'Pouring Water' by me, via Flickr

The last few days have been stressful, to say the least. I was so worried about what the psychiatrist would say when I saw him on Monday that over the weekend, I hardly managed to get anything done at all. It has been terrible to think that there were two possible reasons for the delusions I’ve had over the last few months, and one of those reasons was that my mind had created a wild but highly intricate fantasy.

I hoped that the psychiatrist would say everything was fine with me and that the reason I had thought I had been working for months now when I had actually not been doing anything was because the antidepressants I had been on had given me terrible side effects. I hoped he would say I would be fine once the medication had been given enough time to leave my system.

He did not say that. He told me the evidence I presented suggested I was mentally ill and that I had created the delusion due to a combination of stress and mania. Not just normal, everyday mania though, he called it hypermania. I had to look that up because it’s not on Wikipedia or my normal haunts. Basically, it’s state of “full-on psychotic mania”. Great. No diet crazy for me, then.

He told me I was likely to be mentally ill and suffering from Bipolar Affective Disorder. This is something Jennifer and I have suspected for a long time but which I never had confirmed in the past because I was unnerved by the stigma associated with mental illness. Yes, I know. That’s terribly shallow of me but that’s just how it is.

Even though I knew in the back of my mind that he was going to tell me it wasn’t the medication that caused my problems, I didn’t want to hear it. The actual diagnosis came as a shock to my system. The fact that he wants to start me on lithium to treat the illness, and the fact that he handed me forms to get blood, thyroid and cardiac tests done immediately so that I wouldn’t have a big delay before treatment could start was an even bigger shock. Am I so badly damaged that treatment can’t possibly wait a second longer than absolutely necessary? Damn. I don’t do anything by halves, apparently. When it comes to the chuckle factory, I go all in.

I talked a little about what this might mean for my intended career in law in today’s vlog. The short version is that I might not be able to become a barrister even if the resits in April go well. I’ll have to check up on whether mental illness bars me from practicing at the highest levels in the court system or not. I hope it doesn’t but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that you need to be all there if you’re going to represent someone in the higher courts.

Monday wasn’t all bad news, however. On the way to the hospital, I checked my emails and found I had been asked to licence one of my images from the 365 Days of Photography project to the company making 2012 olympics commemorative stamps. They want to make a stamp bearing an image from each city the olympic torch is passing through, which includes Bolton. Specifically, they want my photograph of Bolton Town Hall to represent Bolton on their stamps. I said yes. How could I not?

Tonight we’ve had Jen’s parents and grandfather around for a meal. It was nice to see them again, and nice to chat with everyone. Jen told them what the psychiatrist had said and it didn’t seem to affect how they acted around me, which is great. I knew it wouldn’t change anything but there’s always that worry in the back of my mind, as I’m sure you can understand. It’s that stigma thing rearing its seven puss-filled, greasy heads again.

Still, the evening went very nicely and we all enjoyed it. Jen showed them her YouTube videos via the wonders of the YouTube app on the Xbox 360, which was fun. It’s interesting to see images I recorded on my telephone being streamed across the ether onto our TV screen. The future is a wonderful place to live, isn’t it?

Speaking of videos, I think I’ve spent enough time rambling at you all today so I’ll leave you with a brief episode from the Nobmouse channel. Today marks the end of the New Funkytron saga, so expect regular programming to return tomorrow.

Bye for now!

'Group Hug!' by me, via Flickr

New year really takes it out of me. It always has and it probably always will. Hot on the heels of the Christmas family gatherings, where the nearest and dearest are a lot nearer than usual for a lot longer than usual, I come to it with my socialising batteries already somewhat depleted.

I am not a party animal, I need my own company for large amounts of time if I am going to function correctly. As a result, New Year is often a test of my ability to act like a human being while people are around.

I got through it this year like I always somehow manage to, but I shall be spending the next few days hidden away in my office, drawing comics and writing articles on my own. I need this time to recharge and get back into my equilibrium. If I don’t get it, I will no doubt go even more mad than I apparently already am.

That’s not to say I don’t like the company of others – I really do! I just need time to myself after the get-togethers are over with. I love seeing friends, chatting, playing games and otherwise generally being sociable. It’s just that happy and sociable are not my default settings. My usual state of mind is more akin to that of a hermit. I am comfortable in my own company, just as others are only comfortable when people are around them.

While Sam and Jade (both of whom I would count as somewhere between best friends and actual family in terms of how high a regard I hold them in) were visiting, Jade and I got to discussing our video channels. We are both determined to increase our content this year in the hope of making our output both better and, consequentially, more popular.

There is a new channel online for our combined efforts and also for us to discuss future projects in messages to one-another, and we even discussed putting together a production of Jennifer’s Bringing Home the Stars, if we can secure enough time and funding to do it. I would love to be able to put together a film of Bringing Home the Stars. It is an amazing novel and it would transfer to the big screen so well.

We shall have to wait and see what happens, of course. For now, I’ll leave you with today’s vlog from the ZJKR channel.

Oh, as a final note I’ve just been playing Doom on my iPhone. It’s an odd experience to be playing a game on my telephone that I couldn’t run on the PC I had when the game came out (a 386SX/25 with 4Mb RAM and a 40Mb hard disk drive) without seriously reducing the graphic quality. That’s right, my phone now runs games from my childhood better than I could run them at the time. I love living in the future.

So today I was directed to a website called All This, The Ten-minute Exchange by Scott McCloud over on Google+. The premise of the website is that you can buy and sell ten minutes of time with someone, anyone in the world who signs up to “pledge time”, as if it was a commodity on the stock exchange.

This premise is so creepily similar to the script for a comic I wrote when I was still living in Durham that I was literally taken aback when I read it. The comic is question is called Time Share and I wrote it as a one-off horror piece with a twist ending, as a strip to send to 2000AD. I never got the script quite how I wanted it and therefore never sent it in but now I’ve been reminded of it, maybe it’s time I blew the dust off and gave it another going-over.

In addition to this strange website, which I would love to see work but really can’t see how it would, I have been reading up on strange laws today. It’s Wednesday and that’s the theme for my video over on Nobmouse, so it was fun to dive in and see if I could find some claims about strange, confusing or just plain stupid legislation to have a joke about. Good grief, there’s a lot of it out there! Have a look at what I finally came up with.

There’s no vlog for ZJKR today because I had to cut five minutes of coughing and spluttering out of the Nobmouse video to make it watchable and I didn’t think you’d want to see something like that on my vlog. This text will have to suffice for today.