Rapid Cycling...

I'm sitting here in my jeans and a long sleeved shirt with my boots on and a scarf around my neck. I have the heater turned up, but I still feel cold. Outside the weather isn't very nice either. It has been overcast and cool all day and I wore my leather jacket when I walked the dog. For some reason, it doesn't seem to want to become Spring and I read that in some other blogs too. In some places snow is even falling. At least things aren't as bad here. We just suffer from dreariness, which is bad enough when you would like for it to be a little bit warmer and a little more cheerful. Not that I expect tropical weather, of course. Temperatures around 20C would be very nice.

I talked to my psychiatrist this morning. In his opinion I'm not suffering from a depression in the traditional sense of the word. I am, however, very unstable and he says that I'm rapid cycling a lot. That means that your moods change from one extreme to another in a relatively short amount of time. Of course, when he said that, I knew he was right, but when I'm in one mood, I always think I have been in that mood all the time and I forget the other moods.

It seems like every time these mood changes happen, I'm taken by surprise. It is like every time is the first time and I never learn what to do or how to deal with it. I forget everything and almost have to start over again from scratch, unless I am reminded of them by someone else and then all my knowledge comes back to me. Well, not even all of it, bits and pieces of it and I really should reread the textbook every time, but I'm too mentally exhausted to do it.

Something in my memory doesn't work well and I forget things that are important. I have a hard time storing and retrieving bits of information. I've always had that problem, my whole life, so it's not due to the medication. I am rereading novels now that I read 6 or 7 years ago and I have no memory of having read them before. They are like new books to me. So I just go down the list of books I've already read and read them again. Unless the dog destroys them.

It's because of him that I've decided not to read anymore before I fall asleep at night, because he destroys my books if I don't put them away and I go to sleep with one in my hands too often. That's a lifetime habit. When I was a kid, my father had to come and take away my book and turn of my bedside light every night. Later on I had husbands who did that. After the initial thrills of married life wore off, of course, when we weren't enfolded in each other's arms every night.

Oh, the happiness of new love.

I'm going to watch TV. The 8 o'clock news will be on soon. I've got to watch that.

Ciao,
Nora