Depression Talk

I’m on vacation this week, a vacation that started out with my nephew howling at the train station “Please don’t move away forever, Auntie!!”. And for a moment, just one little moment, I thought of threatening to stay away FOREVER if he ever wanders right into the ring IN FRONT OF MY HORSE while I am riding him again. But then I figured, hey, the poor kid is probably still traumatized from the time I fed him hummingbird food in a bottle at three a.m. He likely doesn’t need any more tramautic experiences at the hands of his beloved Auntie.

My vacation was interrupted today by going on a date, and when I say that it was interrupted by a date I mean that it actually was. Dating for me is like a full time job; the stress and anxiety and amount of workplace-appropriate shoes I need is really that important. I went on a date and it was fun and he was nice and in the end, CAN I GO BACK TO BEING SINGLE NOW?

And PHEW, the answer to that one is always yes because every time I meet someone I fancy just a little bit, he turns out to be a stalker or insane or unemployed or the father of five children or a chronic back-waxer. And I just can’t put my poor mother through another of THOSE types of men.

As a person suffering from Insanity, I have a grave fear of watching anything that relates to psychiatric hospitals. This has been my fear since the first few times I suspected that I wasn’t right ‘in the head’: if I mentioned it to anyone, I would be immediately descended upon by large, burly men with restraints and syringes full of Haldol. And while I do typically find myself in a trance over large burly men, and I am a proponent of the use of presecription sedatives, I’m not so big on the restraints.

Tonight Mal and I are settling in for a quiet night of stuffing our faces and lazing on the couch in unflattering pajamas. Mine are so unsettlingly hideous that her father accused me of stealing jogging pants from his closet. Because clearly, only a family man in his mid forties would be seen wearing some of the clothes that I wear.

I happen to be a horror movie fanatic. By fanatic, I mean someone who can spend three months of her life watching only those movies that pertain to chainsaw, axe, serial, and posessed-by-demons movies, and I rarely ever flinch.

By the end of Girl, Interrupted, I fully intend to be hiding under Mal’s mother’s kitchen table, clutching my CrazyMeds and crying out for mercy, in a manner akin Mel Gibson in the final scenes of Braveheart.

But I think I can do it.

Life at the Ranch House has seemed stressful lately. Perhaps that’s because since the twenty-third of May we’ve had something going on literally EVERY SINGLE DAY. No joke. Eight weeks of radiation therapy overlapped my moving home, graduating university, buying a horse, and going to berry season. Since we returned home from BerryLand, we’ve had visitors or something on each day.

Now, some of it has been brought on myself, no doubt. The horse, garden, yard work and so forth I’ve been doing? All my choosing. And of course, we could have opted out of berry season this year, but really… its kind of a must for the female members of this household to attend berry season.

So, I’ve booked myself a vacation. Sort of last minute, I suppose, but last night I talked to my dear friend Mal, and it was decided that I should come stay with her for six days. Hurrah!

Bring on the beer drinking, sleeping in, ready access to high speed internet, chain smoking, late nights, napping all day, reading mindless novels, AND NOT SWEATING FOR ONE SINGLE SECOND.

Damn, this is gonna be good.

If someone’s future mother-in-law whispers under her breath that she thinks you’re crazy, does that make you crazier than you really are?

The anger from yesterday seems to have subsided. Perhaps I was just over-caffeinated and bored, I’m not sure, but I spent a small portion of my time sweating in the barn today and I feel much better.

Also, The Ranch house has cleared out, at least a little bit, and silence almost reigns. Though not quite.

I still feel slightly bleh.

Bleh.

I’ve been in a blind rage all day today, no telling why. I woke up perfectly content, rode my horse, recieved a call from my dearest Berry Queen who later arrived with her kids. We went fishing briefly and then returned back to The Ranch to swim the afternoon away. I’ve been on edge and ready and willing to holler, screech, and contemplate beating anything that crosses my path. Including inanimate objects.

I don’t know why I’m in such a foul mood: Everything is going perfectly. The cancer treatment is behind us, we made it through another berry season. I have my horse, my beautiful, wonderful Thoroughbred gelding who I love. He lets me scratch his ears and kiss his nose AND he lets me ride him. Seriously. Like winning the horse lottery, that one is.

