Discordant

1. being at variance; disagreeing; incongruous: discordant opinions.
2. disagreeable to the ear; dissonant; harsh.

I like the first definition: being at variance. It’s not positive or negative, it’s just at variance. That feels good. It feels accurate.

I am at variance in several places in my life right now. It’s like working on a puzzle. That great big field of blue sky that has 1,428 of the 5,000 pieces, and there’s that one blue piece that really should go there but just won’t snap in…

Good metaphor. I’m good at coming up with metaphors for my life. Maybe not so good at carrying them to their logical conclusion. But hell, they’re literary devices. What do they really solve?

I’m not writing with a purpose this morning. I’m just writing. My mood swings are bad, still, but I know that writing helps. It centers me to tap away at my keyboard, even with no goal or topic or point in sight. I’ve started taking this supplement stuff that my mother came across. I pooh-poohed it at first (I have an unfortunate tendency to do that with her), but a couple weeks have made me a believer. I have to take it kind of selectively; it’s got a moderately icky side effect of tearing up my guts and leaving me stuck in the bathroom. It also can make me more jittery than 12 cups of Kona coffee. But on bluesy mornings, it helps. On sleepy mornings, it helps.

Kind of a natural upper, if you will.

I’ve been talking to my wonderful husband more about all of this, too. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t just slapped me into a rubber room by now, but there you go. He has the patience of a saint. It’s terrifying to go digging around in my past, my psyche, and my deepestdarkest places with him.

Still.

You’d think three years of friendship and almost two years of marriage would have cured me of those nerves, but nope. I’m still a big ol’ coward.

He asked, a week or so ago, why all of a sudden I’m pushing so hard about taking pills and talking through the old cycles and spending so much time on fingerpainting with my feelings. It’s a fair question. I’m not exactly the type to go all woo.

I am, though, the type to do hours of reading and research and considering when I’ve been slapped with a new label. I want to know exactly what the label means, where it came from, when I “became” that way, if the label fits, where it doesn’t.

I did all of that kind of before I really started talking.

I started piecing together the bigger picture of my patterns of behavior, and didn’t like what I saw.

Since I was 17, I’ve been living on a two year cycle. Every two years, it seems, I burn my life to the ground and start over.

Our second anniversary is coming up.

Eeep.

And I can feel the spiral getting faster, crazier, more extreme.

Double eeep.

I’m so scared. I’m so afraid that I won’t be able to head off this go-round of crazy emotional pyromania. I’m terrified that the crazy will hurt him, hurt our life together, do some kind of damage that we can’t come back from, and that I’ll lose him.

I want, so much, this life we have been building together. I want to be happy, to be still, to be normal. I want the ups and downs and sideways moments to smooth out. Never in my life have I even considered medication (why would I need to be medicated? I’m just fine dammit) but now I’m looking at pills. I’ve talked to a pshrink voluntarily (also a first). I chickened out of the making appointment part, but I did the intake.

That’s huge, just let me tell you that.

I’ve had relationships that lasted through the two year cycle, but they weren’t happy ones. And, in looking back, I see where the first two year break happened, both times. Those relationships never recovered. I never came all the way back into them after I got lost in the mean reds.

I made Rhett promise me, the other day, that even if I lost it, he wouldn’t go away. I need him to pull me back in. I need a lifeguard, and I have to ask the people I trust most to do that for me. Not because I’m not a good person (fear) or because I’m somehow incapable of normal emotion (fear) or because I’m just too selfish to make real life work (fear) but because this chemical mix in my brain sometimes just hits the vinegar-plus-baking-soda stage.

Everything about this process is rooted in fear. It sucks.

My hope is that, because I know so much more about my brain and patterns now, I’ll live through this a little more gracefully than maybe I have done in the past. I know what works for me. I know what makes me stable.

I know that exercise is the best possible thing I can do for myself. Even just going for a walk every day.

I know that an absolutely rigid regular schedule is the second best thing I can do. Going to sleep at the same time and getting up at the same time every single day. Doing X, Y, and Z in the exact same order every single morning. Spending hour 1 at task A, hour 2 at task B.

I know that, for the next couple of months, I’ll need to say less of what I’m feeling and more of what I’m thinking. My feelings get… inaccurate. That seems like an odd thing to think, but it’s completely true. I get overreactive emotionally. Think of it like an overdose of total chick syndrome. It’s like I make up for the other 20 months in between where I don’t act much like a girl at all.

These are the things I know I need to do. Actually doing them for myself is difficult. I think I am at the point in my life where I’m going to have to enlist outside help to get these things accomplished, and that terrifies me, too. I don’t like not being in control, so asking other people to help “control” me feels weak, and uncomfortable, and generally icky. That takes a lot of trust.

I’m not good with the trust.

I did mention that I don’t really have a point this morning, yes?

I need to stop babbling now. I have a house to clean because a chaos-free environment helps me keep a chaos-free head. Wish me luck.