Blow Your Stack Saturday: The Truth Must Be Told

 

This is a response to a post by Mubashshira. The image is their work.

https://musingsbymubashshira.com/2021/04/01/saving-myself-poem/

My usual spring depression was mercifully brief this year, but I'm having really messed-up dreams.

The doodle is a real work of art. My doodles look like a pre-schooler stuck a crayon between the toes of their non-dominant foot.

I appreciate it when people tell their truth. I think it's wretched the way society shames people for being honest like we're always supposed to be giddy with glee and the sky is filled with unicorns farting rainbows and pooping ice cream cones.

A lot of my poetry tends to be pretty dark. Hence, I don't have much of an audience. I've tried to give the people what they want, but that always ends up feeling like a lie. So I always end up going back to being my old salty, snarky, and melancholic self.

Tanka Splendor: Vernal Equinox

Image Source

vernal equinox

fifty-fifth year of my life

will I find some peace

or will the dark curtain fall

as it tends to do in spring?

~cie~

notes

I created the Tanka Splendor badge with a free to use stock image on Pixlr. Please feel free to use it on your own blog. No credit is necessary.

I was not correctly diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder until I was nearly 40 years old. I was diagnosed with "depression and anxiety." I have both of those, but I have bipolar disorder rather than unipolar depression as my son has. My restlessness was sometimes blamed on ADD, which I have as well, but the restlessness becomes magnified in a hypomanic state.

My baseline mood is moderately depressed. Some of my depression is situational. Living in poverty is very stressful. I try to ameliorate the way I feel about it by the fact that I keep trying, but sometimes I feel like all my trying adds up to one big ole heapin' helpin' of horse manure and I become despondent. 

I live with suicide ideation. I think about offing myself a lot. Ideation is not the same as planning. My planning levels tend to be low regardless of how strong the ideation levels are. Generally speaking, I'm probably too much of an asshole to commit suicide because then I wouldn't be able to piss people off by existing in a corporeal fashion in their presence. But sometimes not having to struggle sure sounds like a winner.

I have experienced spring depression almost every year of my life since I hit puberty. My puberty was somewhat precocious and started coming on when I was nine years old. Thinking back on things, the first time I can remember seeing a strong manifestation that could have been identified as bipolar 2 was on my tenth birthday. 

Bipolar 2 can be sneaky since it presents with hypomania rather than full mania. Hypomania is like "mania lite." However, it can be just as destructive. I've learned to recognize the magical thinking that comes with the condition and to try not to act on my impulses during periods of hypomania. By magical thinking, I don't mean believing in fairies or even believing something potentially fatal like thinking I could get up on a roof and float down. Hypomania does not create that sort of delusion. (The delusion that jumping off a roof is a good idea. I like to hope that believing in fairies is not a delusion.) It does create the sort of delusion that I should buy into an MLM program for a thousand dollars and will make a butt-ton of money and be able to live happily ever after. I don't have the focus to be successful at such a thing, even if it is one of the few programs that is legit.

By the way, Watkins is not that sort of program. It is legit, and the "buy-in" for a year is only $30. I'm only saying this because the -666 of you who follow my blogs might be saying "oh, Cie, have you done this again with this Watkins thing?" No, I actually only signed up for Watkins to get discounts on my own merchandise but after reviewing the material felt good about recommending it to others.

I am trying to learn to forgive myself for sometimes really awful and personally destructive past decisions and to stop belittling myself for having a brain that works differently than the brains of the sort of people who tend to be held up as examples. Nobody will ever say: "why can't you be more like that ornery old hag cie? I mean, she's simply all over the place, and she's easily distracted except when she's laser-focused on one of her ruinous plans? Now there's someone you can look up to!"

I will be fifty-five in a month and a day from this writing unless I go tits up in the meantime. I have no hope that "this will be my year" as I always told myself on birthdays in the past and was inevitably disappointed. This will be a year. There will be no significant shifts. I will remain me and the world will wag on.

