Another day, another mood, and good meds

Yesterday was the Big Event at work. I survived! We all survived, but the biggest hazards turned out to be each other. Our entire department gets snarky with each other when this event rolls around. I cannot hold myself above the bitchy, for lo, I am the worst of them.

Here's the thing. I'm still in chronic pain from shingles. When I do too much physically or experience too much stress emotionally, the pain flares brutally. It's worse when I don't sleep. On Wednesday night, I barely slept. This means that when Thursday rolled around, I was one big batch of Bitch.

There is no reason to recount my bad behavior here, especially since I'm sure it will be told and retold among my coworkers until it becomes legend. The only part of the day that brought me any true satisfaction was when I got into it with the parking troll who "guards" the parking lot where I work. It was a telling-off that was ten years in coming, and it just means that I won't be able to illegally park in the alley anymore. Easy come, easy go.

Here is what I know for sure. My mood came from stress, unmitigated physical pain, lack of sleep, and resentment at having to participate in an event that requires an unreasonable amount of work but results in no benefit at all to me or my coworkers. This year was the year I stopped pretending that I was a team player, on board and happy about it. Instead, I was just exceptionally frank about what I thought and how I felt the whole damn day. What a refreshing change.

Last night my feet hurt so badly that I had trouble falling asleep. The incessant throbbing was relentless--and I wore running shoes under my floor-length dress throughout the entire day. We had off today, and that was a blessing. There was no improvement to my mood, though. I can dwell under the clouds of bitchiness, deep in the Dungeon of Resentment, indefinitely. When the conditions are right, my moods are no longer within my control.

All of those bipolar medications work, although it may not seem that way. Without them, this mood would have escalated into flat-out nastiness and rude behavior. Every thought coming into my head would have exited through my mouth, unchecked and unfiltered. Taking medication doesn't stop you from having moods; the medication stops the moods from turning into something unmanageable. Sometimes I miss that lack of a filter. I can insult people with exceptional skill and intensity, but my willingness to cross that line is greatly diminished by the medication. Ah, those were the days.

Have I mentioned that the entire right side of my body is on fire? It's getting old and I'm very ready for it to end.

Which reminds me of a conversation I had with myself. Every morning, as I drive to work, I play a question game with myself. There's a different game for the afternoon. The morning game is called, "If you could be anything in the world what would that be?" The answer is a litmus test for whether or not I am mentally healthy. These days, the answer is likely to be "free of pain," "lottery winner," "exceptionally thin," or an equally shallow option.

It wasn't always like that. For two years, my answer to the question was, "Dead." Every day, for more than 700 days, I asked and answered without deviation. That made me come up with another question game for the afternoon: "How would you kill yourself?" For a long time, the answer was really a list of things I wouldn't do. Then it became a list of things I would do. And then I finally got the answer, and until this moment, never revealed it to anyone.

Here's what I would do: I hate late fall, I detest winter, and I don't like spring very much because where I live, spring is often cold, wet, windy, and snowy. Summer is my haven, my salvation, the season I am awake. So, I would have to carry out my plan in the winter. On a frigid, sub-zero-temperature night, I would first sedate myself with a sufficient dose of the appropriate medications (which I have in abundance), knowing it would eventually send me into deep unconsciousness. Before that point, though, I would, quite simply, go outside and lie down in the bitter cold night, on the frozen ground of my front lawn, wearing nothing more than my pajamas and socks. Then, I would fall asleep and die--if not from the overdose, then definitely from hypothermia. It makes for an easy clean up, too, as well as being easy for the coroner to recover the body. No stairs, no walls, no furniture, no obstacles at all. No blood, no bodily fluids, no mess of any kind (with the exception of my office and basement which are beyond the scope of my organizational abilities at this point).

So, summer is on the way, and I feel cheerier at this time. The irritability will pass. The drugs will force me to feel OK, and lithium will protect me from killing myself. I will live to blog at least another 120 days. After that, it's really a matter of mood and weather. Nobody ever really knows how precarious my situation actually is, and that's probably best for my own autonomy.