Rotten Moods...

I have a mood disorder. I'm on meds, and I take them.

Here's what it's like, living with someone with a mood disorder.

It's like living with permanent teenager. Some days.

I get cycles, 3-5 days long. A period of feeling okay, playing music loud, dancing around the room while vaccuming, singing while sweeping... Followed by a day or two of feeling like a disgusting pre-reptilian lifeform that crawled out from under a stinky rock, followed by an angry outburst, followed by wallowing in bed wishing either I, or everybody I know, could just drop dead. Repeat ad nauseum.

It killed my first marriage, although, to be fair, so did my ex.

It scared of a bunch of men when I was madly dating.

It wrecked hell with my family and quite a few of my friends.

You could say I'm hard to love.

I'm not as noisy now as I used to be - most of the time, I mean. I can still crank it up past "Jet engine" when required. But, by and large, I'm a lot quieter than people think I am. I have a reputation, you see, so now not everybody gives me a chance to really get going - they prefer to shush me before I open my mouth. Sometimes I feel like Basil Fawlty (Fawlty Towers) when the deaf old bat Mrs. Alice Richards walks into the room and says "What!" See, she thinks that's his name. He replies "I haven't said anything yet!" Sometimes it feels like that. But I don't really blame anybody.

Along came Hubby, my equal in many ways, and my equal-and-total-opposite in others. He's just as stubborn as I am. We can lock horns for HOURS. Days. Months. We've had arguments we re-start periodically for thirteen years! For example, he insists that pedestrians crossing against the light do not have the right-of-way. Driver's ed taught me otherwise. And no amount of argument or reasoning or facts or evidence gets in the way of this continuing argument.

He's my total opposite in the length of time it takes him to get mad. I'm zero to ballistic in under one millisecond. He's zero to zero-plus-point-five-seven in roughly three years, give or take a decade. To say H is "calm" is to say the Great Wall of China is "calm." Any calmer, and he'd slip into a coma...

When I take on new tasks, I push through to the end, come what may, because I want a general idea of the entire process. He won't start till he could make a movie from fade-in to fade-to-black, in terms of his understanding. He won't just "try" something. For him, it has to be perfect, or he'd die of shame. For me, I don't care about the result. The result can be s--t, as long as I learned how the process works. But we both think we're experts, that much is certain!

Well, certainty is pretty hard to come by in the world to begin with, and if I may play the pity card here, a little tougher for someone with a mood disorder.

See, I can LOVE someone, and HATE someone, and be totally INDIFFERENT to this same someone, all in the space of a couple of days. "Someone" doesn't change, doesn't do anything different than usual, just my limits change like other people change their socks.

With a relationship as rocky as Hubby's and mine has been, we've endured our share of loving advice through the years, but lately it's all been aimed in one direction. "Figure out what makes you happy, then do it, never mind who you're married to or not married to. Be independent."

Okay. So how do I figure out what makes me happy? Well, some of it's not hard. Dark chocolate is a good starter. Bright sunshine. Lying in a hammock in summer. Lying on a floatie toy in the pool in summer. Lying with a heating pad under mountains of covers, snuggled up with the dog and the cat in winter. Good music. Friends. Lots of friends. My Daughter. Even the Stepkids, on occasion! My Cousin, and all her family. My Bro and his.

Full moons - reflected in the ocean, the swimming pool, or on the snow. I like full moons! They make me feel connected to the universe.

Playing cards. Writing blogs. Quilting. Sewing. Designing something beautiful. Making people laugh. Listening to people who make me laugh.

Okay. This doesn't help much though. Because I'm still going to love all those things, no matter where I live or who it's with. And there are days when I detest myself BECAUSE I like chocolate too much, and I'm fat and ugly. When I feel like I must be the laziest person in the whole world, lying in my hammock or curled up in bed. When I hate all music. When I don't want to see anyone. When I'm afraid to talk to my daughter, my stepkids, my hubby, because I'm SURE I'll say all the wrong things. When I'm bored with cards and don't have anything to say to the world, when the quilting is stagnating and the sewing machine is my enemy. When everything I design looks like s--t, nothing I say is funny, and nobody in the world is funny, either.

And quite often, I don't remember the cycles. In the middle of a "down" mood, I don't remember being happy. Well, I remember it, like something I read in a book, about twenty years ago... And vice-versa.

The point being, it's really hard for someone with a mood disorder to figure out what makes them happy.