Lately (and by “lately,” I mean “for the past year”) I have been getting every single cold and flu that’s been going around. (Well, I haven’t gotten swine flu. That’s something to be thankful for.) The past couple of months, I’ve spent a lot of time too wired too sleep but too tired to focus or do anything much. I am used to this, since I’m an insomniac, but I’m just used to it taking up some of the night, not the entire evening and some of the night. This is very frustrating.

I still have several partially-written posts that I never finished because I got too tired in the middle of typing them. I like to think that I’ll get to them someday.

Yup, I’m still alive. But my back hurt for a while longer due to another slight injury, and then I had a bad headache constantly for a month. The headache went away as mysteriously as it came, which is good, because I was getting really tired of having Tylenol for breakfast. Then I had a cold, and all through all of these things, I was exhausted all of the time, but the exhaustion is finally going away and I’m not quite so tired all the time.

I’m still kind of tired lately, but mostly I feel frantic. There is so much stuff that I want to do and I was feeling too crappy to do any of it. I don’t mean “essential” things; I mean I wanted to read more books, write more blog posts, make more artwork, etc., etc., etc. (Screw housework.) Now I don’t feel like I can catch up. I always feel that however much I do, it’s not enough.

Really, really bad insomnia last night. I haven’t been sleeping well in a while, but this was particularly brutal. I went to bed early (for me), around eleven, and it took me a couple of hours to get to sleep, which isn’t unusual (for me), but then I kept waking up repeatedly all night, which is unusual for me. Ugh. Then when I got up for the day, instead of feeling tired, I was all jittery and wired. It was as if the one cup of coffee I’d had the previous day had suddenly multiplied to about six cups. No, I don’t usually drink coffee, but it still shouldn’t affect me that strongly.

My back does not feel any better after the first treatment with the chiropractor, but at least it also doesn’t feel any worse. Plus, now I know that my back can make sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies, which I suppose is sort of interesting.

Despite my complete absence from the blogosphere lately, I’m still alive.

Eight years since my most serious suicide attempt, and I’m still alive.

I haven’t been getting much sleep lately, but I’m not doing too badly apart from that.

I did get the sleeping thing more or less straightened out, but then I had a household emergency which ate up all of my free time for a few weeks. Not a threatening-to-life-and-limb kind of household emergency, just a really, really annoying and time-consuming one. I’ll be back to my irregularly scheduled blogging sometime next week.

It’s been one of those times when I was dismayed to remember that even when I am well, life can still suck quite a lot sometimes. No matter. Stuff is in order now.

My mood has gone back to what passes for normal in my little world, but I’m still having sleep problems and I’ll be lying low, blogwise, until I get my sleep a bit more back on track. I am happy, but not too happy, and I’m no longer wired… but once again, I’m tired. Moderate sort of tired, not walking-dead sort of tired, but I’d been doing so well in the sleep department lately that this is disappointing. Internet-land won’t be a priority for me until I can manage to get back onto a more regular sleep/wake cycle.

When I was a bit younger, I used to have really bad PMS. It was probably bad enough to be diagnosed as PMDD, but if anybody ever did diagnose me as such, they didn’t tell me. Every time I attempted suicide, I think it was just before or during my period. The worst thing about it was that my period was also extremely irregular, so I never even knew when the PMS was coming. Although there was a good side to that, too — I’d suddenly become intensely suicidal, but when my period would come, I’d be so relieved to know that there was a concrete reason for my mood, I wasn’t “going crazy” again, and I’d be feeling better in a few days. That’s an amazing sense of relief to have.

This was a major issue for me until I started taking the birth control pill. I wanted to start taking it a few years before I actually did, but I couldn’t find a doctor who would prescribe it for me. The reason? I was on Topamax, and Topamax can sometimes make oral contraceptives less effective. This only holds true if you’re on 200 mg or more daily, and I think I was on 100 mg at the time, but who’s counting?

How did I eventually get prescribed oral contraceptives? Well, one day I went to a clinic to get the morning after pill (yes, we’d been using protection, but we had a condom breakage issue) and when the doctor was asking me some questions, I told her that this was the third or fourth occasion that I’d taken emergency contraceptives (over a span of three years).

She said, “Polly, Polly, Polly, what are we going to do with you?”

She had never seen me before in her life.

I said, “Well, for starters, somebody could prescribe me the birth control pill!”

And so she did. Yes, she knew that I was taking Topamax and that it could make the Pill less effective. I should point out that the other doctors I’d asked about birth control had all been male.

I never took the morning after pill again. I have never been pregnant. A couple years later, I stopped taking Topamax.

I know that oral contraceptives cause really bad mood swings in some women, but they actually help prevent them for me. It’s also nice having my menstrual cycle regulated, so that I know when a possible time of PMS is coming up. On the other hand, since I now only rarely get depressed and irritable before I get my period, there’s still that element of surprise. If I’ve gone for many months without PMS, I’m not expecting it to happen.

