continuing with my example, several have occurred to me. I could have asked myself, “What is the worst thing that can happen?” The answer, I realize now and maybe could have seen back then, is that my mistake would only cost us some money. No one would die. I could have told myself as well, “You really are doing much better. This is just a tiny thing. It doesn’t show that you are getting unwell again”.

Looking ahead, what I’m trying to do is to prepare myself to engage in this self-talk as soon as a prompting event occurs. This is all the more important because I am starting to travel on my own again, and that means that I must be able to calm myself; I can’t shut down and rely on my travel partner to take control. I’m asking, therefore: “What must I be telling myself (that is, what are my interpretations and thoughts)
about the event that causes such distress and arousal?” Then I need to come up with alternative thoughts that I can use to reassure myself.

Effective rethinking is also paired, in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, with breath work. Next time I encounter an incident, I am to take a deep breath, say the more effective thoughts to myself, then breath out. For example: [Breath in deeply] “Everyone makes mistakes. This doesn’t mean that you are falling apart”. [Breath out slowly] “So, relax…” [Breath in deeply] “The worst outcome would be spending some money”. [Breath out slowly] “So, relax…”

The Dignity of Risk

I am part of a group preparing materials on living with chronic suicidal thoughts. We group members are made up of mental patients like me, family members of sufferers, and specialized clinicians. As I’ve written about before, as a Recovery College project, our task will be to create a “course” that interested parties can “study” online. So far, we’ve had three online meetings. I think it’s going well.

What I wanted to write about was a concept that was introduced during the second meeting. It was new to me and struck me as being of great importance. This is the notion of the dignity of risk. The idea is that, if a person’s support group (whether official, as in a clinical setting, or informal, out in the world) “rescues” a mentally ill patient from all genuine risk, the group thereby robs the patient of dignity.

A “normal” adult, in the everyday course of things, will constantly undertake tasks where they can fail; and such that they thereby suffer some bad consequences. Indeed, neurotypical folks regularly do things that could have very serious consequences – consequences such as getting hit by a car, being knocked over into traffic on one’s bike, getting serious food poisoning, etc. Living with such risk is simply part of being a grown up. In contrast, we don’t allow infants to even attempt the genuinely risky.

What’s the difference between the “normal” adult and the small child? Among other things, it’s that the former can be trusted to make reasonable choices about which risks to incur, whereas the baby can’t make wise decisions on its own. Now consider, in this context, attempts to save people like me from failure – whether that be just serious failures, or even the modestly risky. On the one hand, protecting folks like me is an understandable impulse, based in level-headed concern for the mentally ill person’s welfare. People who love me ipso facto want to protect me from harm. On the other hand, to shield a loved one from all risk, even all serious risk, is to literally infantilize them. It can be, in short, a way of robing the patient of their dignity as responsible adults.

Respecting a person’s dignity thus brings with it allowing that person to take serious risks. I have been pondering this realization for days, on two fronts.

First, there’s obviously a question of balance hereabouts. Pondering the first, part (a): there’s the dimension of how mentally ill the person is at the time. Speaking for myself, when I’m really bad, I simply can’t be trusted to make appropriate choices. In fact, my decision-making has sometimes been so irrational that it’s been necessary to lock me up. In such scenarios, maybe infantilizing is the right stance. Pondering the first, part (b): there is the dimension of how big the risk is, and how large the consequences of failing. As an example, given that an overdose of Nortriptyline would be fatal, it likely makes sense for my family and friends to dispense that medication to me only a week’s worth at a time. Arguably the resulting harm to my dignity is worth it. (It was precisely in the context of a potential for suicide that our working group touched on the dignity of risk, by the way. When should we protect a loved one who is running the risk of “failing” in the sense of killing themselves? How suicidal is too suicidal to let them be? That’s a really tough question.)

Second, I’ve been thinking about the dignity of risk in relation to another phenomenon, namely my on-going “upwards spiral”. Part of the reason I’ve been improving, I think, is that I have felt confident enough to take on more challenging tasks; I’ve succeeded in those; and this has made me even more confident; which has encouraged me to take a still bigger risk; etc. Such a positive spiral inevitably brings along with it, however, the possibility of failure, even major-league failure.

If our little group figures out precisely how to balance autonomy versus potential failure, I’ll be sure to share the result here! Meanwhile, I’ll keep pondering the dignity of risk.

On Getting Easily Flustered

I have been doing much better. But there’s are curious symptoms I wanted to write about, to inform the interested and to garner opinions about what might be going on.

