I’ve been thinking about my thinking again.

Also about my feeling.

There’s a deeply superstitious part of me that hesitates to make further prognostications about … well, anything really, but especially my mental health. Likewise, the streak of stubborn pride that so dislikes being wrong doesn’t want to make any blanket statements that I might have to retract.

But, although I suppose I’ve “known” this for much of my life, in the sense that I could echo the phrase and tell you what it literally means (or, well, what I think it literally means?), I haven’t really known in the past that the only constant is change.

Ask me twenty-five years, fifteen years, ten years, five years, five months from now what that means, and I suspect I’ll give you a different-ish answer than I would give you today. My answer will change because my understanding will change. At least, I hope it will: when our minds cease to change, we are either literally or metaphorically dead.

So, anyway.

I’ve had a longish–for me, anyway–run of relatively smaller troughs and peaks in my mood. I wouldn’t describe my mood-state as “stable,” exactly: the lows just aren’t as frequently bone-scraping, and the highs aren’t quite so knife’s-edge glittery and wrathful.

I mean, nobody’s is enitrely stable (with the possible exception once again of people who are literally dead … but since we can’t ask them, we can’t know). Though maybe that’s a function of this particular phase of my evolution: I think I used to understand the neurotypical mood-space[1] as a lake, rather than a tidal basin[2].

1. By which I mean the area occupied on a graph between the lowest of my lows and the highest of my highs.
2. I might be using “tidal basin” incorrectly here. I’ll try to double-check it before I publish this post, but I’m afraid if I try right now I’ll fall down a rabbit hole about tides and forget to finish writing this.

The water levels of lakes are disturbed from time to time by droughts or storms, and are subject to some degree of seasonal rise and fall, but on average their levels remain fairly predictable and fairly constant.

The water level in a tidal basin, on the other hand, varies more frequently. Ebb and flow is the major constant, though its degree varies–a spring tide may bring the waves washing far up the beach; coupled with a storm, it may send the waters flooding into the streets of the nearby towns.

Perhaps most people’s mood-space is like a fairly typical tidal basin, while mine has often more closely resembled the Bay of Fundy.

The Bay of Fundy at high and low tides. Screenshot from Wikipedia, because I’m lazy.

I think the rate of change from low tide to high is still greater for me than it is for many people, but it’s frequently less than it often was in the past. I am learning to manage my life and to see the imposition of boundaries that protect my mood-space as tools that enable me to do the things I love doing rather than as chains confining my wings.

I suppose it helps that I have something, now, that I love doing, and that I must do just about every day if I’m going to do it well. Ballet is a demanding mistress.

Because life is never a controlled experiment, I can’t say which of variable or combination of variables has been most responsible for this particular phase in my personal evolution. Physical activity has always been central in keeping me on a more even keel, but prioritizing good sleep hygiene is also crucial. A much-stronger social circle, a reasonably happy home life, and work that I enjoy certainly contribute as well. Likewise, it’s difficult to overstate the role that hormones play in all this, and I shouldn’t overlook hormone therapy as a factor.

Being able to identify the sensation of an uptick in mood that’s about to jump the track, and to take steps to either prevent the derailure or at least mitigate some of its harm makes a world of difference. Being willing and able to unburden myself when the dark closes in would, undoubtedly, help to reduce the time I spend in the depths of despair, and would probably lift the floor a bit, so to speak.

I’m still working on that last one.

Everything we do changes us constantly on the most literal and fundamental level: our bodies and our brains adapt. Undoubtedly, my brain has been changing all along. I hope its current configuration is wired for a bit more stability: but it will continue to change, and I think I would be foolish to conclude that my brain is now much better at braining in this stressful modern world and that I don’t need to keep working on it.

In the hardest, darkest moments, that knowledge is almost unbearable. It seems like so much work, so much effort, for so little return.

Right now, though, in this moment of clear, calm light–a kind of pearl-grey springtime light–I realize that what seems, at other times, like so much work and such an exhausting struggle seems, right now, like simply life and living.

This is a change. I’m not going to shout, “Aha! I’ve figured it out!” because I’m quite sure that I haven’t. There was a phase in my life during which I’d reach a kind of equilibrium and feel like I’d reached the end of the novel and now all the struggle and confusion was behindme and it would be clear sailing (feel free to have a chuckle). 

Another phase followed in which I rather violently distrusted the sensation of equilibrium because it felt like a bait-and-switch: I had learned enough to know that it was almost certainly going to end, but not enough to stop resenting and fighting the end of equilibrium.

Now I’m in a phase where I can accept the idea that although this equilibrium is pleasant, it’s also temporary; that something is going to come along and trouble the waters. I don’t know if I’ll manage to keep my composure when that happens: maybe that’s another phase. I hope that if I do lose my grip a bit, I’ll treat myself more compassionately than I have in the past.

Change is going to come. Hell, change is happening right this very moment. I’m not going to make any silly statements about how one must be ready when it comes: frankly, we can’t always be ready.

Besides, the eruptions that change us most profoundly for the good (though not, I am forced to admit, always for the pleasant good) are often those for which we are least prepared. In other words, we learn a lot more from kludging together a solution with paperclips and gum than we do from effectign one with a full tool-kit and a generous array of spare parts. Likewise, we can’t  learn or do much from within an intact eggshell.

The shattering of our worlds, of our illusory senses of permanence and control, is at the same time a powerful force of creation. 

I know this isn’t a new idea. I know people have been telling me this for years.

I know I understand it differently than I did a year ago.

I know that later I will understand more differently still.