I've just done my mood chart for June - til now. It's very colourful, lots of colours, including black. Not a good month, which I already knew. I colour each day, depending on what kind of mood I've had. The colours depict the amount of emotional control and stability I have felt. They don't depict whether bad things have happened to me, whether I'm happy or content or if I've just had some bad luck. It's the emotional control that gets noted here.
From the top:
Orange - great day, positive emotions and I'm very stable. I'm pretty happy and content
Blue - great day, getting lots done, very stable but no warm and fuzzy feelings inside.
Green - pretty good, still getting things done, it's a neutral mood
Pink - Just Ok. Negative thoughts are swirling, taking form, but I'm still functional and if you looked at me, you might just think I'm pre-occupied.
Black - Not good at all. The thoughts in my head are nasty, there's a rage inside just waiting for any excuse to bust through and ruin everyone's day. Or, I'm a blubbering mess, desperate for approval about anything. Crying, raging when I don't get what I want, can't make decisions, can't think straight. The world is coming to an end, there is no way out of this situation, I'm a terrible mother and of course it can (not always) get to the point where I really believe that my kids would be better off without me. At this point, I should take xanax. Sometimes I don't, then realise that I should have. My decision making when I'm like this is very flawed.
So that's the mood chart. In April (my best month since I'd started 8 months ago doing this) I had 23.5 blue days, 3 green, 2.5 pink and .5 black. In May, I added a new colour (orange) because I was feeling soooo good. Incidently, it was the month of our holiday back home. I had 6 orange days, 19 blue days and 5 green days and just 1 black day. that was a great month.
The holiday overlapped into the first week of June and when we'd come back I went downhill. Just 2 orange days, 11 blue days, 10 green days, 2 pink and, my god, 5 black days. That's the most black days I've had since I've started.
It's just crossed my mind that with this amount of data and awareness about what the moods do to me that I'd be able to stop it or at least do something about it. I haven't found an answer to it yet. I know that the situation I'm in (living in the same house but having separate lives from my ex, who I've been with for 17 years) doesn't help. I know I'm much more stable when I don't feel trapped here. The moods strike most viciously when I've had an interaction with ex that I don't like. When he's not here, they come and go, but not nearly so intensely - normal even. When he's just around and we haven't had a D&M, the moods strike badly too, but if I let him know about it, it usually dissipates of it's own accord.
Aggh, so confusing. oh well, it's my blog and I'll be confusing if I want to be.
Seeing the month in colours paints a picture of a person who is trying. If I wasn't, there would be no orange, blue and green days. It would be one black day after another. If I was to let go and just let it all happen, black days would dominate me, I'm sure of it. But the mood colours change and plateau for a while, then they go down and slowly go up again before crashing back down into darkness. July's picture shows a person who is taking things slowly but surely. I'm getting back there, functioning at a normal level for most days. The first week was green, this week I'm blue. If I can keep it going, it will be a good month and I can be proud that I've picked myself up off the floor and continued on.
But one thing I know for sure, my life will always have black days. But it's how I get through them that will matter. Minimise the children's exposure and come out the other side and keep going. It's life, my life and I'm Ok with it.
3 comments:
it's positive that you've called yourself jo_blue on this blog then.
i think it's a great idea, doing the colour thing.
how do you actually do it? do you have coloured pencils or textas and just rub a little bit on each day in your diary or do you have a chart?
i love data like this. i once charted my dreams (after writing them down in my diaries) and looked at them over the period of a year. i wasn't interested in content, it was frequency. the bar charts just increased and increased over the year. (either increased dreaming or increased remembering.) but it was really interesting.
Hey Melba, I'd never thought of that but I chose blue for both because it's the colour of the ocean and I love the ocean - so it is connected.
I have a normal diary and each day I write in which colour I am and then every few weeks I get my pencil case out, with my own textas (childish? I don't care)and colour the small yearly planner at the front. I find it really interesting too, seeing how the moods go up and down. I also mark when jin's away, when I have my hormone headache and a few other things so I can correlate the data and see if there are any relationships between what's happening and the moods I'm having.
Funny, I remember I'd originally called myself jo_black and then asked you to change it! Glad I changed it!
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