Let’s begin with “doing much better”.

My anxiety symptoms are mostly in remission. They do hit me once a week or so, seemingly out of the blue: suddenly, I feel afraid, but with no obvious cause and no obvious object-of-fear. It seems that, roughly weekly, my brain pointlessly fills with cortisol, a fear hormone. That’s no fun; but, as I say, it happens infrequently.

“Sue”, as I call my suicidal ideations, pops up much more regularly than fear does. It’s still the case that, pretty much every time I see a bus, I’ll think, “I could jump in front of that”. I’ll look at my daily pills – especially the Nortriptyline, which is fatal in overdose – and the thought of taking them all will just show up in my head. However, I’ve worked hard to just let Sue be there, reminding myself: “It’s just an intrusive thought; it’s coming from a malfunctioning part of your mind; it doesn’t reflect the overall values that you as a complete person have. Let it be there.”

(An aside. I was trying to explain to a philosopher friend what it’s like to have thoughts which, in a sense, don’t correspond to who you really are. What the heck can that even mean? I still don’t have a good answer to that question, but I did think of an analogy that helped us move forward in the conversation. An intrusive thought is like having a song stuck in your head. Someone mentions Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and, damn it, the song starts playing in your mind. Worse, now you can’t get rid of it, except maybe by choosing a different “ear worm”. Trust me that “Dancing Queen” emphatically does not reflect my aesthetic values, yet it can intrude in my mind!)

My symptoms are mild enough that I’ve been able to increase my workload at Western. I had been at 50%, for a couple of years at least. Well, and I was at 0% in the Spring of 2024, while in the hospital. Starting this month, however, I have increased both my research load and my service duties, rising to a total of 65%. The plan, if I continue to improve, is to increase to 85% in April and then 100% on July 1st, 2025. It’s a somewhat scary prospect, I’ll grant you, but I think it’s the right approach. I am fear-cited.

In short, as I’ve been telling people, it’s not that I’m “fixed”. Nonetheless, I am coping much better with my chronic symptoms, and I plan to continue on my “upwards spiral”. There are caveats, however. And this takes me to the topic of today’s post.

First, I have developed some nervous ticks. The toes on my left foot curl in and out much of the time. I also find myself picking at my fingernails compulsively. Most embarrassing of all, whenever I do anything that requires even a mite of concentration – climbing the stairs, taking the phone out from my pocket, starting a challenging sentence in this blog post – my tongue protrudes. Poor Anita says that it looks like I’m constantly sticking my tongue out at people! I try to restrain these behaviours, but to no avail. That’s one caveat.

A second caveat to my ongoing recovery is that I now get very flustered by tiny incidents. The other day, for instance, I couldn’t delete an “invisible table” from a Word document. The program said that there was a table present – but I didn’t see anything, and no method of deleting material seemed to remove the phantom. Objectively speaking, this was a small thing. Yet it drove me into an absolute tizzy, and I needed to call Anita over to help calm me down. She helped me, but I was already in a state, and it took a long time to return to normal. (Eventually we opted for saving the problematic section of the paper as a txt document, and then copying it back into the Word file. In fact, this was even my idea. But I was shaking with ill-humour by the time we got there.) Another instance. Down in Uruguay, I needed to use an adapter to plug in my computer. The adapter I had with me kept falling out of the electrical socket. Another miniscule problem. Yet, here again, I had an outsized reaction. I felt confused, stumped, incompetent, frustrated.

 The phenomenon of over-reacting reminds me of what used to happen years ago with respect to anger. As a young man, I didn’t like feeling angry. It was a scary emotion. In my experience as a child, anger had been a hallmark of a chaotic, dangerous situation. As a result, I wouldn’t let myself get angry at big things: back then, I’d sublimate the feeling, withdrawing and going temporarily quiet, say, instead of yelling. My anger had to get manifested eventually, however, and I think it did so in the following way: I would get tremendously mad in the face of tiny problems; I’d absolutely fume because a bus was a few minutes late, for instance.

My thought, taking anger as my analogy, is that my negative symptoms haven’t simply vanished. Instead, they’ve recently found other outlets. Rather than getting released through frequent episodes of fear and despair, my longstanding demons are nowadays showing up (in an outsized way) in response to miniature frustrations. They are also showing up as nervous ticks.

