"The Fence"

Since I last made an entry there has been no change with my Bipolar Disorder.  I have been depressed and having periodic moments of hypomania that last can last anywhere from five minutes up to an entire day.  I've found that while walking, coloring, listening to meditations, and music can have a positive effect on my hypomania what has helped me most lately is by not letting myself be in a situation where I feel like I need to have an opinion about something.  To do this I basically have to stay indoors and away from other people as much as I can which I feel alright in doing.  There are going to be those times which I need to go out and times I need to be around other people but I need to be aware at all times of what I'm getting myself in to.  Well, this past weekend I was blind sided when the drama came to me and I had to deal with more than I could handle.

First off, I live with my Mother in the same house I grew up in and also have the same neighbors as I did as a child.  I'm forty-two years old and that's a long time to be around the same people.  Because of this I've always felt very comfortable with my neighbors, being around them, talking to them, and I thought they all felt that way as well.  Well, I learned differently this past Saturday when my next door neighbor, in the middle of January, had a six foot fence put down the lot line between her and my Mom's house.  She didn't have fencing put across the back of her yard to connect with her neighbor just a tall fence on our lot line.  I can still walk around the fence and into her yard and walk through her back lot line which has some overgrown hedges.  

She had called my Mom the night before and told her she was thinking about having the yard fenced.  She told my Mom she didn't like people cutting through our backyard into hers to get from one street to the next.  Last September my neighbor was talking to my Mom and told her that all the leaves from our trees and in our yard always blow into her yard.  She's mentioned this too my Mom on several occasions.  Well, I take care of my Mom's yard and mow an average of two times a week during the fall season.  This year all of our leaves were up and done for two weeks before my neighbor's lawn service came to suck hers up.  I keep a good watch on the leaves in the fall and mulch or pick them up if they look out of control which means I end up outside sometimes three times a week.  I should also mention that we only have two big trees in our backyard and that my neighbor has four.  I should also mention that my neighbor uses a walker and doesn't go in her backyard at all.  Even before she started using a walker she probably hadn't been in her yard in twenty years. 

Anyway, this whole fence thing has had me really upset.  It looks like a spite fence to me and all the other neighbors think so as well.  I've looked up the rules set forth by the township we live in and there's no rule saying she can't put a fence on the lot line.  She also doesn't need a permit to do so.  I have looked and looked everywhere for some sort of loophole but I just keep coming up at a dead end.  I have thought about all the meanest things I could do or say to her and I just keep hitting a dead end.  The whole thing has me nuts and the anxiety of it is triggering hypomania for me.

As a result of the constant hypomania I'm having I've come to a conclusion.  I'm going to just let it go as hard as that may be and live with it.  I'm not going to do or say anything about it to my neighbor.  What that means is that I'm going to go about my business and do what I do.  She put that barrier up between us and I don't have to acknowledge her.