Still Alive

I am still alive.

Since the last time I posted, a lot has changed. My father had several strokes over the course of a year and died in his fifties. I got full custody of my daughter and moved in with a friend on the west coast. I decided to wean myself off 2/3 of the antidepressants I was on.

Some things are about to change. My daughter is turning eighteen. She'll be a legal adult, and she can't remain here after high school. It's not what either of us wants, but this is not my house, I do not pay the bills, and I cannot afford to send her to college, I can't even pay my own student loans, so she's being sent to my mother.

Some things remain the same. I am unemployed. I am constantly fighting depression.

But I'm still alive.

Fighting depression and I'm still alive.
No one to talk to and I'm still alive.
Fearing the future and I'm still alive.
So sick with stress and yet I'm still alive.
Still alive.

Still alive.

A Hard Day's Night

I realized I was standing in the store I work at in the middle of the night. I'd obviously come to get something, but I couldn't remember what, nor could I remember how I'd gotten there. There were other customers around, considering the store is open 24/7, so no one was looking at me weird, but I felt weird. Intensely so.

Had I been asleep? It's scary realizing you've just woken up somewhere. I had to have gotten in my car and driven from home, and the biggest relief I had besides the fact that I'd obviously made it alive was that my daughter is with her other parent this weekend. I could have just left my daughter alone in the middle of the night. I could have caused a car accident, could have killed someone, could have died.

I puttered, reeling, around the store. Since I was there, maybe I'd buy something. Maybe I'd remember what I had come for. I was certainly in no condition to drive. I ran into a few people I've worked with and gave watery smiles, all the while trying to hold onto sanity.

At the checkout, I noticed the registers had all been changed during my day off. I hadn't heard anything about a remodel and didn't like it. It looked a lot more complicated than it needed to be. A couple managers showed up, offered me some snacks they'd had in the back for whatever employees wanted them, and I took one, all the while still trying to figure out what I was doing.

This is the kind of dream I regularly have. It's hard to separate from reality for the most part, and I'm left feeling off-kilter for the rest of the day. I'll be going to work soon and I'll see all these people and feel like I'm insane and if they just thought about it they'd know because they saw something bizarre and didn't recognize it.

My job has eaten my life. I dream about it, think about it, worry about it, and get one day off twice a week instead of an actual weekend. Some people like getting two breaks, but one day isn't enough for me to shake things off and relax because there's something fundamentally wrong with my brain. At least, that's the way it feels.

I haven't contemplated suicide this winter, which is good, but that's less because I like my life and more because I found a question to ask myself that scares me too much to want to find out: What if there's no heaven or hell and death just erases us from existence? The idea of disappearing entirely scares me more than eternal hellfire, and I'll take that.

I'll take it and my feelings of insanity to work, and I'll be quiet all day. I'll work, I'll jump every time someone walks up behind me, and every time I try to smile politely, people will give me a look that says I'm not fooling anyone.

Personality Tests

I'm a sucker for a good personality test. It has to be difficult, however. I can see results a mile away, and can't help tweaking my answer toward one result or another, or spreading my answers out so I know the result could have gone in multiple directions.

This one, however, stumped me. (Disclaimer: flashy lights, avoid if epileptic.) You're given a couple circles on a pulsing background and asked a question, such as, "Which one is angry?" or "Where will you never be safe?"

I, being the smart-aleck I am, started out picking the opposite of what I thought was obvious. As I went through it got a little disturbing, and I started to play it straight. My results were... me.

Though quiet on the outside, you are often the hidden hero; someone who rushes in when needed and then after the emergency is over fades back into the woodwork. Because of this sense of duty and honor, you can also on occasion be rigid in your viewpoint and unyielding in the face of other ways of thinking. Usually cynical and rarely trusting of others, you maintain a small set of intimate friends. These bonds are stronger than most. You are always grounded in the present moment. Your close bonds can also lead to clique-ishness and a tendency to gossip about those who are deemed less worthy. You are an integrative thinker, collecting data from a wide range of sources and applying it to your worldview. You can become overly task-oriented. In stressful situations you often withdraw from the world to seek peace in contemplation. You often seem cold and withdrawn. Often you will withdraw rather than verbalize your discontent.

