Now Let's All Praise the Lord

Here we go again, with another update on my life before I get into the meat of my blog.

The update is: since January, when I completely fucking lost my mind, I've been playing with my medications to try and find the right balance.  We thought just popping me onto Wellbutrin in the winter, then back off again in the summer would be fine, but as soon as I went off of it, I started getting manic - not happy fun manic, but angry manic, because why should I have anything good in my life? That was mostly a joke.
Anyway, I was super high anxiety, angry at myself and others, and getting these super weird suicidal urges. I have literally never had that before. I've been what I would call suicidal before, but it came from an empty place and wasn't like this. Plus, I figure if I was actually going to do it, there'd be drama.  I'd put on opera and light candles and shit. I mean, you don't know for sure, but what I'm saying is, these were not like that, and were super weird.  It wasn't like I was dwelling, or had a plan, it was a sudden, very strong urge to whack my head as hard as I could against any hard, smooth thing that I happened to see. Sinks, granite counter-tops, stone railings, etc.  WEIRD.  Also: CLEARLY A PROBLEM
So I went back to the doctor and she put me back on Wellbutrin and also on a mood stabilizer and now:
I am feeling better than I have in years.  I haven't felt this good since I first went on Lamotrigine.  I guess I know that my illness is degenerative, which is terrifying, but I had been on the same dose of the same medication for 6 years, and I figured I would be ok if I just kept it up forever.  Not so.
I am sleeping normally and have no particular desire to drink/fuck everything, so I'm pretty sure I'm not manic.  That's the most frustrating thing about this whole business.

On Identity as Cultural Appropriation

This blog is 3 1/2 years old.  It is tremendously bizarre to me how far I have come in those years.  I read some of my older posts and think, "I can't believe I said that!"  But that's what this is.  A chronicle of my life, growing up, and whatnot.
Speaking of growing up, this post is one about some oddities of my upbringing that make me uncomfortable.  I swear on me mum that it is pure weird coincidence that I am writing this on the first day of black history month.  I've been thinking on it for a few months but...you know, "stuff" has been "up."
The first thing you need to know is this: I am a white girl.  My mom, a Lehman, is a white lady.  Her mom, a Wolff, is a white lady.  We're not pure German, like my dad's side, or German-Irish-Polish like Husband.  We don't really know fully where we come from, but that's not important.  What is important is that I joke, in the summer, about bringing back the "Elizabeth I look," and that I spent my formative years in suburban/rural Wisconsin.  I am a white girl.
And yet.

Poor Old Michael Finnigan, Begin Again

Well, I have settled on my excuse for not writing more lately: I was in the throes of a major depressive episode that I didn't know I was having.  Or maybe I talked myself out of thinking I was having it.  Because October is always bad, so obviously that was just October.  And November, I was getting over October.  Then the holidays are always rough, and December is a hectic mess.  Then January is for getting over the holidays, so of course I was low, and also, my husband is a huge jerk.  It all seemed so rational.
When I finally did figure out that I was too low, I had my reasons, and I just thought it was a slight overreaction to serious provocation.  I had a prescheduled check-up with my doctor, and she put me on some Wellbutrin to boost my normal stuff, and I figured it would help a bit.  I was really low by this point, crying every night before I went to bed and every morning when I got up, because, you know, I had grievances.  Then a few days later, I completely lost my mind.  I told Husband that I couldn't remember why I ever thought he'd loved me.  I spent the next day in an impenetrable fog, working 8 hours that I mostly don't remember, so low that my coworker could hear it over the phone, so tired that I had trouble moving my body and I kept dropping things and knocking them over because I just couldn't function.
Then the next day, I woke up.  I rolled over.  I was...fine.  Just fine.  Not *All better!*  Not suddenly happy, just fine.  As the day went on, the horror of what I had said to my husband started to dawn on me.  I still took issue with some things (we live together, this is inevitable), but none of them seemed to matter as much.  Then the next day, I woke up and I was fine again, and he was still there.  I told him that I ever said something like that again, he could site this incident as proof that he loved me.  I said awful, horrible things to him, but he just sort of waited it out.  He was still here when I came back.
I mean, I know he married me and whatever, but seriously.