Are you bored?  I used to be.  I was Bored for approximately 36 years and 10 months, until I was put on a mood stabilizer that changed a whole lot about my life, including the fact that I was always bored.  And I don’t just mean that I was bored when things got a little humdrum.  I mean I was bored every minute of every hour of every day.  All.  The.  Time.

Sometimes, it’s pretty appropriate to be bored.  Like when you’re sitting around the house for the third rainy day in a row, and there are no more good movies to watch.  Or when the dentist is delayed and you forgot reading material and you can’t be bothered checking out their magazine selection, which never offers what you read, anyway.

Other times, boredom is incomprehensible.  I lay on the beach during my first tropical holiday at 15, in a turquoise floral bikini, turning purple from the equatorial sun because I ignored my mother’s instructions to wear sunscreen, and I was bored.  I explored Stockholm on a high school band exchange at 17, taking in magnificent buildings that were hundreds of years old,  while my hair whipped around my face in a bitter March wind straight off the winter-blackened Baltic Sea, and I was bored.  I was bored at my wedding and on my honeymoon, despite marrying a man I adore and remembering my honeymoon almost dreamily, so young and in love was I.  I was bored at my M.A. thesis defense, which was kind of precarious, since an inadequate performance could have caused my formidable committee of examiners to decide that I wasn’t worthy of a graduate degree after all.  I was even bored last summer when my husband and I shared a week together in the Mayan Riviera, staring out at a Caribbean Sea that sparkled like a jewel beyond description under a hot sky, staying at a resort abundant with fragrant vegetation and funny local wildlife and accommodating staff.  I was bored two years ago when I ran a half marathon in our nation’s capital, bored running past the beautiful Rideau Canal and over the Chaudiere Bridge into Hull.  I was bored for 17 of 21 kilometers, until I hit the proverbial runners’ wall, and then my attention was focused on not falling over and on aiming the vomit that eventually came somewhere respectable, like a sewer.

This boredom, to say the least, has annoyed the living shit out of me, and others.  It was intractable, and it never ended.  Until one day it did.  Last November, I began to get proper treatment for my bipolar disorder, and just like that, I stopped being bored. I stopped fidgeting, stopped squirming, stopped wishing I was anywhere other than where I was, doing anything other than what I was doing.  I am still getting used to this non-boredom-ness, all these months later.

There is probably a chemical explanation for what has happened.  Some neurotransmitter has increased in my brain, or a chemical pathway that was overactive before has been settled.  I honestly don’t care.  What I care about is that life seems interesting now, in a way that it never did.  I am not always chasing an adventure that never delivers, an experience that is over before it starts.  I am less distracted, more fully in the here and now, which is brimming over with simple gifts and small miracles, but I was too bored, too inside my own head and illness to notice.   Of all the blessings that proper treatment has brought, perhaps being interested is the greatest of all.  There’s a whole big world out there, and I was too bored for decades to appreciate all the wonderful things right in front of me.  There are none so blind, goes the saying, as those who cannot see…