Two seasons of rain and sun

Two seasons of rain and sun

In 2018, my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. That bombshell helped me understand myself many times over, like Sun Wukong reaching his ninth enlightenment. Applying this theory to my whole life's past, it all made perfect sense: when my mood was at the South Pole I couldn't care less even if the sky were falling; when my spirit was at the North Pole I'd single-handedly do everything, refusing all help, to hold the sky up myself. This pattern must have shown up by the age of the second prime number!

Every year since, I've gathered more information, tracked my own emotional patterns, to test whether that diagnosis was accurate. I don't let myself treat anything as "settled" or "by default." The more I tracked, the more wrong it looked. Correct: my two mood poles are very far apart — when I'm down I'm a black hole, when I'm up I'm the sun. Incorrect: I only have two cycles a year, and each cycle is very long (5-6 months). Compared to actual bipolar disorder, where the cycles are shorter (1-4 weeks) and highly sudden and irregular.

The last "sun" cycle ended with the post I wrote back in March; the "black hole" cycle ended with the post I wrote a few months after that.

Not always, but these two cycles of mine tend to line up exactly with the unbearably hot and the cool seasons. Like the way people grumble that their mood is just like the weather. What can I do? My weather has been like this since I was three, so ladies and gentlemen, please bear with me. If you can't bear it, curse me out the way my old bosses did: when he's up he works like a madman; when he's down he doesn't do a damn thing. I can't help it, guys! Wait till I'm reborn and maybe it'll be different! And until my next reincarnation, the best I can offer is this: instead of working like a madman every single one of the 365 days (where on earth would you find such a guy anyway, mom), I'll sleep for six months, and in the other six months I'll do the work of a regular person's two years — how about that? When it's so hot I can't think straight, just let me sleep, boss.

I went looking for answers to why. I've asked and asked and gotten nothing — maybe I'll have to live to a hundred before I get it. For now, I only have two answers:

My head is like a steam engine. Lots of thinking, lots of heat. When the air temperature is high, the engine overloads from the heat; when the air temperature is low, the heat dissipates and the engine runs at peak output. When it overloads, the power cuts and it stops running.

Or.

In Miền Tây's hot season, the land cracks, the flowers wither, the fruit droops, the rice paddies split open, the fish and shrimp waste away, and how could the people there be cheerful when there isn't enough food to eat, flowers to look at, water to drink? Every year, after Reunification Day, the rain begins; by the seventh lunar month the plants are green everywhere, and the rain comes down even harder, as if to push the trees to flower and fruit and to pair the fish and crabs into couples. Sitting alone in a hut at midday in the middle of a rice field just coming of age, whether it's pouring rain or blinding sun, who could be sad. Every time I was there, I never wanted to go home; I prayed to the sun never to set and the rain never to stop. If there really is a fairy-tale land, that land will be green, smell of rice, echo with birdsong and cool breezes, and taste sweet like the passionfruit the birds have been chewing on. I was born and raised here, and my operating system is synchronized with it, so my soul belongs to the place in that old song:

"My hometown has two seasons of rain and sun, / Two poor hamlets joined by a single dike line..."