Maybe not the best parts of me, but that is me, minus the bravado. That's me minus the logic that keeps me going. "I feel ____, but logically I know ____, so I refuse to show anger because I have no real reason to be angry."

Eh, it makes my mind swim. So of course I took the second test in the series immediately.

This one was four pulsing colored squares, each with shadowy figures in the center. "Which one knows your secret?" "Which is better than you?" Entirely different results, but still me.

A risk taking individual who fights against the burdens of life through a quest for excessive stimuli. This individual is not only impulsive but admires impulsive behavior, as this is perceived as being free of the exhaustion he or she feels from everyday life. Best method of entry is to appeal to the novel and the future development of our protocol. 

This client feels that times have come to a juncture that is requiring immediate action. This belief is often mistaken however and such an individual can react to perceived threats with overzealous behavior or asymmetrical responses. This client will not heed advice, whether good or bad, and will take his or her own guidance, even if it is only chosen as a means of asserting individuation.

This one cut deeper. Part of it is who I want to be. I want to take risks. I want something to truly interest me. Yes, I admire people who can set aside that very logic that I hold to and do what they want. Freedom is a heady thought. Freedom from constantly thinking about the consequences and deciding "It's not worth it," because maybe sometimes it is.

Also, interesting little fact here: When trying to read the second paragraph, I blanked out. I do that sometimes when something hits too close, or is too stressful. Rather than stressing over it, I just lose my train of thought and have to start over (much easier when I can reread what I've written). A quick read tells me that I sometimes go overboard and I don't trust advice. Sometimes just to prove that I have my own mind.

Well, ouch.

You know what's really fun? They have a third test, complete with pulsing lights and disconcerting noises.

You feel frustrated in your attempts to make your will manifest in a relationship, either personal or public. This frustration can be seen by others as irritability or anxiety and occasionally a tendency to drift into righteous anger. There is a feeling that society or people are holding you back, which can lead to a moral exhaustion and a sense of apathy if allowed to fester. If this continues you will ultimately desire only to be left alone.

Insecurity is the watchword for you at this moment. There is a strong sense that you have been socially demeaned or ignored recently. Hopes and dreams have been stymied, leading to an ever greater anxiety or unease. You need reassurance and to believe that your problems will someday be overcome, whether or not this is actually the case. Often your anxieties will lead you to become unreasonable or demanding. 

Mild discomfort now. I'd really rather deny this one and delete this entire post, but I won't let myself.

Big Disclaimer:
The tests I just took may beat your ego to death and creep you the heck out. In fact, they recommend not taking them unless you have a clinician ready to look at your results. I don't know if I just took one for the team or if I'm psyching myself out.

Little Disclaimer:
I love stuff that messes with your mind. For example, The Game, starring Michael Douglas, is an awesome movie that will drag your brain through the mud, push it off the roof on your dad's birthday, then laugh at you.

The moral of this blog post: How I entertain myself alone on the Internet.

DSL - Dog-Specific Legislation

My sister has rottweilers. If you just grimaced or shuddered, feel free to hit the back button, because the dogs are not the problem in this story. The dogs are house pets. One is from a long line of show dogs, and spends most of his time cuddling and asking to be pet. The other is from a line of working dogs, and enjoys fetching things and learning commands. A busy dog is a happy dog, and these dogs are happy.

Puppies do not come trained, this is a sad fact of life. Kids don't come trained, either. When a puppy was introduced to my 11-year-old daughter, there was much drama because puppies nip, and they have no sense of personal boundaries whatsoever. It has been six months now. The puppy is quite a bit bigger and far better trained. She knows things like off, down, toy, bring, and leave it. The kid, however, does not seem to understand this.

My daughter panics every time the puppy comes toward her. The puppy's intentions are greet-and-sniff. My daughter starts turning away to cower against something, squealing, bending and covering her face. Unless something has happened with her father's dog that I don't know about, she's never been hurt by a dog in her life, and yet she acts terrified.

