Depression Talk

Apologies for the no post yesterday: My internet was not co-operating with me. I have to say that the one major drawback of living in the middle of nowhere is the wonky dial-up internet connection.

Anyhow.

My hair.

When I went to university, I had this goal to not cut, color, perm, streak, or mess with my hair in any way for the duration.

I don’t know why I wanted to do this, other than to see what my natural hair is like, sans additives.

Last January, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. So I decided to donate all my hair to Locks of Love.

But, my best friend got engaged and begged me not to cut my hair until after her September wedding. I figured that would just mean more hair for Locks of Love.

Well, I measured my hair the other day (Because that’s just how cool I am) and I have over fifteen inches of long, straight, brown hair to donate.

And now I have to live with all fifteen inches of it (More than that, because I measured it in a pony tail) until September AND IT IS DRIVING ME CRAZY.

This hair is ON MY PERSON at all times. If I wear a tank-top, it tickles the backs of my arms. When I ride, it is sticking to the back of my neck. It gets tangled in things (Like my cat. Nothing worse than having your hair tangled in a cat) and when the wind blows it stands on end and attacks my face like a rabid squirrel.

It does these things even if it is tied up.

The dogs chase it, babies grab it; it grabs onto my horse’s halter and when all twelve hundred pounds of him walks away? It is very, very hurty.

I have approximately six weeks left of this insanity.

I’m going to need to buy stocks in mousse and many, many varieties of drugs.

On edge.

On the brink.

The horizon is looming over.

The straw that’s likely to break the camel’s back…

And I have to stop and wonder, just how much straw would it actually take to break a camel’s back? And how, exactly is that straw packaged? Like, is it pressure packed into little packages such that it will sit on the camel’s back? And just how would you put straw on a camel? I dunno, its just that I’ve worked with straw on numerous occasions and a camel doesn’t seem to be the handiest way to go about transporting it. I suppose its a regional thing, though.

At any rate, I’m ever amazed, because I feel utterly twitchy, like if one more thing were to happen, or if one more person were to open their mouth and make sound come out of it I might just explode.

And, as per usual, I don’t.

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.

So I watched Girl, Interrupted the other night, and at first, I didn’t think it was that bad. First, the movie is set in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960’s, so I’m pretty sure that those of us who may be sent to one in the modern day are freed from worries of electric shock therapy. Phew.

The movie was fine until half-way through, or thereabouts, when a lot of it really started to hit home with me. Is that main character, Susanna, really crazy? Or is the world she lives in crazy? Or maybe her insanity has her more enlightened than the average Joe?

I’m not sure, but either way, I didn’t cry for Steel Magnolias, Beaches, Titanic, or The Notebook. This one had me weeping in my pillows until I feared I might actually drown in the soggy mess that made up my bed when I was through.

Clearly, I should stick to horror. I always sleep much better after movies of that genre.

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.

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.

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?

It was just one of those regular nights. We celebrated July the Fourth last night, with fireworks and a barbeque and friends and family. Happy Independence Day.

I got to chat with my best girl, my T who I love so much, and the Berry Queen and my mother were playing music in the background, and she told me that he said my name.

And I felt all floaty and wondrous and lightheaded and grand.

And then when I realized that I felt that way because I’d been holding my breath since she began on the topic of him, I started breathing again and everything returned to normal, and I told myself to grow up and move on and not be such a nitwit.

But I still have smile when I think of it, because its not often that someone with a PBR shirt says my name.

I live in a near constant state of fear, one that I don’t really understand. I constantly fear that I am not a good enough friend, that I’m not a good enough worker, that I’m a bad Aunt, that I’m a bad daughter or sister…

I don’t know why this fear comes over me, or why I feel it so often. But still, it remains, and any criticism of anything I do makes me want to curl into a ball and weep.

Just another part of being obsessed with everything.

Sleeping has been a problem for me most of my life. Namely, the problem is that when I’m sane, I can’t get enough of it, and when I’m Insane I can’t get any at all.

I’m living away from home right now and the Bery Family has a wonderful bed for me here. It has a new matress and flannel sheets and a down duvet. I think they’re trying to convince me to move in here forever because I do handy things like play with the baby and manage their fields. If only they needed me for more than three weeks out of every year, I’d be set.

Getting out of bed in the morning is especially difficult while here because the sheets are just so… flannel-y. So luxuriously soft, as though they were made from the down of day-old chicks. As though you’d washed the finest sheep with Infusium Conditioner every day of its life and then shorn it with shears made of gold.

