Option anxiety?  Nope.  I’m not a woman getting ready to go out for a night on the town with her BFFs, standing in front of a closet bigger than my office and agonizing over which boots will match the new earrings she bought that afternoon.  Nor, to be fair to women everywhere, am I myself standing in front of the DVD shelf at Best Buy trying to narrow down my purchasing options.

No, in the spirit of the crossover with Spiff, I’m referring to the choice of perspective on the world. I agree completely with him — that there is no good or bad until we decide that it is.  And you can, with the right effort, decide to shift your view, as I’ve said here many times.  Not only here, actually, but to other friends a lot lately.

Those who can, do.  Those who can’t, blog.

Detached, I can see the choices.  They’re right in front of me.  There’s a lot of stuff in my life that it’s easy to view as good: I’m clothed, housed, fed (if I could remember to eat, that is), with a nice car, nice enough stuff.  I’ve got lots of friends and plenty of opportunities for making money.  The potential for romance is out there, nearby, at least close enough that I can pretend for a little while (even if I am misinterpretting signals, for which I have a knack).  I’m talented and smart and blah.

But on the glass half-empty side, it’s been a long few weeks.  I’m overloading myself, which is not unusual, only this time I may have found my envelope and snapped the boundaries.  I just spent way too much money getting that nice car repaired (just three months after purchasing it, I might add).  I am so busy that I continually — moreso than usual — forget to eat, and I’m getting even less sleep than usual.  My chosen career sucks, but in order to keep fed and housed, I don’t have a lot of other options at the moment. My house is a wreck, and for someone as borderline anal retentive as I am, that just adds to the stress.
I’m at least keeping myself from sinking into the familiar depths of funk by focusing on the former and doing my best to push the latter from my head.  There’s that.  Knowing that you’re bipolar doesn’t fix things, but it does make it easier to cope.

But I’m tired, honestly.  Tired of struggling, and tired of my ideas and plans to lessen the struggle backfiring on me.  I begin to understand more and more the people that withdraw from the world and become hermits in the woods, sending scathing rants scrawled on unlined paper to their local newspapers, thinking anyone gives a shit about how they feel about the decline of their once beautiful United States, surrounded by animals that they talk to by name with an earnest sincerity that would spook the boldest of therapists.

I want to push all this out of my head, not only because it’s a waste of perfectly good mental and emotional energy, but because I fear that I will miss out on too many of the small moments that I have faith are headed my way.

What I wouldn’t give to trade this for a simple case of option anxiety.