The puppy sees this squealing and body-contorting, and thinks my daughter is initiating play. My daughter won't listen to simple commands, such as Say off, or Ignore her and keep walking, so the puppy bounces or jumps up or yips, and my daughter claims that the dog has attacked her.

Let's pause a moment. The puppy is a rottweiler. What could happen if a melodramatic pre-teen goes to school and tells someone that a rottweiler attacked her? There's a possibility that two pets could be taken from their home and put down, isn't there? Even if neither dog has ever left a mark?

My sister is a certified dog trainer. It drives her crazy that my daughter, after six months of living with my sister and her dogs, still panics. But only over the puppy. The full-grown male rottweiler she's fine with. He can come greet her and she pats his head awkwardly. He tends to move slower in general, but he is no less capable of acting like a dog than the puppy is.

My daughter is afraid of the puppy's potential to hurt her. She's done this with other things, too. For example: she's been afraid of movie theaters since she was about seven because her dad took her to a scary movie once and she doesn't want to get scared.

My daughter doesn't want to listen to instructions because her fear has gotten in the way, and my sister is so upset that she doesn't want to work with the kid. My sister has taken this stubbornness or fear or whatever it is as a personal insult.

I have now ranted myself into either mental exhaustion or a block, which means that I might have been about to really get somewhere. Can't think anymore, though. My sister's crying because my daughter cries every time the puppy comes up, and my daughter is in her bedroom doing whatever 11-year-old girls do in their rooms alone.

So one time, at the cheese factory, they decided to tell a guy he was being fired for a bunch of tardies during his lunch break. Then they sent him back to finish work all emotional and he cut his hand pretty badly with a box knife. The whole line had to be shut down so they could clean everything. They decided after that to maybe start giving people notice on Fridays after their shifts.

I Don't Believe in Luck

I found a sequin on the floor. That may seem random, but in my mind, it's a little eerie. Let's go waaaay back to the 1900's, when I was in high school. There were some rough times, and I did a lot of praying as well as some tinkering in wicca, and a lot of things I prayed for came true (though, as usual with life, not in quite the ways I expected). I did not live in a house full of glitter and confetti. My mom hated the stuff, and so my tendency to find a piece of metallic confetti in some random shape in between a prayer and something life-changing happening was unexpected. I have a sister, but she's not really the glitter and confetti type either.

I have a job interview in just over an hour, my first job interview in three and a half years. Life has done a lot of shitting on me in the past five or ten years, so no confetti and little luck. It's hard times all around. My family decided that since 13 is supposed to be an unlucky number and we're among the unluckiest people we know, all that unluck would cancel itself out and this could be an okay year.

The first resume I sent out this year, one in the field I want to get into, got me an e-mail asking for an interview two days after I sent it. I found a sequin, recognizably from one of my daughter's shirts, on the kitchen floor not fifteen minutes ago.

Logic says that shirt went through the kitchen yesterday on its way between the dryer and her bedroom, but I don't care, I'm taking it! Random sign from the glitter angels! Confidence!

I'm so sick with nerves that I only slept an hour and a half last night. I'll tell you guys how it goes.

One Thousand Dollars

It turns out that panhandling in the nearest city is illegal. Here I thought I'd finally come up with a way to scrape up some money—just the thousand dollars I need to get into low-income housing—and already my dream of standing terrified on a street corner hating myself for a day has been dashed, because I went online to find out if it was even possible.

Of course, apparently I'd be lucky to make seven dollars a day in this part of the country, but begging being illegal is more of a deterrent to me than it not being lucrative.

Why, you may ask, did I decide to look up panhandling?

The answer is: I'm highly discouraged by my continued unemployment, and today I overheard my sister telling my dad that she wants me and my daughter out of her house. Ouch.

