Mixed nuts

Hi, kids. I'm having a mixed episode today. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a delightful state of emotional flux in which the bipolar individual experiences symptoms of both mania and depression simultaneously. It's also called "manic dysphoria" or "dysphoric mania," neither of which are recognized by my spell-check program as real words, but here we are. I am feeling agitated, restless, and anticipatory. By "anticipatory," I mean to say that I feel like I'm waiting for something to happen, even though there is nothing to wait for. Imagine feeling like you're waiting for your test results (the kind of test doesn't matter- Math test, blood test, pregnancy test, whatever), but there never was any test to begin with, and there's no way you can convince your brain otherwise. Fun times. Recommend it to anyone suffering from a lack of thrills in life. That was sarcasm. Fuck off. Racing thoughts? My brain is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on a track filled with hairpin turns and boobytraps. Most of my thoughts are of what the fuck I should write next, where to begin about how I am feeling lately, and how much bile to spill about how irritated and frustrated and goddamn fucking angry I am that I can't relax, now that everything's fine.

EVERYTHING'S FINE. No, it really, really is. It's fine. Everything is absolutely bloody fine... now what do I do? Well, anything I want, theoretically, but I seem to have forgotten how to want to do things. Yeah, I know it doesn't make much sense, but some of my worst bouts of mental instability have come during periods of relative calm. I don't know how to shut down that little asshole in my brain who keeps flooding the engine with adrenaline so that I can't even start the car. That was a metaphor. Fuck you. I'm not really a car. Moving on.

Pent-up, unexpressed grief. Stress from the holidays. Stress from moving. Stress from new relationships. Stress from change, in general. Good stress, bad stress, doesn't matter. It's taxing. I'm taxed to the max, and I want my fucking refund. That was a pun and a metaphor. Fuck you. (This one is going to be fun to read to my therapist in a little while.) But it's helping. Really, it is, typing like the wind, getting all this shit out of my brain and into the little screen with the letters on it. Already, I am feeling somewhat better. Good enough, at least, to start to talk about the appointment I had with my doctor today.

Okay, so it's actually my doctor's assistant, but she's much more pleasant to deal with than my doctor, because Doctor Gregory Figg has the personality of a sheet of drywall. This is actually worse than a slab of sheetrock, because drywall is crumbly and leaves dust all over the place. I digress. I'm digressing a lot today. I'm scheduling surgery. Boom. There's the point. I finally got tired of himming and hawing about whether I should try this or that therapy or holistic remedy or exercise, and have just decided to get the damn surgery. The injections have done exactly jack and shit, respectively, and although physical therapy is helpful, it isn't going to magically grow my disks back or make my bone spurs disappear. So, I have a consult for surgery on my low back at the end of the month. I'm hoping they can go in through the back, so I can get the tattoo I already planned. It feels a little bit like victory and a little bit like defeat, but there's something to be said for facing facts.

Radar. Radar is my cat who's dead now. How's that for a lack of segue? I still can't seem to cry for him. Every time I feel like I'm getting close to letting go, something stops me, like I'm afraid to mess up my makeup, or something stupid like that. I don't know why I keep making excuses. I don't know why I am afraid to mourn. Is it some bizarre form of denial? He's not here. He does not live with us, has never lived with us in the new apartment. Perhaps that's part of the problem. It feels, in some ways, as if he just vanished without a trace. Normally, a pet dies, you look around and see the spot where he used to lie on your floor, the dent in the couch where she always sat, the footprints on the windowsill where he watched birds. I have none of these reminders. All I have is a box, a very pretty little box, that is already gathering dust because I have barely touched it since we moved in. Just like everything else.

I have done a lot of relaxing since we moved in, and also a lot of cleaning downstairs. I want to keep the place looking new and pretty and ready for guests. Normally, I would focus on my own room, but this time, I've done little beyond the initial basic moving-in stuff. It looks fine, it isn't terribly messy or anything, but it lacks spirit. I have not created anything in that room yet; I have barely even spent any time there. This is partly due to the fact that our living area is comfortable for me, now, for the first time since we lived in the house in Hilliard, and partly due to whatever the fuck (yes, I said fuck again) is paralyzing me from the inside. I sit on the couch next to Matt, and he has no idea that I'm feeling awful, no idea how frustrated I am that I want to talk and work out all the kinks in my brain, but, for some reason, I can't.

Like I said, I have no reason to be depressed. I can sit and think about how lucky I am, absolutely gush about how everything is falling into place after such a long period of strife for me and Matt, and yet, something isn't clicking. It's like someone forgot to throw the little switch in my head that says "all clear," and I'm still deep in energy-conservation mode, guarding myself from who knows what. I'm not even consciously waiting for something to go wrong. I don't have any doubts about where we are and that things are going to continue to get better. This shit is entirely chemical, and that's frustrating, because I have been adjusting and tweaking and experimenting with psych meds for more than a decade. I keep seeing these ads for Abilify, you know, the ones with the cute little cartoon people talking about how much better they feel now that they're taking another cute little anthropomorphized pill, and I want to throw something at the TV. My anxiety prevents me from taking any kind of stimulant, which, intellectually, I know should help me, were I only able to tolerate them.

I have all this energy. I need to make things and do stuff and go places. I have the opportunity and the means, now, but do I have the ability to get past these mental blocks? Do I even know what the blocks are, anymore? I feel so overwhelmed, and so guilty, because I feel like I should have gotten the fuck over it by now, really blossomed now that I'm planted firmly in fertile soil. But I guess it's only been a month. Maybe I'm just being too hard on myself. Argh. I don't know. It's really hard to look at things objectively when you're dysphoric, dysthymic, and discouraged. (That was an alliteration. Consonance, specifically. Fuck you.)

So how am I feeling right now, at this moment, sitting here in the lobby of my therapist's office as I read over this entry? Better than I did before I started writing, that's for sure. And I can at least change things up and talk about some stuff I'm proud of myself for. I have had only six cigarettes in the past week, and I have no immediate desire to buy more, thanks to my new e-cig. I'll be able to step down the nicotine gradually, but I'm already doing myself good by quitting tobacco. (Still miss the fire, a bit, but maybe I just need to burn more incense.) Also, a chronic issue with candida (yeast, thrush, whatever you want to call it) that I've been dealing with since my steroid treatments started has prompted me to drop processed sugars from my diet. I'm doing a two-week sugar fast, even avoiding fruits and fruit juices, in an attempt to starve the fungus so my immune system can catch up and get rid of it. I'm also taking pro-biotics. Even after a couple of days, I have noticed the nodules under the skin of my lips have started to dry up. TMI? Too bad. Nobody forced you to read this.

I am glad to be out of the house. I desperately need structure, both on a macro- and micro- level. Ideas I have for this include checking out the free or low-cost art classes at the Cultural Arts Center, having a regular "Morgan Day" once per week in which I leave the house and do whatever I want, and scheduling time to make art, even if they're doodles I don't do anything more with. As I mentioned before, though, I am really bad at keeping myself to a schedule, which leads me back to asking my therapist for some tools to help me do it. Calendars and reminders and stuff don't work. I need something better, something I can't ignore.

I guess that's it for now. I got some other stuff to talk about, but I can't even go there until this wibbly-wobbly manic-dysphoric issue has passed.