It’s getting both more difficult and more easy, by turns. You can probably tell my bad days, when I don’t blog, and my mediocre days, when I blog a little, and my good days, when I try to get in as much blogging as I can in my free time, because I don’t know when it’ll all go away.

For a lot of tonight, I felt calm and happy. And maybe resourceful and useful. Those good moments are now slipping out of my grasp, no matter how hard (or how not-hard, you know, the idea that the harder you try the worse it gets) I try not to. At the moment, I want to cry, and it’s probably all worse because of the lack of Xanax and Ambien and oh my gods oncall is going to run me over this holiday season, just like it does all the rest, no matter if I deny it utterly (which usually leads to combustion, like last year) or if I accept it (which leads to staring down an oncoming train).

Is it the bipolar down-cycle due to the days getting shorter? Is it my severe PTSD trauma that intrudes forcefully into the present and even takes away my ability to perceive the present and reality? It’s probably both. Gods, I wish it weren’t. Right now it’s limited to something that’s maybe teetering on the edge between intrusive auditory memories (classical music, my father loved classical music, in a “it’s good to mood angrily to and threaten to knife your children while crowding them in a corner of the kitchen” kind of way; and yes, classical music is a trigger, even though… but that’s another blog post someday) and actual auditory hallucinations (and that’s how my PTSD and bipolar work hand-in-hand).

There are three sessions with the bartender I haven’t blogged. I wish I did, but life’s all kind of going to hell right now. Tomorrow is my last session for the holiday season, as I head deeper and deeper into a hell that will persist until a week after the first of January (you know, drop an egg, and your father screams at you and menaces you into tears in a corner of the kitchen as punishment for ruining the corresponding month of the coming year, and you’ve ruined every single day). That’s really rather depressing.

A coworker of mine used to tell me that if I would just work harder, I’d feel better. It seemed to work for him (but… I don’t know if it really did, from what I heard from a friend of mine). I put in 60 hour weeks consistently once, and all that happened was that I tried to code delicate pieces of a service while cycling rapidly through untreated bipolar and being ravaged by triggering PTSD that I had no idea how to deal with, or what it even was. This did not go well.

And now that I know, and that I’m taking steps to deal with it, and those steps have, from time to time, involved taking intermittent or even full-out leave, sometimes I wonder if it would have been better for me to not know and to keep going through 60 hour weeks. But probably I would have been dead otherwise from the growing desire to combine lots of sleeping pills with alcohol, which would not have been terribly useful to anybody. So probably not.

Yes, I kind of want to scream and not stop now. It’ll go away when I get tired, and when the sun comes up, and when some hours later I can take my medication.