Sibling Assignment #88: Fog

I have disappointed myself with this sibling assignment: and I'm the one who gave it! I like the assignment. I just wrote the word "fog" to my sisters and they posted beautiful pieces. You can find Silver Valley Girl's here and InlandEmpireGirl's here.

My disappointment is pretty simple. We had a series of foggy mornings here in Eugene and I had planned to grab my camera and take fog photos.

Every morning, I forgot my camera.

Crap.

So why my forgetfulness?

Mental fog.

If you've read much of this blog at all, you know that I struggle with mental health problems, namely depression, and I take medication to keep the chemicals in my head in some kind of balance.

The medications are a good thing, for the most part; they help keep my mood even and help my behavior be more predictable. But the medications also rob me of a certain range of feeling and when I don't take this medicine, my dreams stimulate me with their absurd plot lines and fantastic images.

So, sometimes I take a vacation from my medicine, and I make a contract with myself. As soon as I begin to have feelings of self-destruction or of sabotaging myself or as soon as I can tell I'm getting needlessly cranky, snapping at people, I go right back to taking my medicine.

Well, I went quite a while without taking my medicine, but about a week and half ago, I started again. I felt myself getting cranky and moody in ways that I knew I needed to treat before a destructive momentum built up.

Taking the medicine again made me dizzy, nauseous, and sick. That was the physical part.

Mentally, fog has rolled in.

The fog of fatigue. The fog of lethargy. The fog of procrastination. It's a drowsy fog, a paralyzing fog. It's a familiar fog. It's a fog a dread. Hours of fog pass by and I've done nothing: no writing, no grading, no reading, no cooking, eating, walking, just sleeping. Sleep helps me escape this fog, but when I awake, the fog is still settled into the valleys of my consciousness.

At work, I exert a lot of energy masking the fog, trying to keep my voice upbeat, my performance in the classroom lively. I crack jokes. I engage my students. I can feel the energy draining from my mind and body, from my muscles and my bones. I push forward. I can hardly wait to get back home and sleep.

No one can know that I'm in a fog. Especially my students. I confide to MB that I'm a little foggy and she understands and, as we share the teaching load of our team taught course, we look out for each other. She's in a different fog of preoccupation with a criminal in her life, and we both know what each other is going through and respect the impact of the mental fogs we are in.

As I write this, I realize that I haven't posted on my blog since January 12th. It was the 14th when I started taking my medicine again. That's the fog at work. It separates me from what I enjoy and in some areas of my life I don't have the will to fight it.

Today, I am fighting it, though. I've written this post. I don't have pictures of fog for it like I wanted, but maybe you get the picture.

Maybe you sense that the fog is slowly lifting.