Swelltide.

My last week or so has been pretty rough. It started last Thursday (or Tuesday? I can't remember). Woke up late for a job, which I found out later was scheduled even earlier in the morning and I didn't get the voice message about it. This job was almost two hours away from my house, which I was pretty angry about in the first place. Why me, the guy who is in school and is spending every waking moment studying and doing homework? Why me, the guy who has bent over backwards to make himself available on those days he isn't going to school? When I found out the job was scheduled even earlier, I got even more upset. Anyway, I missed the job after driving all the way out there, then had to make the hour drive to Richmond from it. Stewing the whole time.

On the way to the job, I hit a dog on the main road. I stopped and started to run to run back to it. I could see its legs up in the air and I have this vision of the dog convulsing, foaming at the mouth or bleeding from a gaping wound. I couldn't do it. I stood there thinking of what to do, saw a car coming and just left. I feel terrible for it. I know some people think nothing of killing an animal that walks out in front of their car. Not me. Thinking about it makes me a little queasy. Mad at myself. Guilty because I didn't do everything I could, and trying to justify that rather pathetically by telling myself that I was already running late.

Then the last week of school. Spending ten hours one day studying chemistry that I still don't understand. A whole day on a lab report, and then trying to catch up in everything else. I am scared that this is going to be, yet again, another semester where I fall behind because I am not getting things as quickly as I should. I got an email tonight that my lab report contained a few errors. Sunday, I spent the better part of eight hours doing math homework and algebra review.

I hope it gets better. I cannot, and never have allowed myself to drop a class. Surely my grade suffers for it but I don't need to delay graduation any longer than I already have. I am thirty. Thirty! The age when many are reaching their strides, creating careers. Here I am starting over.

I was reading this article about a L.A. musician. What life was like for him prior to his diagnosis of bipolar... It is equally heartening that there are influential people out there who live with it and do well, and disheartening what even these 'successful' people  put up with-- and put themselves through.  I am desperate at times for people around me to understand what it is really like. Nope, I am not touring all the time and dealing with serious substance abuse-- but the mania is the same. The depression is the same. It helps me, reading about such people, to not feel so isolated or alone.