Carpe Diem New Beginnings: First Day of Spring Depression

Image by Claudia Peters from Pixabay

before the first bud

emerging from the cold ground

spring depression creeps

foolish butterfly flitting

in the garden of the damned

~nobody~

notes from a damned soul

I could not be more rubbish if I tried. I missed this prompt too. Again, not like anyone would miss me, so I don't know why I should care.

Carpe Diem Weekend Meditation #109 Renga with Basho ... life's journey

Mount Fuji

spring rain

trickling into the wasp's nest

a leaky roof

the roof has been repaired

the wasps eradicated

blooming wildly

among the peach trees

first cherry blossoms

it is my dream to one day

have a few fruit trees growing

butterflies and birds

restlessly they rise up

a cloud of flowers

these are the best things in spring

not so a mind painted black

coming to the eye

especially at this time

May's Mount Fuji

I hoped to visit sometime

must be content with pictures

life's journey

plowing the patch of rice field

back and forth

sometimes best to look forward

to simple things in our lives

the lettuce

leaves are just as green

eggplant soup

I must remember to try

vegetables for cooking

~Basho & Cie~

Notes:

The Hokku stanzas of these Renga were written by Matsuo Basho (1644 - 1694). The Ageku stanzas were whipped up by me.

The Ageku of the third verse references the fact that I experience my worst depressive states in the spring. When the hearts of normal people turn to lurrrrve and all that happy crappy, my psyche turns to a dark tomb while the flowers bloom and the birds sing and I just want to sleep forever but usually don't sleep very well. I tend to get the side-eye from people when I try to talk about spring depression. "What do you mean you get depressed in the spring? Springtime is happy time! Normal depressed people get depressed in the WINTER!"

You see, I don't even know how to do depression right, even though I've been doing it my entire life!

Crappy Fucking Birthday to Me

Copyright Prettysleepy

You know what I don't get?

Shaming people because they don't care for a particular season.

Now, I'd have plenty of company if I did things like normal people and got depressed in the winter but loved the spring. 

Newp. Like always, I'm ass-backwards.

 I'm fine in the winter. My most severe depression hits at the beginning of spring. It probably doesn't help that my birthday is here and I have one more year of being a crappy, unaccomplished, broke-ass loser under my belt. Another year to suck at everything is ahead of me. 

But I am supposed to pull sunshine out of my ass and fucking love the god damn springtime regardless of how I actually feel, or I am a BAD PERSON on top of being screwy as all fuck.

I can remember the first year that the spring depression hit like a ton of bricks and I started really hating who I was. I was ten years old. I had hit puberty a year before, and that is what triggered the onset of my bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. The OCD was already firmly in place, but I didn't know it at the time, of course. 

I didn't want puberty. I was well aware of how women were looked at, and I didn't want to be looked at that way. I became a feminist when I was 8 years old because it made me angry that women were seen as lesser and not allowed to do the "cool" jobs like astronaut or pilot. When I was 10, I knew how I would be looked at the rest of my life, and I tried to hide the body I didn't want.

Like a prophecy of what the rest of my stupid life was going to be like, my stupid birthday cake fell apart. I pretended I didn't care. I laughed. I spent the rest of the school year pretending I was fine when I wasn't at all. There was something screaming inside me. Something was wrong. I was wrong, and I needed to hide it so I wouldn't be "put away" somewhere.

I'd like it if no other kid ever had to feel the way  I did. Pretending  I was okay when I wasn't and believing that I was bad and wrong and broken. Well, I am broken. Bad or wrong, maybe not so much, but I've always felt like I was.

So, no, I am not "evil" or "bad" or just a big meanie mean because I dislike seeing spring come on. Spring tends to mean several months of wanting to crawl into a fucking mausoleum and sleep forever. If I'm lucky, April will be rainy and I can get back to being a salty asshole who gives no fucks sooner. 

I hate summer because of the heat, but I don't tend to be depressed to the point of having no fight left in me at all.

I'd love to like spring with all the pretty plants. But spring made it clear to me long ago that this is an unrequited affair, so spring can go fuck itself.

~Cie~