Damn, Damn, Damn Depression!

I'm sunk in the stupid pit again. Why? Hell if I know. And it's not just depression, although that is an overriding emotion. I'm crabby and antisocial. I'm terrifically stressed and anxious, to the tune of taking an extra 1 mg of Xanax each of the last two days. (So far today I haven't taken any extra.) I took a four-hour nap yesterday and still slept for 9.5 hours last night … and still didn't want to get up this morning.

I'm really tired of being "the sick one", the one people have to ask "how are you doing today?" I have no idea what I'm doing wrong or what I'm not doing right that keeps dumping me back into this debilitating space. "Functional" might as well be at the top of the highest glacier on Mt. Rainier, it seems to impossible to reach.

You can't get there from here.

I'm trying. But I've been sleeping so late (thanks to this great melatonin-based supplement my psych recommended) that I feel if I don't get up NOW then the day is fucking OVER, so I haven't been journaling or trying to meditate or visualize. And when I do try to meditate or visualize, I haven't been able to achieve the levels I was at back before I tried the Abilify (which I've been off of all this month).

In therapy yesterday, Michele asked why I feel I have to get up and start my day as soon as I wake up. What will happen if I put it off for another half an hour while I journal or meditate or something? If I stay in bed even later, I feel as if the entire day is over, wasted. I feel like a complete failure for the day. I feel judged and judging.

We also talked about writing. And drawing. About how I used to do them all the time virtually every day, from the time I was quite young. How somewhere in my 20s, I stopped doing them much and they became fraught with difficulties and issues. And yet, I need to do them. Writing and drawing are parts of me that need attention. When I do them I feel better. I feel like myself.

Irrational Thinking, the Scarcity Mindset, and Cognitive Therapy

I am afraid. I'm afraid of many things, few of them rational. Some of them even have names. One of the things that most occupies my fear at the moment is that I'm going to run out of money and have no options. This is called a Scarcity Mindset. It's a little rational to think that I'll run out of money because I'm not working and the inheritance will last for only so long. But it's not rational to the extent that I fear it. I'm almost paralyzed with it.

It doesn't help that, for almost two years, I've been almost incapable of holding down a job. I worked at that contract job and called in sick way too often, just out of the stress of working and commuting when I was still recovering from my grief.

I'm capable of working a regular job now. I'd rather work freelance, but I think I can work something more normal. It would be best if it could be on a contract so I could get paid by the hour and extra for more than 40 hours a week; I don't want to work all those extra hours without extra pay anymore. I'm too old for that shit.

So here I am, looking for work on craigslist and the freelancer's association job list and LinkedIn and not finding anything or at least not getting even any messages back and I'm thinking maybe I need to find an office job (not like there aren't already enough office workers looking for work out there) or a retail job or something just so I can earn some money. I need to find work. I need an income. And I'm terrified that I won't find work and that I'll end up stone-broke. 

But this is something that cognitive therapy is designed to work with.

I'm Rambling Blue Today

Today I have no umph. I don't care about much, I'm not particularly hungry but I was craving ice cream and cookies before lunch (peanut butter and butter on english muffins). There is a dark chocolate bar in the fridge but I don't have any real compulsion to go get it. I feel vague and kinda numb.

I'm feeling depressed.

Nothing specific I can think of, except that I am still struggling and needing therapy and meds (and the meds are probably forever, at least some of them). 

I even woke up feeling kinda good because my mom was in my dreams and it was her voice saying the kinds of things she would say (I think we were shopping). It felt nice waking up with her voice in my head.

But since then the day has gone downhill. I keep saying I'll go to the farmer's market on Thursdays (3pm to 7pm), but I don't want to today. I don't want contact with strangers. I want my mom, but that aside, I'd like to be with one of my close friends. Maybe they'd hold my hand and stroke my hair and tell me it's all going to be okay, because I feel like it's all going to be bad and just fall apart.