Berry season is also particularly difficult because I wor from seven in the morning until eight at night. Regardless of what you do for a living, when you do it that continuously, you’re tired.

And now every day I have to tear myself out of this bed, and some days I literally have to be torn, and it pains me to know for the rest of the year, my bed will be empty, my sheets without my sunburned and peeling body.

I think of my bed and my sheets and the lovely duvet without me for eleven months of the year, and I feel a little bit sad.

My boss and I went on a beer run tonight, the type of run that is not uncommon for girls like us. We generally guise our beer runs under some other thing, like “Us leaving the farm right now will help the farm succeed through this season. As a result, it is pertinent that we leave. Now. Heading South. And I swear, its totally a coincidence that we must go South and the Beer store is South of us.”

We were on this run when my boss went on a diatribe about the people I date and I have to say, My God, is that really the impression people get? Because I swear, I’ve totally dated nice people. It just so happens that they’re generally terrified of a psycho like me, and head for the hills after my first outbreak of hives. If that’s not the case, I have to toss them soon, Very, Very Soon because what’s wrong with him if he’s sticking around? Clearly, a lot.

But, we happened across a handsome man this evening, one driving a minivan which either means he is so young he’s not legal for me to date, or he’s got seventeen kids and he’s met and needs to drive around at least five of them. I commented on his attractiveness and sighed. My boss could contain himself no more and shrieked “Amanda! He has only TWO LIMBS and they both come out of his NECK!”

“Wha-?”

“Amanda’s dream boyfriend: No speak English!”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that for the love of GOD, you need to date someone who doesn’t have an obvious deformity and who’s native tongue is compatible with yours!”

“But-”

“And he can’t be a chemist because that’s code for someone who WORKS IN A METH LAB!”

“They typically are more covert about their –”

“And just because he’s HIGH ALL THE TIME doesn’t mean he can call himself a pilot!”

“Well, now, I’ve never –”

“AND his native language needs to have developed a form of WRITING COMPATIBLE WITH WINDOWS XP!!”

And you know, I’ve never really thought about it like that before, but maybe she has a point. Maybe I should look for someone who’s limbs number more than two, that extend from a part of his body that is entirely separate from his neck.

And after that, there were people, and after the people came a desire to eat the fruit, and then all reason was lost.

I don’t know why it is so difficult, and you’d think that managing fruit and who picks where would be easy, but it is not so. It is difficult, it is trying, it is madness inducing and mostly the people doing the picking are mad themselves.

Its hard not to throw up my arms in disgust. Like, if you went to a fruit farm to pick fruit, and you saw a big white sign that read ‘Picking Here Today’ and then you saw a large number of little blaze yellow flags beyond that sign, wouldn’t you think that PERHAPS you should obtain fruit AT THAT LOCATION?

I need Xanax.

I am going to combust.

Seriously.

SO MANY PEOPLE have been doing revolting things while in my presence in the last week or so that sometimes I just want to scream for everyone in the free world to stay ten feet back at all times.

What makes things worse is that now I am sick. Clearly, there can be no other reason for my sickness than the disgusting things people have forced me to inhale over the last few days.

Some examples include, but are not limited to:
1) Burping so that I have to inhale the burp air.
2) Coughing without covering.
3) Not washing hands for thirty seconds with warm, soapy water before leaving the washroom.
4) Not even pretending to wash hands after using the restroom.
5) Breathing heavily where I have to breath.
6) Allowing their air to waft over to where my air is, so that I am FORCED AGAINST MY WILL to inhale the air of others.
7) Maintaining a level of stench upon their person such that I am sure that the air infected by said stench is full of harmful bugs.

These are only a FEW of the nasty things that people have done near me and if one more inhabitant of this world causes me to ingest the cast-off nastiness from their person, I will simply cease to exist.

The other day I was in Wal-Mart and I watched a woman come out of the stall from using the restroom, change her baby’s diaper, pack up her baby and its belongings, and leave the restroom without washing. She even had the nerve to leave through the door that I had to leave through, leaving her trail of germ-y goodness for me to be forced to put my hands in. Every time I’m in a line, it seems as though I’m standing behind or in front of a non-covering sneezer.

I blame these people, these diaper changing, non-handwashing, non-covering sneezers I run into in Wal-Mart and Tim Horton’s that I’m SICK. I’m stuffed up and sore-throated and I can’t breath and I haven’t slept and I’m just a big old barrel of sunshine really, really pissed.

GAH.