I'm off again!

I have a conference all next week, so don't be surprised if I don't get on here. I'll be back on the other coast with my buds, and we're going to have an early Christmas. Should be fun! I'm leaving in the morning, at 6am, so it's almost time for bed.

Talk to you all soon!

I hate health care

So I'm fighting with the health insurance companies again. I tried to fill my prescriptions with my discount card, and it was still $2,000 for one med for 90 days. The other two were close to $1,000 each, and there were no generics. Jesus. I couldn't even put that on my credit card!

I called medicaid and they denied me because I have a pre-existing condition. That's right, kids, they can totally deny you because you have bipolar disorder, even if you've been covered by the same company for years before. Until 2014, they can still deny you. So every company denied me, and someone told me about a "high risk" insurance I could call. I called, and they need an official denial letter from an insurance company, so I'm applying AGAIN just to get the letter.

How incredibly frustrating. But I need meds now. I'm going to be out soon, and I need them in the mail. So I went to Canada drugs and got my meds, prescription free (which I wish I had known before I spent $200 on the psychiatrist). It was still $967 for 90 days of all my meds, where it used to be $90, but that I can stick on a credit card and pay slowly. How depressing to add more debt!

My sponsor yelled at me

She said she can only help me as much as I want to be helped, and I'm not making the program a priority; that I should go back to step one. Interesting. I haven't been to meetings lately because a) I was in a small town up north for a week, b) last night Emily was in town with her baby and I stayed for dinner, missing the 8:30 meeting. Suddenly I don't care about AA?

But she kind of has a point. In my life, my friends and family are more important than me making a meeting. Does that "lead me straight to a drink"? I think God and I are doing just fine going to 3 or 4 meetings a week. I think that's enough to keep me involved in the program. And I have no interest in drinking. I was a little embarrassed around Emily's parents, but I got over it and let them know what was going on. All the people in my life know I'm sober, and I'm happy to be.

So have I stepped away? I think I'm just having trouble with the program as my sponsor sees it. She has me calling every day. I don't even talk to my mom every day. I don't want to talk to her every day. I just call and say "hi, everything's still the same as it was yesterday." How useful is that? I don't know if it is. It's not useful to me. Once a week and seeing her at 3 meetings a week would be just fine, but calling her every day AND seeing her at 3 meetings?

Maybe I'm still hesitant to put both feet into this program. Why? Well, I hate being told what to do, #1, but I think I'm also weary of drinking the "Kool-Aid." I saw how it affected Adam in the beginning, and he was annoying as hell. He also spent all his time and energy on AA, and now only has friends in AA. I don't want to limit myself so much. I want to keep the people I love and not alienate them.

How do I make it right with my sponsor? I need to talk to her about all this. I know she's going to call me a dry drunk and tell me I'm never going to be or stay sober unless I do it whole hog, and maybe I'll just have to tell her I'm not ready yet.

Feel like getting fat?

I just had to join Weight Watchers again. It is getting ridiculous. I've eaten pie for breakfast, lunch, and dinner since Thanksgiving. During my time driving cross-country I ate McDonald's chicken nuggets all the way. I had a brownie for breakfast this morning, and two big helpings of macaroni and cheese for dinner.

None of this is good for me.

So I joined Weight Watchers again. Maybe this time of feeling like purging isn't so great to start a diet, but it's more like I'm just continuing what I was doing before I left the other coast. I had been doing this for a year, and lost 40 pounds, and I hope to lose the last 10.

The job process

Got another rejection today from somewhere I interviewed. That's 3 out of 8 so far. We'll see what the rest of them do. I'm not holding out hope anymore. No one has called my references, and the only one I'm super qualified for is one I haven't heard a peep from despite them saying they were going to get back to me the next week (a month ago). I think that one would be nice, but we'll just have to wait.

Since the holidays are coming up, I'm not going to hold my breathe for a good job to show up on the searches, either. Nothing is coming up in the past few days, and I wouldn't expect to hear from anyone until after New Year's anyway.