Miracles

I started a part-time paid position with the group I've volunteered with for two years: I am the manager/ coordinator for making sure that everything is accomplished, and on time, and that the event runs successfully and smoothly. Not sure how I got roped into this. Doug made it sound simpler.


So, right after I agreed to that job, I was asked to interview with a writing services company. One of my colleagues on the volunteer job is always trying to help me, so she recommended me to the owner of this company. With my new resume that showed my new part-time position, I sat down and had the best interview EVAH with the owner and the VP. I told them what the ideal situation was for me (2 part-time jobs, at least until the other one is finished) and freelance. They didn't pull away or act like that was a deal-killer. I took their tests. Last week they offered me some part-time work. I don't know if it's just this one project or an ongoing relationship, but wow. I start early tomorrow morning.


All I have to do now is get the freelance stuff back on track.


If the writing services company keeps me on regularly, I'll be able to pay all my bills and put money in the bank for the first time since January 2008.


Of course, I have this virus that has given me laryngitis and a cough that is keeping me up at night. I have the writing job tomorrow, then therapy, then a meeting with the other PT job. It's possible I will have no voice by the end of the day, but so what. I'll have been doing things.


Now can someone help me pay my mom's last bills so I can finish my work as executor and get my bit of money?

Can't find it in the classifieds

Wanted: Help. 

Help with bringing order to my apartment. Help with finding work. Help with paying bills. Help with not getting so consumed with anxiety over these things that I simply pop.

I have a couple of small projects coming up, but not with anyone who can afford to pay me full price. Yes, I do have a sliding fee scale. Extremely small businesses and individuals get a break, because they have very little spare cash. And that's who I seem to be working for right now. When I work.

The money I had left from before, plus the money my mom gave me, plus some of the other is shrinking much too quickly. It was a lot of money, but between me and the estate, it's going, going. 

Health insurance is just about prohibitively expensive for me. If you take even one medicine routinely, you can't get individual health insurance; you have to buy it from the High Risk Pool. Which is far more expensive in Houston that it was in Oregon. And I have a much higher deductible. I'm thinking of doubling the deductible so I can lower the monthly cost. The cost went up significantly when I turned 50. Lucky me.

My rent is not cheap, but it certainly is not the most expensive around here. If I want to go significantly cheaper, I'd have to move into a unit that is too small for my stuff, or even for an actual dining table, or I'd have to move to places that I don't really want to live.  And rent is going up at the end of my lease in a couple of months.

I have credit card debt, because I've been unemployed for a long time, except for bit and pieces, and I've had expenses. 

If Mom's house doesn't sell soon, or if I don't get some real income soon, or if I don't win the lottery soon, I'm going to be hurting big time.

I am one scared kitty right now.

Is this truly my life?

Have you ever heard about Smith Magazine's "Six-Word Memoir" projects? You describe your life in six words. They have published several books from what their readers share.

Traditionally, when one loses one's parents, one is usually in one's fifties or sixties, or older if one is lucky, and the parent(s) in their seventies or eighties or more. It is hard to lose a parent, of course, but there usually exists a spouse and children, probably siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles, to comfort one.

To steal someone else's memoir, my life has been "Not quite what I had expected." Or, more accurately: "It's all gone so horribly wrong." 

Because I have none of those people to comfort me. I have this aunt, who has not been a part of my life for 90% of it, as well as her children who I had not seen since the younger ones (now in the thirties) were ten. I have a half-brother who has been even less than 5% of my life and who drops into it now and then when it suits him. He always says he will call in a couple of days, even when I told him about Mom's death. That was more than a week ago. It's okay — I expected that.

Other aunts and uncles let go of me — and I of them — a couple of decades or more ago.

And my younger brother, the treasure of my life, died very young.

This is not how my life should be. Nothing has gone the way it should. Even allowing for my father's dying of a heart attack when I was seventeen, I should have my younger brother as my sibling and friend. I should have married and had children — if anyone was "made" for such things, I was. Family has always meant so much to me, and has been so elusive.

