Tried my hand at a little virtual stand-up (well, sit-down) comedy today. It’s pretty rough but I think I got off a mildly entertaining rant about something that bugs me.

It was originally going to have a lot more of the little bits of text adding to the density, but I had a power drain (opposite of a power surge) and just plain could not stay upright long enough to think them up and add them.

Oh well, every day, something new, something better.

One odd thing : I actually napped this afternoon. That has become quite unusual for me. Thanks to the stimulating effects of Wellbutrin, I hardly ever sleep during the day any more. I still lie down and read several times during the day, and spend some quiet time just laying in bed, letting my batteries recharge.

But unlike before, I don’t actually sleep. I just lay there essentially till I get bored, and then I get back up and it’s back in front of the computer time.

And yet today, I napped. I am pretty sure I know why, though.

I stayed up quite late last night, watching videos with my besties, and so I did not get to bed till a little after 5 AM.

But then at 8 AM, I was awoken by a painfully empty stomach demanding food, and so I staggered out to have breakfast. And with my breakfast, I took my Wellbutrin and my Paxil.

That created a conflict between Wellbutrin’s wakening effect and the fact that I had only had three hours or so of sleep so far.

And that resolved itself with my surprise afternoon nap, I presume. It was some fairly unpleasant sleep, as it tends to be when I sleep in the afternoon (is it the heat?), but better than nothing.

Tomorrow is therapy day. I have some idea of what I want to talk about, which is nice for a change.

For one thing, I have decided that I fucking hate my father. And real hate, fiery hate, not the cold and clammy self-pitying hate that depression allows because it’s one more thing to be depressed about.

No, I hate his fucking guts. Nothing like Father’s Day to make you think about dear old Dad, huh? I hate him because he molested me when I was barely out of diapers, I hate him because his anger and his delusions made the home I grew up in a positively toxic environment, I hate him for making dinner as a family a tense and frightening ordeal, I hate him for taking his anger out on my siblings Anne and David, I hate him for verbally abusing my mother and destroying the self-esteem of a good, kind, sweet, competent woman who was worth ten of him, and I especially hate him for talking my mother into taking my brother David and I out of college so he could retire early, thus fucking up our entire lives.

And I hate myself for agreeing to it. But I was so conditioned to be agreeable and pliable and “understanding” that I would have agreed to damn near anything just for a few scraps of approval.

It feels good to let it finally emerge as pure white hot hatred. I feel like this is a vital step towards unlocking and expressing all that rage and pain that I have buried deep in the frozen ground of my soil.

Well it’s springtime, motherfuckers, and time for the thaw. All that rage has got to be externalized somehow or it will continue poisoning me inside and powering my depression.

Suppression breeds depression. Expression kills depression. It’s that simple.

And with my therapist’s invaluable help, I am growing increasingly confident that I can face all that rage/pain/anger/fear without it destroying me.

There will be many painful ascents and brutal falls to endure, but I can handle it. Emotional roller-coasters aren’t the most fun kind, but at the end of the day, they’re just a ride, and when the ride is over, there you are.

You’re the same person you have always been, just with a lot less baggage. It’s fair dinkum.

Emotional emesis might be horribly gross and disturbing while it happens, but it sure beats letting your demons poison your soul to death.

Let them little fuckers out. They can’t survive out there.

I feel like my mood has dipped slightly in the last few days. I am once more face to face with the idea that I might just plain have a mood cycle, and I will always go up and down like the tide, and I have to learn to just accept that and learn to cope with it.

Stop trying to impose linear structure on a cyclical thing, and instead of trying to make the curves flatter, instead make them smoother.

A cycle is predictable too, as long as you take the long view. When you are down, know that you will be up again soon. And when you are up, look not at the valley below, but at the next peak.

And know that you will be here again, over and over, for the rest of your life.

Viewed that way, dysthymic depression can be viewed as the exact opposite malfunction as bipolar disorder. Dysthymic depression seeks to hug the midline and would rather be down for good than face the normal ups and downs of a normal person’s moods.

Biplor disorder goes in the other direction, and would rather wild highs and catastrophic lows to the boring predictable sameness of a normal mood cycle.

These are not conscious choices, of course, just ways of characterizing the disorders.

As a deeply dysthymic type, my path to recovery involves learning to be more tolerant of variability and the unexpected, and letting go of the idea that I need to hyper-control everything in order to keep total calmness and hence self-medicate against my anxieties.

There comes a time when you have to stop tiptoeing around the sleeping giant, and start waking him up and cutting him down to size.

And that… is called “therapy”.