Depression Talk

Sometimes people say things in jest that can leave you spinning. I drove home from work today with two of the kids in the car fighting back tears over what a co-worker said as he made a joke.

I know that he was joking. At the time, I laughed, brushed it off, everyone else got a laugh out of my response. It went well.

But then I had to deal with the aftermath. When I got the kids back to their house, my best friend was there working. (Are you confused about my working situation? Oh, privacy!) My first instinct was to throw my head on her shoulder and weep, because what the co-worker said left me wanting to pick up my life and leave for the wild blue without ever looking back.

Instead, I’m going to list five positive things about today. Its easier to write nice things on your blog than it is to pack up and leave, anyhow.

1. I took a nap on the couch with Dixie and Kami instead of going duck hunting. It was a luxurious nap and I awoke to the sound of my nephew having an afternoon snack. Very, very quietly. And when he saw my open eyes, he yelled “Granny! I WOKE UP AUNTIE! But I PROMISE I WAS BEING QUIET!!!”. Thanks, Babe.

2. My car has three quarters of a tank of gas in it.

3. I have a FULL day off tomorrow. I don’t have to go to work, go to school, go to my placement for school, or get out of my bed for any reason.

4. I may spend all day in my pajamas, not because I’m spiralling into one of my fits where I do that for months on end, but BECAUSE I CAN.

5. I read to my nephew from the Bible before he went to bed. I have been doing this of late, and so far I’ve learned several things. Like, did you know that the Angel Gabriel told Elizabeth and Zechariah that they would bear their son, John, the same way he told the Virgin Mary?

One more reason to name my first born John!

Anything positive in your life lately? Jooms? Davey? Sarah?

I had a Psychology class the other day in which the teacher began by asking the difference between saying “Today I will…” And “Today I have to…”

The ‘I will’ statement is a positive choice, whereas with the ‘I have to’ has more negative connotations.

I wake up every day with a whole list of ‘I have to’s’. I wake up and think that I have to shower, I have to find something to eat at lunch, I have to go to school, I have to come home and ride my horse and go hunting and watch whatever is on TV that night. I have to write on my blogs, I have to call back the friend I haven’t called in weeks. I have to I have to do my homework, research something for an assignment, and think up something interesting to do with the kids at work.

Tonight I came home after a rather rewarding day at work looking forward to riding my horse. For the first time in weeks, I thought: I’m not going to worry about honing my equestrian skills today. I’m not going to worry that I seem to have lost any and all muscle tone in my legs, or that I can’t get the pony on the bit or into a frame for more than ninety seconds at a time. I will not be frustrated in aiming for ninety seconds of perfection in every hour, because two months ago, I lived for those ninety seconds.

Is there anything you could say “I get to” instead of saying “I have to” about?

Sarah has tagged me!

I now have to list six wierd things about me. And I must say, I’m a little upset, because I’ve been limited to SIX? Come on, now. I could write a post a day on that for a week. Sheesh.

1. My foods can’t touch each other for ANY reason. Not even if the peas have a huge crush on the potatoes, and just want to cuddle up for a moment before a torrential downpour of salt and their imminent massacre by my fork. They were grown apart, they lived apart, and they can die apart, dammit.

2. I own more pairs of socks than any one living being should ever own. It is one of my goals for this year to throw away ALL of my socks and replace ALL of them with thirty or so pairs that are all exactly the same.

3. I love underwear, like Sarah. I can never own enough pairs. Right now I’m in love with Haines’ girls boxer-briefs. Ever so comfy. I think I’ve bought about twelve pairs since I found them.

4. I’m totally grossed out, to the point of leaving an area, by people breathing in my air space. I can’t stand uncovered sneezes or coughs, and if someone belches in my airspace? I tend to dry heave. I hate nastiness and bodily functions.

5. Odd thing is, though, that my horse could snot all over my shirt for an hour every time I’m done riding him, and I could care less. Animal nastiness does not bother me nearly as much as human nastiness.

6. I frequently lament my single status, yet I hate dating. I mean, I would love to be in the middle of a relationship, but I hate the thought of meeting someone and having to get to know him and all that other crap. Like when he finds out that I hate getting flowers and that I don’t care, I don’t want to meet his mom but that in a year, she’ll likely be like one of my buds. I hate dating but I like relationships. Wierd. Sure.

I now tag Jooms because I love her!