And yet this rage consumes me over every action every person or thing takes. So far today I’ve considered taking up kickboxing, a vow of silence, buddhism, alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, and a combination of any of those things listed. At one point I was thinking that perhaps I’d feel better if I took up all of the above at the same time.

I just can’t work out the logistics of a drunken, sedated, silent, praying girl trying to kick box her way into happiness.

I feel bleh right now. That’s not to say that I *am* bleh, or that my life is bleh. But I’m tired, cranky, and I need a nap. I’ve missed dinner at The Ranch now because of social obligations that DIDN’T EVEN HAPPEN. And nothing makes me crankier than when my plans change. NOTHING.

Except running out of beer. That makes me MUCH, MUCH crankier.

Moving on has never been one of my strong points. I remember everything. I once organized twenty years worth of photos because I remembered every outfit I had in them and what year I wore them, along with who bought them for me. I remember everything.

Sometimes I worry that I will never be able to move on from anything, and that I will spend the rest of my life dwelling on something that was never meant to happen, and that as a result I will miss out on the things that I am really supposed to be living.

Like, this guy. I just can’t get him out of my head, and I really, really don’t want to come off sounding like I spend ANY TIME AT ALL listening to Kylie Minogue, because I totally don’t, but really, the thought of him will JUST NOT GO AWAY.

And then I sit and I wonder, what if I never, ever move on? What if I’m stuck on this same old topic for the rest of the years of my life, and when I’m elderly and needing geriatric care while I still live in the room above my parents’ kitchen? What then?

I finished the book called ‘Odd Girl Out’. I strongly recommend it to everyone. It is a detailed account of many girls’ struggle with female bullying.

Every time I think of girls bullying, I think of an episode of Seinfeld. Jerry is talking about beating up people as a way of solving problems. Elaine states that girls don’t do that, and Jerry asks how girls deal with issues between them. “Easy,” Elaine replies. “We tease them until they develop an eating disorder and then we move on.”

And while the comment is hysterically funny at the time, it is also so true.

I wish the book had led me to some conclusions on female bullying. But it didn’t. I’m still the same person I was when I picked up the book.

Only now I’m a little more enlightened on the way things really are for girls. I find comfort in knowing that I am not the only one.

I live in Canada, and as a result, the vast majority of my time is spent FREEZING MY ASS OFF. I am one of those perpetually cold people who is not happy unless she’s wearing three sweaters and has no less than two dogs, a cat, and a small child piled on top of her while she sleeps.

Summer has come here in Canada, finally, and so far we’ve had three days that I would consider hot. Today is one, the type where you head outside and within twenty minutes of working your body becomes drenched in sweat and your underwear sticks to your ass so that movement becomes all but impossible.

The cold makes me want to weep, to curl up in a little ball with fifty five blankets and seventy two pillows surrounding me, with three space heaters pointed in my direction.

And now here I am, finally able to be warm, and everywhere I go, I find myself drowning in air conditioning.

I don’t think that its really too much to ask of stores and restaurants that I BE COMFORTABLE for the two months of the year that it is actually possible for me to be so.

Hmph.

Dear You,

Its been months since I opened up the folder in my inbox devoted entirely to you. Months since I read through your letters to me and I grinned like an ass over all the wonderful things you said to me.

You sent me an email a month or so ago, and I replied and attached a photo of me on my Thoroughbred. He is huge. And I’d like to train him so that if he ever saw you, he’d stomp you like a fly. And he loves me so damn much he would, too.

I feel so free of you these days, so much so that I wonder what happened to the girl who spent three years of her life begging you to come back. You never did, but you promised again and again that you would. I’m happy that we’re apart: I’m happy that I knew you, I’m happy that I made an ass of myself in your eyes again and again because now I know so much more.

But if I am so damn happy all the time, why can’t I bring myself to delete your folder? Why can’t I get the picture of your face out of my head, and why is it that when someone walks by who smells like you, I’m brought back to everything I thought you were?

And maybe its just that you were the only one there when I left and went to the city, you were the only one who called and came to visit and all those wonderful things.

