Thar She Blows

Dr. Yeow has frequently warned me to look out for manic episodes. I think he thought I was having one.

I don't want to say he's right, but at the moment, I'm feeling pretty low.

I got another love letter from Wells Fargo. This one said that I could put off paying my mortgage payment until Jan 10, 2010. Then everything would be due - three months of back mortgage payments PLUS late fees.

What f*ing saints.

And someone kept telling me they don't want my house?

And it turns out - it really does turn out - that I was making more money on unemployment than I am now.

I have been pushed and pushed and pushed and now I can't be pushed any further. Not unless someone comes and takes me where I've fallen down in a heap and bodily throws me off the precipice.

I've been crying and crying. The stupid cow at Wells Fargo kept saying, "You have to make more money and reduce your expenses to get into another program." And I kept saying, "How much more and how much less?" And she kept saying, "But that doesn't give us a true picture of your situation."

And finally, sobbing, I hung up.

I'm going to take some clonazepam. And maybe when I wake up, things won't feel so f*ing horrible.

I Want a New Drug

Through a circuitous route, I happened to take part in a clinical study run by a psychiatrist. (Go figure!)

It involved a lengthy telephone interview. I knew others who had participated in the study and as I was talking to Dr. A, he said, "Oh, and what was the family crisis that derailed you when you were twelve?"

"Oh, that was when my grandfather was arrested for molesting my friends."

Brief silence from Dr. A. "And did he molest you?"

"No. Just my friends and cousins. Not me."

Dr. A cleared his throat. We went off in another direction and at one point, he stopped me and said, "So why were you living with your grandparents?"

"Oh, my mom was in a car accident and was hospitalized for about six months when I was little."

"Six months?"

"Yeah. Six months."

On we went. There was some backtracking here and there, but in the end, Dr. A did a summation and said, "So. As I understand it, your parents divorced when you were quite young, your mother was in the hospital for six months when you were a toddler, various relatives looked after you, you had no contact with your father, your mother was physically and emotionally abusive of you as well as negligent. And as you were entering puberty, your grandfather was charged with sexually assaulting your friends and young cousins. Then..." Okay, then I kind of tuned it out.

Because stepping back from it, I thought, dang, and we haven't even gotten to the whole marriage to Xman and being laid off three times part yet. And although I've put everything that happened to me before, oh, age 45, into a box in the basement, it's kind of not-good when I think about this. I mean, this is a lot of stuff.

Dr. A inquired politely, "Are you in therapy?" And I thought, holy God, I should be.
I said not currently.
Dr. A asked if I was satisfied with my therapist. Then it finally dawned on me. "You know, I've been seeing Ari the Therapist for twelve years and I'm not any better at all than when I first started. So no, I'm not."

"Would you be interested in a referral? I may be able to find someone who can help regarding medication."

Well, sure. Sign me up.

To Dr. A's enormous credit, he got back to me within 24 hours. I now have the name of a colleague of a colleague. I have permission to drop names. "It helps sometimes," said Dr. A.

I'm going to call the number tomorrow. Because, um, honestly, if there's anybody out there still paying attention, I need a new drug. My old ones haven't been working for ages. I've been playing fast and loose with dosages. My head is doing things that scare me.

Like this...

Yesterday, because I wanted to feel like a normal human being, I went shopping. At my first stop, I found a pair of truly adorable shoes and I tried them on. I loved them, but they were a bit too big, so I moved on. Two hours later, in the same shopping center, I saw another pair of shoes and I thought, oh, I had a dream about these shoes! Then I realized, no, these were much like the shoes I had tried on only hours before.

It doesn't sound scary, does it? But it does scare me. Because for the past...I don't know how long...I've been living my life under a brain cloud. Sometimes I'll think I dreamed something when it turns out to have been real. Sometimes I think something has happened, when it hasn't happened at all. I feel unmoored, but I've been too terrified to admit it.

I lose things. Things slip through my hands like water. I'll be looking up something to put on my Netflix queue, then poof! It'll be gone. What was it, I think. A documentary. Someone who makes documentaries. What's his name? Not the fat one. Wheel. Spur. Horses? No. Mason Spurlock from Wheeling.

I'm lucky if I can keep hold of Mason long enough to look him up.

Honestly, after awhile, I've just given up trying to hold onto those things and I've been even more terrified to admit it.

I was talking to a friend yesterday who said she had a terrible time retrieving words when she had been depressed. Yes, I said, I've had a terrible time too. "Pen" has become "the thing with ink."

Look, I'm really tired of my adventures in psychiatry. I know I've been very depressed for years and very, very depressed for the last five years, with little hypomanic episodes tucked in. (They were nice. I miss them.)

I'm sick of being sick. I'm sick of the roller coaster. I'm tired of not having any friends, I'm especially tired of not having a job. I'm tired of a lot of things.

I hope Dr. Referral doesn't dick me around, because I honestly can't take many more of shenanigans a la Dr. Lavender.

That's all.

Scribble, Scribble

Class is over. I briefly sympathized with Concepcion when I learned she commutes through New York City to get to work. Then she leaned on me and all sympathy vanished.

I am acting weird at work. I don't know what's going on. I am worried. Am I coming down with a cold? Should I be working longer hours to get the work done? Is it a bad sign that some grunt work that I might have been forced to do is being outsourced to the departed employee who used to do it? All I can think to do is to go to work, sit down, and put my nose to the grindstone until it's dark outside.

Why do people decide they have to confide in me? It's the face, I know, the doughy, innocent, baby-at-52 face. Yesterday, someone in the class who had been boasting about his teenage son said to me, "Just between you and me, he's the only reason I go home." Oh, man. Don't tell me this.

