Anger

I can feel my blood curdling inside of my veins.  My breath catches and I can’t think.  All I want to do is scream and rail against him, or this, or something.

It is almost my birthday.  I have been struggling with a midlife crisis that I have just recently been able to name.  Our finances are in imminent peril.  I feel set adrift and I am pissed.

Today is supposed to be a day about the kids.  I need to focus in on them, and my husband, and make this all good for them.  I can’t go around today being pissed off and thickening the air with my angst.  So today I need to be what they need and not who I am.  Bipolar disorder tends to sweep me up and into a swirling cloud of red haze.  That blinding anger that can so quickly consume me.  Today I need to push that away.  Chances are, though, that I will simply suppress it only to find it emerge at some other time, twisting and writhing and coating everything I touch.

Gnawing

I am watching my dog gnaw on her rawhide bone and she gets off these little tiny wet bits and swallows them.  She gnaws incessantly and the noise of it has slowly become background drone.  She is so diligent about it that it almost seems noble.  Certainly expected. 

My bipolar is “in remission” as I like to say.  It is completely managed right now.  Except… except I can feel it incessantly gnawing tiny wet bits of me off of my health and swallowing them.  No one else can see it and for so long it was a part of who I am so I am rarely one the wiser.  But it is there.  Etching away at my health.

I don’t think that I always wake up one day and say, OH MAN I am sick again.  I think that sometimes I wake up and just feel that there is a hole inside of me that has slowly been gnawed away.  Eroded like sand washed away by water.  One slow drip at a time until there is a cavern left where my identity was.

This insidious disease is destroying me faster than I can get well.