When I got up this morning, my mood was neither up nor down. I was just here.
Decided to hit a couple of the first yard sales of the season. I love finding great deals and odds and ends that way. My kid had her own purse and money and we shopped together and it was fun.
The flipside to the neutral mood was the anxiety blasting my nerve endings out from under my skin. Traffic, the cats, the kid not listening to a word I say, the financial considerations over ever nickel I spend…It just became this deafening cacophony in my head and I wanted to scream. I didn’t. I walked away to another part of the room when we got back. I tried to sit my kid down and talk to her calmly and logically. Of course, she’s like adhd toddler and before I could get my sentence out it’s “Oh,look a bunny…why do bunnies have ears…what’s that noise outside….I want this…Give me your stuff…NO!NO!NO!”
And I start envisioning a sturdy rafter and a fucking noose.
After lunch the toddler war has continued.
My mood has crashed down into the gutter. I’ve got her calmed down for the moment and I have just been sitting here, no music, no tv, nothing, just staring off into space and listening to the heavy gusts of wind whipping at everything. I feel blank. I could fold laundry, I could clean closets, I could read a book…
But like I am frozen, I am just sitting here staring off into space, too mentally scattered to string two thoughts together.
Thus I thought I’d post, because these gutter times are the bucket of suck from hell. Bad moods, fine. Good moods fine. Restless moods, fine. This low for no reason off in space mood…
I don’t know how to cope.
Scumbag brain says liquor will help. At least numb me to the anxiety.
Logical brain points out it costs money, it solves nothing, and will inevitably make me sleepy and sluggish.
The two brains need to get on the same fucking page.
That sounds nutsy kookoo doesn’t it? Like I name my brain and it has two personalities or some shit.
It’s not like that, would be much simpler if everything were separate and compartmentalized.
It’s just…like my brain is in a constant war with itself, and there is never a peaceful accord, locked in a catch 22 from hell that never ends. And it just came from out of nowhere, the abrupt shift into gutter mood. Nothing bad happened. I didn’t drink or take pills. I didn’t get hurt.
It happens like that, constantly.
Which has always been the largest stumbling block in trying to work. It’s like having some sort of disease where your bones break suddenly and without much cause. Hard to commit to ya know, typing up a 60 page report if your finger got broken while brushing your teeth. Hard to help unload a truck if you stubbed your toe and broke three bones in your foot. (Okay, not the greatest example but you get the gist.)
Cyclothymia is similar. I have lamented here numerous times on how I make a commitment on Monday and by Thursday my mental space has changed so much, having plans feels like an albatross around my neck.
It’s damn near impossible to promote yourself and your abilities and reliability when the very nature of your disorder is the opposite of reliable. I don’t know how I am going to feel two minutes from now, let alone overnight and or in a week or a month.
Everyone thinks it’s so damn easy, oh,look, you’re out of bed and functioning, you must be all better and work will do you good, get to it.
Yet as these posts prove, I am so all over the map mentally, I can barely keep up with my basic hygiene a times. How I raise a kid is beyond me, unless it was the parental programming which had me raising my sister from age 11 and I just go on autopilot lest I get a verbal assault by mom. Programming goes deep.
But the rest…And even how good I am at autopilot like parenting, caring for house and cats, et al…It’s all subject to the roller coaster ride that never ends. It’s rarely a constant. I can clean the house magnificently on Monday, do the exact same thing on Friday in a different mindspace, and it looks like Stevie Wonder did it ‘cos everything is tidy but still not clean.
No consistency. None.
And during the gutter moods, I am pretty much useless and limited to dull monosyllabic responses and functioning. Viva bipolar.
