Espérer

To hope.

My heart lies heavily in my chest this evening.  I have been trying to let go of all the things I wrote about last night.  I had classes today, which was a welcome distraction, but I am feeling a little under the weather.  I took some hair clients when I got home, and after chatting all afternoon, I'm experiencing some mild laryngitis.  For a singer, this is devastating.  All I do almost every day is sing.  At school, at rehearsal, even at work or at home... always singing.  I have to take a singing test tomorrow and I am not sure it is going to happen.

I also got some pretty heavy news regarding a family member.  He is very sick and I'm not really sure what's going to happen.  He will be receiving treatments, but he will have to drastically change his lifestyle, and this will certainly cost him his job.  I'm less worried about how this is going to affect me, and more concerned about how it will affect other members of my family.  I just don't know how to properly cope with something like this.  I'm tired of losing grandparents.  I don't have that many left... so all I have is hope.

Life is overwhelming.

To hope.

Too Long Has Passed, Too Little Has Changed.

Greetings, friends.  It has been entirely too long.  I feel as though I have lived a whole lifetime since my last post, but there are reasons for my absence.  The greatest if these reasons is that for nearly two years, I have been living unmedicated for my conditions.  The world has been a swirling mass of confusion and reckless emotion.  It takes everything I have every single day to process, compartmentalize, and decompress.  I hardly have a moments' peace to try to put words to all those feelings.  It's hard enough to chew up the emotion and anxiety and swallow it without having to try to explain it to the world.

For the most part, I do quite well.  It's like riding a bike- your legs are shaky at first, but eventually it all comes back to you.  The coping mechanisms, finding someone to confide in who can help you navigate when to walk away and deal... finding like-minded people who aren't annoyed when you have to bail because you can't bring yourself to leave the goddamn house.  You know, because sometimes you just can't leave the house.  Sometimes, a sunny blue sky feels like it adds 15 pounds to each shoulder.  You can't even find joy in the rain.

In the almost two years since I last posted here, good things have happened to me.  I feel like I owe it to my two readers to admit that.  I have had moments of excitement and joy.  Outweighing those moments, however, has been wave after wave of frustration, pain, malcontent, paralyzing anxiety, and hollow, dark depression.  I owe it to you to admit that, as well. There have been times where I could barely lift my head.  It felt too heavy, and the things I was seeing were too much to bear.  If I kept my head buried in the sand, it was just easier.  Or, i thought it was...

It wasn't.  Hiding is never an appropriate or effective coping mechanism.  I have to keep telling myself this, because lately hiding has been my go-to.  I distract myself with projects, school, trying to help friends that seem like they might need me...

I am desperate for that kind of love in my life where I feel secure... where I can just be open and free and honest with all these insane things that make up so much of me... but lie hidden from the world, minute by minute.  I feel most people don't have the time to love me like that... it's time-consuming and emotionally draining to make yourself so spiritually available to someone who needs so much.  And whenever someone comes forward with statements like this, they often get inundated with messages of "why don't you call/text/message/carrier pigeon me?  I'm always here for you!"... before that happens, I beg you to please consider all of the responsibility that comes with that.  You will hear sad stories that make you worry, that make you wonder if you shouldn't have me thrown in a facility somewhere... it's hard to mentally equip oneself for the kind of burden I am.

I have been trying desperately to open up to people, but I often get the vibe that I'm over-sharing or making people uncomfortable with my awkward approach.  Or I find someone I even more desperately want to connect with, so as to have a kindred spirit in this world, but I hold back because I am not good enough, cool enough, I'm too damaged for their life.

The damage in my subconscious has already been done, and the fire feels like it's a slow spread, like magma rivers... burning its way down the hillside to infiltrate and destroy everything that's good, green, safe.

Do not feel pity for me, because this is just the way I was put together.  Do feel hope for me that I can get my head above the water.  I suppress so much that my dreams are exhaustingly vivid and distracting, but I got all my medications renewed today.  That's why I'm back here... to start the journey fresh and see if my once-revered meds can get me back to healthy, or to see if this is just my burden to bear in life.  It will be an interesting journey... please join me, if you'd like.  A little support goes a long long way with me.

On a personal note...

I haven't been keeping up with this as much as I had originally intended.  I feel bad.  The whole point was to keep up with it, so that other people might benefit from my experience... but let me tell you.  When every day just seems exhausting, it's really hard to sit down, write about it, and re-live it all.

Also, there seems to be a lot of negative action going on in my personal life.  I think we need at least half of our roof replaced, I still haven't redone my bathroom, we have to sell our SUV, the mister's back still isn't completely healed and he's still not working, my job isn't as fruitful for me as it could be, and I'm just beat.  All of this stuff is very stressful and it weighs on me constantly.  I try hard not to turn this into a personal blog about ALL my crap, but in the interest of keeping it real, I just have a lot of BS happening.

I'm a little whiny.  I took some time off this week and originally had something specific planned for the weekend, but... that fell through.  I was also planning my big 30th birthday party for later in the summer, but now that mister isn't working and we just have my money and disability payments, looks like that probably isn't going to happen, either.  So poor me, lol.

