It may sound contradictory, but while I have severe anxiety and panic attacks, I generally don’t have any depression or mood problems. When I’ve seen therapists for the first time, they typically ask me to sit down to various tests to measure THE CRAZY, and while I routinely score off the charts for anxiety (I love some of the comments I’ve gotten; “How did you even get to my office with scores like this?”), I consistently score low on depression.

I’ve always thought of this as a major blessing, because anxiety this crippling often feels like a sort of emotional paraplegia. To further weigh down this extraordinary metaphor, if I had depression, it would feel like I’d just gotten my arms ripped off, too.

For some reason, the last few days have been pretty awful for me in terms of mood. While I use the phrase “feeling depressed”, I’m not ready to say it’s a “depression”. I had one of those once. Just one, and it was enough. If I had to make up my own mental illness (OH WHAT FUN), I’d have to say this is something like Sudden-Onset Age-Related Mental-Exhaustion-From-Recurring Life Issues  Spectrum Disorder. Or SOARMEFRLISD, for short.

While SOARMEFRLISD is based in real, quantitative issues, I feel sure that it’s exacerbated by diet. The last few days have seen me abandoning my vegan leanings, my paleo leanings, and my sugar-addict leanings, and settling instead into a place of “moderation”, which has stupidly included a fair amount of dairy. While I can’t prove it, because no one has given me a ton of money to begin my own study, and there’s also that nagging lack of a PhD to lend me some scientific authority, I’m convinced that at least in this particular meat sack I inhabit, dairy products makes moodiness, anxiety, and depression, significantly worse.

While this can’t be true for everyone, by all available data it certainly seems true for me, and why I continue to eat the crap is something I simply don’t get. Okay, it’s DELICIOUS, sure, and it’s addicting, sure, and it’s smooth and tasty and comes in a wide variety of awesome permutations (to be fair, we should really be including goats in this hate-fest), but it’s so not good for me. I think this post is intended to be something that you can all use as a reason to pelt me with olives the next time I report that I ate some pizza, because it was there, and it was looking at me, with that big doughy expanse of white, cheesy goodness, and EVERYONE ELSE WAS DOING IT SO WHY NOT ME?

My husband is leaving for California tomorrow, to cavort with other geeks at WWDC, and enjoy his rock-star status as a senior engineer at Omni. One of my favorite ways to make him laugh during the week before he goes is to ask him how he’ll manage writing GREG WAS HERE across the breasts of all those hot women programmers, and did he remember his black Sharpie?

My commitment, during the next 6 Greg-free days, which will be stressful for many reasons, not least of which is his absence, my kids possibly getting sick, myself possibly getting sick, and of course SOARMEFRLISD, is that:

1. I will eat no dairy. Not even a smidgen. Not even a skosh.

2. Okay, I will TRY to eat no dairy.

3. No, I’ll just commit to not eating any. That’s better.

And next weekend, we’ll see if I’m feeling better. I’m hoping the moodiness will have mostly packed it in, and maybe I’ll have learned something.