Live on the outside
I'll help you though your pain if you help me through mine
'Relapse', Little Birdy

So I've been a cranky bitch for a couple of days now, and I can't even blame my hormones. A big part of it is having a hand that is only half functional, and knowing it is not getting better fast enough because I am doing too much, true to my usual style. I can't help it, work is busy and I feel as though every time I bow out of doing something I shouldn't be doing with my hand that the others resent me for it. I may be imagining that... but I don't want to let them down either. So yeah, the hand thing, and the fact that work has had us all flat chat because this Sunday we are going away for three days with 120 kids and this requires rather a lot of organisation. Work is mad. The fact that we have nine days holiday just two days after we get back from this thing is pretty much the only redeeming thing about work just now... we all agree on this one: we *need* a holiday now.

Part of it is lack of sleep aswell, and we all know how I get when I'm tired, right? Not a pretty sight. The Writer had a boozy Monday and had some rather dark conversations with me on MSN and I worried. I do worry about him and I know he doesn't need me to and doesn't ask me to, but unless I stop caring for him I won't be able to stop worrying.

I have to say that I have been thinking a lot about this relationship of ours... we both have somewhat bipolar tendencies. When we're up, we're up... when we're down, holy fuck. We never seem to synchronise this either, often when he's down I'm okay, or vice versa. Always someone trying to carry the other through it. When he's down he's bent on destruction, what he maybe does not realise is that so am I, though perhaps not so severe... I still feel my gag reflex going when I am down and sometimes it is all I can do to prevent myself from purging my insides. I am better... I wonder if you ever really get better though, or you just get better at hiding it. That's something that dance taught me – how to make hard work look easy and painless and pretty. The Writer can generally see straight through that though...

So are we going to destroy ourselves alone, or destroy each other... or will we be able to lift each other up? It would be preferable to help one another, of course, but I'd much rather be standing on my on two feet anyway. I can't find the balance on my own, let alone with the weight of another to complicate the equation. My problem with us right now is that I love him so much, in a way that I have never imagined I had the capacity for... but I can't imagine a future. I can't see how we're gonna get out of this mess we're in with both of us sane, intact, and still loving each other.

That’s not what I need tonight
Maybe I don’t think right
Maybe I lack that insight
And only the numb or the peaceful might
Sleep in perfection
Asleep in perfection
A soul’s misdirection, directed at you
‘Asleep in Perfection’, Augie March

But I know that I don't see everything, so this does not mean I have given up hope. Loving him is easy, so much easier than it ever has been... and despite our collective, inconsistent moodiness I feel secure and more understood than I ever have been. I have to remember that my moods swing like this whether I am single or coupled... it's really just a matter of riding out the storm... and the next, and the next, and the next... at least I have a warm place in the crook of his neck to take shelter in this way.

Today I am better, just as I am better than I was a year ago, and much better than a decade ago (holy shit has it really been that long?)... but it's still a slippery slope and I am bound to falter and slide back a little every now and then. What's important is that I do pick myself up and keep going... the only thing that really scares me is a consuming apathy, that I occasionally glimpse but thankfully it never swallows me up, something in me won't allow it to.

Before After

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