My sister is a great person, really. She can't stand kids, though. She doesn't understand them, and thinks that being patient with them is a waste of time when you could just yell at them, tell them how horrible they are, and send them to their rooms. Because our mom doing that to us didn't have any long-term effects. *sarcasm*

Anyhow, it's a good thing she has dogs, and not human children. She's amazing with dogs. Hers are well-trained, and don't mind if she cusses at them when they bark at inopportune moments. But I digress.

All that's keeping me from moving into cheap housing is approximately $1,000. I owe a couple hundred on an old electricity bill, I need five hundred as a down-payment, and I need some to get all the utilities turned on. No clue how I'd keep the utilities on once I was there, but I can cross that bridge when I come to it. Right?

As much as I disliked my grandmother's house, I'm tempted to ask if I can move back in. They're getting ready to sell it, but I have to live somewhere, and that's the only place where there aren't other people to be annoyed at having an eleven year old girl around being moody and dramatic. Because, let's face it: eleven year old girls are moody and dramatic.

I get this. I don't know how all my family who raised kids, or who were kids, can honestly believe that a child of any age can behave perfectly at all times. Or maybe they're why I'm so hard on myself. I was expected to be perfect, and I did not succeed. I did not succeed pretty hard, in the long run.

The holiday season approaches, and so does the return of the choice I've faced too many times over the past years; where am I going to live? How can I keep a roof over my daughter's head with no money and apparently no marketable skills?

Unless you want to pay me for blogging.

Some Things Never Change

My dad sounded a little too cheerful when he asked to take me out to lunch tomorrow. I am, as a result, filled with dread.

How can someone sound too cheerful? you may ask, and why does that frighten you to your very core?

It's rather simple, really. Whenever my parents had really horrible news, they would try to temper that news with a treat. They'd act a little too casual, and the treat would be completely out of nowhere, because usually it was something they'd been trying to hide. For example: My sister has never watched the movie Forrest Gump through to the end.

One fine spring day, our parents pushed the couch up in front of the tv to make things cozier, told us we were going to have a movie and ice cream sundaes later, then sat us down and announced that my mom was moving out. My sister had no clue until that moment, and she did not enjoy her sundae, nor did she watch the movie all the way through.

I loved my sundae, and I loved the movie. Of course, my bedroom was directly across the hall from my parents' and I was a bit older, so the announcement was wonderful for me. No more being unable to sleep until 3 am listening to them argue! And a sundae on top of it all!

Once in a while I'd wake up and find that my father had taken my sister out for the day, and that announcement was always met with dread. It meant that my mother wanted to tell me something truly horrible, perhaps break my spirit and remind me what a horrible person I was for having repeatedly done something wrong over the previous weeks or months. The problem was me, and she needed several hours in which to set me straight, while my sister went bowling or fishing or out to the park.

So any time I get an unexpected treat just for me, I'm thrown into anxiety. I asked my dad if my sister and brother-in-law were also invited to lunch, which is always the case, but no, it's something just for us. *shudder*

So, what am I so afraid of?

Well, number 1: homelessness. I've been living in someone else's house as a favor to me since December 2009. My then-best-friend kicked me out after three and a half months because I was still unemployed, and she and her boyfriend had decided that not only did I not actually want a job, or I'd have one already, but that I was never going to amount to anything, and I should give up and try to get on disability.

I then moved into my aunt's house. She didn't actually have room, but I had just been kicked out, and it was that or let me live in my car. I stayed with her for about two months before I managed to get into Grad School. Unfortunately, I flunked out after two semesters because I couldn't wrap my mind around Accounting, and my school did not offer any kind of Master's degree in any kind of art or design.

So it was on to grandma's house. I was there for several months before I was notified (by my father) that my grandmother wanted me to leave, because I wasn't the companionship she'd hoped for. I'm an introvert, you see, and sitting quietly in the same room with someone feels like good company. I don't like to fill the air with words unless I have something to say which I think is important.

My grandmother was terribly injured, went into surgery, and ended up staying with my father, because his house is wheelchair accessible and hers is not. This extended my stay at her house to nearly two years, because I took care of her pets and kept the house from being abandoned/broken into.

