In evaluating what things are triggery for me, I have pinpointed the Big Cleaning Project as a primary offender. So now I am afraid to tidy. Afraid to clean. Friend suggested that I just pick manageable little chunks or set a timer. She also suggested a number or other helpful things. I know these things. I also know that once I get started, it's hard for me to stop unless someone is bossing me around. In my reading of How To Be A Better Bipolar Person there is much talk on how important the visuals in your space are. And how vital it is to have a home space free of chaos and clutter. I can't imagine that there are many people who benefit from a chaotic, cluttered environment. Just people who mind it more or less. Item number two that is triggery for me (for either the Ups or the Downs in my energy levels) is the yelliness. And I started this morning with a grumpy building custodian (chief engineer, I guess). I just wanted to get into my room, make the copies I needed to make, and prepare for my students. Instead (although I arrived an hour early) I spent so much time dealing with trying to get in to the building, calling my boss to figure out how to get into the building and THEN being chewed out by the chief engineer. For fifteen minutes. Because he doesn't like the fact that I am teaching adults in a building at the same time that a Chinese Language School is teaching children. I will not go into details because they are not important. The experience was highly unpleasant and rattled me quite a bit. I tried to extricate myself politely and he followed me down the hall to rant some more. And apparently he had already made calls to higher ups all around the district at 10:30 pm. Last night. The day before my class was scheduled to start. Returned home to general yelliness on the part of children and spouse (and I soon joined in) about the toys left all over the yard and the extremely S L O W way in which the children were "helping." Most of helping seemed to involve yelling at the person younger than you and insisting that you had never touched this or that particular object, so you should not have to pick it up.
Justified Righteous Booming Parental Yelliness Then I realized that I was tired, hungry, had a sore throat and a pathetic cough and couldn't decide what to do so I thought I would read. Only I fell asleep. Presumably things happened while I was sleeping, but after waking and eating dinner there was a continuation of the morning's yelliness. Because the yard was still a disaster. And the children (who had been given the option to clean up in the nebulous area of "sometime today") And I did not deal well. So I wandered around zombie gardening for a while. Not trying to grow zombies, but resembling one myself, that is. I realized that much of the disastrous mess in the yard was mine. Some from years and years ago. And what wasn't mine I felt guilty about because I had not tried to enforce cleaning up at all this summer. Because it was too difficult to deal with the whiny and crying and unhelpful behavior and having to direct every little step in the clean-up process... Don't my children have me well trained? Except I had not been cleaning up either. Just moving dirt and plants and bricks and rocks. So when I decided that I had enough of the children bickering and whining and getting little done, I dismissed them. Go play. Fine.
I need to figure out a more helpful way to deal with my stress in the face of conflict other than hypomanic tidying and/or gardening. The semi-rational part of my brain insists that the cleany-gardeny thing is just fine, because then at least I have accomplished something. Sigh. Grateful Crap: it is too dark to put all the weeds and brush into bags to take to composting Daily Convexions: walked back from work (30minutes) drank lots of water (but I shoulda had it earlier) took meds am - 150mg venlafaxine, 450mg bupropion pm - 25mg lamotrigine, omega-3, multivitamin, sertraline, magnesium Read the Everything Book on Bipolar (or something like that) Comments are closed.
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |