My ex-therapist told me to label my moods
on a color wheel of thick wedges and tinier slivers,
to shade them accordingly every day,
then add them to my bullet journal in FuN! shapes
like an old-fashioned bubblegum machine 
with a moody ball of gum per day of the month.

I didn’t know how to put it into words at the time,
so I just stopped journaling and started lapsing 
a few days, then weeks between chat sessions.
I always did my homework in grade school
but adult homework is called shadow work
and can’t be pinned down to coloring
assorted gumballs in a fat, blank book 
when I needed each daily page to reflect me
like a shimmering murky oil spill,
all the colors swimming around in a puddle,
already-chewed gum pasted haphazardly
underneath that damn desk where I sat
to do my shadow work by moonlight
and none of it made a shade of sense.