My sister kindly, generously, amazingly, asked me to come live with her for reasons such as the horrible heat wave, horror at my living situation, and hope that she could help me out. I've been here four months and I'm still unemployed, even with her tossing every job she hears about my way (yes, I apply for them all), and now it's into autumn, which means the Seasonal Affective Disorder is kicking in. I'm sleepy all the time, I'm no longer oozing the hope and enthusiasm I was when I first got here.

So, back around to lunch with my dad tomorrow. There's a chance he just wants to have lunch with only me, though we don't get along for more than the shortest amounts of time. There is also a chance that he wants to pass on a complaint from someone else because he thinks it's helpful.

I'm taking bets.

Depression is Depressing. III

You don't want to hear it, so I just won't say it.

That's why I'm so quiet.

Failure is Not My Muse

NaNoWriMo gives me the following advice:

Tell everyone you know that you're writing a novel in November. [...] Seriously. Email them now about your awesome new book. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.

Humiliation. Well, that used to be a great motivator for me. Lately, however, the fear of failure has been sending me directly to failure. For example: Recently, a job became available as desk help at a local hotel. I was incredibly excited by this. So excited that I began to worry about being rejected. Getting an e-mail from a fast food place telling me that they have no open positions I am qualified for is an annoyance. Getting one from some massive Graphic Design company is disappointing. This was something which felt reachable.

The first day, I sat at my computer and tried to distract myself enough to calm down. The second day, swamped with guilt, I lay in bed alternately staring at the wall and sleeping. The third day, I hid beneath the covers and cried.

I later confessed my nerves to my father, a huge mistake on my part. I should know better by now than to hope for encouragement. Instead, he reminded me that a former boss of mine (a woman I couldn't stand, who fired me when Workforce Development stopped paying her back half my wages) eventually left to work at this hotel.

"I was fired from that job, you know," I told him. He just grinned. I don't know why. Why was he grinning at me? He seemed to think it amusing. Anyway, I spent the next two days alternately sitting at my computer and sleeping, and never went in to get an application.

Despite the likelihood that I will not manage to write a 50,000 word rough draft of a novel, I have told a couple people.

I will not be telling my family. As much as I long for their approval and support, that is not what I would get, if anyone managed to read it. Whatever I write seems to apply directly to them. My sister read a play I wrote, which was based on characters I'd used and changed multiple times; she decided that I had made her a cripple and was bashing her.

Actually, the only reason the main character had a brother at all was that I originally created the pair for a role-playing site which needed more single male characters. I crippled the brother for the same reason I killed his mother in my play, to give my protagonist a deep source for his guilt. Not because my parents are divorced and... I don't even know why I'd injure my sister. Except that she trashed my work.

So there's no reason for me to worry about pleasing anyone with what I write. I'm telling you, because you're all very supportive and I love you all to pieces, and two of my friends know. If I fail, I will not feel humiliated, and that's good. Now I just need to decide what to write about.

Depression Theatre: Popping the Bubble

I understand why people kill themselves, and I shouldn't, and I don't want to. I believe in Hell, even when I'm so pissed off and disillusioned that it doesn't feel like anything could exist but the pain. There's not even a reason for it! I cried when a nurse practitioner told me it was low thyroid, because that can cause depression. That's a reason. And I cried again when my regular doctor took me off the thyroid medicine because it was making my heart race, making it impossible to sleep or think, and because that meant it was just depression again.

If you believe the whole brain chemicals thing, it shouldn't make a difference. If you don't believe it, just knowing me is enough to prove it's got to be more than dramatics. I can't control it, God, I wish I could. My eleven year old has better emotional control than I do. She'll freak out at little things, because kids do that, but in half an hour, she's back to herself. Half an hour later, I'm still reminding myself not to do anything stupid. Same an hour later. Same for days, sometimes.

I even have reasons to be depressed, real reasons to be ever-so-slightly discouraged about life. I worked my ass off in school, worked my ass off to go to college, and it seems like life keeps shitting on me. It shits on everyone, I know. It's my own fault for making bad decisions, I know. I should be able to just get over it, just work through it like everyone else does, but the littlest things can set me back so far.

