Depression Talk

I went away for the weekend to drink and be silly with some girlfriends for my best friend’s bachelorette weekend. It turns out that my sleeping habits were the highlight of everyone’s weekend.

I talk often of my desire to sleep, my need to nap, and the intenseness of my unconcsciousness, but I don’t think that people really get it until they’ve experienced it firsthand.

The first night all of us drunken girls returned to the camper to go to bed. So I announced that I would be having one more cigarette and then I was going to sleep. And then I had my ciggie, and then I laid down, shut my eyes, and was gone.

In the morning my bunkmate was astounded. Like, Dude, you were totally asleep two seconds after you said you were going to sleep! And my best friend was like, Yep, that’s what she does. She announces her need to be unconcsious and then she’s gone.

The following afternoon, I needed my required nap. I laid down on the couch, told the girls I would be going to sleep, and promptly did.

During this time, the other members of the campsite decided to come over and visit with us. At one point, they decided they should do something cruel to the unconscious girl, and they sent in a few people to investigate. I slept on. They decided against tormenting me.

Then one of the guys said that someone needs to do something to that girl. Well, the girls informed him of my hatred for feet. So he decided that he should come in and bother my feet. He reached right into the blanket, pinched my toes, and tickled my feet. I slept on.

He went back outside and announced to the rest of the people in the yard “THAT GIRL IS DEAD. WE NEED A CORONER.”

And while I’m mortified that someone had the gall to molest my poor, innocent little feet while I slept, I have to say that the ability to play dead at will came in very handy.

Because if he had come near my feet while I was awake, he probably would have lost a tooth, his left testicle, and a large portion of his kidneys.

I’ve been having anxiety and panic attacks the last number of days, and I have no idea why. They have lasted hours and at one point I was in my friend’s basement, clinging to the remote control, desperate to find some mindless television with sheer terror and adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Someone recently asked what it feels like to have a panic attack, and I suppose there is no real way to describe it. For me, it feels like no matter what amount of deep breathing exercises I do, I can’t get enough breath. My heart races, my palms sweat. My stomach feels like it is on a roller coaster, alternated with feelings of being squeezed by the Hand of God.

If I’m nervous about an upcoming event, I don’t mind a panic attack. I don’t mind pre-onstage anxiety, I don’t mind fleeting terror when I feel like my horse is about to toss me to kingdom come. I can deal with the heart-stopping anguish when I worry that I’ve lost my nephew while I’m caring for him (He can generally be found coaxing my neagle to love him with a box of Milk Bone).

What kills me about this is that I don’t know why I feel the way I do. I’m overcome with these horrid feelings, for two to five hours at a time, and I DON’T KNOW WHY. I’m a very compartmentalized person. I like everything to be defined, neat, tidy, and put away in a little box. I can deal with being a crazy person, because there are a plethora of reasons behind it.

I can not deal with anxiety coursing through my veins for no apparent reason at all.

I’ve had fits of anxiety and panic twice this week. I’m very irritated at them because for one thing, I can’t seem to pinpoint why I had them. And for another thing, I’m on enough drugs to sink the navy. I’m not supposed to have panic attacks any more.

At any rate, two of them in one week, and my word, feeling like your head is going to explode and that you’re going to suffocate in broad daylight for hours on end is exhausting. But no, I mean, like, its more than exhausting.

I suppose if I was to describe the way I feel after a good, long anxiety attack, it would be something like a deflated balloon. One that spent all day out in the sun at a carnival, in the hands of a hyperactive toddler. Only, half way through the day, it got deflated and left the hands of the toddler, to be picked up and dropped repeatedly by small birds. But the thing is, the last time it got dropped by a bird, it landed on the free way and spent a good three hours being smashed into the pavement by transports.

Yeah. That’s it. I think I’ve got down how it feels to have survived a panic attack. You’d think the feeling would be more virtuous, victorious… but no. I felt like someone in need of intensive care and a six week order for bedrest.

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?

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.

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.

Just a big old blank. Just a whole bunch of let down, like, I just devoted the last six months of my life to something and it ends and then what? Like, you’re supposed to be happy? Or ecstatic? Should you jump around screeching that its over, or should you go back to clenching your fists and hoping you don’t have to deal with it again?

If its just a big old lump of nothing, does that count as a feeling? Does nothingness fall under that category? Should a person be guilty for experiencing nothingness over a momentous occasion? Does that mean the real feeling I’m feeling is guilt?

So far, though, a whole lot of nothing.

I met someone this weekend, quite unexpectedly as it is Berry Season, after all, and how do you meet someone when you devote your life to fruit?

I got to leave the berry farm for a little over fourteen hours this weekend and it was a great relief to discover that the world is still turning beyond Field #7.

This individual I met wears cowboy boots and has a belt bucle and showed up tp the stag I was at in a PBR button-down shirt. For those of you not in the know, the Pro Bull Riding finals are the highlight of my year, and anyone who knows what they are — other than my parents — is really a special person in my eyes. Someone I’d consider offering my second last beer to, even.

He drives a tractor for a living and has a big ol’ pickup truck and wears a ball cap and I got to thinking about it, and who’s kidding who? I can’t date someone. I hate dating. When people breathe near me, I want to smack them. When people sit beside me, I feel claustrophobic. I detest the awkwardness of dating, the formality of it, the expectation that you should lean in for a kiss goodnight. And by the way, how are you supposed to know if you’re on a date with someone that the other party actually WANTS to be kissed goodnight?

But at the same time I’m thinking that it would be awfully nice to have my phone ring at some point. This is not typical of me at all.

I think the PBR shirt has clouded my judgement.

