Night and Day

I was crying my eyes out today after I ate "breakfast" at 12:30 pm and got on the computer. I’d started thinking about what a terrible mother I am because my husband had told me quite gently that I should stop teasing my son about his regular sleep schedule (mine's totally irregular, his used to be - I rib him about it). But whoa, I took that gently tossed ball and raaaaan with it! Got all the way to the goal post over where I had that first kid 25 years ago. Touchdown! I suck! I'm an evil witch and I didn't even know it till now! Now that all those scenes of my children's lives are clicking through my head in a terminal slideshow of recrimination, I see it all right.

My God, what have I done?.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.

Then I spent five solid hours on Facebook, trying to shake all that guilt and remorse by talking about something else, reading boring research, looking for images like the ones in my head to post on my wall, or for a joke that I could actually laugh at, but mostly just by being together with all the good people I know there and sharing our thoughts - the bipolar people especially, but normals too. You know, for ballast. Got to keep that boat afloat.

But things didn't really start looking up for me and my shrouded mind until about 7 pm when I called for takeout and the sun sank. By about 9 pm I’d sloughed off my slough of despond - as in every other depressed day/happy night combo I've experienced MY WHOLE LIFE LONG. When the sun goes down, my mood gets bright again.

This is not the way God intended us to be, is it? It's the "dark night of the soul" not the "dark day of the soul." There's a book about bipolar called "The Midnight Disease" meaning the disease that makes you come alive at midnight - and fight for your life with what another book dubs “The Noonday Demon.”

Touchdown! But how embarrassing! The wrong goal.