This has been hard. Harder than some other things I have faced. I have mentioned before I have bipolar II disorder. I have learned to live and control it without medications. It wasn’t because the medications were bad, they were just bad for me. I am by no means saying that this is the way to handle this mental disorder, I am just saying that it is the best way for me to handle it. Well until “lockdown” happened.

Normally it is just like a basic static noise in the background unless I am cycling hard. Then the volume gets turned up slightly. However, lately it has been so very loud in my head. I have heard myself snapping in anger, saying things that had virtually disappeared from my vocabulary and feeling trapped.

Things that I would do to combat the noise have been taken away. I cannot go visit my favorite public garden and just enjoy the flowers, I cannot just go window shopping, or go to national parks or just about anything. Yes, I agree, I could go for a walk, but for some reason I am also challenged right now with the inability to walk ( I have a genetic disorder in my spine that caused a fusion in 2013). My sciatic nerve has decided that it needs to be firing causing my right leg and back to hurt when I walk more than a very short distance.

What has really been difficult is social media. I guess I have been looking for that connection with people that don’t live in my house. I have found that I don’t like as many people as I thought I did. I have unfollowed a lot of people just so I don’t engage in yet another battle with people that I supposedly like. Then there have been the few, very few, that I have unfriended. On a normal day I don’t suffer fools gladly, but I find that I don’t want to even suffer then on a not so normal day.

Just recently a person that I am not overly fond of in real life got up on their hind legs and decided that, not for the first time, they were going to admonish me for my behavior on my own page. I’ll admit I will debate if I have taken a stand that I feel is right and just. But the one thing that no one can ever say about me is that I waffle and I don’t stand on my convictions. I will say that in this place in time it is not the time to challenge me because I will just make you go away (the unfollow button on Facebook is awesome). Tick me off enough and unfriend is in your immediate future. I don’t have to be your friend on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

The static in my head does not allow for me to offer as much grace as I would normally.  Sometimes I know too much about you personally to want to deal with you on social media. Sometimes I don’t really like dealing with you in real life so right now I can’t deal with you in a forum where keyboard warriors (myself included) abound.

I hope that soon the powers that be will see that what we have been doing in this time is really not working like it should have. That they will release us from lockdown so that we can breath again, work again, and be free as we should be.