Happy birthday to me! No, you won’t ever know how old I am.
The wood stove in my parents’ house; a wonderful, cozy and lazy birthday evening.
Dear Person/Family who lives there,
I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve already put up your Christmas decorations as I drove home from work today. I laud your desire to get into the festive spirit early in the season; after all, the warm, fuzziness of Christmas is something that most people long for all year round. I commend your decorations, which seem so professionally done that I imagine you left them up from last year, just in case. As the evenings grow ever darker, your home is a dazzling visual feast on my way home from work.
However: it’s not f***ing Christmas! Perhaps you didn’t notice that none of your neighbors have followed your trailblazing example and set up their own seasonal decorations. Not one single person has wished me (or probably you) happy holidays. If you’ve offered such a gesture to others, I imagine you received something of a blank stare in return.
It isn’t the season to be jolly, not by a long shot. The season to visit the dentist, yes, after all the Halloween candy we’ve all just gorged ourselves on. The season to stock up the larders and raise the average national weight a good few pounds as Thanksgiving approaches. The season to start penny-pinching so that we can prepare to buy all those frivolous and meaningless gifts for people we’ve barely met and don’t really care about. But it is not the season to sing O Come Ye Faithful or Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel or Jingle f***ing Bells.
I think you had your lights up shortly before Halloween. That’s in October, in case you forgot. Christmas is in December. Thats two – count them – two months too soon. At least wait until Black Friday, when the Christmas season truly gets started at 3:00 AM at the local mall in a trampling rush of frenzied shoppers, and usually ends with someone getting shot. That’s the kind of Christmas season that deserves a small city’s worth of lights on your roof.
I doubt that you’ll do anything about it, and I doubt that I will either, but just in case you see this: can you at least turn them off once in a while?
Yours truly,
Satis
P.S. You’re still not as bad as the folk with the creepy backlit life-size Santa in their front yard.
Featured image from http://www.hdwallpapersinn.com/christmas-lights-wallpapers.html.
And so goes by another week of wasted time and workless nights; no writing, no doing, no thinking. Long evenings of dozing and watching Futurama and eating too many bowls of cereal, waiting to be able to go to bed and fall asleep, to forget the emptiness of yet another day.
I’ve been struggling with my maladies for many, many years, but was only recently diagnosed with (or learned of my diagnosis of) Bipolar Type I. I’ve already written about this, but it just all suddenly makes sense. Look at this graph:
This is a chart of my mood over the past six months. As you can see, it goes up and down a lot. I haven’t had more than a week or two of feeling generally stable. What’s much more interesting is the pattern of ups and downs. I need more data to be able to see a genuine trend, but I’ve highlighted above periods of time where my average mood remained below a rating of “5”. They seem pretty evenly spaced, don’t they? A month of up, a month of down.
And so the cycle goes. I’m in a black phase at the moment, entering autumn and feeling overwhelmed with the work ahead of me, both in my personal life and with my novel, and although it seems like it’s lasted forever this time, I can see about that it’s only been about three weeks. Another week or two, and I might be looking up again.
Wouldn’t it be nice? What if I could predict my depression, prepare for it, set things in place to ease the way for myself and my family? “Well sweetie, in about two weeks I’m going to start making your life miserable again; we’d better prepare.”
It probably won’t work out that way. I’m unpredictable, and that’s part of the problem. Ignoring the averages, look at the variation in the above graph: I can go from a 9 to a 2 overnight, and back up again the next day. It’s not easy, believe me.
Unlike typical bipolar disorders, I don’t have especially manic phases. I don’t spend money compulsively, I’m not promiscuous, and I certainly don’t feel like I can do anything and everything in the world. On the best of days it’s a struggle to force myself to do even the things I want to do. However, I do have extremely difficult depressive phases. I’m on four different drugs to try and combat this. And as of this week, I’ve added a fifth: lithium.
That’s right – the dreaded lithium. The certain and dreaded proof, if any was needed, that I truly am bipolar. And I don’t know how I feel about it. If it works – if it softens the downs – I’d be very pleased. The side effects are worrisome, though. I have a mild hand tremor as it is from my existing drugs; lithium may make this worse. In my work I need to have pretty steady hands, and this could definitely cause problems. Weight gain? I gain weight when I’m depressed anyway – my nightly routine usually includes several bowls of cereal. I certainly don’t need to get any fatter.
Worse, I’m both looking forward to and worried about just simply feeling numb. At its worst, my depression nonetheless warms me, a kind of comfort in solitude, in trusting in a known quantity. I know my depression, it is me in the most basic of ways. It’s as much a part of me as my own hands. Drawing back into it is like curling up by the fire in the dark. What am I going to do without it? Will I be able to carry on working, writing, living without as much difficulty? Or will like become even more intolerable without even the escape of withdrawing into the dark?
We’re going to have to see. My doctor hasn’t exactly started me on a low dose of lithium, though there’s plenty of room for increasing it. Part of me wants it, just to see what it’s like – and part of me is terrified.
Which will win?
Featured image from http://quenya101.com/ainulindale-quenyanna/page-5-§§14-8/.
Satis Writes 