Re: weirdness at work: Could it be that I've been knocked off my stride by seeing Boy Wonder for the ruthless climber he claims to be, as well as getting a pretty good view of what True Boss is, um, truly like? It could be. However, the only answer to this is to suck it up and get over it.

I've been going to bed at 8:30. Once dinner is done, the house is tended to, and I've read for about an hour, I can't think of anything else to do with myself. So I go to bed. Surely this isn't right.

Cats in the Age of Anxiety

The cats sleep with me,usually. Not all of them, but a good number of them. I go to sleep with Katy at my head, Mo somewhere on the bed, Dylan in my arms, and Taylor trying to get as close to my butt as she can. (I find this very disconcerting.)

I wake up with Dylan in my arms, Katy at my head, Gus at my feet, Sophie fleeing as soon as she realizes I'm awake, and Brianna fresh in from Briannaland prancing on the bed.

During the night, they have pushed me, crowded me, tried to sleep on my face (but it's warm there), slept on my head, around my neck, nudged up under my arms, crawled under the covers and tried to get beneath my pajama top (but it's warm there). God help me if I wake up at three o'clock needing to pee. It isn't a matter of hopping up, doing what I need to do, then settling back under the wonderfully snug covers. No.

Our Goddess is awake! We must arise and accept the manna she gives us! And if she tries to go back to sleep, let's get her!

Last night, I went to bed early. And I closed the bedroom door with all of the cats on the other side of it.

When I woke up, Dylan was repeatedly hurling himself headfirst into the door. When I opened the door, he leaped into my arms. Everyone else was all freaked out, too. So we went into the kitchen, I fed them their daily ration of canned food, and then I settled in with my cup of coffee to write in my diary as I do every morning.

Wrong. So many feelings were bruised and anxieties raised during the night that I broke up three fights, escorted Butch to the litter box, kept Mo from attacking Butch while he was in the litter box, pulled Mo off of Butch after he finished in the litter box, and chased Taylor away from Mo. (If the cats see me scolding another, they all go after the scolded one.)

I had to go around soothing them all. When the cats fight, the first thing for me to do is to break it up, although it's usually over by the time I get to the scene of the crime. When it goes on, I break it up. Then I have to go find the guilty parties and separately soothe them.

Taylor is a terrible scrapper. Once I get her away from whoever she's been picking on, I then have to pick her up and pet her until she calms down. Cats don't see this as a reward for bad behavior. They fight because they're anxious, they don't know where they stand and they need to be reassured that all is as it should be.

They're all sleeping now. Sometimes I wish I had one of those air horns obnoxious people use at sporting events.

Once Around the Park

Yesterday, E and I took a walk around Boondoggle Park.

I hadn't been there since Thanksgiving. The cold weather has definitely had an impact on my desire to go around and photograph everything. (Actually, I took a lot of photos at Emma's but haven't had the heart to go through them and put them on Flickr.)

E is still looking great and is back at work. She's lost so much weight that she had to go out and buy bags and bags of new clothes.

We met in the tiny parking lot and set out around the frozen lake. I was surprised to see it iced over to the point where there were kids playing hocky on it. I noted that none of them likely weighed over a hundred pounds and there were life rings and ropes every fifty feet along the lakeshore.

We set out at a moderate pace. "This is why I called you instead of Someone Else," E said. "I knew you wouldn't go racing ahead of me and then yell at me to keep up." Like her seventy-ish mother, Annushka.

Since letting go of Emma, I have noticed that it's easier for me to let go of Annushka as well. It doesn't hurt anymore that the handmade gifts I've given her over the years have disappeared from their various places of honor. I almost don't wonder anymore if she gave them away, threw them out, or has them neatly wrapped up in the basement, facing a wall.

In fact, my hold on everyone else seems to have loosened. At least, it seems that way to me. I'm glad about it.

Halfway around the lake, we encountered a woman walking her dog. Of course, E knew her. We stopped and talked. E introduced her. Donna is a realtor and in Annushka's and E's world, this practically makes her one of the family. Both E and Annushka have an unflagging interest in real estate. I have spent happy Sunday afternoons trailing E to open houses. It's cheap and I get a good idea of what to do with Ma Maisonette.

Donna's son has graduated college and is floundering around, trying to find a job in the publishing world. I offered some tips and then we said our good-byes.

On the other side of the lake are houses built in the 1920s and 1930s, now undergoing massive renovations. I almost bought a little house here before I found Ma Maisonette. The little house had a gorgeous living room straight out of "The Enchanted Cottage" - beamed ceilings, white-mantled fireplace, and mullioned windows. I would have bought it just for the living room alone, but it went to auction and ended up $20,000 out of my price range.

E knew the renovation history of each house we passed. She pointed out one in particular. "This is my favorite." The house backed onto Boondoggle Park, with a flat yard that had a staircase going down to a grassy terrace next to the lake. It could be a choice spot anytime but winter.

We ended up going to Coffee Heaven West, where we warmed up. Then she went to Costco and I went to the library and we both felt virtuous about our walk around the park.

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I am unaccountably anxious about this whole car business.

I got halfway through cleaning out the old one before rushing back into the house with a case of the fantods. I drank hot cocoa and read until I felt human again.

In the cleaning-out process, I came across a photo of Xman and me, taken on the day I bought the Faithful Camry in 1996. Oh my God, I thought. I am fat and ugly. This isn't just a knee jerk reaction that most women have and say to observe some kind of womanly etiquette. I really mean it. I am fat and ugly. Luckily, I accepted this some time ago but it was jarring to have to face it unexpectedly.

I threw the picture away.

I don't know why I've got this jittery nervousness going on. I have a feeling it won't go away until I make the first car payment. Whereupon anxiety will likely give way to sorrow and despair.

And so it goes.