A little nap will do ya

I feel so stuck right now. I don't know what to do with myself. I have all that stuff in storage that needs to be gone through and sold. I have all sorts of stuff here that needs to be categorized in boxes and then moved to storage. I have job opportunities and I want to house hunt, but I don't even know where to look or in what price range.

As usual, I'm getting ahead of myself. It's all so overwhelming. So what do I want to do? I want to take a nap. I have this overwhelming urge to sleep right now. I just can't handle all the chaos that's going on around me. It's too much to think about, so I want to sleep.

Maybe just a little nap....

Ex-libris

I can't even bear to look at them. I have so many, and they just sit there collecting dust, but my love for them is strong. I love books.

I had a nightmare last night that I gave away a bunch of books to the library, but they just threw them out. It pained me so much to watch the imaginary librarian throw out my beloved novels and works of fiction. I couldn't stand it in my dream, and I don't think I would be much better in person.

There are just so many of them, and thinking about moving them all with me forever just makes me... overwhelmed. I can't imagine it. At this point I have over 20 boxes of books: novels of young women in trouble, non-fiction about mental illness, art books, and 3 boxes of religious texts. All things that I love to read and think about, and even quote from occasionally. I can't just let them go without knowing they would be going to a good home.

So they're all moving to storage. It's becoming a catch-all for things I just don't want to think about anymore. It's all just becoming a hide-away. I know that kind of behavior can't happen. It will become crowded with crap and I'll end up moving in somewhere with a UHaul full of junk. I need to go through the storage already and get rid of some things. Spring is here: time to clean.

Nice to meet you

Apparently panic attacks and job interviews go well together. The interview I had the other week where I was shaking and a mess? They called me back for a second interview. I think it's the writing test I did. If anything, I can write under pressure. I can't find the job description online again, but I think it was just fine. I'll ask for a paper copy, perhaps.

The job would be here in the area, though on the other side of the city. I would either have to live close to work in a place I hate (I just can't stand the area around the organization), or I could live around here and deal with a shitty commute. I think if they offer it I'm just going to take it. I need to move out, and it's a good job.

Let's get past the next interview, first.

Bleh

It's been a tough, emotional kind of day. I didn't realize it until I sat here and tried to go to sleep, but my brain is all a twitter. Turning 31 while living at home is going to be really hard. I can't stand it already, and it's not even my birth month, for crying out loud.

We're moving all the stuff in the apartment to make room for new floors, and I had to pack up a stack of books in my room today. "Dad, these are yours." "No, they're all books that I thought you would want. They all mention your grandfather." Grandpa. I miss him a lot. He was my rock, my hero, the only adult in my life. I could rely on him for anything. I could have asked him for help right now. I wouldn't have, but I could have. He was solid. It's been 3 years. I can't believe it.

I feel so... bleh. I don't even have the energy to type it out. I can't even verbalize. It's just... bleh.

Shit sucks

I've been reminded twice today that my birthday is coming up in 3 weeks. I'm not going to the look back yet, but boy what a year it's been. It was the best 6 months of my life in the beginning, and the worst past 6 months. I suppose there is yin and yang, good and bad, in all things, but man, what a ride.

My aunt and my therapist, Julie, both told me I have to stop saying everything is alright. I'm allowed to be upset, miserable, depressed. In fact, I probably should be. But I'm so used to being optimistic. I'm used to seeing the bright side of life. But shit sucks! Man, I'm about to be 31, living at home on a twin bed with all my stuff in storage, I lost my dog, I don't have my car but I'm still paying for it, I have one friend here that I see, and I'm not even dating. Shit sucks.

Here I go again. Well, if it sucks, Anne, what are we going to do about it? I'm going out with an old friend on Sunday and he just invited me to something next month, too. I'm supposed to go out tomorrow night with someone, but I don't think she remembers it's tomorrow. I'll have to call in the morning. I'd like to see her. So there, I'm hanging out with friends and getting out of the house.

I don't want to do anything else on the dating front because I don't know where I'll be living. Damn. I need to just do it. I need to just date. I'm scared, I guess. I've gained some weight back, which makes me feel self-conscious. And I don't have any of my cute shoes and dresses. They're all in storage. And I don't have somewhere to take a date should I want to take them home. Sigh.

I need to get it together. No wallowing in how much my life has changed this year. I need to move forward. Time to move on. Now how can I get out of here?

1 + 1 does not equal 2

I need to get the hell out of here, so I did a few calculations, and it seems one clear picture came out of it: I'm stuck. I make $800 every 2 weeks. It's minimum $1,000 to rent a studio here. Then I pay $500 to cover my car. So that's $1,500 I'd be spending, and $1,600 I'd be making. It's just not possible. I knew this; It's the reason I moved from the other coast, anyway. I knew I couldn't make it on my own, but I just feel so awful here that I had to try.