So I probably wouldn't get a job until February, assuming interviews in January. My benefits run out in March, so please oh please I need a job before then. I really don't want to go back to making $11 an hour for really hard labor and long hours at a retail job. Plus, everyone does inventory in January, which would suck. They lock you in overnight and you count everything. Boo.

I keep forgetting

"People who have had depression are more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than people who have never had depression...."

Everyone I know likes to make fun of my really bad memory. I can't remember who I've told what (which makes me a bad liar) and who was with me when I did something. I often tell stories to folks that have been with me when the event happened. Amanda jokes that I've already got Alzheimer's.

Now there's a study saying I just might have a higher chance of getting it because I suffer from depression. They did a study with major depressives, but I bet bipolar has the same effect. I also wonder how much the meds we take have to do with memory loss. That would be a good study to do.

Calcium

Researchers "...identify a molecular switch that leads to a sustained increase of calcium in nerve cells and plays a crucial role in the formation of memory and addictive behaviors."

Apparently when your brain makes memories or addictive behaviors it uses calcium. According to a lot of studies I've seen, we don't get enough calcium, and our body has trouble using what it does get. "Although the dynamic is not well understood, tobacco smoking also appears to interfere with bone mineralization."

Since I quit smoking I've been taking a multi-vitamin to get my body back to a healthy place. I'm obviously not getting enough water, since my lips are really chapped and my skin is dry, but I'm at least getting the right vitamins. I'm hoping my body will just keep getting healthier, though the weight gain of being home and not smoking is getting to me. It's only about 5 pounds I've gained, but it took me so long to lose it that I'm nervous about putting it back on.

Are tattoos harm?

Weird. On Facebook a friend of mine just posted that she's 10 months sober. I had no idea she was in AA. She took a picture of her chips and posted the picture. I am so proud of her. She used to smoke a lot of pot in high school, and I can imagine her being an alcoholic. She's a tattoo artist, and it's funny how many of them are sober. I should give her a call and see if she wants to go to a meeting and tattoo me.

My dad the other day said he read a study that tattooing is a replacement for cutting. Haven't we talked about this already? I haven't found the study, but this sounded interesting:

"Now, 10 tats is a lot of tats. Are you a self-harmer? I don't know. Are you distorting yourself to make yourself special or different, maybe even to get attention? Probably...that's where the BPD comes in. You are naturally impulsive and you like tattoos. Hence, 10 tattoos. The real question is this...and this is the conceptual/theoretical relationship between tattooing and BPD -- do you get a secret pleasure from the relinquishing of control and symbolic victimhood associated with experience of getting a tattoo? If so, that's what you need to look at because it brings us into the realm of self-harm and sado-masochism."

I have 8.

9 days smoke free

Although I'm not using the lozenges (cause they taste like chalk), I'm still tracking my quitting on the Nicorette website. It tells you really cool things like in the past nine days I've saved $20 and 5 hours by not smoking. It also let me know I've missed out on an average of 81 cigarettes. 81! In 9 days? That's just gross. I can't believe I smoked that much. No wonder my body is rebelling.

According to a lot of sites, my blood pressure is sure to have gone down, my heart is back to beating normally, and my circulation is getting better. I can already tell that, besides the snot, it's easier to breathe. I can also smell more. Like tonight on the metro, I smelled a man who had been drinking. It was really gross and reconfirmed my decision to not drink. Who knew drinking made you smell bad, too?

The other night at my grandmother's house I couldn't breathe and she had some Nyquil. Now, I know a lot of people relapse on Nyquil, but I thought I would take a chance. It didn't make me run for the alcohol, and it helped me breathe enough to sleep. Apparently, they have alcohol free Nyquil, which until this smoking cleanse goes away, I think I'll invest in.