I posted yesterday about my challenges in the workplace. I’m back in school now to finish my diploma in the field. I already have my degree, but I figured that in today’s tough job market, I need every advantage I can get.

Or at least, that’s what the television commercials about saving up for school tell me.

At any rate, as a person dealing with anxiety and depression issues, I have to say that one of the most trying parts of my job for me is keeping my cool.

I am a person entirely incapable of keeping my cool. I know this about myself and I try to keep myself under control. So far at work I’ve had one shift that has sent me spinning and wanting to lay in my bed and weep: Not for anything that any one person did, but because I hate feeling like there is any aspect of my life that is not within my grasp. I hate feeling like I am not one hundred per cent in charge of every situation.

The classes I’m taking at school right now focus on finding out who you are. I think this is mostly because we need to be sure of ourselves before we can teach youths how to be sure of themselves.

I was discussing with a professor today the ups and downs of working in this field. And I’m beginning to think that everything I’m giong through is part of an ongoing process.

The fact is that I must go on in this field without spiraling into one of my infamous fits of hysteria. I may not cry, weep, scream, or lay on the living room floor howling for hours at a time.

When I think of the events that have gone on in the past weeks that have not caused me to lose my cool completely, I’m actually quite impressed with myself.

And I suppose that this is the point, this is part of the end goal. Not only, knowing myself, putting the positive aspects of myself out there; but also recognizing and accepting the negative aspects of myself and working on controlling them so they won’t impact my professional self.

This weekend was one of those weekends that goes about testing every bit of your mental and emotional strength. I’ve started working in a group home for boys aged 12-15, and I can’t get past how up and down, up and down, every single shift is.

Hardship is a regular part of every person’s life. You just can’t get around it in this world, be it personal issues, family issues, health issues, relationship issues… Issues abound and no matter what you do, you can’t avoid them. Unless you curl up in your bed with a magnum bottle of wine and refuse to come out until springtime.

Which I’ve only done once.

That I’m willing to admit.

At any rate, I’m on this roller coaster now, learning about myself and my abilities. The thing that I like most about hardships is that once they’re said and done, you know that much more about yourself, about who you are and what you stand for.

And I like it.

If you scroll down here, you’ll notice that it was seven days ago that I posted how great I felt about giving up beer.

I’ve had a number of failures in my lifetime. Some of them have been fairly big failures and some of them took me months, and even years, to move past.

One of the hardest parts of accepting that you’ve been a miserable failure in some areas is being able to not sit at home and weep because you haven’t succeeded. I find it incredibly easy to sit at home in a heap of self-loathing without giving anything other than my sad little self a single thought. I can do this for weeks.

In fact, I’ve got it down so well that even the dog knows when I feel like this: When I do, she can typically sleep with the entirety of her body ON TOP OF MY PERSON and I don’t notice.

I’m beginning to think that perhaps even being a failure takes learning and practice, because this time, I’m doing my best to not engage in these self-loathing behaviours. Sure, I may have eaten half a bag of Chee-Tos and an entire tray of Oreos for dinner. With a can of diet pop. Because that totally makes sense.

But I ate my Chee-Tos and Oreos WITHOUT feeling miserable.

I’m growing as a person, I suppose, because without failures I would never really know what success feels like. The successes I’ve had in school, in educating myself, in starting a new job, in my barn and with my horse: These are all little tastes of a very, very big something I hope to have one day.

If giving up beer, if being petrified of a relationship that goes beyond the third date, if my whole history of running from anything that gets too tough weren’t a part of me, perhaps the successes I do get to taste now and then wouldn’t be nearly so sweet.

And I really don’t want the things I love most to lose any of their sweetness in my world.

When I started out this sixty five days of not drinking, I didn’t know where I wanted to go with it. I thought that my mind would be clear and made up: I thought that at the end of that period of time, I would have a definite idea of how I feel about alcohol.

I think that at a certain point in my life, I became defined by being the one with the beer in her hand. I have an entire circle of friends who don’t know the other sides of me that even exist: The quiet, pensive, serious, studious side of me. They see the Saturday Night me, the me without a care in the world.

And that bothered me.

The Saturday Night me is not a me who I dislike. Quite the opposite, I love that now and then I can get up and dance, laugh and look like I’m loving it. Typically, I’m not even inebriated when I hit the dance floor at a club. But if I’ve got the beer in hand, people think that I am. As a result, I’m covered. If I trip and fall over my own two feet? I’m a drunken fool, rather than a really bad dancer.