Which is why last week, I spent a couple of days feeling like I wanted to go lie down in traffic, but was cheered up when I realized that I only felt that was because of PMS. Then I got a little too cheered up, because I had an insomnia thing going on, and I got hypomanic. I was so jumpy and hyper that I was seriously afraid that I was going to have to call in sick to work one day because of it. I had a cup of coffee the day before, like an idiot — I try not to drink coffee at all normally, and when I’m hypomanic, coffee is an incredibly bad idea. IT MAKES MY BRAIN FEEL LIKE IT IS JUMPING UP AND DOWN. AND IT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE EVERY NERVE IN MY BODY IS JUMPING UP AND DOWN INSIDE MY SKIN, TOO. And that’s actually a lot of fun, even if my pitiful, inaccurate attempts to describe it make it sound uncomfortable. The uncomfortable part comes because I. Can’t. Keep. Still. and any situation that would require me to stay still is horrible for me. If I’ve got free rein to climb on stuff and do whatever I want, then it’s tons of fun.

You see why this might be a problem when I’m at work, though.

I guess caffeine does this to a lot of people, but if you are not manic-depressive, I don’t think that ONE CUP OF COFFEE can make you feel like this for TWELVE HOURS STRAIGHT before you start to come down a little.

Anyway, I somehow started feeling a lot more subdued, and I was able to go to work, and it was all good.

Um, I have no idea where I was going with this. I’m still a wee bit on the hypomanic side, but not in a bad way. Oh, yeah. I wanted to mention that although I don’t eat as well as I should, for a long time now I’ve been doing really well at trying to make sure my sleep schedule is as regular as possible, because I know how important it is for me to sleep properly if I want to stay well.

Ha ha ha, I’m standing up at the computer again because I’m still not so awesome with the sitting still. Sit down, you.

Anyway, my sleep being messed up through no fault of my own and the subsequent consequences provided me with additional proof that I should definitely stick to a regular sleeping schedule. I’m so much more stable when I do. I know, duh, right? Although the insomnia wasn’t brought on by anything I did, for a few days I didn’t try hard enough to get my schedule back on track, and that only served to remind me that it is dumb not to try to get enough sleep. It is also dumb for me to oversleep, or to sleep at weird times, especially since I have a more-or-less nine-to-five kind of job.

I’m trying harder now, though. For really.

I’ve been having a rough week. This used to be de rigeur for me, but now that I’m so stable most of the time and don’t have random severe mood swings caused by nothing whatsoever, I tend to forget that I can still have major mood swings triggered by physical things such as my sleep schedule being all messed up. Which it is right now. I try to keep a much more regular sleep schedule than I used to, because I know how important it is to my mental health. Overall, it works out pretty well… but no matter how hard I try, it doesn’t work all the time.

So now there is insomnia leading to rapid-fire mood swings, and even though it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be a few years ago, I still find it disturbing. I find it disturbing simply because I’m not used to it anymore. I didn’t used to have a normal baseline mood. Now that I do have one, it’s kind of freaky to watch myself deviate from it. I’m not even worried that things will get worse; I’m really not. I know I’ve got everything under control. It’s just unsettling to be going along for a while not having to try particularly hard to keep everything under control, and then all of a sudden having to work at it again.

Yup, I’m still around; I’ve just been too tired to blog lately. It is several hours before my usual bedtime, but I am already seriously considering crawling under my covers. The good thing is that so far I still haven’t gotten the flu that everybody else has. Exhaustion is better than exhaustion plus vomiting plus headache, but it still kind of sucks. I tried to fight the tiredness for a few days by not taking my meds exactly as prescribed, which was a poor idea, because it didn’t bring me back to normal, it just propelled me into a Zoloft-induced state of wakefulness where I felt like jumping out of my skin but I didn’t actually accomplish anything. I’ll take sleep instead of that, thank you very much. I don’t usually get enough sleep, so I just have to keep reminding myself that a temporary surplus of it is A Good Thing.

I started this blog a year ago today, but I’m far too tired to come up with any blogiversary-worthy Deep Thoughts about What I Have Learned in the past year. I’ve been really tired all week. At first I worried that I was getting depressed, but then I realized that almost everybody I know has a cold or the flu or some virus or other. I am not sick, but it seems highly likely that trying to stay not sick is completely exhausting me. Being run-down like this is certainly better than having stomach flu, though, so I ain’t complaining. Since I am not up to spewing forth Really Deep Thoughts (not that I ever am), instead I will simply share with you what are probably my favourite lines of poetry ever:

On a razor edge of reality,
I knew I would come out of this, bleeding and broken,
and singing.
~ Gwendolyn MacEwan, “Deraa”

Speaking of What I Have Learned, yes, it’s true that a year ago, I knew that I had already come out of “this,” bleeding & broken & singing, and that I would be likely to do so repeatedly. I do become surer and surer of this fact as time goes on, though, and I guess that’s a kind of learning, too. Sometimes I forget that I’ll get better every time I get worse, but I have been remembering it more and more often in the past couple of years, and for longer and longer periods of time.