The idea for this blog came to me suddenly; I wanted to create a self-improvement website for screwed up people (like me).

At Lovesong.blog, I planned to write about various topics, including mental health, travel, and love/relationships. Since I’m a storyteller at heart and a musician, the blog would also feature stories and songs.

My end goal?

To help screwed up people, as I said, and to promote my book—Love Songs and Suicide: A Travel Memoir, Romance, and Tragic Musical Comedy.

Following my session with Dr. Gillis, during which I told her I was “used to being miserable,” I spent the next two weeks developing content for this website. I wrote my first twelve blog posts during that time, all reflecting back on my previous sessions in therapy. I wrote two long-form articles as well, covering mindfulness and dialectical behavior therapy, respectively.

I wanted the blog to have a unique aesthetic.

So I did some research and read up on the AI image-generation tool Midjourney. I subsequently signed up for Midjourney, and in less than two weeks, I created over 2,000 images using that tool.

I was totally addicted and loved the product. It opened up a world that had previously been inaccessible to me: the arts.

 

As I continued down the Midjourney rabbit hole, I neglected my responsibilities at my day job, slept far fewer hours than normal but still felt energized, and experienced other symptoms of mental illness, including agitation and anxiety.

Cut to my next therapy session . . .

“What is happening to me?” I asked Dr. Gillis, my therapist, after telling her about my new blog and insanely productive yet anxiety-ridden past two weeks. “I guess it must be hypomania, right?” I said, referring to the mild form of mania that people with bipolar disorder experience.

“I don’t think you’re bipolar,” Dr. Gilis said. “Hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD. It sounds like that’s what you’ve been dealing with.”

“Hyperfocus can lead to a decreased need for sleep, anxiety, agitation, and so on?”

“One hundred percent. And I can relate. On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself wide awake at 8 o’clock in the morning, feverishly working on whatever obsession was foremost on my mind.” Like me, Dr. Gillis suffers from ADHD, a fact I alluded to but didn’t state explicitly in a previous post.

“That’s fascinating,” I said. “I’m a little disappointed in a way. Hypomania is kind of a sexy term, and I always figured I was bipolar.”

“I don’t think so. It’s possible I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you’re not bipolar.”

There’s a chapter in my book called “The Bipolar Express” (and I may need to change the title of that chapter…).

Honestly, I wasn’t fully convinced I had ADHD until this session with Dr. Gillis. But after hearing her reiterate her diagnosis and highlight her own experiences with ADHD—with hyperfocus, specifically—I knew she was right.

And knowledge is power. Going forward, knowing that I have ADHD will help me develop strategies to harness my creativity without losing my grip on reality, manage distractions, and establish healthy routines that optimize my productivity.

It’s going to be a process.

But I’m going to learn how to live with ADHD, and I’m relieved to finally have a fundamental understanding of how my mind works (and why it doesn’t always work properly).

So, yeah, this blog is a byproduct of mental illness—but not bipolar disorder. And I’m proud of what I’ve done with this blog so far, and that is all for today.

 

Next: Therapy Journal 15 – “Phoenix Reborn”

Previous: Therapy Journal 13 – “Used to Being Miserable”

Go to the Beginning: Journal 1 – “Broke, Miserable, and Alone”