I have another potential hypothesis. My diagnosis is Bipolar Type II, after all, and that includes hypomania as a central symptom. The latter famously manifests itself as tons of energy and creativity, as impulsive buying, as risky behavior. Less famously, it sometimes shows up as free-floating irritability. Realizing this, my alternative conjecture is that I’m actually experiencing hypomania again, after many years experiencing unipolar depression.  

My question for my mental health team will be: “Now that I’ve recognized these symptoms, how should I respond?” After all, nervous habits and petty frustration are mere irritants when compared to what I had been experiencing. Maybe, if what I am going through really are “escape valves”, I should just let them do their job. Put otherwise, maybe these are actually coping mechanisms – features, rather than bugs. And what if what’s going on is hypomania? Once upon a time, it was my friend: my most productive times as an academic have been when I’m hypomanic. So, there too, maybe the right attitude is acceptance.

Thoughts, dear readers?

How I’m Doing (Redux)

I thought I’d provide an update on my mental health. I don’t have a tale to tell. So, I’ll just list a bunch of relevant things.

Relevant thing #1: I am planning to return to work full time as of July, 2025. I am, as of now, on a gradual return-to-work regimen, worked out jointly with my psychiatrist, my insurance company Manulife, and my various (very supportive) bosses at Western. In particular, I am moving immediately from 50% workload to 65%. Specifically, I am ramping up my research load and my service duties this month: I am already doing much more academic writing than I was able to in the Spring, labouring simultaneously on three scholarly articles, and on a grant application. And I volunteered for some extra administrative duties, including Grad Admissions. In April, when Winter term ends, I’ll move to 80%, and I’ll increase my teaching load too: I’ll be offering “Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy” in the Summer session. Assuming I continue to do well, I’ll move to 100% when the new academic year begins, i.e., July 1st. I confess, I never thought I’d be able to go back to work full time. It’s wonderful news.

My wife Anita has been slightly worried that my productivity is actually a symptom of mania, as opposed to signaling recovery. This is a valid point. It’s something we need to keep an eye on. But, so far, I haven’t been acting out in a manic way, other than having energy for academic work.

Relevant thing #2: I am down in Uruguay for a big academic conference. The Interamerican Congress of Philosophy. Today is the last day. This morning, I presented a jointly authored paper called, “On the Autonomy of Knowledge of Language”. (Shout out to my co-authors Arthur Sullivan at Memorial and Chris Viger at Western Ontario.) I was shaking a little, but I didn’t get lost during the presentation, and I think it went very well. I’ve also been able to follow other people’s talks very well, regardless of which language they’re given in. (It’s a multilingual affair.) I’ve even managed to pose some helpful questions in the Q&A session.

It’s not all sweetness and light, however. On the first day of the conference, Monday, I kept getting those old fear symptoms coming back. And that created meta-fear: feeling scared that I was soon going to become really afraid. I have been able to contain the anxiety symptoms in the ensuing days, but it makes clear that I am not “fixed” yet, and likely never will be. The key is coping with symptoms, rather than excising them.

Relevant thing #3: I am down here in Uruguay without Anita, Moon or Saima. Nonetheless, I am doing okay. This is important because I hope to mostly evade Canadian winters from now on, even though the family won’t be able to travel with me much of the time. Being all the way down here for a couple of weeks without them is another step towards independence. Of course, I’m not alone down here: I have lots of friends, family and work connections in Uruguay. I’m not well enough yet to be entirely on my own for weeks! I doubt I’ll ever relish that. (Oh, and did I mention that I’m sitting outside on a patio, wearing a short sleeve shirt, while Western Ontario is closed today due to a blizzard?)

Being Bipolar in the Time of Trump

I had such a strong reaction when Trump won re-election on November 5th that my therapist Lori thought it must have especially deep meaning for me. She wanted me to explore that, and suggested that I do a blog post about it. Well, here it is.

In 2016, when Trump lost the popular vote but took the White House anyway, I was surprised, disappointed and worried. I was especially concerned about what his tenure would mean for refugees, including in particular Muslim refugees. But I didn’t get suicidal or anything like that, partly because I told myself back then that voters had picked Trump despite his awful words and deeds; maybe not realizing that he meant what he said. This time, my reaction was much more severe: I couldn’t think of anything else in the days after this year’s American election, and I definitely did feel full-on suicidal.

Why? There are at least two reasons.

