In My Head (The devil made me do it)

So, I'm talking to a friend of mine last night; he's going through some tough times, and probably the worst of it is, someone he cares about has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So, he's coming to me for advice and a wall to wail against because I know a lot about bipolar disorder.

He asks me if bipolar can explain this, or that.

It's an excuse. It's like saying "The Devil Made me Do it." Yes, your brain is broken, but that doesn't mean you get to get out of the consequences of the stupid fucking decisions you made.

You drink, you get in the car, you drive over someone's daughter in the street. You'd have never done that when you were sober, but that doesn't change a damn thing. Someone's still dead and you are still a pathetic excuse of a human being.

I don't know about that. A lot of the time, these sorts of things go on almost entirely in our heads. I mean, how often do you look at me and think "She's practicing the speech she's going to give to her father when he finds out his only grandchild has smothered to death in her sleep." You'd be astonished how often what I'm thinking has nothing AT ALL to do with what's going on in the room. I've planned my own suicide more times than I could count. I know exactly how to spend the money if the husband should die and I get his life insurance policy. Almost every second of every day, I'm living my real life out here, and in my head there's at least 4 different other things going on; I'm almost always plotting or planning a novel/story/character/scene. I'm worrying about some long term problem (right now it's getting through Christmas dinner with my parents), visualizing everything that could possibly go wrong in that moment - falling down the stairs, rogue asteroid landing in the living room, being run over by a car, the house catching on fire... every single time I come home I have a brief moment of relief when I discover the house has NOT burned down - AND trying to pay attention to whatever the FUCK everyone is talking about at the moment.

Every minute of my life is like that. EVERY. Minute.

And that doesn't even include the depression that gets so bad I can't breathe, can't see an end in sight to any of the pain that I'm in, and I loathe myself with the kind of religious fervor that people reserve especially for the enemies of God.

Or the days when I can't sit still, I have to clean clean clean everything and nothing will ever be good enough, but if I sit down for more than two minutes, I'm listening to an internal monologue about what a bad housekeeper I am, and a bad mother, and did I really ever think I should be writing at all?

These are my elephants, and they're all in the room, and boy-howdy do they get in the way.

But at the same time, if I pay any attention to the shit going on in my head, they start trampling around.

Talking about this... doesn't make it easier. It makes it harder for me to build my life in the corners around the elephants.

My elephants are smaller than they used to be. I still hate myself, pretty much constantly. I've accepted that I don't see myself the way other people do, and I still try most of the time to act like I want to feel. It's an act, but it's generally a pretty damn good one. Sometimes I even fool myself. But I don't hate my life. And most of the time, I keep it under control.

But it was a long time coming. And I've known about my elephants for over 20 years now (back when they called it Manic-Depression, which I personally hate, because manic does not mean HAPPY, ok. Thank you.) and learned to deal with them. And my husband has learned to deal with them, and how to help me.

My friend, for the first time, has just realized there's an elephant in his life.


Ok, enough of the depressing shit. Go listen to my favorite song, and then go check out today's Smutty Advent Calendar!! Yay!