I'm thinking of just taking any old job (think retail) just to get by and make a little more money so I can move out. I don't want to be living here after April, and there's no guarantee I'm going to get a full-time gig before then. Maybe I should have taken that other job, boredom or no, but I just can't see hating my next job before I even start it.

But I've got to get out of here....

Baby talk

"Where do you want to be when you're 34?"

"I don't know. Everything has changed since I hit this rough patch. My timeline is off. But I just figured out something that changes everything: I don't think I want kids."

"I'm glad to hear that."

Really? My aunt thinks I need to be pampered; taken care of instead of being the one who always takes care of others.

"You and your cousin Henry shouldn't have kids. I've told him this, too. You both would be better marrying someone who has kids already, older kids."

I wouldn't mind someone elses kids. Especially older kids. I think that would be just fine. I just have no patience for the screaming toddler phase or the losing sleep of infancy. Call me selfish, but I'm just not the kid type.

"My generation fucked up raising kids, and I can say that cause I did it too, though my kids are great. The baby boomers, the hippies, just all screwed it up."

I am a rock, I am an island

Abandoned. Some synonyms are rejected and forsaken. Rejected. It all leads to the irrational fear of abandonment.

"It's a wonder you can even function. I mean, with parents like that, and I love my brother and your mom, don't get me wrong, but they aren't the most stable people. And they left you. To drop you off at school and leave you for three years at your most delicate time. No wonder you can't get close to anyone! No wonder you won't let anyone in."

It's funny when even your aunt thinks your parents sucked. They really tried. They did. They're both good people, but neither of them should have had children. They both would make, and do make, great aunts or uncles, but parents? Not so much. But I love them anyway.

She's right, about the fear of abandonment. It's why I can't let anyone close to me for more than a year. All my relationships last about a year and then I push away. Julie and I were talking about it on Tuesday, and she said, "That would include therapists, too, no?" And I think she's right. I haven't had a therapist for more than a year and a half. I suppose that's my timeline for closeness.

Do I have to let people in? "You know you can call me anytime. I'm going to be there for you. You have to let people in. No one can do it alone." No man is an island, I suppose. I ask for help sometimes, but I just don't trust that others will be there to do it. I am perfectly fine taking care of myself. I always have been. I even got through that last suicidal patch by myself. I don't need anyone else.

But I'm lonely.

From the mouth of auntie

I had a nice dinner with my aunt last night, and we covered a lot of ground. We went over some things that I had just discovered in therapy; or more like just finally want to think about taking on. This is going to be a few blog posts, me thinks.

"What's with this alcohol thing? You're not an alcoholic, you know." She said.

"I'm not? But I was drinking alone, a lot, and blacking out?"

"You were using it as a crutch, and that's bad. You're the kind of person who can have one or two drinks occasionally, especially with your meds. But it doesn't make you an alcoholic."

Words to think about. In fact, I had been. I mean, I drank. A lot. But I gave up easy. And it's been fine. I don't know. I was thinking I'll give it till a year and then try to drink like a normal person again. Perhaps alcohol just isn't done with me.

Disturbing the dust

"Everything has to be up off the floor by Monday. Except the furniture."

One wouldn't think that a huge request, except if you're living out of boxes and living with a hoarder. It's taken 2 weeks and he's finally moved the majority of his collection to storage facilities around the building. But what am I supposed to do with my stuff? I've managed to fit most of it in the closets, but I still have the odds and ends that now can't be tucked away somewhere.

"Bring more of it to your storage facility," he says.

If I were doing it right, I would get rid of some of my shoes and pack the winter stuff up. It's only February, but March is coming fast, and around here the weather can change to spring really quickly. I'm anticipating the change soon, and so I need my wardrobe to reflect that.

But I'm not smart. I'm just shoving it all into boxes without really looking at it. I'm throwing trinkets into boxes knowing I don't really know what the hell to do with them once they come out of boxes - if they ever come out again. I don't want to be hauling this stuff around with me, but I don't have the heart to let it go.

Monday. Crap.

Pharma sleep

It's too late for pharmaceutically enhanced sleep. Or, maybe it's too early for it. Either way, I'm not going to get a lot of sleep tonight. My stomach hurts and it's keeping me up. That's right, I ate too much (I think it was the pickled vegetables) and so I have a stomach ache. So what did I just do? I ate again. Yep. Because sometimes eating makes a stomach ache go away. It's counter-intuitive, but it works, sometimes. I can't tell yet if it worked this time.

I have to be up in a couple of hours to go to work and work out. I'm going to do it this time. I mean workout. I always go to work. My cousin Roger told my dad I was the hardest working person he knew. I don't know where he gets that from: he works two jobs and has a two year old. I give him mad props.