Someone reminds me of my faults, and I'm useless for days, just hating myself. I know logically that I'm smart, I'm a good writer, good designer, good artist, good parent, but none of that means anything because smart doesn't get me a job. Good writer, designer, artist, doesn't get me a job, doesn't get me I don't know, love or something. I don't even know what I want.

Do I want a house of my own? Yes. I would like to get my life out of storage after almost three years. I would like my daughter to have a space all of her own, and all of her toys. I'd like to be able to stop telling her I'm sorry, that's in storage, and tell my family, I can't get that for you, or I can't find out, because that's in storage, too.

I'm not a big guy, so I let someone else pack the storage unit. He and his friend piled stuff up in such a cluster that I can't get it apart without either injuring myself or going into a rage and just breaking it all. My paintings are supporting box corners and there are beer bottles scattered around. My belongings don't remain in storage because I'm lazy.

This is where I'd complain again about being unemployed if I hadn't done so a hundred times before. A note on that subject, though. Pizza Hut sent me an e-mail after I applied saying they don't have any jobs I'm qualified for.

My friends get sick of the drama. I don't blame them.

I feel like a complete waste of life having to hide the scissors when I get like this. I've never hurt myself like that, and I don't like even the urge to do it. I can't control that, either. I don't sit down and say, I'm miserable. I want to cut to punish myself/to show people how much I hurt/to remind myself that I really am alive, and I can still feel.

I've been over that before, too.

Why do you even bother?

Because I don't have a choice.

There's always a choice. Your choices got you here.

I tried! I tried to do the best I could. I listened to my parents even when I didn't want to, I never did drugs, I never sneaked out, I didn't even teach myself to cuss until college. I was nice to people who were mean to me. I've tried to be everything anyone ever wanted me to be, so why can't something go right?

Because you don't get anywhere being nice. People are attracted to confidence. They want someone who knows their own mind. What the hell do you know?

I don't know.

Exactly.

And I'd continue trying to convince my inner critic that I'm worth something, but the mind blank just got me. Sometimes it's annoying. Sometimes I'm in the middle of telling someone something, maybe explaining to my sister why I'm acting even more pseudo-emo than usual. Then poof I've got no clue what I was saying.

It's trying to get me again. I'm having trouble stringing together sentences, but right now, I'm fine with that. I was feeling really bad a few minutes ago.

So, to paraphrase: I was having suicidal thoughts and self-harm thoughts, and chose to blog while listening to Don't Jump, by Tokio Hotel. The depression bubble popped. I'm still miserable, but no longer leaking from my face (highly unpleasant, that) and no longer thinking, self-harm or otherwise. If I wasn't out of cereal, I'd go have myself a bowl of comfort food.

Moment passed, nothing to see here. Move along.

*insert amusing cheese factory anecdote here*

No One

One of the many problems with long-term depression is that it doesn't stop. There's no three-month period where you're sunshine and roses, and everyone can just enjoy your company and forget the depression ever existed. It's constant, and that makes it extremely difficult to find anyone to talk to when you desperately need to talk.

Everyone has problems. Everyone has bills they need to pay, everyone has things they need to do and not enough time to do them. Everyone has people who need things from them, and that's not a complaint, it's a fact of life. People have problems.

I can't ask my friends and family to put their problems aside and listen to my unfounded worries (or my completely legitimate worries) every time I have a stress attack. They know I'm stressed. They know I'm broke, that I hate myself so much sometimes that I can hardly stand to take another breath, and there's really nothing they can do about it. They can't take care of me.

I should be able to take care of myself, anyway. I should. But for some reason, I can't deal with stress the way "normal" people can. I can go take a shower, try to read a book, snuggle under some blankets, eat comfort food, tell myself repeatedly that someone loves me, and the entire time I'm still on the verge of breaking down.

Does it really matter if someone loves me? Not really. In the face of crippling depression, logically knowing that someone loves me doesn't help. If I die, they'll be miserable for a while, but they'll go on, because that's what people do. When I'm in heaven or hell or purgatory or limbo or being reborn as a dung beetle, is it really going to bother me that a handful of mortals on planet Earth will be left mourning? Probably not. They'll comfort each other, assure each other that they'll see their loved ones in heaven.