The Texas Skye in Summer

I'm living in the land of summer. The land of sunshine and heat. The land of warmth in temperature and warmth in people.

The land of tropical storms and hurricanes and killing levels of heat and humidity.

I worry about summer here. I worry about August and September, which are supposed to be the killer months, the months that could send me running for the PNW without so much as packing my bags.

I mean, it's not like the temps will faze me. I've been happily roasting (in limited amounts) in 97-degree weather (heat index 101-103). I walk outside from the extremely cold newspaper office, where I have to wear a sweater, and toast myself until I feel warm. Then I walk back into the ice cube of work. And about half the time, I don't turn on my AC in the car, preferring to warm myself as I drive (once the 140-degree heat leaks out thru the open windows, of course).

People are amazed by my tolerance and joy in the heat. They know where I've been. And I've dealt with 100+ degree weather in Eastern Washington (a LONG time ago) and occasionally in Seattle or in the Willamette Valley. Last year May, it hit 103 for a freak weather day in Lincoln City.

But the humidity: I worry about tolerating 110 degrees with 98% humidity for 2 months. I worry about the fact that I have things in my apartment that I want to keep. I worry about the fact that I bought a really nice couch last weekend (to be delivered next week) and would need to move that sucker if I fled.

Then there are the storms; it is now officially storm season.

I worry that maybe I can tolerate neither the NW nor the South, but I cannot afford the northern California coastal or near-coastal areas. (Because that would be the ideal climate for me.) I've made a couple of friends here. I might be on the way to making one or two more: this is so quick for me! :) What if I feel the need to leave?

I worry about money: unemployment ran out and I'm now living on my savings, which represents all the money I have in the world. Well, that and the bit of money I make at The Tribune, which pays for my health insurance, plus a little more. Maybe dinners out.

I don't mind being alone so much anymore. A friend from back "home" asked me how I was when I was a child, what did I do when I was alone. And I remembered that I was mostly solitary as a child, too.

So what did I do? Solitary things, things that occupied me; I rarely felt lonely. I read books. I wrote, I drew, I painted. I rode my bike around and around the cul de sac when my mom wouldn't let me ride out of it. I skated around and around, too. I played with my "dangerous" things: Fun Flowers when I was a child, a toy that could burn you pretty good and that I never had adult supervision when using, never hurt myself with; and my chemistry set when I was a little older, ditto for supervision and never hurting myself (even when I broke a test tube). I climbed a tree and I made my own detective kit to pretend with.

I guess it's time to let myself free of expectations. And just enjoy me, enjoy my life and the sunshine and the heat.

And to create: I've started a creative crochet project (picked up a couple of books); I have a painting sketched out and the supplies ready; I am working on not one, not two, but THREE novel ideas; I have a blog (obviously), and I have a website that desperately needs Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that potential clients can find me---my site doesn't come up in the first two or three DOZEN pages when you search on "Houston writer/editor" or "Houston freelance writer" or "Houston technical writer." That has to change. And I need to add some other things to my site.

All and all, there is no reason for my solitude to be difficult.

Only the summer heat, and the summer humidity.

Only the expectations and fears floating around in the Texas Skye.

Still alive, not exactly kicking tho'

Yes, it has been a very long time. I apologize. When I feel overwhelmed, I tend to conserve my energy.

I will write more posts. As for now, check out The Tribune. I've been writing articles. But there was a big smash-up today and now "I be uh editore". That's okay: I'm not aggressive and I found many things were actually painful for me to do (calling the same source very five minutes for updates on breaking news, that sort of thing).

Some articles were a pleasure, tho', so I hope I get other chances for those types.

Writing for a newspaper has taught me a great deal. Editing will teach me more. I love learning, even if I'm making only $10/hour and now working only 10 hours/week. And my unemployment is due to run out at any time.

What the hell! It's only money, right? And if I run out next year, can I live in someone's basement? Or attic? Or little shack/garage out back? I'll be good....

Love you all.