There’s a general reason, not specific to me, namely that this time Trump’s election cannot be written off as an anomaly. He won the popular vote; he carried all the “swing states”; he increased his margins across pretty much every demographic. So, it now seems to me that Trump gets many millions of votes because of his awful words and deeds, rather than despite them. To come at it another way, I thought back in 2016 that Trump voters were either unwise or unfair. Last time, I was able to put most weight on the former. He was an unfamiliar wild card back then. I think that the disjunction still applies, but now I can’t help but weight the latter more heavily, because Americans now have plenty of experience with President Donald J. Trump.

My reaction was so strong for another reason, and it requires some personal history to explain it. Being raised in Canada in the 1960s and 70s, I developed my fair share of Anti-Americanism. It’s sort of in the water up here. That was only buttressed in the 1980s, as I came to understand the role of the United States throughout Latin America — the latter having become my adopted second home, because of my student exchange in Uruguay in 1983-84. I did my share of protesting at the American consulate in Toronto back in my teens, let me tell you! However, I ended up going to grad school at MIT in Boston, and my first wife Hamila and I lived there very happily for five years. (Hamila, having grown up in Uruguay under its dictatorship, also had plenty of Anti-American sentiments when we first arrived.) I also did stints in the 90s at UMass-Amherst, Rutgers and University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. The result was that I came to have a much more favourable impression of Americans. I never concluded that the place was a justice-driven paradise. I remained very aware of its continuing foreign and domestic policy, for example. But I came to separate in my mind much more clearly the US Government’s policies, under both Democrats and Republicans, from the US folk. The folk, in my personal experience, were mostly generous of spirit, openminded, caring, etc. I had tons of friends and acquaintances, tons of experiences with random strangers, who all provided compelling evidence of this.

Now you can understand better my reaction on November 5th, and during the ensuing days. I couldn’t put together my erstwhile impressions of quotidian Americans with them (knowingly, purposely, showing malice aforethought) picking that guy to lead them. Had I been mistaken to cast off my Anti-Americanism? Had the populace changed its mood so much in the last decades? Surely my many dear friends down there hadn’t turned outright nasty?

Here’s a telling clue to how I initially felt. When I ran into American tourists down in Costa Rica in the days after the election, I couldn’t help but wonder: “Did you vote for him? Are you a Trumpista?” And as a result, I chose not to say “Good morning” or “Lovely place, Costa Rica” to American-looking strangers. I opted instead for an uncharacteristic stone cold silence.

Is that destined to become my usual attitude for the next four years? How awful that would be.

Having explained a little better my immediate depression-grade reaction to Trump’s second term, I now owe you some wise words about overcoming it. For, as I know from Facebook and from conversations off-line as well, I am not the only person who felt suicidal on the morning of November 6th.

In fact, that takes me to my first recommendation: Help others deal with the situation. Talk them through it as best you can. That will aid you as well, as you’ll have to rehearse the bright side not just for them, but for yourself. It also really comforted me to realize that I was far from alone. In particular, ever so many Americans felt despondent just as I did.

Here’s a second suggestion. Avoid the temptation of generalizing, as the prejudiced are wont to do. At a minimum, keep firmly in mind that the US is now a nation divided. I read, for example, that every single county in Massachusetts — which, maybe not coincidentally, is the state where I had lived for five years — had gone heavily Democratic. It’s not an adequate comfort to know that none of the places where I have resided went for Trump, but it merits remembering. Another important step in forestalling the return of Anti-American sentiment is to keep in touch with American friends who aren’t Trumpistas.

Next, turning to some ideas from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, I recommend practicing radical acceptance. Especially if you don’t live there, you can’t hold yourself responsible for fixing things in the USA. Like aging, loss and death, there may be essentially nothing that you yourself can do to drastically change the situation. So, it’s crucial to stop resisting it. I’m reminded here of my favourite parable from the Buddha: the second dart of painful feeling. The Buddha asks us to imagine a man who has been struck by a poison dart, and who won’t let a physician help him until the man understands who fired the dart, why they did so, who else was involved, etc. Fretting about all those issues is a second dart. Says the Buddha, the man cannot avoid the first pain, the one from the dart itself; but it’s in his power to not experience the second dart, by simply accepting that the first dart is outside his control. (Of course, if you can change things in the US, if that happens to be in your power, work on that too! It’s a fine balance, knowing when to accept the first dart versus fighting back.)

I have some practical tips too, that have been helping me manage my dark thoughts. Keep busy, especially with exercise. The active body helps heal the wounded mind. Do fruitful tasks — like cooking dinner, calling a friend, or writing a blog post — to feel some sense of accomplishment. Definitely do guided meditations on the theme of acceptance. Here’s one from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=2rwCdGW-7q8&t=0s. If you can manage it, practice regular loving-kindness meditations as well, directed even at Trump’s followers! The Mindful Movement has one on that general theme too, which you can find here: https://youtu.be/tY3NnodM3Ww.

