Messy Mental Musings

Warning: this post will ramble.

It's been a Potato Chip Effect or Dropped Spoon kind of week and its only Tuesday. Actually, it started Saturday, when I told Facebook to eff off for a day. Some people thought this meant I was staying off entirely, and sent me little I-thought-you-were-off-Facebook texts when I was on later, which were not helpful. So I ignored them; better that than biting their heads off.

Physical health is generally measurable and treatable, and there are specific goals (reduce pain, close wound, clear infection). But mental health is a slippery beast, and while it may not hurt to know that mid-December is always a problem for me even before Laston's illness, it's isn't something that my fairly logical mind can really grok as a useful data point. Until I sit down and write it out, of course.

When you have even mild mental health issues (hello, Seasonal Affective Disorder, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion) on top of things that are still sometimes considered to be mental health issues but aren't (like ADHD or ASD), the tendency is to try to analyze, at least for me. How much of my emotional exhaustion (it's not really compassion fatigue because that implies I'm less able to feel compassion than I was) is due to winter? To financial stress? About things that are neither my monkeys nor my circus? To grief? To living with children? To being a single mom on a budget? To missing a deadline because I couldn't log in? To fretting about my friends who are also having hard times, in different ways? About my mom's recent knee surgery, even though she's fine? To feeling guilty because my friends have it worse so what am I complaining about? About the things my country is doing to people who are not straight white males? About the little things, like head colds and power outages and traffic snarls? To my therapist being out of town for the holidays?

It doesn't really matter how much of each issue is affecting me in what way. But try telling my busy little brain that in the moment. It's just as effective as telling Meltdown Lizzy that her art project can be fixed; you have to step back to a place of calm for it to even register.

I did that today in the car on the way to school. I said to Lizzy that we need a plan for when mom loses it, because otherwise I'm Shouty Mom (who nobody likes) or even Weepy Mom (which unnerves them somewhat). What can we plan for right now, when I'm not Shouty or Weepy? "Um..." Lizzy says reluctantly, "We could like do chores before you get Shouty."

Well, that's terrific, but I've been trying to get you to do that for years and it hasn't worked yet. "Maybe you could use one of the code phrases? Like "Potato Chip Effect?" So we know when you're about to be Shouty Mom?"

The child is a genius. Now to get my brain to notice the path and act accordingly before I start being Shouty. If I can expect Lizzy to do this, I can expect me to do this.

And now I'm going to sign out before our second windstorm in the past five days causes another power outage. Because if I typed all this and didn't save before Mother Nature gets Shouty, I'm going to Drop Spoons loudly and all over the floor.