No matter how many times I try to convince myself that I've made a positive difference in someone's life, or that I might in the future, I still feel empty and useless. There's nothing I can do that no one else in the world could do. If I don't do it, someone will fill my place.

No happy ending this time. That's life; suck it up.

Santé Mentale

My mental health is far too precarious for me to feel like a functional human being. It likely doesn't help that the only people I have regular face-to-face contact with (due largely to a combination of location, funds, and lack of employment) are a ten-year-old girl and a 54-year-old man. There is the desk clerk at the library, but I don't consider handing someone my library card and being told You're on computer three quality time. Call me picky.

I'm in an odd position, actually. I'm what you might call a loner, or perhaps socially inept, or even misanthropic. I don't feel a need to constantly be around other people, and have never been a social butterfly, but there comes a time now and then when I find myself in company and realize I actually enjoy it.

I've been craving social interaction lately, which is odd enough on its own, but what's even stranger is realizing that I no longer know where to find it. My college friends have had a couple years to move away and get distracted with other things, and since I've got to drive fifteen or so miles to get to the nearest town and I'm broke as dirt, I find myself testing my Internet to see how far I can stretch 5GB per month.

I'm freakin' out, man.

Winter is hard enough as it is. The seasonal affective disorder kicks in and when I'm not drooping from a desperate need to sleep, I'm on-edge, trying not to have a breakdown. No, I will not throw things and scream and kick and generally make an ass of myself because doing so doesn't actually make me feel better, it just makes me feel out of control. I enjoy control.

You would think that all this would motivate me into a thorough job search. I want a job, I want to look for a job, I know that I have skills which would make me a valuable employee, but my mind is all over the place, unable to concentrate on much of anything.

You're doing a pretty damned good job right now, you say.

My mind really is all over the place. I'm just a really good writer, wink, nudge.

I'm good at psyching myself out. If I can't concentrate, how am I going to function in the workplace? If I have no social skills, how will I ever make it through a job interview, assuming I can make it to a job interview? Strangely, when I get to a certain point in a high-stress situation, my never-ending thoughts clear, I go on autopilot, and I cruise through with smiles and grace. It is, however, difficult to push myself into that state, so I continue hovering on the edge of OMGWTF SHOOT ME. (Don't really, please. Unless you feel like it, then shoot to kill, not to injure.)

And then we have suicidal thoughts. I've been dealing with depression for so long that it feels normal to have them now and then. Just your average little, I could easily drive into that solid concrete wall or I wonder how many of my medications could kill me if I downed the whole bottle? but they pass as quickly as that and it's back to regular life.

Mid-winter I have to think about it for a while before I can move on. I have family who likes to look at the corpse before it's buried, I could at least make sure I die without facial wounds, and my meds would probably just give me seizures and make me puke. Then I'd have medical bills on top of everything else. Damn.

Just completely lost my train of thought, a side effect of overstressing.

So I lost my cheese factory turtle recently. Can't believe I still even had that thing.

This is my anticlimactic ending. C'est la vie.

Shaken, Not Stirred

Ever had a nightmare so profound that you can't shake it off? I've had many, leading me to such rational acts as telling my father not to go to a certain store for a week, and freaking out whenever he wore a certain shirt. Last night's was one for the books. The kind where you wake sweating, feeling nauseous and fairly certain you've been crying, and for the rest of the day you're on edge, praying nothing happens and afraid to do anything, lest it turn out to be real after all.

Warning: Parental Fear Trigger ahead.

The realism didn't help any. I was sitting in this very house alone, my grandmother in physical rehab, during Thanksgiving break, and got a phone call that my daughter had died. She'd been in a horrible car accident and a piece of iron had gone through her eye. Of course, countless times during this nightmare I got visuals of exactly that, of my child screaming in terror, and I was shattered. My child, one of my best friends, my favorite pet, my life's work, something that will never happen again in my life, gone. Just gone.

