Tracking My Illness (subtitle: Microsoft Outlook was not built for this shit)

Okay.  This is going to sound stupid.  But at some point I remember saying to myself, "you may have a problem and you should do something to monitor it".  I often tell people that I have no concept of time.  Like a dog that is excited to see you after you have walked out of the house, and come back inside because you forgot your keys.  This makes it dificult for me to remember where I am in the whole manic-depression process.

Did I just complete an episode of mania?  When can I expect this depression to end?

I must have seen something on TV or heard a conversation related to tracking a menstrual cycle.  And I thought it would make sense to do the same thing with my mental illness.  When you think about it, it's almost for the same reason that a teenaged girl might want to track her period.  So that when you start to feel like you might be headed into that dark place, you can look at a calendar and say "aha - well, this was to be expected".  Maybe I could even plan around it.

With that I set out to start tracking what I was feeling.  Once a day, in the morning, I would place an event on my Outlook calendar at work.  But then, this calendar is shared amongst co-workers.  And I don't want them knowing how fucking crazy I am.  So I started coming up with acronyms that I could use.  I would have to match these up to symptoms of manic depression (or Bi-Polar II as they are calling it these days) so that I could look at these markings later and make sense of them.

Day one: ESF+ (Extreme Sexual Focus, the plus meaning a lot)
Day two: ESF+ (still, extreme sexual focus, still a lot)
Day three: ESF (still, extreme sexual focus, but not as much)
Day four: EWF (Extreme Work Focus)
Day five: ???

Shit.  I stopped recoding it.  Somewhere along the lines I forgot to keep track, and I didn't remember that I had even started this until I hit the depression a week or so later.  I pulled up the calendar to see when I started to take the turn and that damned calendar was worthless.  Fuck.

I have accepted now that tracking my illness this way was a stupid idea to begin with.  So what if there is a pattern?  What am I proving?  How am I really helping myself?  And who is to say that I won't become one of those people that starts trying to treat themselves for conditions that they never really had?

I have a new doctor that I see this week.  I need to work up the nerve to explain some of these feelings to him.

I need help.