Please just stop

It's sunny today; looks gorgeous outside. The birds are tweeting (they have very tiny smartphones). I've had some truly good days where I felt very, very good.

So I don't know why today I feel like absolute shit and want to crawl back in bed and into a ball underneath the covers. Not only would I be too warm under there, I would soon find it difficult to breathe do to the carbon dioxide build up. I know this from experience.

I didn't do anything differently. Went to bed at the same stupid time after letting myself stay up until I was seeing two of everything. Got my now-typical six hours of sleep. Got up at 9am or so. All very usual. Ate the same foods, did the same unproductive routine: tea, breakfast, sitting on couch reading blogs and email, taking meds, putting drops in eyes. No different than the last many, many mornings. So why were the past several days good and today is very much not good?

I feel bad today, in many senses of the word. I feel mentally and emotionally in a bad place. I've not fulfilled some very serious commitments, making me feel like a bad person. i left some comments on two blogs that i wish I could take back because in the one case I feel chastised and in the other ... I just feel like I've done the wrong thing and everyone is simply ignoring it. And because the two people who run the blogs are friends who share a house, I feel as if they are talking to each other and saying "geez, she's such a pain. And all she talks about is herself. I wish she'd go away." I feel like I wish I weren't here, not necessarily forever, but just for awhile.

The bills are all late and I think the city may have cut off mom's water. I'm a totally crappy executor. I haven't been keeping records, I rack up late fees. It's even worse for my own finances. Fifty years old and I cannot even keep track of my own money or keep up with my checkbook.

I am having a really, really bad day. I'm starting to cry. Just a self-pitying blob. And I'm not saying this to get people to feel sorry for me to to validate me or any of that. It's just how I feel: I feel like a pathetic example of humanity, incompetent, self-centered, moody, immature, can't-suck-it-up-and-cope nothing. And everyone is getting tired of me bitching and moaning all the time; pretty soon no one will want to even be my friend because I'm so tiresome.

Hell, any more of this and I'll dump me.

I want cake.

The balance between gravity and flight

Tonight, I and several friends spent time on Facebook accomplishing a group project and it spawned a great deal of activity; double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking; and laughter. It has also left me with the jittery feelings that come when I let loose the dogs of hypomania, to completely destroy a phrase. The feeling is the same as when I was in college and didn't know about mania and mood swings and crashes as anything other than the regular feelings I experienced and assumed that many others experienced as well. 

In my 20s, I always encouraged and followed that emotional arrow as it flew up and up, past the birds, then the clouds, sometimes clear into the lower Earth orbit. The arrow would halt there, for a moment, balanced almost perfectly between both up and down forces, and that moment of balance was better than alcohol, better than pot, better than sex. However, gravity always won and the emotional arrow would plummet down, faster and faster until it achieved terminal velocity and crashed into the solid Earth, leaving me exhausted, in a vicious mood, confused, and often ill. 

When my first therapist first talked to me about controlling my highs in order to control the crashes, I was ferociously against it. I was convinced I would lose my personality, be some dull drone. I knew I would lose my creativity and my whimsy and spontaneity. It was another 3 years or so before I gave in and, tired of the crashes, began to recognize and control the arrow as it flew upward. I was relieved beyond words to see that it didn't kill my creativity or those parts of my personality that I valued so much. In fact, I think it made those facets better by virtue of my achieving some control. Later, when we decided to go further and add a medication layer of control, I wasn't so dead set against that. I'd grown accustomed to and grateful for control and the loss of those crashes.

In the past few years, I've also learned that I do have a cycling mood disorder and that the medication doesn't remove the cycling, it only dampens it. The rest is still up to me. I didn't have any awareness of those cycles until a friend who had gotten to know me very well and who has a keen perception pointed out to me that I fell into these phases where I would feel as if rabid hamsters were running on wheels in my mind and I couldn't control them. During those times, I would become dramatic and sure that the very worst thing that could happen would happen. These phases happened, he pointed out, every three weeks. Nothing I could lay to female hormones. 

Now that I've become aware of those three-week events, I've been able to perceive and control them. Over the  years I've come to appreciate control. So do my OCD and my PTSD and my hypervigilance and my regular anxiety ....

My moods ride a bicycle. Get out of their way.

Today I felt damned perky (sorry, Julie). The last couple of days I have felt myself coming up further from the Abyss, not really in the "happy" area yet, but not in the depressed area.

In fact, I felt beyond perky. As the morning went along, I felt the edge of mania* coming on. My mood and energy began to develop an edge. It felt to me there was a thin, electrical edge to my mood. My body developed a tremor and I felt ill. I felt nauseated and irritable.

My mood and physical feelings deteriorated quickly from there and I had to miss a commitment (but was able to email in what I needed to).

I wasn't expecting this. I'm on more and greater amounts of meds — twice as much for Pristiq (for anxiety), and half again as much for the Lamictal (mood disorder, cycling). And then my added Abilify (boost the other two). Plus, I have Lorazepam for sleeping and for taking off any anxiety that the Pristiq doesn't handle. This quick plunge made me feel — again — like I'm not on any meds at all. So I wonder what would be the effect of taking me off of everything and slowly bringing me back up? Cuz this isn't fun. And it's so reminiscent of the old days.

I was going to talk about my meds and my history of being on them, but I'm far too distracted and buzzy to write. At all. I'll write more later.

*Not the Bipolar I (Manic-Depressive) Mania. Something that is much, much less explosive. I might stay up extra hours, not days. I might spend a couple hundred dollars, not ten thousand.