Anyway, I'm going to try very very hard to wade through my crap and make sure I'm posting like I should be.  I really do care about helping others, and I need to make it more of a priority.

Trust Issues and Anxiety

What do you get when you pair trust issues with your anxiety?  You get paranoia & panic.  For me, I get obsessed with what people might be saying about me when I'm not around.  I get very withdrawn and very angry- internalizing it all.  For example, I often worry about what coworkers may or may not be saying about me.  Are they having a negative conversation with me as the central topic?  Sometimes I can't even enjoy my days off because I just sit around and worry incessantly about what other people are saying about me.  Maybe it's true and I should worry about it, or maybe it's not true and I should just chill the hell out, but the thoughts absolutely eat me alive.  This has proven to be a very stressful way to go about living my life.

This tells me a few things.
* The world needs nicer people
* I need to stop surrounding myself with busybodies or people I feel I can't trust
* More Meds!

I'm only partially joking.  Seriously, though, that's my biggest mental barnacle.  Can't trust anyone!  Add general anxiety and a dash of OCD and that is a recipe for conspiracy-theory-level paranoia...

And what THAT tells me is that my biggest trust issue is with myself.  If I can't trust that I'm the person I'm supposed to be, what else do I have left?  I try really hard, on the daily, to be the nice, cheerful, supportive kind of person I'm "supposed" to be.  What I'm really doing is over-compensating for my introvert qualities and the fact that I am actually very socially awkward.

I'm totally feeling like Eeyore, guys.  I don't want to drag you down, but it's just sort of ho-hum for me lately.

Keep it secret, keep it safe.
J

Bad Situations and Recommended Reading

Hey.  I don't have a lot to say.  I have been dealing with my own emotional and mental health, which has taken up a lot of my time and energy... I should be blogging about it, but I will provide a re-cap once my brain has stabilized itself a little bit.

In the meantime, this is an interesting post by a friend regarding how you see yourself, aka your self-value.  I think I could stand to read this daily, and make it part of my mission statement as a human being.  I have a very big issue with my self-worth.  I have a hard time figuring out exactly what I mean to myself and to the world.  This is something I've been going over with my therapist... who am I, what am I, where am I going?  It's difficult, but Mike offers an interesting perspective.

Enjoy.

May the meds be ever in your favor,
J

Slackers' Guilt!

I'm experiencing Slackers' Guilt.  I haven't posted in a while, and there's good reason.  On top of being CRAZZZZY busy in my real life, I also have been getting into some pretty intense stuff at my therapy sessions.  It's all a lot for me to process on my own, let alone share with you.  I have a couple days off, so I'm hoping that I can get a "real update" in here soon...

In the meantime, if you have questions or suggestions for blog topics, I have set up an email account for this blog.  You can email me at thesquarestpeg@gmail.com.  I am also able to respond to your needs individually that way.  Please don't hesitate to email me if you feel you need my assistance.

Procrastinating...

Procrastinating is something I'm very good at.  I've been putting off an update in here because I've been trying to get my thoughts in order.  I have a lot going on.

First off, I want to talk about my counseling sessions.  My therapist is GREAT.  Her name is Susan and she is an absolute joy.  She's very real and engaging.  She doesn't just sit there and go "How does that make you feel?"... very interactive and very helpful.  She's also a certified acupuncturist, and at my last appointment, she taped these little radish seeds to the backs of my ears!  Apparently they're in a good spot for acupressure... The point that controls anxiety and enables clear thought.  It's only cleared the fog a little, though.

We have talked about quite a few things in the... 4 times I've seen her?  I had to go in twice this week, because we had a lot to deal with.  I have a lot of different emotions going in a lot of different directions and she's trying to help me get them all sorted out.  It's proving to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated... and she's also forcing me to be really honest with myself, which is really really hard.  I don't necessarily recommend it... I probably should, but I don't really like it, so you probably won't either.

I've had a hard week.  I'm ready to put it behind me and start over next week.  I decided this week that I want to go to college and finally grow up and make something of myself.  Then I found out that my previous student loan from 12 years ago still has a balance on it and that it's in default.  They won't give me any financial aid until that balance is paid off, and that's not going to happen anytime soon.  It's a really big disappointment to me... my previous screw-ups are coming back to haunt me... they never seem to leave.  I feel like life is just throwing it all back in my face as if to say "Well, you screwed it up once, what makes you think that you'll come out of it okay this time?"  I'm trying to stand up to life, but it's another one of those really hard things I don't like.  Finding a way to overcome is overwhelming sometimes.

Susan wants me to block off time during the week to think about my problems and what I'm going to do.  She says I can't just constantly think about it, or I will drive myself crazy... and I told her I'm halfway there!  Sometimes I feel like it would just be easier to admit myself to a program where people would take care of me, and they'd let me do crafts all day...  but I get too overwhelmed by the reality of my situation, which is I need to work and make money and follow through with my other commitments.  Once that's done, though, I guess I can go check myself in somewhere... We'll see.  Only if they let me blog ;)

I guess that's all for now.  Needed to unload some of this stuff and also log it here for future reference.

Stay Classy, San Diego.