weather adaptable

Man, it's hard to break five years of silence.  The habit of idly contemplating writing something and then going nahhhhh has some roots.

My emotional state was kind of bad this week.  I blame hormones, mostly, plus sleep deprivation.  My body is still adjusting to the pill, perhaps, and I never do well when I'm tired.  Whatever the reason, everything was all splintery in my head the last couple of days, my perspective like a slivered mirror, so that everything looked distorted and horrible, and I kept cutting myself on my thoughts.  So I did what I usually do on Bad Head Days and holed up.  The comfort rituals have changed a little over the years; this week it was sushi and Pride and Prejudice instead of [whatever comfort food I used to eat] and Aliens (although I still love to watch Aliens in any mood because oh my god can I be Sigourney Weaver when I grow up?).  It helped; today was a little better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better still.

I guess that's the thing with mood disorders.  You never get rid of them, never "cure" them; you just learn how to live with them, manage them, cope.  Which isn't as defeatist as perhaps it sounds; it's actually kind of empowering.  I've been saddled with these things (depression and, less severely, anxiety); they're part of my genetic heritage and my learned experience, and not "curing" them is not failure, just like not "curing" my nearsightedness is not failure.  It's not curable.  But it's absolutely manageable.  Wonderfully so.  I've had a lot of therapy to learn better tools for relating to myself and to others; I take medication to maintain a more even baseline; and when the bad days come, as come they will, I know how to handle them.  And I know that they'll go away, and everything will get better.  Which leaves me free to be myself, and to accept my experiences.  Hell yes, that's empowering.  I can't control the weather, but I have tools to mitigate the weather's effects: umbrellas, coats, scarves, gloves, boots, etc.  So with my mood disorders.  The nasty days come, and I can't stop them from coming, and it's not my fault that they happen; but I have a good array of implements to buffer me against the worst parts of them.  And mostly those tools are things I do to relax and make myself feel a little better, a little more comfortable.

So the week has felt pretty shitty, but having not had Bad Head Days like this in awhile, getting through them as well as I have averages out to a net positive, in my book.  It's been crap, but I'm still okay.  And that's pretty profoundly wonderful all by itself.