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.

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.

One concept that I really like is the idea of microactions, which are tiny actions that aren’t even big enough to be considered “steps” to achieving a goal. They can be useful when you’re feeling like I was when I wrote my last post, as if everything is too much work and far too complicated.

The article Inch by Inch: Microactions by Mary LoVerde has a good overview:

Microactions are teeny tiny steps that propel us forward without threatening our sense of control. They get around our fears because we commit to something so little we could hardly be afraid and we’re guaranteed success. They’re much smaller than steps and often so ridiculous that we outfox our resistance to change.

Sometimes, when you do a microaction, it provides you with so much momentum that you actually find yourself achieving a goal, or at least taking a couple of steps toward doing so. The example in the article is of a woman whose microaction was to put on exercise clothes, and she felt silly standing around in exercise clothes and figured she might as well go for a walk. You can’t go into it expecting that to happen, though, because then you might be too freaked out to even take a microaction since you feel like you’d have to immediately follow it up with a bunch of other stuff you’re too tired to do, or you just do the microaction and feel disappointed in yourself for not accomplishing anything big. Sometimes you will accomplish something bigger, sometimes you’ll acclimatize yourself to a certain microaction so that it becomes part of your routine and it won’t take so much effort in the future, and sometimes you’ll only manage to do one tiny, little thing, and that might be the only thing that you do all day.

And sometimes that’s okay, because doing something is better than doing nothing.

A bit of looking around online shows me that Mary LoVerde is the author of Stop Screaming at the Microwave! : How to Connect Your Disconnected Life. I have always thought that was the best title for a self-help book that I’ve ever heard. I don’t know if I’d actually find the book itself helpful if I ever read it, but I can tell you that every time I see it in a store, I feel a bit better, because the title makes me giggle. Stop screaming at the microwave! Hee hee hee.

On a slightly related note, just in case you don’t understand how much of a dork I am, whenever I write a to-do list, the first item on it is always “Write to-do list.” That means there’s always something I can cross off right away, and it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.