I am fun to be around when I am happy! I've been told this a lot of times, and I believe it. But a lot of the time I am very, very, very sad. When I get very sad, it lasts for a long time. Weeks! Sometimes it even lasts for a month! (This high-and-low business is called, in my case, Cyclothymic disorder. That sounds a lot fancier and worse than it really is. It really just means "high highs and low lows.")
When I am very sad, it is almost impossible to do anything. This is hard for people around me to understand. They want to make me feel better. I want them to make me feel better, too, but there really is no making me feel better.
I want to explain this to the people I love, but I haven't found words for it, really. My descriptions come out as a lot of gurgling. So for the past year I have been scribbling scrappy notes about what it feels like in this little brown journal. Because it's hard for me to get anything done, these notes say things like, "Tentacle." My hope is that I will remember later what I meant when I wrote "tentacle."
I've been wanting to draw this feeling. Sometimes the words sort of escape me. Here is a set of drawings that attempt to show what I meant when I wrote the word, "Cat."
(Due to the frustrating limitations of my website, these are a little hard to read. Please click on them to make them bigger!)