It's the stress that does it

What is a breakdown, exactly? "...depressed patients' mental suffering led to a sort of 'breakdown' in the stress system, resulting in low levels of stress hormones." So it's basically when your immune system stops working well. Remember before we talked about the immune system and the role it plays in depression? Well this is another study talking about immune response. It's interesting that a breakdown can have biological implications.

I was really stressed out before my breakdown. Everything was wrong in my life, it seemed. My job was absolutely horrible, my living situation was disgusting, and my life was one drunken night after another. It wasn't any way to live, really. It all became too much, and I suppose what happened is my immune system broke down, and allowed me to become suicidal.

It's interesting that a breakdown of stress would allow you to hit a breaking point. You would think suicidal people would have more cortisol in their systems. So I suppose if you're still feeling stress, you're ok.

Purging

My therapist and I started talking about purging lately. Sometimes I get this incredible urge to projectile vomit on people while they're talking, and my therapist was saying how this is a purging urge, and asked what it is that I need to get out.

Feelings, I suppose. Purging is also defined as "To rid of sin, guilt, or defilement." It's all that old stuff that sits inside of you, the pain and fear from long ago, all the crappy stuff, and for me, the obsessive tendencies. I need to rid myself of all the "bad" emotions or "character defects." Luckily, I have lots of time to work on them.

So I'm going to detox. I think this advice for detoxing from cigarettes is applicable all around, so I'm going to try it. Water in, sweat out. There are also some things available on emotional cleanses, which I'm going to read a bit more into before I try anything.

Drip, drip, cough

So not smoking is gross. I have post-nasal drip which is making me hack up all sorts of gross stuff and sound like I'm sick. I know it's just my body detoxifying and cleaning the cilia in my nose, throat, and lungs. I like that the body can clean itself. After 15 years of smoking, I expect this will take a long time. I'm trying to drink water, but it's coming in the form of coffee, as it usually does.

But the drip is making quitting easy. I have no interest in smoking when I'm sick, because I know it just tastes gross and makes the mucus worse. It's nice to have evidence of this from over the years. I always quit when I'm sick, anyway, so it's been fine.

I had a dream about smoking last night, and I was worried when I got up that I actually did it. It's like those booze dreams. I suppose it means I really am an addict. Normal people don't dream about smoking, do they?

Travel on a dime

Therapy is one of those nice inventions. Thanks Dr. Freud for making it cool to go to therapy and spreading the love to us peasants. It's also really great that the place I go for therapy has poor people rates. My new (old from when I used to live here) psychiatrist on the other hand, does not. He's really expensive without insurance, but he's worth it. I really like him, and he totally remembered me.

My therapist is really proud of me for using my "limbo" time well. I'm making progress in changing my life for the better and finding out what I really want in life. I'm moving towards a better life.

So what do I want for myself? Well, I wish I had enough money to travel for a few years. Maybe I should join the Peace Corps. I didn't before because of my dog and my car, but I've proven that my mom can take care of those things. I would just need about $600 a month to pay my bills. I don't know where I would get that, unless I took out some money from my IRA, which tax-wise would be stupid, but it could work.

Then again, I just want to travel, not work. I wish I were rich. Where would I go? Well, I haven't done Asia or South America or Africa. I know! That's a lot. I think I would start with Chile and Peru. Then I would go to Vietnam and Thailand. Then maybe Japan, Morocco, South Africa, New Zealand. That's a lot of places, and a lot of money. If I'm not employed by March (when my benefits run out) I'm taking the rest of the money from my money market (about $4k) and running away with it. I think half that will get me a plane ticket somewhere far away, and the rest will be an apartment in some beautiful town like Santiago or Marrakesh.

Of course, it's all wishful thinking. I need a job, even a job in retail. I need some income. If it's a retail job, then I can afford to take the time to leave for a little bit and still have some money saved up. I need to stop spending all my money on clothes and tattoos. Alright, I'm calling a moratorium on spending. After this tattoo I'm buying nothing. No more plane tickets, no more clothes, no more tattoos. I'm saving my money for another trip or to pay bills while I'm on a trip.