A bad week, an asshat doctor, an exhausting wedding, no date, a painful hairstyle, confusion about my work and my position at school: I ended up drinking on Saturday night.

Are those lame, pathetic excuses? Or is it a matter of me not caring enough to continue with my beer-fast? Does it really speak volumes about my character that I hate being in public next to the woman who is the centre of attention?

I don’t know what it says about me that I didn’t make it. I had a few drinks on Saturday. It didn’t lead to a bender. I still made it forty days and I plan to go another twenty-five days from there.

I don’t know what it means, but I failed on my mission.

And I’m trying to be ok with that.

Depression makes you feel like there is nothing you can do to make anything in your life better. I think that everyone goes through phases in their life when everything seems bland and hopeless, and most of the time, we don’t know what to do about those feelings.

My mother frequently feels that the way to feel better about yourself or your life is to clean something. A dear friend and I were discussing depression today and she’s received that advice from four or five people now. Just clean the sink, and your life will magically turn itself around.

I’ve been a firm believer of the clean sink philosophy since I was quite young. When I first moved away from home to go to school and live in Hell, I could lay happily in the depths of despair for days, content to know that my sink was clean and so clearly, all was not lost.

Of course, like so many things that we do in this life, it is not actually about the sink being clean. Its about having gotten up, having made yourself a goal, and having achieved that goal before collapsing back into bed.

So, clean the sink. Your life may be a shambles, you may have no clue as to what you are doing with yourself, and you might be fucking up royally at work every time you go there.

But hey! The sink will be clean when you get home.

I was the maid of honor in a wedding this weekend, a wedding that has been planned for some time now (I’m thinking at least two years). Somehow, this wedding managed to sneak up on us; however, and we were caught almost totally by surprise on Friday night. The decorations were graciously donated by a relative of the groom’s family, and they were beautifully done. however, there were a few places that needed a touch more spice. So the bride and I found ourselves hacking through the woods, through the back of my parents’ farm, through my garden, in and out of ditches and gravel pits looking for fall decorations: Corn, cat-tails, red leaves.

After that, we were at the reception hall until almost ten o’clock at night deciding where the head table should go. Of course, following that, the bride and I COULD NOT SLEEP. So, like typical girls, we took to having fits of giggling until the wee hours. We both woke up early and stared into he darkness before one of the longest days in my life commenced.

The bride cried when she said her vows, the maid of honor tripped on her high heels on her way up the aisle; the wind was cold and the groom was mortified when he accidentally dropped cake down the front of his new wife’s wedding dress.

All in all, a wonderful day.

I-Escape is a method used with people in crisis. It is part of what I’m learning about in school. Essentially, it deals with the steps you use in debriefing people about a crisis they’ve just entered, how they felt about it, what they can do the next time, make a plan for the next time a similar situation pops up, and then re-enter the situation.

The thing that is killing me about this is that having gone into a mini-crisis of my own this past weekend, I can’t follow the steps myself. What kind of leader will I make to people who need me later on down the road?

I need to take the necessary steps to turn my behaviour around but at this point?

I really don’t know how.

I posted a while back about breaking up with beer, and our breakup has gone well so far. The first three weeks were the hardest, and I wondered if I needed to seek out some outside help to talk it through. I mean, I have a number of people I can talk to at any time with regards to drinking, but I strongly doubt that any of them realize how I feel when I want a drink. (How bad does that make me sound? Bad, bad, bad.)

It has gotten easier as time has gone on, and I’ve found myself thinking of a beer at the end of a few rough days this past week.

I think the most surprising element here is that even though I do want one, I’m not feeling as though I am in need of one.

Stranger still, I am actually feeling turned off by the thought of beer lately. I’ve been feeling much better about my physique since I gave it up: I don’t wake up in the morning with an air-filled beer belly any more, and I never have that belchy feeling that you have to try and hide because you’re just such a damn lady.

The wedding is this Saturday and initially, I was terrified of being in a crowd without a bottle in hand to keep me company. (Hey, if you’ve no date to hold hands with…)

I’m feeling more and more confident as time goes by, more and more happy with my decision to stop with this unhealthy habit before it gets the better of me.

