I didn't quite catch that I was hypomanic (or became hypomanic?) when reading them, or around the time I was reading them--not sure which. Now I suddenly realize that I definitely was. When I was SUPER manic the first time, I wrote in books like The Last Unicorn and some Neil Gaiman books, plus just different random shit I drew or wrote on... I wrote in a lot of stuff that I regret marking up. I didn't quite realize how much I fucking HATE the habit, though, until after I had really marked up these Sherlock Holmes books.
This year (a year and a half after being manic the first time) I had written in the book in pencil. When I was reading the stories, I was reacting to the annotated notes REALLY strongly and it was like "... nope, gonna make my own notes, now." NOTHING worthy--just a lot of nonsense. Some of it makes me laugh because I know what I was thinking, but the thought of what someone ELSE would think if they saw it makes me so ashamed. There are ones that make me feel like "what the fuck was I even thinking? I seem so full of myself" are just worse.
Now I'm really ashamed of what I did--and how much I did it. It just LOOKS so crazy, and clearly very juvenile. I just spent about ten minutes erasing stuff out and I can't even look at the words I wrote; it's all embarrassing. Worst is the thought of what someone would think or suspect if they had decided to peruse the books themselves... I'm hiding the books under my bed just so my brother or anyone else doesn't suddenly get the idea to read the books while I'm gone for a week. It would KILL ME if anyone else saw what I did in my weird chicken scratch.
Worst yet, I even highlighted a bunch of stuff; those obviously I can't get rid of. I'm only lucky I didn't write in highlighter or in ink. If anyone else reads the book they'll just have to live knowing that I put pink highlighter over "I fancy, Watson" and will have to speculate on whether or not I just thought that was funny or thought it was evidence of something else. (Since I was hypomanic, I thought it was funny and put a "Let's eat, grandpa" joke in pencil... which I just erased. So. Just a taste of the kind of crap I threw in there.)So this post is just kind of a slap on the wrist for me/a confessional... or if anyone else does stupid shit like this when they're hypomanic that is a mostly private thing to get embarrassed about later. I would mention it to my therapist today but I want to really talk about the trip I'm going on first. I'm just wondering what the hell goes through my head when I graffiti my property like this; like "it's just a thing, nobody else cares about this thing except me" or "this is MY THING and I can do what I want with it" or what. I'm not being considerate to myself when I do this, that's what gets to me most.
