Lexical Gap No. 39: 物の哀れ

April 2023 summary

“How are things?” my therapist asked in our first session together since my trip to Japan at the beginning of the month. “Did you finish your book? How was your vacation?”

“Good,” I said. And then I paused. “I think I’m depressed.”

I’ve been living with a bipolar diagnosis since high school, but it’s only in the past five years or so that I’ve started to understand how my moods forms the bedrock, the foundation, of how I live. I mentioned last month that I had zero-drafted GUARDIANS 2 in a manic period, so it follows that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.

I’m tired.

“If mania feels like coasting on a bike downhill,” I said to my therapist, “then depression is biking uphill. Like...I’m doing it, but now I’m fighting gravity in addition to moving forward.”

The longer I live with bipolar disorder, the more I underst…