When I was 20, I was diagnosed with a mood disorder, cyclothymia. This is ‘bipolar lite’, or rapid cycling minor to moderate mood swings. Think of the mood swings as being faster and lighter than Bipolar II, which is not as manic as Bipolar I.

The meds were not as good back then as they are now. We’re talking 40 years ago. The doc put me on lithium and a tricyclic antidepressant. There were no SSRI or SNRIs back then, and tricyclics didn’t work for everyone. They didn’t work for me. So the lithium was regulating the highs and nothing was working for the lows. I stayed depressed all the time.

I finally decided that I didn’t need medication and took myself off it, going back to a yo-yo mood and years of poor sleep.

It took thirty years before I was diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder. The symptoms had gotten bad enough that I could not sleep in my hypomanic days, and depressions were deep. With some trial and error, however, the new medications available helped me find a new normal where sleepless nights are seldom and I don’t cry for days at a time.

I wish I had taken the people at student health seriously, because I could have saved myself years of what I thought was simple insomnia. I wish I could tell 20-year-old me to stay on the meds and maybe try another antidepressant. I probably would have made better decisions with the right medication.

On the other hand, would I be who I am today if I had stayed on the medication? Would I have been creative? (I think so, but on the other hand I would not have had hopeless crushes, which fueled a lot of creativity for me). Would my life have been as interesting? I will never know.

The one rule that has helped me in making healthy boundaries in relationships is also one of the hardest ones to get into my head. It makes perfect sense yet is maddening.

The key, I’ve learned, is “You can’t make someone do anything.” This has staggering implications. You can’t make someone take out the garbage. You can’t keep someone from cheating. It seems unfair, but it’s true.

You can choose how to react to what the other person is doing. You can argue with them, ignore them, walk away. You can communicate so both of your viewpoints are heard. If that doesn’t work, you can go into therapy or break up. Or both.

It’s not a comforting truth. We want things to go our way, because tension is uncomfortable. Conflict is not pleasant. But it is inevitable, because conflict is what happens when someone’s needs are not being met.

The bright part of this is that trying to control the other is a great part of why relationships fail. Accepting that you can’t control someone else is a way out. Use your words, learn to argue better, nurture the positive so that your relationship feels ‘worth it’ — this is the rest of how to do healthy relationships. But it starts with “You can’t make someone do anything.”

These ideas are not original with me. I would recommend works by John and Julie Gottman for more on healthy relationships.

I’m a Boomer, so expect my choice in songs to be old, before your time. The song that came to mind, the one that always puts me in a good mood, is “Lola” by the Kinks. That garage band jangle, the winking lyrics, the feel of perpetual summer.

I understand it’s a controversial song these days, for a different reason than the original one. Originally, the controversy was singing about a trans person at all. Nowadays, it is about whether the song fetishizes being trans. I don’t think it does. It’s a playful nod to the twists and turns of sexuality. It tells us life is not always what we expected.

When I hear that opening riff, I am back riding shotgun in an automobile, endless summer ahead of me, reveling in being alive.

The person I spend the most time with is my husband. We suit each other well. He has a silly sense of humor, which appeals to me, and we have much in common. He supports my writing, and I support his collecting Star Trek replicas. (I have also supported his writing, but he does very little of that).

We have been married for 19 years (as he reminds me). It doesn’t seem that long, to be honest. Years just fly by, and I swear I’m only 45 (I’m not). It’s enough time that we finish each others’ sentences. Enough time that we kind of look alike.

Richard is my favorite person. The cats like him too. I think I’ll keep him.

Daily writing prompt

What’s the best way to build self-confidence?

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I find the best way to build self-confidence is to keep trying and do better. What I mean by this is that the first time you do something, you’ve done your best. But doing it again and trying something new is doing better than last time. That gives self-confidence, because you see that you’ve done better.

Don’t compare your work to others’, because you’re probably seeing their work after several cycles of getting better and comparing it to your first or second go-around. That will erode self-confidence every time. Measure your own improvement and keep practicing. Keep learning. Keep trying new things.

I thought about a pen name. The advantages of a pen name would be that my writing career would be held separate from my academic identity, and I could hide writing romantic fantasy from my colleagues. The disadvantages? That my writing career would be held separate from my academic identity, and I could hide writing romantic fantasy from my colleagues. Why hide? I like who I am, with all my bizarre facets.

If I had a pen name, however, it would be Marie DeLoye. Admittedly it has a bit more of a romance feel to it. It sounds like gothic romance, though, which is not what I write (although the first draft of what became Apocalypse had gothic elements to it. It was pretty dark).

I got the name from my dad’s side of the family, the French Canadian side. My grandmother’s maiden name was DeLoye, and Marie was my grandfather’s first love. It’s a catchy name. But it is not mine.

Daily writing prompt

What’s a moment in your life that felt like it was straight out of a movie?

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One day, many many years ago, I was 25 years old and in a mood. I could get moody when I was younger, before I was medicated. I was walking alone on a blustery, grey day, my cloak flapping. I wore my headphones, and the song that came on was “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana as I walked through the grass across a park. The moment so matched my mood that I felt like someone should be filming the scene. That was a movie moment. I seem to like dramas.

Another moment was when and how my husband proposed. We had gone to a shop in Valley Junction (Des Moines) that had, among other things, claddagh rings. I mentioned how some people used them as engagement rings, not as a hint, but as a thought. When Richard and I arrived back at his apartment, we sat on the couch. Richard said, “I was thinking …” He said this, and only this, several times over the course of a minute or two. Then he finally asked me to marry him. We went to the jeweler the next day to buy each other claddagh rings. Silly romance, but it works.

I think movie moments should have background music. I had soundtrack music for the first scene; the second scene needed some music. Vivaldi? No, something folky and adorable. I can’t think of what exactly. Maybe a bluegrass version of “Solsbury Hill”. I don’t know!

I’m 62 years old. I remember life before computers, when a TI-30 calculator was the epitome of technology. I remember the IBM-PC and the excitement of the WYSIWYG interfaces of Apple computers.

And I remember the Internet. And the Internet before the Internet.

Arpanet was considered the Internet before the Internet according to the history of the Internet. I remember sitting at a VAX terminal on Internet Relay Chat. but there was another system that featured chat, group chat, notes, and games. And that was the PLATO system. PLATO was an educational system that put terminals in colleges and universities, and occasional K-12 schools.

The interface was, by today’s standards, primitive. The classic PLATO terminal was a hulking box with an orange on black plasma screen. (The definitive book on PLATO is actually named The Friendly Orange Glow, by Brian Dear.) But the interface was far friendlier than the cryptically driven Arpanet. PLATO’s programmers and designers built an interface that allowed users to congregate in topic clusters (notes files) and communicate (chat). In addition, with very crude graphics, one could game.

This resulted in a fertile social milieu. PLATO people gamed together, chatted in interest groups, flirted online. There was (informally) online dating, and there were catfishers (I personally knew one, perhaps even the first one). I online dated and attended meetups before the cautionary tales. PLATO spawned its own slang, its own nerd culture.

PLATO and its programmers laid the foundation for things we take for granted on the Internet today. Our web browsers descend from the early browsers that were written by PLATO alumni. Dungeon-style online games started with the crude graphics of PLATO.

So I remember the Internet before the Internet, where I was a gamer and chatted in chat rooms, dated online, and wrote poetry in what we would now call forums.