Scheduling Your Sadness

Putting my emotions on the calendar actually ... helped?

It has come to my attention that I am a human being.

This information shocks me as much as it probably does you, and if you need a moment to compose yourself, I completely understand.

I was crying in my car last Saturday, as you do, but couldn’t figure out what I was actually feeling. Not sad, necessarily, but out of control. Anything I’ve ever been scared of, mostly in the realm of losing everyone and everything I love, not only felt BIG but very very real. And the crying felt less like self expression and more like vomiting, my body’s weird method of self-defense. Get all the poison out and do it now.

Instead of accepting that it’s normal to have fears (I mean, heck, my cat can’t even SEE the vacuum without losing his mind), I tried making plans to avoid this discomfort. I’ll move. I’ll quit. I’ll disappear.

As if that would ensure I never cry in my car on a Saturday ever again.

How Do *You* Decide Where to Live?

But then the deja vu kicked in.

Fear has bubbled this close to the surface before. I’ve cried, like barf-cried, about almost the exact same things. And I had proof!

In my Notes App, a few months ago, I started keeping track of the days when I felt uncontrollably upset. Not sad. Upset. I qualify “sad” as: “A sad thing happened and I feel sad.” Upset I define more along the lines of: “Emotions are heaving out of me from seemingly out of nowhere.”

When I explained the phenomenon to West, I told him when I felt upset for no reason as a kid, I told my parents I missed my dead hamster, Simmy (short for Cinammon). She was the love of my life, and I needed to have a logical reason behind my sobbing.

So now that’s my code for I AM UPSET AND I REALLY CANNOT EXPLAIN WHY. “I miss Simmy.”

Here’s my Note. Do you see what I see?

This is unedited. Feel free to make fun of 01/25.

My upsetness is on a schedule of sorts.

Besides two exceptions, my upheavals have been arriving around the 25th of each month.

You didn’t ask for this information, but it’s important for my hypothesis … I don’t get my period. My IUD performed a miracle and stopped my monthly bleeding like six years ago. (When I indicated “period” on my Simmy Note, I was talking about spotting, which does happen from time to time, usually ONLY if I’m wearing my favorite underwear.)

But bleeding is only one indication of the hormonal cycles our bodies go through, and I don’t just mean bodies with uteruses. Every human being experiences hormonal ebbs and flows. It’s just a body thing.

Even though it’s been a while, I have vivid memories of days where I sobbed to a friend: “It doesn’t make any sense I’m this sad. I feel crazy.” Only to find blood in my porcelain throne mere hours later. A monthly period “aha” moment.

Time has been so weird lately, maybe always. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t understand how I’m still a mystery to myself.

It’s tempting to block out the 25th and 26th of every month so I can banish myself to a cave, or at the very least, my room. I don’t like the idea of my body being able to confuse itself. But can I really pencil in the high tides of my emotions in my planner?

Maybe! Calendars have always been a way to predict life cycles.

My brief research brought me to the Mayan calendar (you know, the one that we thought predicted the world’s end in 2012). The Mayans were writing and inventing math a couple thousand years before white dudes decided to keep track of time according to Jesus’ birthday, so it’s safe to say they were pretty freaking smart.

So smart that they actually had two calendars: one that tracked their spiritual year and one that tracked the earth’s orbit around the sun. Their spiritual year consisted of 260 days (8.5 months), which some think is a salute to pregnancy and/or the Mayans’ obsession with the numbers 20 and 13. Spiritual leaders used this calendar to schedule ceremonies and announce days that would be extra lucky. My personal favorite tidbit is that Mayans used people’s birthday on this calendar to predict and interpret aspects of their personality, kind of like how I use astrology memes.

The second calendar was more practical. Because it tracked the sun, it also corresponded with weather, crops, and business stuff.

You might not be able to tell at first glance, but this shows both the 365 earth-circling-sun days of the agricultural year as well as the 260 days of the spiritual year. As you can see, I am busy all next week, so please don’t ask me to hang out.

As I continue to monitor my monthly-ish emotional outbursts, I’m going to keep the Mayans in mind. We can keep track of Earth’s orbit, but we can also track which days we need to cry in our cars. Start a Cry Calendar, if you will. Everything — even my little hormones — are running on their own schedule, and that’s nature, baby. Our spiritual cycles are as impactful as crop cycles.

Spring is always just a few months away.

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