I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t bipolar. I could have been diagnosed 35 years earlier. I should have been diagnosed 24 years earlier. There’s no excuse for not being diagnosed 10 years earlier. That’s what happens when you get packed off to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist wants to prescribe meds but doesn’t want to listen. During the time I was undiagnosed, I put myself through college earning degrees in journalism and biology even though I had no high school math or science, put myself through law school, took and passed two bar exams, ran my own law practice, appeared before the US Supreme Court, moved 2000 miles across the country, argued before the New Mexico Supreme Court three times, did about a hundred trials and a couple dozen appeals. Bipolar disorder never kept me from doing what I wanted to be doing.
I have a mental illness. I’m not disabled. Except, I am. Thursday, my brain didn’t work. I’m taking a biology class and although I find the class fascinating, I can’t remember things, can’t figure out answers to problems, can’t concentrate. For the first time in my life, bipolar disorder is a disability. Knowing that many other people who are bipolar have similar experiences doesn’t help. My brain is broken and cannot be fixed. I’m not able to accept that.
My severe lack of ambition seems to be a function of a pandemic. So many people let me know after my last blog post that they share my malaise. Because my extreme lack of endurance, I need to set exercise goals. Right now I can only handle small goals. My current small goal is 10 minutes on the elliptical machine every day. I’ve done that five days in a row. I think the exercise, pitifully small though it is, helps.
I’ve been doing some macro work lately. Some of my work involves taking photos of interesting patterns and manipulating the photos.
I’ve also been doing some product photography. I’ll be listing these in my store, Deb Thuman Art, in the next couple days.
I’m linking with Nina Marie here: http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com
My store, Deb Thuman Art, is here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com
My Spoonflower shop is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman
Deb's Art 
Your manipulated photos are fascinating, Deb! I like the idea of a 10 minute exercise goal. I bought an Apple Watch early into the pandemic, hoping it would help me to move around more (like you, I value exercise more for mental health benefits than “getting ready for bikini season” crap). But my Apple Watch is actually DIScouraging me, because it has a preset exercise goal of 30 minutes per day AND it is not registering what constitutes exercise for me as being exercise at all. So I’ll wrangle the vacuum through the house for 45 minutes, dragging furniture around until I’m out of breath and perspiring, and Apple Watch says I did 4 minutes of exercise. Same thing if I walk the dog for 30 minutes — Apple says I only exercised for 9 minutes. It’s so discouraging to have my watch telling me, day after day, that I “failed” to reach my exercise goal! I wish I could reset that stupid thing to a 10 minute goal, or find some way to change the threshold for heartrate or whatever it’s using to determine what constitutes “exercise!”
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I’m sorry your Apple Watch isn’t helping you. You’re making progress even if your watch doesn’t agree.
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