Ok, I'm going to lie down and see what happens this time....

It's baby fat

"You're the queen of the yo-yo weight." -Michael

Sometimes I want to smack him. In context, he was giving me a compliment. The whole conversation was: "I can't fit into my pants. I'm so fat." And he replied, "At least you're still pretty. You're the queen of the yo-yo weight, but you're always pretty. You can fix fat." Awful! I love him.

I've eaten so much today that I feel like vomiting. I'm still eating, though. If I thought my dad wasn't watching I would go out and eat more food. I know that's sick. I just eat and eat.... And I'm sitting here belching and really feel sick. I don't know what's wrong with me.

I need to start running again. I have a marathon to run in a month and I haven't run since Christmas. I'm so not going to make it, but I'm going to try. I'm going to run until I can't run anymore. So tomorrow I'm going to run for a half hour just to get myself started. I need to start watching what I'm eating and stop binging. It's time to get serious about Weight Watchers and running, again. I need to lose about 20 pounds at this point, but I'll take 10.

The full monty

So there's a cool chat on Twitter that happens on Tuesday nights at 9pm (#mhsm). Tonight they were talking about disclosure; when and who to disclose to, what the repercussions are, etc.

I'm one big contradiction. Everyone in my life knows I'm bipolar. I tell people usually the first or second time I meet them. I like people to know up front, and I like to have the people around me educated about the illness. I find it easier to just be me and have people who can call me out on my behavior if it gets too one direction or the other. It's also good to have people in your corner when you're not a very good advocate for yourself. Saying, "I don't feel good." to someone who knows how bad you can really feel is easier than getting yourself to a doctor. So really, disclosure is totally selfish.

But hardly anyone knows I'm sober. Isn't that odd? It's not like I care if they know, but I do, sort of. I mean, everyone drinks, and everyone is used to me drinking heavily. It's part of my personality, like being bipolar is. So what happens to a me without alcohol? I'm just finding that out, and I'm not sure I know how to represent myself yet.

Strange, huh? That I should be ok with the debilitating illness and not with the minor alcoholism?

Separate worlds

"You are not your illness. It's just something you have that flares up every now and again. It's not you." - Julie

I need to learn how to separate me from the bipolar. I tend to think of myself always as ill first, and everything else second. But who am I without the illness? Well, I'm hella optimistic, I can tell you that. I'm in a spot right now where anyone would be depressed, and I'm ok. I really am. I'm confused, and a little torn, but I should be. It's natural to be up in the air about everything when everything is up in the air like it is. But I'm optimistic that it's all going to work out. Everything is going to be fine; better, even.

The horrible, suicidal depression I slipped into the other week isn't me, I have to remember that. It's not who I am, it's just a thing that happens. A flair up. It's like having psoriasis or some other disease where the symptoms present sometimes and you have to fix them with medications, and then they go away for a while. Going off meds always reminds me how much I need them. I mean, look at my posts. I'm suicidally depressed and yet questioning my diagnosis. Dumb. Makes me laugh at how delusional I can get, but scared, too. I need to keep myself on track. It's not ok to go off meds.

Dance, dance, revolution

I'm sure by now you've heard about the dance team in Wisconsin that did a "crazy" routine, complete with fake straitjackets labeled "Psych Ward." There's a huge uproar in the mental health community over it. Twitter is all a fuss. So what happened here? It's nothing new. People just don't see mental illness as something that needs advocacy or understanding. It's still cool to call someone schizo or bipolar when they're doing something you don't like. It's still ok to portray the mentally ill as violent. Not that that's what these girls were doing, but they weren't helping. My favorite quote:

"It's such a contradiction, to have such compassion for cancer, and no compassion for mental illness. How many people sitting in that audience might have had a mental illness or had a loved one with a mental illness? And to have to sit through that ... It's not funny when you know somebody who's suffering."

It's nice that people are standing up and saying something. It's hard to say something about things like this, because you, or at least I, feel like a jackass speaking up. "Don't call people crazy!" seems like a battle cry that's not going anywhere but harassed for being too politically correct. Hell, I use the word crazy all the time. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I hate when people misuse bipolar or schizo.

I'm glad to see these girls changed the wardrobe, but I hope they actually learned something. It doesn't seem like their coach did. She still says she doesn't see where we're coming from.

Manic Mondays

Ok, ok, I admit it: I'm a little manic. I think the extra 5mg of Abilify he added to the regular dose pulled me up a bit, though I'm sleepy. I feel great in comparison to last week, and especially the week before. I'm not suicidal, I'm not depressed, I'm just good. Which is nice. My cousin last night said, "I can believe you'd be depressed. Your life sucks ass right now." And she's right! Things are so crappy right now. But I have a plan.