I still can’t decide if I will celebrate with a drink when my 65 days are up. I don’t know when they will be up, for that matter.

Did you read that? It is on my mind so infrequently that I have stopped counting the days and I am not rushing to my calendar this moment to find out.

I’m so proud of myself this week. So very, very proud of me.

I’m the Maid of Honor in a wedding this weekend, the wedding that is the reason my hair is five hundred and forty eight feet long. If it were up to me, the reception would be held at a reputable hairdressers’ salon, and the bride and groom would clink delicate champagne glasses together as the hair is chopped from my head. Somewhere near the scalp, preferably.

As part of my duty, I am making the guest book. Now, typically, this would require me leaving my house, going to a store, buying a guest book, and coming back home to laze on the couch. But, no. I had to go and have this wonderful idea that would make a lovely memory book of the guest book.

I decided to make it a scrap book of the bride and groom’s life, with alternating pages for guests to leave messages on.

Crafts and neatness have never been my forte. I am the worst Obsessive-Compulsive person in the world, because my handwriting is atrocious and I can not do anything in a straight line. I’m surprised that I can drive my car to work every day without killing people. Lots of people.

All those teeny tiny stickers with letters on them? Make me want to impale myself on sharp farm implements. The cutting tiny things out? Smash me in the face with a shovel. The glue? MY GOD, THE GLUE.

My hands sweat, my heart rate increases, my stomach tightens, and my legs tremble just thinking about all those teeny, tiny little things that need to be stuck to other teeny tiny little things.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and wash the leftover glue from my locks of hair.

I have an intense fear of rejection. I’m cool with that.

I think one of the main reasons I’ve never tried to go anywhere with my music is a fear of rejection. My family and friends tell me I’m wonderful, and I’m glad because if they didn’t I would pack it in for good and never play again. The problem is that everyone’s family and friends have to tell them they’re wonderful. That’s just the rule.

My uncle in particular is very fond of my music, and frequently tells me to make more and more demo tapes to send to more and more companies. While it is nice that he has such faith in me, I just don’t think I can handle being told “Sorry, but you suck donkey balls and that screechy thing you’re doing to the microphone? STOP IT” at this point in my life. It would surely send me running for my oversized sweats (Not that there is much that doesn’t send me running for them) and weeping into my pillows for days.

In an attempt to preserve my mental health? I don’t take a lot of risks.

Well, the other day I got a package in the mail and at first I was sure it was a bomb from one of the dates I had last year who ended up being blog fodder. (Sorry, but if you bring your knitting on a date with me? You are blog fodder for YEARS. Suck it up.)

But, no. It was a package from a recording company sending me back the tape of mine that they didn’t want.

And you know, its one thing to be rejected when you ASK FOR IT. It is another matter entirely to be skipping merrily through life and then find out that you’ve been rejected without your knowledge.

Fortunately, since I had no time to prepare for this surprise rejection, I am simply making up my mind to ignore it altogether. THe power of denial is strong, and when my mind is made up to deny? The CIA would have trouble making me see eye to eye with the truth.

I went to a walk-in clinic today about my wierd health ailments. I’m sure that the world is happy to know that FINALLY, someone is acting like they give a damn about me. Or, at least, she is doing a really good job of pretending. Either way, the doctor I saw today was concerned and has ordered a battery of tests, so I should know what is up with me within weeks.

I realized today as I sat in the walk-in clinic being totally calm and collect that I’ve never before been to a walk-in clinic for a medical ailment. Before, it has always been because I’m LOSING MY MIND and I fear that my brain is about to splatter all over the walls. Or perhaps because I fear that my small intestine is about to worm its way out my nose and strangle someone. Or, you know, the sleep button in my brain needed to be re-wired or because a roommate found me sobbing in a heap on the floor (Over socks. For the third time. That day. Oh, shut up.)

Today there was none of that fear. There was no rehearsing which drugs I’ve taken before and which just don’t work for me. There was no concern that someone would recommend some Haldol and ship me off to the loony bin. There was no worrying about pronouncing complicated medications. All I had to do was point at my neck and wait! Fabulous!

Just a regular person, with a regular doctor, having visible parts of her anatomy checked out.

Who would have thought this was even POSSIBLE?

Amazing.

But I’ve got nothing.

My neck hurts.

I’m cranky.

My doctor is closed.

And I have nothing of substance to say.