I was stricken with grief. I didn't want to live anymore, didn't want to eat, and sometimes I was in shock, like I'd just blink and she'd walk through the door. In fact, part of me insisted it had to be a nightmare, and I'd look at the door, knowing she was about to come in, but she didn't. There was no closure, and I couldn't handle it. I couldn't see her again, it didn't feel real, and how was I supposed to go looking for a job when I my world had just died?

And I was still alone, but more alone than ever. My family was worried, but nobody did anything, as always. If you don't talk about it, it goes away, except for me it wasn't going away and it never would.

I was told I should move to the city and try to get a job, now there wouldn't be anything holding me back, and all I could think was I don't care if she was 'holding me back,' I don't feel free, I feel lost. I had the thought that I could finally move to California, that I'd never have to see my ex again, but if I expected to feel relief, I didn't. What if I did move? I'd be living with someone who has a child of her own, a daughter only a year younger than mine. Could I handle it? Would envy kill me? Self-pity? Would I get attached to someone else's child in a sad attempt to replace my own? Could I live with that? Would I ever be a functional human being again?

I didn't know, and I don't know. I woke sweating, nauseous, and spent, and I've spent all day dreading the possibility that my phone might ring, despite knowing that it didn't happen. When I walked into the kitchen this afternoon, I looked at the door, listening for her, and I knew she wouldn't come in. She's due home Sunday night.

I should have called my ex to talk to her, and for a while it seemed like the perfect solution, but I didn't think of it until nighttime, and at this hour, I'd be leaving a shaky-sounding voicemail begging to hear from my daughter in the morning. My ex doesn't return my calls when he has her, though. She doesn't call, and that would be infinitely worse than just trying to make it through the day, just reminding myself that even if the memories of the dream feel as real as any other memories I have, none of it happened.

I still feel sick and exhausted, I don't want to drive anywhere, and I hate that anything that takes my mind off it is only temporary.

So one time, at the cheese factory, someone walked up to me in my new hoodie, and without preamble, cut the ties that pull the hood tight because we weren't allowed to have any loose items or jewelry above the waist. So I clipped a stuffed turtle to my belt loop in protest, and no one ever said a word against it.

I made that damn turtle a raincoat out of an empty bag of latex gloves, and it worked with me for over a year. Yes, I've told that story before, but I told it better this time.

It's All In Your Head

I had forgotten about the anxiety part of depression, for the most part. Yes, I remember that one time in high school where my mind was spinning with so many thoughts that I simply blacked out, and yes, I've had sleepless nights since, but that doesn't hold a candle to actually spending four nights off my main depression/anxiety medication.

If you think it's all in my head, you're right. I'm trapped in here with it, and though I've never had a true manic episode, thank God, there's such a fine line between the two sides of bipolar that the depression is all worked up and I can hardly hold a thought.

I'll regret posting this later.

I'll call myself an idiot, then remind myself that I'm not technically stupid, and that there are worse things than this. I'm alive, right? Those thoughts won't comfort me, but they'll keep me busy for a while not wishing myself dead. Because really, do dead people care if they leave behind a handful of grieving and guilt-riddled people? I think not.

But I'm not wanting to die, so that's a moot point. The point is that I managed to sleep for three hours, which I'm proud of, before being trapped in my head in bed for the next two hours, messing up my covers, and thinking and rethinking the same things over and over.

How am I going to get a job, no one's hiring. I should shower and walk around town asking for a job today. On three hours sleep, on the edge of freaking out? Good luck, loser. I'm not a loser. No, I'm just a waste of space. No, you're not. You're right, this is unhealthy thinking, you should take the day off and try to relax. relax how?! I can't freaking relax! Think about something calming, think about how well that writing is going. I wanna write right now! Ugh, five a.m., she's asleep. You should be asleep. Why can't I sleep?!

Only say all those sentences at the same time repeatedly for two hours.

So hopefully my doctor will call in my prescription today, because if this is day four, I'm not going to make it to my appointment at the end of November.