I am in a nasty mood.  I don’t have a good reason for being in this mood; I have taken all my medicines, I have gotten over my 24 hour bug, and I have a wonderful life.  But it is the kind of mood that sits on you, pushes you and drags you places that you don’t want to go.  And even as I open my mouth to deliver what is usually a nasty diatribe about someone, I know that I am just in a bad mood.

I often think that just like the suggestion given in that movie, For the Love of The Game, when the heroine says we should all wear cardboard signs around our necks, has great merit.  I could simply wear a sign that says ‘nasty’; and then the people around me wouldn’t engage me in the inane, and ridiculous conversations that I don’t care about on a good day much less a day like today.

That is the strange thing I have learned as I grew up.  I don’t particularly care for people.  I don’t care if they are having trouble with something or if they are doing something fun. I don’t care who their friends are, or what their day was like.  It is one day, and I just don’t care for the insanity of it all.  It is why I write.  My characters don’t have nasty, insane days and if they do, I simply put them in the middle of a murder scene so that it is all put in perspective.  (This doesn’t mean that if someone comes to me with a real problem – abuse by spouse for example that I am not jumping on that bag wagon…it is the normal stuff I don’t care about).

I had a therapist who used to ask me to go home each night and tell my husband one thing about my day.  It was a ridiculous homework assignment as I realize quite instinctively that no one really cares how my day went.  And you can’t sit there on the other side of this screen and pretend that you care if I ate lunch or if I received more emails than normal.  No one honestly cares; and if you do care all I can really say is get a life.  (See, nasty!)

I hated that homework, and couldn’t figure out why I paid a lot of money to a therapist to talk to them about my life, and then I had to go home and talk to my husband about it.  If I wanted to talk about my life and pretend to myself that the people listening care, I wouldn’t hire someone to do the same thing.  But when it comes down to it, you simply can’t convince me that anyone cares about the single things that are forever happening with me.

I know that my communication skills, despite my writing skills, are lacking.  But I always say when I having something that needs to be shared, I will do so.  Otherwise, I am not going to bother you with it, and I would appreciate if you didn’t bother me.

I have a coworker (as we all do) that can not go through one hour without complaining.  She complains about everything; home, work, weather, politics, family, animals…it is a constant and dragging amount of ridiculousness that I wish I could literally respond with, ‘I don’t care’.  I try not to say those words, I try not to even believe those words, but they are the truth.

And when I am in a nasty mood, they are a greater truth. When I am in a nasty mood it takes all my energy to not roll my eyes, or respond with what I really think.  And that energy drains me so that it simply becomes harder and harder to abide by society’s dictates of normal behavior.  It is a vicious and unrelieving cycle that makes it so I have to bury my head as far in the sand as I can.

And I know it isn’t fair.  I know that it isn’t fair to my husband that I don’t care to share my day, when he is perfectly willing to share every bit of it with me.  I know it isn’t fair to not care to my kids, when I am supposed to always be interested and welcoming to them.  I know it isn’t fair to my coworkers who are not complaining because that is all they do, but because they simply want a sympathetic ear.  They simply want someone to listen to them. And I am too nasty to care.

Nasty moods make it difficult to literally function in the world.  They make it impossible not to say things that I know I will regret, and to not treat my children in ways that I will hate myself for in the morning.  And the worst thing is, because I am bi-polar, the nasty moods I am talking about are not nice, are not easily overcome and they can easily do more damage in a single second than all the highs can do in a year.

A bi-polar patient in a nasty mood is not a good thing.  And a bi-polar patient in a nasty mood is someone to stay far away from.  You would think with taking that many pills a day, I would be free from this.  You would think with taking that many pills a day, I would live in a world that everything was the same day in and day out.  Instead the insanity continues when I am in a nasty mood as much as when I am in a great mood.