Unsolicited Advice

About 3pm. I am in a foul mood. I have been listening to music and entertaining myself by trying to put together some hooping choreography. Then all at once the bottom drops out, and it dawns on me that this is a pointless exercise, as nobody is ever going to see it. I fetch up in the kitchen with the computer, grousing at someone unfortunate enough to be on Facebook Messenger. I have no idea if the sudden plunge is a harbinger of migraine, a trigger for migraine, or merely co-morbid with the migraines. An acute case of emo is part of the prodrome of colds and various gastrointestinal misery for me, to the point where I can tell something is up before my nose even starts running. On the other hand, stress triggers depressive episodes, which in turn trigger headaches, which in turn put me under more stress, because I can't cope with anything when my head hurts. YMMV. It takes the person I am grousing at pointing out that mood changes are connected with his migraines for me to...

I am very good at getting into other people's heads. Not infallible, mind. But good enough to know that I should never try it on anyone I don't genuinely like and want to listen to, because if it works, I'm going to wind up hearing a lot whether I want to or not. It's a combination of intelligence, skill, constant practice, and hypervigilance. It's probably fairly obvious that I came by most of it from being surrounded by dysfunctional people: Two of the things I can spot most reliably are people who are lonely and depressed and trying not to let anyone else know that, and impending train wrecks that I want to stay far the fuck away from. If you live in a house of lunatics and can't get out, you learn this stuff as a matter of self-defense. I can usually work out if it's welcome or not. It throws some people off-balance; others just plain don't like it, or me, and are not interested in telling me a damn thing. I try to be hyper-alert for signs that som...