I’m done, though, I really am. I’m through hoping we’ll have another of those movie-esque scenes in an airport or when you drive up to my house in your Benz. (And if you did, my trusty steed would most certainly dent it with a hind hoof. Or maybe even a front one.)

But regardless of how through I am with you, I can’t delete your folder, and it just pisses me off every time I see it.

Sincerely,
The Girl You Used to Call Your Girl

At this time in my life, I was very withdrawn. Also at this time, the laws about selling tobacco to minors became much more strict.

I don’t know if this made me want to smoke or what, but one day I was wandering up the dirt road to the corner store and I decided just to see if the girl would sell me a packet of cigarettes.

She did.

So I snuck off one evening at sunset to have a cigarette. I didn’t particularly like the first one, although it didn’t make me turn green and hack and cough the way it does in the movies. I did, however, have a slight head rush afterwards, I was a little bit dizzy, and I thought, Great. This is what Cancer feels like. I’m dying.

But the feeling subsided and afterwards I felt relaxed and happy. At the same time I was anxious because I was ever so sure that my parents would look at me and know, instantly, that I’d been smoking.

But I wandered out for a walk the next night and the night after that, with a can of pop hidden out in the bushes, behind an old shed, behind the public school in town, and I’d sit alone and I’d smoke and I really, really enjoyed those evenings. I was alone, I had time to myself. I wasn’t a loser during my smoking time in the evening: I didn’t have to watch television shows focussed on people with social lives, I didn’t have to listen to the phone not ring for me.

Smoking made me ok during that time. Smoking made me have something to look forward to in the day, something I could have all to myself that no one could take from me. I felt that as long as I had a packet of cigarettes, I would make it through another day.

And thus, smoking became the first vice.

So, after getting to the seventh grade, I became different.

I was no longer loud and boisterous. My oldest brother used to call me Giggling Brigade. He lost that soon after, and looking back, I think that realizing that I was no longer known as the giggler was the first time I realized that my personality had shifted.

I said before that I learned how to draw up into myself. I’m not sure what I mean by that. When I use that phrase, I picture a turtle drawing its head up into its shell, laying on the side of the road trying not to be noticed. I suppose that this is exactly what I did. I used to be the one to always talk to the teachers, the first to raise my hand to answer a question, the one who was always willing to share something in creative writing class.

Eventually I made myself become unknown. I would never buy any clothes that would stand out in public, I would never raise my hand to answer because, my God, what if I had been wrong? The public school me would have been able to laugh it off. The teased me? Would have dissolved into tears and willed the world to swallow me whole.

I remained this way until I started University in 2004. Once I got to highschool, I remained the silent wallflower. I did meet a boy who became my shield, my protector and my bodyguard for three years. That is not to say that I did not love him, that I did not treasure our time together: he had a role on top of the boyfriend role and I actually feel like this minute, writing him a letter and letting him know what all he actually did do for me. I suppose that some boys like the shy, quiet types who don’t have too much to say, who chew on their hands and don’t make eye contact with others. Every time I acted neurotic around people, he would squeeze my hand, arm, shoulder, whatever he could get a hold of, and say “You’re just TOO CUTE!” I learned to become my ridiculous self around him in private, and towards the end of our relationship, it was a major bone of contention. We fought and he would yell out in exasperation “Why can’t you just be yourself around everyone else? Why do you only act normal around me?!”

I suppose that even then, even after the people who tormented me had moved on to new targets and I was safe hiding behind this long term relationship, I was too ashamed to admit to him that I was the one everyone called loser. I was the one people yelled out obscenities at because the cool kids at school would laugh about it. I can’t believe, looking back, that I couldn’t tell my first real love what actually went on in my past. I told him everything, but I couldn’t manage to tell him that.

And even as I write it out here and now, I don’t know what that says about me. Am I forever scarred because of something that happened in public school? Am I forever broken because I was abnormal in the sixth through eighth grade? And even more important: Does it mean that I am fixed now, no longer broken, because I’ve come back into the loud, obnoxious, centre of attention, drunken fool that I once was?

In line with my last post, I’m not really sure what made, or makes, me different than my peers.

When I was younger, I used to bound into a room, owning it, on top of the world. No one could ever knock the giant, goofy smile off my face, and I was forever hollering out to anyone anywhere about whatever was on my mind.

