4 A.M.

My life is just totally off-kilter.  In the pictures I have in my mind of years going back, for all that this period of my life is quiet, its chart of activities best matches the stretch before I left college mid-semester my sophomore year.

There's no pattern.  My sleep schedule is all over the place.  Up later and later for days, finally lucky to catch even an hour of sleep but never wanting to sleep because there's so much to do, then 12 or 14 hours of sleep for days interspersed with hours technically awake but paralyzed in my bed with anxiety, unable to make the first decision about what to do when I get up.

And there is NOTHING in my life stressful enough to make me act this way.  So I don't know why it's happening.  My gut observation is that it's building on itself.  The little fungus that gets a foothold on the cheese.  Now it's here and it's breeding.  Ha ha ha!

It's been in the refrigerator way too long.

My crotch is roaring for no reason.  That, obviously, does not help.  It's a background despair, though, so it takes me a while to figure out that it's bugging me.

I think every time the pain rears up, which is like all the time, I feel defeated all over again.  So maybe every time it drops, which is like all the time, I feel like it's going away for good.

And I'm riding this coaster all the time without really noticing.

I am concerned, finally.  Tomorrow, which is today, I see my psychiatrist.  I have questions to ask him:
- What is a reasonable goal for stabilizing bipolar II?
- What medications could improve my stability when added to the mix?
- How does bipolar II pan out on average?  You'd think I'd've asked this at some point since the year 2000. But I haven't.  I've never said, look, doc.  What's the general prognosis among all patients.  Because I don't seem to be getting better.

I am not getting better.  I have good stretches, and then I go back.  All I want is
- Not to be unhappy most days
- Not to be paranoid or anxious most days
- To have consistent sleep needs
- To be able to keep up with errands and chores
- To have the energy to be social, and, beyond that, to pursue my hobbies.

And harshest of all, I am tormented, currently, by the thought that even if I find someone to love, I'll never be able to sustain having a family.  Admitting this to the few of you who read is like admitting that I'll be a horrible mother.  But I'm still writing because confessing my fear takes some of its power away.  I have a happy cat, I tell myself, whom I seem to have eternal patience for, my friend pointed out as I worried this at her.

It is the hardest, hardest part.  I am 32.  This is full-on ticking clock combined with continuous dissolution of confidence.

I wonder what I would be like now if I'd never gotten, developed, arrived at vulvodynia.  Six years down the drain.  Maybe I'd have a handle on the bipolar dysfunction by now.  Maybe it's this perturbing vulvodynia force that keeps me feeling like trash, feeling like I function like trash.

I want to run away.  I want to put my struggles outside my body.  I want to face something outside my body that is harder to face than the stuff inside.  My lovely friend hiked the Appalachian Trail this past summer.  I read his blog more jealous than I have ever been of anyone else in my entire life.  I think I could do it.  I think about my crotch for a split second.  Fuck that bitch; I am a rock star.  I could do it.  To be outside myself like that in some way, I feel like that's what I need to put my mind right, to set my eyes parallel to the horizon.

You take yourself with you wherever you go.  People think they advise it wisely.  But going somewhere else isn't necessarily an attempt to escape yourself.  Sometimes it's taking everything you are and offering it up to a different god, one of the east wind instead of the south.  He has different mandates and different mercies.  Throws different tantrums.  And maybe he is the god of what you need to pray for.