Emotional roller-coaster is still running. I feel like on the outside I look normal, but inside I’ve been a mess. I’m not at that total breakdown stage… yet… and I’m still able to be chipper and happy and joking and go about my life. But there are frequent pauses where my emotions just turn to mush. I either get extremely irritable and want to snap my husband’s head off for little reason, or else something random just puts me on edge and I want to curl up in bed and hide from the world. The benefit of having dealt with depression for as long as I have is that I can recognize the signs of emotional instability in myself. I know when I first started feeling the depression it was like it had me, not the other way around. But now, after many years of medication and self-therapy (lots and lots of introspection) I feel much more detached from “it”. That’s how I feel about these pregnancy hormones. On one hand they’re happening to me and I can’t stop it – but on the other side I’m able to step back and watch it happening and say to myself, “This isn’t me.” Very useful.

Physically I’m doing much better. I decided not to reschedule my chiro appointment (Friday) because the pain I had was muscle aches from over-use… not nerve pain. So nothing the chiro could really do about it, you know? I just need to learn to take it easy on myself. It’s easy to forget I’m carrying around 15 extra pounds on me (give or take – the scale can’t make up its mind). I don’t know HOW it’s easy to forget, with this belly sticking out in front, but I guess some days I just feel so normal.

Speaking of weight… I’ve been doing very nicely in the weight gain department, gaining about a pound a week in a nice steady fashion. And then this past weekend my scale told me I’d gained over 3lbs in one week! I was really irritated by that. How does that even happen? No, I’m not really obsessing over my weight – or haven’t been at all. I do track it in a graph, because graphs make me feel good. And I don’t have any sort of arbitrary “goal” or “limit” set on myself, though I do have some numbers that I would like better than others, of course. If my body gains faster or more than I’d “like,” well, there’s not much I can do about it other than cut out the junk food that I sometimes eat. Otherwise I’m eating well and just trying to trust in my body to do it right.

I do know where those 3lbs went to, though – they’re all in my ass. I can feel it. Ugh.

(I just noticed, while looking at my graph, that there’s a pattern ever since week 20 when I started gaining weight. About once a month my weight jumps up multiple pounds in a week, then it drops and gains slowly… then another jump and drop. Huh. How weird.)

Really the only two physical complaints I have right now are the aching hips when I wake up – it feels like I’m sleeping on rock, not a soft cushy bed! – and the heartburn. But neither are totally oh-my-god horrible, either. The hips ache when I wake up, so I have to get up and walk around for a while to take the pressure off of them, then I’m fine. (Though they still feel bruised all day, if I bump them.) The heartburn is getting worse, and can really irritate me when I’m trying to sleep, but it’s pretty normal heartburn for 3rd tri and I can deal with it… sometimes it does require me sitting up in bed with my laptop for 3 hours at night when I’d rather be sleeping, but oh well.

It has taken me roughly 12 hours to write this entry (saving in drafts and coming back later) so I think I’ll post it now before my brain takes another major detour.