I had a great interview up north, and I'm hoping to get that job. It would be a great career step forward for me. I should hear back about a third interview with them by next week, where I'll go up there and meet face to face. I've also applied for a bunch of other positions.

The plan: if by the end of March I don't have a job I will move to the north and work retail. I'll just get an apartment and a UHaul and go.

That would be 6 months of living here. I think that's enough. I think I've given it the good ol' college try. 6 months is a long time. I'll give somewhere else a year to grow on me, and if I don't have a job in a year, then I'll have to reconsider my career path. I like this plan. I think it has merit.

Carry me home

I think I've made my decision: I'm moving.

I can hear them now: you're pulling a "geographic," you can't run from your troubles, blah, blah, blah. And I hear that. I know. I'm not running from anything. I'm just not happy here, and I know that all the old things that are here are just going to haunt me if I stay. It's not a matter of the grass is greener, it's a matter of living where you're not haunted.

It's so sad here. There are so many roads and houses and bars and neighborhoods that just leave a bad taste in my mouth. So many places that remind me of suicide attempts, or low self-esteem, or problems. I don't want to have to look at these things daily. And I don't want to have to carve out a new nitch in an old town. I want to start fresh, new, clean.

First things first, I've got to go through my storage and let go of some things. I know I should get rid of my dresser, because it's 300 pounds of solid wood number one, and because it's huge. I think where I'm moving to I'll only be able to afford a studio apartment. That means all those books have to go. Perhaps I'll just donate them all to the library. 9 boxes of books....

Or, maybe I'll just move it all (minus the books) and see what furniture fits and what doesn't. I think if a studio is the size of my old bedroom then I could fit the dresser and the couch, if a tight fit. I love redecorating.

Bullseyes are hard to get

I need a map and a dart. What I've been doing is just applying to everything in three cities north of here, but I think I should maybe move up there. If I live with others, my unemployment will cover housing. I really should just sell my car, but I'm not ready for that, yet. I'll have to think about it more. I mean, it took me 3 months to find that car just the color and specs I wanted it, and I've already thrown so much money at it. And I love driving. Anne, you can always buy a new car. And it's time to get rid of my couch, too. I love it, everyone else hates it, and with roommates I won't be able to keep it anyway.

I'm almost done with my taxes, and my return should be huge because of the unemployment. Hooray! Finally, some good news about unemployment. I can use that to rent a truck and put a deposit down someplace. I just have to pick the city and stick with it, even if it takes a while to find the right job. Am I ready for that, or do I want to stay in the cheap, comfort of home.

I have to get out of here. It's driving me crazy living at home. I would much rather take some awful part-time gig and live on my own than continue to live at home. It's crowded with stuff, none of it's mine, I'm sleeping on a twin bed, and I feel like I'm under a microscope (even though I know I'm not). Ugh! This period in my life has become uncomfortable. I suppose I should stay, if only because I have a great doctor who will give me free medication. I still haven't sent back the meds that came in the mail (did I tell you they came? Finally.), and I might just pull the Abilify out of there and then send the rest back.

So much to decide. I need a dart. Or Rochambeau.

This could have been my secret

Life stages

Where do you go when you don't know what you want or what direction you're headed in?

After 4 or so months of being home I'm realizing a few things: I did miss the snow; I've got to live on my own again soon; and I moved away from home for a reason. I picked up and moved across the country for a few good reasons: my mom makes me insane; there are. Lot of bad memories here; Adam. I love him, I do, but... I don't know. Its like having a controlling older brother. He just makes me want to rebel.

There's a job here that I think they're going to offer me, and I think I'm going to turn them down. All I want is to be working, but there's a few things here (it's the day of semi-colons!): my mentor thinks I would be bored at this job; I think I wouldn't want to stay in it more than 2 years, and part of my career hopes are to stay in a job longer than that; and it's the part of my field I find too easy to occupy myself. I do get bored doing that kind of work after a while, and it's not as creative a job as I hoped. I think it would be a great job, and I could be happy until I got bored, and my resume shows that only takes about a year.

So I don't know. It seems like I'm pointed north for a few years. I would love to try out a new city; someplace to call my own. I do need to acknowledge a few more things with semi-colons: I'm in a really transitional place in my life right now and I don't know what I'm doing; and I think I'm a bit manic. Thank you Abilify! It makes me feel so much better. But usually I get the urge to move and cut my hair when I get manic, and all weekend I've been thinking about chopping off my hair again. Pixie cut = mania; always. One time in college I pretty much shaved my head. Boy, was I high! I had a great time that summer.

Everything is so up in the air. I wish I knew what was going to happen, but I think I'm just going to have to wing it.