A Beautiful Messy Life

I'm sorry I haven't written for a while. Life has been really good and really bad all rolled up in one.

The bad: I have been dealing with a depression episode caused because I'm less stable, and if it can, my body defaults to depression. I'm working with my doctors on this. The issue is Latuda causes high prolactin levels in me, hyperprolactemia, or something like that. So I have to go on a medicine for that. The problem with this, is the medicine to treat the high prolactin levels also messes with my Latuda. So I'm less balanced. We're changing my meds for the high prolactin levels, and we upped my antidepressant to see if that would help. Good news? I'm not depressed right now. Bad news? I'm irritable a lot of the time. I hate being irritable. I get grumpy over some of the dumbest things. I've had to call myself out for being judgmental about things that are dumb. I'm not so over the top that I can't do that, thank goodness. I don't think I'm particularly irritable for most people. I'm just really irritable for me and I don't like it.

Also, I might be failing a class because of the depression episode early in the semester. If I do, it puts me behind a year. That's the joy of having a mental illness. Yippee?

The good: My life is on an upswing. I don't even know where to start. I made it to the final interview stage of a paid internship that is pretty prestigious. That was cool. I didn't do the interview because I discovered that where they want to put me isn't where I want to go. There's no way I would have turned them down without the other two pieces of my life that are going well. First, I was offered an internship at Barrow Neurological Institute in their spine lab this summer. This is unpaid, but super amazing. I will be getting a lot of good experience at a really prestigious institution. I'm thrilled by this. The other piece is my massage business is kicking off. I do more massages a week than I've done since I moved to Arizona. I'm feeling hopeful about the short term financial outlook for the first time in a long time. It's wonderful.

I haven't been working on my Year of Happiness as much as I thought I would, but I'm doing exactly what the project was intended to do: finding things in my life that bring me happiness on a day to day basis so I can be happy even through the hard times. My life is beautiful.

Don't worry, I haven't given up on the actual goals. I'm still going to work on it. I've knocked a few things off the list. I've tried a new food (Thai food). I've taught a massage class--actually a whole series of them. Those are the two that I think of off the top of my head, but I think I've done more. Anyway, I'm still going to work on it. I'm currently looking for an opportunity to give a talk about mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder. That's the next biggest thing I want to do. Also, I'm finding ways to write my book even when I can't write. I'll go into that some other time.

I'm so glad that I decided to do my Year of Happiness. Even though I'm not focusing on it all the time and I've not done some of the things I've said I'd do, it has made me look for the little things in my life that bring me happiness. My little tender mercies, so to speak. Even through my depression episode (which granted, could have been a lot worse) I was able to find things that make me happy. My whole attitude toward life has become more positive. Even when I'm irritable.

My life is beautiful. It's also incredibly messy. It's not exactly what I want, but it's better than I imagined. I truly have a beautiful messy life.