"Hypomania" means "having a pretty good week."

I've been having a productive and good week. I see tasks that need doing, and I do them. I've not only cleaned my kitchen, including organizing the pantry, but I've managed to KEEP it clean for more than a week. Lis sent me an article about how to make fresh pretzels, and I looked at it, realized we had all the ingredients, and made pretzels, which turned out pretty well, AND CLEANED UP AFTER MYSELF.

I mean, like, I could make pretzels AGAIN if I wanted to. All the tools and equipment and everything is clean and away and ready for more use if I want to.

I went through all the mail on the floor in the front hall -- we have a mail slot in the door, which means that, if I ignore it for a day or two, we get drifts of circulars and junk mail, with a few bills and other things mixed in. It doesn't help that the mail for our downstairs tenant goes in the same place, so I have to sort it out. And it REALLY doesn't help that our postal workers have decided not to bother putting our UPSTAIRS neighbor's mail in HIS slot, so we get all the mail for all three apartments.

And I went through it ALL, got boxes for all the different mail and put everybody's mail in appropriate boxes, and got all the junk mail and circulars into the recycling, and looked through our credit card statements and made sure there was nothing fishy, then shredded them.

This is hypomania.

In "traditional" bipolar, a person cycles between depression and mania. And a person in a manic state comes up with crazy grandiose plans like picking fights with people who are eight times their size, or driving their car at two hundred miles an hour with their eyes closed, or buying an airplane, or stuff like that.

I've got bipolar II, which means that I get hypomania instead of mania. I get crazy grandiose plans like "doing laundry", or "scrubbing the countertops" or "sorting the mail." There are times that I've gone so over-the-top that I've put up adjustable shelving.

The point is, hypomania isn't a bad thing. Hypomania means "being as effective as a normal person on a pretty good day. Not necessarily THE BEST DAY EVER, but, y'know, a pretty good one." I'm doing all sorts of stuff, and it's not even particularly difficult to do so. I'm just DOING it. I can see things that need to be done, and then I can just DO them.

And I'm really happy with what I've been accomplishing. If I could maintain this, I could get back to work and hold down a job and just generally do useful things.

But the problem is -- I know that this is a hypomanic episode. It's an episode. This isn't my baseline, and I am not going to maintain it. I'm worried about when it's going to stop, because I can't know. Today, I am maintaining my household to a level which I consider functional. I'm keeping things tidy and clean -- not crazy-clean, not even to the non-crazy-but-nice level that my mother maintained when we were kids, before she got sick. But a better-than-college-dorm level. Something I consider to be a reasonable adult-who's-not-incapacitated level.

But it's all going to stop. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Maybe in a month. It's unlikely that it would last any longer than that. After that, if I'm lucky, I'd just go into my general holding-pattern mode. My therapy and medication is all to try to get me to the point that, in my general standard mode, I can manage to force myself to function at some sort of minimal level.

Hypomania is so much nicer. I don't HAVE to force myself to function -- I just, y'know, FUNCTION. I just DO things. And it's not even HARD to do things.

It's sad to know that this will go away. All I can do is use this period as well as I can, to pace myself so that I don't burn it out prematurely (if I take on TOO much, work TOO fast, do TOO much, that will trigger a mood drop). I have to use this episode as a resource, use it as well as I can, try to get things in positions such that, when it ends, I'll still be able to function.

Because it's going to end.