It wasn’t helping me.

What ultimately helped me was having a major epiphany on an airplane, and making the decision to accept myself as I am, and make changes based on that.

I’m still a work in progress, but I have a much better idea of who that work was, is and who that work wants to be. :) 5 years ago

I’ve been trying for years to track my moods in an attempt to figure out where my mood swings are and whatnot. So far, it hasn’t worked.

Today I’ve decided that, starting Monday, I need to assign a value system (0 being absolute worst, 10 being absolute best), keeping track of moods throughout the day, and then recording the average each day. I figure that is the best way to do this without having to track my collection of however many data points I hit. Then I can track through the end of September and have a good set of data that I can graph and look at the trends.

I know that this sounds terrifically geeky and all, but spending 4 years without health insurance (and as a result of that, spending the same 4 years without access to much in terms of healthcare and watching your mental health rapidly deteriorate) causes you to choose drastic measures in terms of attempting to identify patterns and ultimately, take care of yourself.

Sure, I have health insurance now. I’ll have my first REAL doctor visit in about ten years at that point. And sometime after that I’ll be able to start working toward bettering my mental health. But until then? I need to focus on taking care of what I can.

And keep in mind that today would probably average somewhere in the range of “3”. 6 years ago

I bought a lined A4 book I can use as a journal, so will finally be getting somewhere with this goal now I hope. 6 years ago

I am going to start doing this by getting a journal to write in, by september I will say. 6 years ago

I just feel lost at the moment. I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going, I have no motivation to do anything. Totally stuck. 7 years ago

I tried working with the phases of the moon. Somehow everything makes sense to me when it can be proven somehow scientifically or pseudo-scientifically. Astrology helps me too. It really helps me to see the cycles and how things return…(..dissolve..and return again.) I can track really bad days by loking at some distant planet, and someone has already predicted the outcome. What a relief! It may not change my ways, but at least I understand some more about me (it, you, everything) 7 years ago

Mike once accused me of being a perfectionist. I protested and disagreed; if you look at my life as a whole, in no way is it anywhere near perfect. My apartment is a mess, my job situation is tolerable at best, I have a lot of debts (some of them unpaid and defaulted upon) and my school life is chaotic. Sure, there are some aspects of my life which are near-perfect. My relationship, for example.

Yet there are days like today when I wake up feeling “decent” and then something happens to encourage a mood swing. Today all it took was the slight spillage of my hot cocoa to shift my mood from apathy (normal/”don’t care” mood) to sheer anger. When I realized a few minutes later that I’d forgotten to bring the calzone I’d purchased for lunch and the strawberries I had allocated for breakfast, I was even more furious.

Twenty minutes later, I was back to “normal/don’t care”. This has to stop. I need to see what’s making my moods go up and down; it’s exhausting. I need to figure out how to stop it. 8 years ago