Goddammit, I love Lithium.

It turns out that for the last ten years I’ve been holding myself hostage. Or rather, bad mogg has been holding a knife to the throat of good mogg. Or, perhaps truer, mogg: proper has been a slave to mogg: bipolar.

I have had violent mood swings. I have acted and acted out in ways that would scandalize even the skeeziest. I overreact to even the tiniest perceived injustices with ferocity. I did not finish high school or university. I have had more jobs than I can count or remember. My relationships have been unhealthy, and unstable, and unsustainable. I was unemployable, unreliable, uneducated. Unmogg! I was UNmogg.

And now, thanks to this pill, this fucking SALT, I am REmogged.

I feel amazing. I feel like the past three weeks will be the start of something pretty cool. I am bipolar! not clinically and perpetually depressed! I am bipolar! not an unlovable, undeserving fuck up!

Last night, after a series of events that would have normally driven me to a bar (or to the drink, or into a stranger’s bed) I thought instead: Shit. Sucks. Oh well. No need to act like a twat over it.

THERE IS NO NEED TO ACT LIKE A TOTAL TWAT.

That seems obvs, I know, but it hasn’t been to me. Lithium, the mood stabilizer, has given me the option to not act like a total mental case, and be a Reg instead. And you will now all benefit from it. SO SAY WE ALL.

Hormones/Happy Birthday Mogg

I've been reading a blog written by this hilarious woman with a baby and a husband. I found a post she wrote recently about hormones, which made me lolz everywhere and also got me thinking about how it can possibly be that nature has produced two sexes with such incredibly different degrees of internal complications. The hormones, of course, are an obvious example. Women are forced to ride a monthly emotional roller-coaster (log-ride) that, instead of culminating in a really fun decent into a pool of water where you get your photo taken and then can buy it as a mini key chain for $10, ends with 5-7 days of vaginal bleeding. What in the hell. Our ultimate reward for all this is being the ones who have to carry the babies and squish them out of our tiny but very elastic vaginas. I guess in the end, the babies love us more, and we should be thankful for that, but it does seem OUTRAGEOUS that we suffer all this and men, nothing.

OMG so complicated

What's more, do you know how often women experience problems with their junk? Like, all the time. Because we have innies, we are remarkably susceptible to any little infection or bacteria that wants to live in a nice, warm, dark hole and as a result, there is a huge section in the shoppers drug mart for yeast infection treatments. I have been doing an informal poll of the men I encounter, asking them how often they have dickissues, and most say: No, I have never had a problem with my dick. I have never had an itchy dick, or had weird stuff come out of it.  I have never had an infection of the urethra.

What? Really? NEVER HAD AN ITCHY DICK?? How is that fair?

If there were no God, then all these annoying affiliations should be distributed 50/50 between men and women, but they are not. Clearly, things are askew. Am I missing something? What shitty things do men have to deal with that women are free from? Please tell me what I am missing, because I am starting to consider that there must be some spiteful, male God to answer for vaginal yeast infections. Is my yeast infection the best proof of God's existence? WOW.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOGG

Amor Fatty

Wow. It's been a while.

Somehow, while I was gone, the blog seems to have turned into Mogg's livejournal circa 1998. Artistic pictures of the emergency ward? What in the...

I'm not worried about the blog's transformation; it's something I predicted would happen when we started, although at that time I thought it would have been my overwrought musings to blame rather than Mogg's. We decided to write a joint blog during one of our epic skype conversations, necessitated by the fact that I was living in Ithaca, alone, depressed and with way too much time on my hands. A blog together appealed to me because I feared that alone, I wouldn't have the sticktoitiveness to write. As it turned out, living in a foreign place with too much time on my hands made it pretty darn easy to write in the blog.

Since then, I've moved back to my dream city (Toronto), gotten a dream apartment (in COOL PARKDALE) with my dream man (AWWWW); I've got work coming out the wazoo and have a list of craft projects a mile and half long that I'm upset I probably won't get to until I retire in 30 years. Now it's actually hard to write.

Coming back here after Mogg's last post is difficult for me. Glibness comes naturally to both of us, and I feel much more comfortable considering her mental illness from behind the veil of exaggerated detachment that is characteristic of our way of communicating with each other. It's been a few years since I've really worried about Mogg because for the last while, I've had to worry about myself. More so, it became too draining to worry; it only makes sense to brood over things that won't get better so at some point I decided it was easier to believe things would get better than to keep on fretting. Since then, I've embraced an attitude that keeps my emotions one degree removed from the emergency  room. Writing about all this erodes the 'healthy distance' I prefer to keep between myself and the fate I'm supposed to love.

Our 'Veil of Exaggerated Detachment' lolz

It's been so nice for me to read the lovely outpouring of support for Mogg from readers. It comforts me to know that others (along with many of our friends and family) are invested and affected by Mogg's state, even if I can't seem to absorb its reality. Sometimes strangers are the best for good vibes.

Now that I'm home and feeling back to my old self, it seems a cruel turn of events that Mogg's episodes are worsening.  It's as though we share some fixed pool of regularness between the two of us, and when one's up, the other is necessarily down.

'Pool of Regularness' looks grrrrreat

Regarding the blog's role in all this: if getting a diagnosis for your 10-year old condition, taking leave from work in order to attend daily treatment and learning to accept this shit show as your fate isn't getting reg, then I don't know what is! Blog away, Mogg, and I'll be here to make sure things don't get too macabre around here.

For now, I'm eating some dessert for breakfast!

"I will live with my intellectual depression forever"