Finally, keep me posted on how you’re doing. We can help each other.

Winter Activities

My DBT therapist Lori H. assigned me a new homework task. I was to come up with a list of activities that I can do during the winter months. I’m posting about that.

To explain, I get very afraid of the long, dark, cold days of December through March in Canada. It’s very hard to keep my spirits up when the sun sets at 4:30 pm, and I can’t sit outside on my porch. Part of my solution has been to simply go away during that period, visiting friends and family in warm, sunny locales. I’ll do some of that again this year. However, I can’t be a true “snow bird” yet; so, I need to find things to keep me productively occupied during Ontario’s winter.

There are some away-from-home activities that I have been doing in the past and I plan to continue doing them. Going out for meals with friends, going to art house movies, taking in live theatre — all of these can be done regardless of the weather. I had been playing bridge at a club in the burbs, and I could easily go back to that too. In addition, I have been taking refugee friends out for driving lessons since mid-summer. I love the social connection with young people, and I like the resulting feeling of helping others. I can continue to do that as well, at least until the roads get hazardous. There’s also winter birding, though there’s not much to see in February!

And, of course, there are many things that I presently do at home which I won’t give up just because it’s dreary out: reading the newspaper and some fiction, watching Netflix with Anita, philosophical writing, enjoying our cats. I need to get back into baking too, both bread and other treats.

There are also some activities that have fallen by the wayside that I can take up again. Years ago, I took weekly skating lessons. (This was before my legs were healed enough to run, after being hit by a car.) I really enjoyed learning how to skate properly, and was making progress on fancy stuff like cross-overs and skating backwards on one foot. When I started running again, though, that crowded out the skating. Now that I have time on my hands, I really should look into starting such lessons again. Even more years ago than that, I sometimes went cross-country skiing with friends. I was very much an amateur, and I’d like to learn how to do it properly, but Nordic skiing was something I enjoyed very much back in graduate school. Unfortunately, though still too cold and dark for me, London, Ontario is no longer wintry enough to permit much local cross-country skiing. But I could make trips up to Barrie to see family, and do some skiing near there.

Speaking of skiing, I feel torn about another favourite hobby from the past. It takes me so long to recover from injuries nowadays that I am a bit scared of taking up downhill again. Well okay, I’m much more than a bit scared! Last year, you see, I went out twice. I was very, very careful and cautious. Nonetheless, on the second outing, a snowboarder came out of nowhere from behind me, and knocked me down. It took a month for my neck to heal and I wasn’t able to ski again that year. The possibility of injury really makes me wonder about Alpine skiing at my age.

Dear reader, please suggest additional activities. Oh, and if you are heading to sun and sand this winter, think about taking me with you!

Visiting My Dad

I’m not doing very well. I have been cataloguing my progress lately, but I thought I should describe these tough times too.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, and my wife Anita and I have come to Brighton, Ontario, to visit my father and my step mother. It’s hard.

My dad is 95, pale and frail these days. Last night, for instance, it was difficult for him to even go from his walker to his seat at the table. He has recurring bladder cancer, and has to have the growths removed every few months. When that happens, he ends up utterly worn out and often sick with some infection or other contracted at the hospital. Meanwhile, his wife Joan is much younger and mostly healthier, but she is nonetheless exhausted because, recently, every night has been a rough night.

Seeing a parent aging is not easy for most of us, I’m sure, but it’s especially trying for me because so much of my depression and anxiety circle around aging and loss. I see my dad and stepmom as they are these days, and I immediately think of myself and Anita. I get frightened on both fronts. I don’t want to be so dependent myself. And I don’t want Anita to have to look after me constantly. Nor do I like thinking of Anita aging. let alone dying. That one is a thought that I simply cannot live with. I mean that literally: I’d rather die, i.e., commit suicide, than have to face losing her.

To be clear, I don’t regret coming. It was important for my dad to see me. And I need to face up to my fears. But I wanted to share here how difficult it has been. (That said, I’ve done a good job of hiding my feelings from my dad so far, as I don’t want him to be worrying about me because of this visit. My depression and anxiety manifested after we left their house last night: I got into to bed at 8 pm to meditate, and I fell asleep and slept for 13 hours.)

Please send positive vibes. And also, share any advice from your own experience confronting an aging parent.