My legs have been itchy these last few days, an itch that will not go away no matter what itch cream I apply or which medications I take. The itch taes over me and I am no longer able to function because I am just so damn itchy and the scratching takes up all of my energy.

I had an experience the other day that made me shriek into the telephone like a crazed and maniacal idiot. My voice reached decibals that only dogs can hear and I became an Insane person who someone else hung up on.

I just can’t stand rude behaviour from other people. I detest people who treat other human beings as less than they deserve to be treated as.

And as a result, my legs are itching like crazy.

No red, purple-ish bumps as of yet, but I’m expecting them to pop up any day now.

Somewhere between managing twenty five staff and eight million members of the public, after the last case of beer was gone and the lung infection cleared up; but before the long weekend rush I realized that THE FOURTEEN HOUR DAYS ARE KILLING ME. I love this job and I love what I do, and a lot of the time I really feel like I’m doing something useful.

The problem is that my day starts at about seven fifteen in the morning. My alarm clock (Read: The people who own the house I live in) haven’t been waking me until, oh I don’t know, around 7:08. The next problem is that it doesn’t END until about eight thirty. And then, if you’re like me, after you’ve showered and cleaned the day’s filth off yourself, once you’ve donned your boxers and tank top for a solid night’s rest, once you’ve consumed a number of beers you realized that your boss is doing tractor wor and you have yet to remove the eight miles of fence you put up on the first day.

So, you, your beer, and your boxer shorts head off through the field nearing ten at night, when the mosquitoes are at their finest and the wind is blowing mightily.

AND THEN YOU SPEND THE ENTIRE NEXT DAY SCRATCHING YOUR ASS BECAUSE THERE ARE JUST THAT MANY MOSQUITO BITES ON IT.

I’ve been feeling great these last few months, stopping occasionally to weep in my bed over this and that. I’ve been feeling especially great since I’ve been home, since I’ve had my horse, since everything has seemed so perfect.

And then for a day or two I’ll hit a low, and I’ll think: Why do I have to feel this way? Why must this cloud of impending doom hang over my head so that all I want to do is lay in my bed listening to bad country music and eating Cheez Whiz straight from the jar?

I suppose the good thing here is that working in BerryLand forces me out of bed every day, forces me to continue in the land of the living. I like my job, I love being here, I wish every day could go by like the last six have gone.

At the same time, though, the Cheez Whiz and the music sound pretty good right about now.

On this date, my mother weighed close to two hundred pounds and she was really, really pissed off because a twenty day old person had taken up residence in her uterus and was refusing to leave.

Twenty three years later, here we are, my poor mother having given up being pissed because she has finally accepted that SHE WILL NEVER BE RID OF ME. She finally managed to get me out of her person, twenty days later than I should have gotten out, and I suppose that having undergone that struggle, she decided to just suck it up when it comes to my taking up space in her house. As long as I don’t use the wrong pot for the macaroni.

It is my birthday today and I feel many ways: I feel tired, but that’s just because I’M INSANE and I’m doing a job that only INSANE people would do. I’m elated to have made it this far, I’m looking back over the last few years thinking ‘Whoa Now…’. I’m looking forward to the next years, I’m excited and interested to know what this world will toss in my direction over the next decades.

But mostly of all I’m looking forward to some cake. The kind that the Berry King gets me every year for my birthday, with all of its yummy goodness to be eaten in the presence of all the Berry Babies and the people I love best.

I’m away from home now, living at the berry farm I work at with my mother. I will stop and tell you right now that WE DO NOT PICk THE FRUIT. We do everything we can to avoid touching the fruit at all costs, and it only really touches us when angered customers aim well in our direction. We are in management, us Berry Babes, and as managers we do things lie laze about in the sun drinking Ice Caps while the pickers sweat in the sun and the customers look on.

I feel that goals are very important and as such, I’ve developed a list of them to aspire to.

1) Don’t get hives.

2) Don’t get a bad case of Athlete’s foot. (My boss has informed me that breaking out in any sort of distasteful rash this year will result in my termination. I’m not sure that its legal, but its probably for the best that I don’t test her when fruit rot is threatening because of the muggy weather)

3) Don’t be the first to cry.

4) Save my first screaming, crying, hives inducing fit for when the thirteen year old Berry Girl and he best friend are not in front of me.

5) Sleep well, and sleep every night.

6) Gain fifteen pounds, all from consuming Ice Caps and chips in the hot sun

I often talk here about wilting up and ceasing to exist. I’ve seen a few things wilt up and cease in my life, like that flower that one guy bought me before I broke up with him because I couldn’t stand his laguh; and then the time that those little kittens ran away from home when I was young. They simply just ceased to exist.

I’ve felt that way a number of times. In 2003 I had what I would call a Pretty Rough Year. I’m not sure which year was worse, the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, or the whole of 2003, but its a pretty close call. That year, when I was still young and had a little bit of faith left in humanity, I would wake up every day and think “My GOD. I’m still living this life!” And while I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to commit suicide, it would have been really, really nice if I could have just ceased to exist.

I wanted to be something other than what I was, living elsewhere than where I was living. I wanted my life to be the same: I wanted my same family and my same things, but there was certain history that I was more than willing to just toss off. I think the best option would have been to simply pack up everything and everyone I new and head us off to Zurich, or maybe Arkansas or even Rio De Janeiro, and we would just start all over without any more insanity or screw-ups in out pasts.

I now how ridiculous it all sounds; I know that there would be no point in waking up and starting over and having only perfection in your past. If that were the case, how would we ever really learn from any of our mistakes? ANd then how could you be perfect without learning?

At the same time, though, sometimes I just really wish that for a little while, once in a while, I could be that perfect person, with no hideousness behind her, no reason to wish that things weren’t any other way but how they are.