Coming Undone

I am unmoored

We think of the world under our feet as being a frame of reference. The mountains that we look up towards have always been there. The seas in their restless waves have always been deep and inscrutable below the ever-changing surface shimmers of storms and sunshine. We are wrong.

I think, if we stopped and pondered, we would realize the mistakes in our thinking. It’s relative to our own lives, the ephemeral fleeting of birth to death, with stutter-stepped milestones we mark time in between. The reality is that the planet we stand on, barefoot in the cool green moss, feeling the damp to our bones, is no more standing still than we are. It hurtles through space, flying around the sun in a merry revolution that sways in a dance bending back and forth through the seasons. The plates that glide over the molten core shift uneasily, tearing apart and melding into different configurations, the fragile surface recovering in time, to raise a face to the sun’s light and warmth again in a new era.

The storms gather, gray and drab, huddling close to the surface for a time. The winds draw them onward, dissolving clouds and the rain falls through the rainbow. It will be all right. It will. I might not live to see it, but another shall in my place, and with my words know that time passes and change comes, yet we still stand.

For a day, even a month, it can feel like nothing is happening external to the inner deluge. Tears fall, temper flashes like the lightning through a cloud, but in the end, the day passes into night with no real difference. We manage. Time is the most precious of resources, and still, we waste it. It’s only in the autumn of our lives that we can turn and look back and see the banner of a life streaming out behind us, billowing here and there, and account for where it went.

About two decades ago, I no longer recall precisely when, I was diagnosed with PMDD.

I could probably figure out when. I can remember the office I was sitting in, staring out the window, when they talked about it. The window was dirty, but it was sunny outside. It was an old medical building, maybe a school before? Not sure, but it was an old brick building the midwives' office was in before they moved to the new building. It was also the place where the pediatrician was, and on the ground floor we’d bring the small brood of littles for their check-ups, with laughter and stickers to soothe after immunizations. This wasn’t that, and there wasn’t any laughter that I remember. 

He said that I turned into a 'psychotic bitch' every month, and I remember them asking me questions. I don't remember what I answered. The end of it all was a diagnosis. How valid that diagnosis was, I couldn’t say. I wasn’t really there for it, after all. It wasn’t what I wanted, but also realized that I didn’t know who or what I was, any more. I was years into the battle for my self, and I was losing, no longer able to stand up and fight. If he wanted me medicated, then I would be. I’d come undone and lost my firm ground underfoot, and I wouldn’t regain it for a very long time.

There was medication, and for the last 18 years, since my youngest  was born, I've carefully been on hormone control to constrain my emotions. A month ago, give or take, I finally know for sure I was off that medication. It could have been done before that - the removal date for the implant  was in May, after all - but I suspect it had a slow taper rather than an abrupt finish point. Hard to do otherwise with a time-release drug, after all, especially one where the duration is measured in years.

And now it is me, naked inside my head, trying to re-learn coping skills I'm not sure I ever really had. My first diagnosis of dysmenorrhea was at the age of 15. I had my first pregnancy begin when I was 21. I turned 22 while I was pregnant with my oldest. I turned 24 just after the birth of my redhead. I turned 25 while pregnant with my youngest daughter. I turned 28 and learned I was pregnant with my son, the last of my children. I turned 47 last week, and I have no dependent children any longer.

The emotional storms are real. I have no defenses against them, no jetties and seawalls built up. I am unmoored.

I sail on the uncharted seas, tied loosely to my history, blown by the unceasing winds of change. The tides are running back out, full tide a memory, the moon setting on the horizon. I want to cry out, but it’s no use. I am where I am, doing what I think I must do, and what else is there? I have no time, yet I must make time.

Perhaps I still have time to make a discovery in my lifetime. I hope so. I like to think that there are still places I haven’t been, both internally and externally. Art that I need to make. Stories to tell. I want to write fiction (I’d say I want to write, and you’d be justified in pointing at your screen and asking me ‘what is this?’ so I’ll say there are tales I want to weave, while this is my best effort at contemplating my navel. No idea what I’ll find, other than lint) and I shall. One way, or another.

I’d like to walk barefoot in the moss again, once or twice in this lifetime. After? Well, no telling what that horizon holds for me, and I’m not rushing towards it. I’ll let that mystery stay opaque because there is no solving it on this side. Before it, there are enough unknowns to keep me busy trying to stay afloat and steering clear of the reefs and shoals.

My anchors have slipped, some cut free so I can rediscover who and what I am without the medication. I am adrift, and the winds are rising. The fog is coming up off the water and my way is unclear. I’d say that I am trying, but it’s no longer clear what that means. I am unmoored from the past, and drawing inexorably to the future.