I’m not sure what set me apart from the other kids in my grade. I’ve never dressed like any normal person would ever dress. I’ve always been a jeans and T-shirts kind of girl, and while my peers were experimenting with padded bras and makeup, I was more worried about writing, horseback riding, and the people I knew outside of school. I’ve forever worn hand-me-downs from my brothers and now I actually make it a point to steal their clothing whenever I get a chance.

I’m not sure if it means that I am incredibly confident in who I am, or if it means I am just that socially unaware, but I’ve rarely ever given two thoughts to my appearance. I am generally clean, as is my clothing, and beyond that, don’t expect too much. I’ve always had that ‘take me as I am’ attitude and I’ve always figured that if people were going to hang out with me, it wouldn’t be because of the super posh outfit I wore that day. Perhaps that is where I fell apart socially.

I never really thought that my attitudes and my constant exuberance would interfere with my social life. And yet, in the sixth grade, I started to be different than the other kids. They were interested in ‘going out’ with each other, they were interested in social drama and gossip about the others in the class. I was still interested in the same things I’d always been: Music, riding my horse, my favorite TV shows and on and on. Perhaps that made me immature, or perhaps I was JUST SO MATURE that they couldn’t handle me any more. I like to think it was the latter, although I do hope that not being interested in the same things as your peers is not what makes you mature or not.

I started the seventh grade the same way, at a new school. I figured that my loudmouthed self would get along wonderfully at the new school, that I would meet a whole circle of new friends and that the sixth grade horror would have ended.

But it didn’t.

I hesitate to post here exactly what it was that I went through. I was only ever physically bullied once. I didn’t bother to tell anyone except my older brothers. My brother thought that perhaps my arm had been sprained or broken and so he wrapped me up in a tensor and we didn’t bother to tell my parents. (In hindsight, that was pretty stupid because the school then wondered if perhaps I had initially hidden my glaring bruises and welts because my parents had caused them. That was a whole big mess. Ugh.)

I suppose that the worst thing about it was that people were so loud about it. To this day, I have the attitude that if you don’t want to hang out with someone, if you don’t want to be friends or whathaveyou, to just move on. But people wouldn’t. They were as loud and obnoxious with their comments and their put-downs as I used to be with my attitude towards everything.

So, I did what I could. I stopped talking to people. I quit answering in class. I did what I could to be unnoticed at all times, regardless of anything else. I learned how to draw up into myself so that I wouldn’t hear what people were saying, or notice what they were doing. I went with my Walkman everywhere I went. I never did my homework so that I could have detention and not have to go outside at recess.

I suppose that made me different in and of itself as well.

I’m reading a book right now on the topic of girl bullying, a topic that interests me greatly.

I don’t like to blame things for me turning out the way I did, but I often wonder if my experiences in public school. In short, I was the biggest loser in my school. I say that and people laugh and say I’m exaggerating, but the sad thing is that I am not. Living with no friends was… hard.

I don’t know what made me into the girl I was by the time I reached the end of the eighth grade. I started out in life as the same girl I am now: Loud, boisterous, obnoxious, outgoing, and always laughing. Eventually I became a person holed up within myself.

I realized how much I had changed at the end of the eighth grade. We had been given art folders that we had to decorate ourselves. Because of my intense need to not be noticed, I rarely completed these projects any more. But at the beginning of the seventh grade, I had been my usual self. I didn’t care if people thought that my picture of my beagle puppy looked like a duck with extra legs. I wanted to draw a beagle, so I did. I had used multiple colors to draw my name in big, bold letters. But two years later, my art work was all either random patterns of colors running into each other, or nothing. Because I was so desperate not to be noticed.

I waffle now that I’m older. In certain situations, I’m a total wallflower. In others, I never shut up. I’m the drunken fool laughing and screeching and dancing.I’ve had people tell me that they’re never sure who I am. Its true. I don’t really either. I’m not sure which persona matches me better. The quiet one who sits back and doesn’t mae eye contact. Or the girl whose voice is so overblown and loud that you can’t help but see me in public because that much NOISE is hard to miss.

The problem is that I never know which persona I’m faking. Am I faking the quiet me, and I’m really the loud me? Or am I the loud girl who occasionally pretends to be quiet?