I'm starting to notice a pattern. I can go for days feeling perfectly fine, and then a thought will wander into my head, and it will pretty much cripple me. For instance, I can get together with a friend for lunch and have a good time, and then hours or days later I'll start to wonder if I bored them, if I should have said this or shouldn't have said that ... And even though I know it's not being realistic and I should be gentle with myself, the thoughts play on a loop. I can't make them stop. And the longer they play, the worse I feel, until I wind up going to bed at 4 o'clock in the afternoon just so I don't have to think about it any more.

My moods seem to be coming in waves. I experience a great high where everything is fine and I'm doing all right -- I'm going to classes, meeting new people, doing lots of writing and dreaming big dreams for my future -- and then I crash and have to spend at least 24hrs hating myself and my life and I'm absolutely sure that I'm a rotten, worthless waste of oxygen. I don't know how to turn off those thoughts. In therapy I learned how to identify them but being able to identify a bully doesn't necessarily stop them from beating you up! You would think that with the alleviation of my symptoms the negative thinking would go away, but it doesn't. It just regroups and attacks me all at once.