I have come out of my head and am back to editing my novella. It was a brief distraction, but it wreaked havoc on my life.
I'm not ruling out a bit of mania, but thankfully it wasn't a full-blown episode. I can never tell if I'm just inspired and have impulse control problems or if my mind is slipping.
Anyway, as I stated, I am once again editing my novella. I am actually rewriting a lot of it at this point. I predict that the whole first revision process may take me a couple of weeks to complete, and then I will have to make a decision:
Do I jump right on to writing book two, or do I rewrite book one?
The plan was to go to book two and edit book one once the second was complete, but the more distance I get from the first book, the more I realize how much love it still requires. I want to keep the series going, but I'm starting to feel that I really need to get book one down before moving forward.
But we will see, there's still time and who knows where my head will be when we get to that point.
In other news, my husband and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary last week. Unfortunately, he is deployed, so mentioning it was the extent of our celebration. However, it really got me thinking about how awesome my husband is.
Living with bipolar disorder (and anxiety and PTSD) is dizzying and frustrating as hell. I want to feel one way but often can't get myself there. Can't snap myself out of a "mood."
And I can't imagine having to live with me.
My husband comes home and sometimes, for weeks at a time, the house is a complete wreck because the thought of doing anything remotely productive is soul-crushing. Other times he can barely say two words without me growing angry because I can't contain all the energy bouncing around in my body. Or sometimes my anxiety gets so bad that I refuse to leave the house. And let's not forget the last time my PTSD popped up, and I thought my husband was trying to kill me.
Let's just say that I am no docile, easy wife.
In return for all my issues, I receive more support and compassion than any one person deserves. There are so many people in my life who don't understand my struggles, and I'll admit that I don't think my husband understands fully, but he is the most supportive of them all. If I tell him I'm having a rough time, he gets it, and that's the end of discussion. There's no questioning why showering is too difficult. There's no judgement. There's just support.
There is no way I could ever express how much that means to me.
But it's only fair to mention that we didn't start out this way.
There was a time when I thought we were done. I thought my husband was the worst person in the world. He didn't understand what was happening to me, and neither did I.
In one last effort (that I was convinced wouldn't work), we went to marriage counseling. There I was promptly informed that my head was a mess, and I needed more help than they could give.
I got a psychiatrist and two therapists to help me sort out my life, but we kept the marriage counselor. That was one of the best decisions we made. Because we had a counselor with us every step of the way, we had someone to mediate what I was doing on my own. Someone to help explain to my husband what I couldn't put into words. Someone who wasnt just on my side, but his as well (because I was not a nice person at that stage).
And that's when my husband adjusted. If he hadn't, we would not be married. It wasn't immediate, and it took me actually opening up and talking about my feelings to him, which I hate doing. You get told to "suck it up" enough times, and you start shutting down. But my husband has never said that. He saw that there was something wrong, and that redneck opened his mind and tried to wrap it around things he had no experience with and couldn't understand. He restores my faith in people.
But that brings me to the point of this story. There was a time when I expected my husband to just know. To know how I felt and to know how to fix it. That was as unfair as unfair gets. Now, I am a strong supporter of taking your spouse or partner to therapy with you. Of letting them into the way your mind works. For things to really work out, there's an openness that needs to happen, and I beg everyone who has some brand of mental illness to strive towards finding it.
We all deserve support and shouldn't settle for anything less.