TUSAL...posted a few days late

So there I was going through my pics and deciding how I wanted to update the blog tabs when I saw my TUSAL pic. Actually, I have several TUSAL pics. One with all of the orts in their pretty bowl

One of the pretty bowl empty

And finally, one with all of the orts placed in their new Original Gangster Brandy bottle

I  have a Patron bottle, a Jack Daniels, and now OG bottle filled with orts. The OG is really not all the way filled and will probably take at least 3 more bowl full of orts before it is truly full. 

Now here is the really sad part, I took the pics on the evening of May 9th after I had finished my days stitching. Why didn't I post it you might ask, well I just have been feeling a little overwhelmed and slightly stressed. I don't usually talk about it, mainly because after years of over reactions I have conditioned myself not to, but I have bipolar disorder. This is an interesting disorder, sometimes I feel like it is a descriptor of who I am as a person, but usually this is only when I am feeling particularly gray. Right now I am dealing with what is called rapid cycling. This means that I am cycling rapidly between mania and depression. I have been aware of the disorder since my mid-twenties, although I have probably had it since my teens. Seeing as how I am now 40-something, I have a bit of experience with it. Being aware of what is going on does help because at least I can try and temper some of my reactions. Of course, this also explains my recent euphoria with shopping on eBay. As with most people who are bipolar, the manias don't really bother me, in fact unless they completely cycle out of control, I enjoy the ride. They sometimes bother other people, but me not so much. Now the depressions, those suck. They make it harder for me to motivate to do what needs to be done and even sometime what I want to do, because we all know that needs and wants are not necessarily the same thing. Right now I am not taking any medications and this is something that I might regret. I have been off and on medications more times than I can count. The downside of medications are that they make me feel like I am thinking through a haze. Colors don't seem as bright and my thought processes feel way to slow. After describing the differences between meds and no meds to a psychiatrist, she replied that how I felt on meds is typically how the average person felt all the time. My immediate response was how do you stand it! Over the years, I have gotten better at dealing with the extremes, or maybe I have just gotten better at hiding them. Regardless, I am trying to stop being afraid of letting people know what it going on. I'm not ready to openly admit to anything face to face, but I have decided in this slightly anonymous forum that I shall take the first step to saying that I have a condition called bipolar disorder.

Wow...I just looked back on this post (reading for obvious typos and grammar mistakes) and realized that I totally bogarted my TUSAL post. I almost deleted everything not TUSAL related, but then thought what the heck, I'll just leave it....