I just took a shot of vodka and chased it with a beer. I started the beer at 4:30pm. The shot had to wait until at least after 5pm. I’m
still proper. Even if the beer was a 16oz tall boy Budweiser The Man had orphaned in the fridge for a hot afternoon.
When The Man and I were in The Keys we went to a Publix to pick up some groceries and some wine (because Florida is one of those really nifty places that sells wine in the grocery stores). While we walked down one of the aisles, an older lady wearing a terry cloth cover-up and years of tans strolled by us. The layers of sun damage made guessing her age damn near impossible unless one picked a number and automatically subtracted twenty to balance out the grievous injury that numerous exposures to Florida sun had wrought upon her face. We weren’t really interested in her looks. We were more interested in her purchases. Her grocery cart held only one block of cheese, a gallon of milk, and six bottles of a fairly good Sauvignon Blanc. One could tell that all of these bottles were for her.
Today has been a six bottle grocery cart kind of day.
Today has been a
shit day. Actually, today has been a shit day on top of a long line of shit days that I haven’t been talking about. As much as I abhor the idea, I must truly adhere to the Southern Woman Standard of acting like bad shit ain’t happening because, well, because I don’t fucking know. Maybe we don’t like to talk about bad things “because of the children”. Most everything is always about “the children”, right?
Well, I don’t have any children but I cried like one today-for a whole hour. It could have been two but I wasn’t timing it and a phone call from my mother in the middle would skew an official count. Turns out this cry was the best decision I’ve made in months-minus going gluten-free. That was a pretty good one as well. And, maybe I shouldn’t forget the decision to go back on my anti-depressants. That is also proving itself to be the best thing I did all year. In fact, by my calculations, it’s the best thing I’ve done in the past two years. Someone once convinced me that I didn’t need them. It took me 12 months to figure out that someone was wrong. It took me another 12 to exercise, eat right, get good sleep, and try every single other homeopathic remedy before I finally admitted to myself that I’m someone that suffers from depression that requires prescription medication. This totally sucks. But, it is what it is. It is a life. It also just happens to be the one that I’ve been given. The only thing that cheers me up (besides large doses of extended release serotonin) is the verified link between depression and writers. Maybe God does even things out in the end, huh?
Other than that, I think I’m just frustrated.
I play “feelings identification” games with the kids I work with in therapy. You’d be amazed how many people there are walking around out there that can’t put a name to what they are feeling on most days. Unfortunately for me, I have an entire list to comb through before I decide which single one characterizes my shit attitude on
that day. Angry, sad, ticked-off, vulnerable, overwhelmed, hopeful, confused, helpless, sulky, disillusioned, fatigued, paranoid, and bitter. I can do this all day. And on most days, I do.
But, I think the one thing I’ve figured out…is that these feelings don’t mean a damn thing if I can’t write about them. I’ve muzzled myself. I no longer write. And, since I was never good at talking face to face, if I’m not writing….I’m not communicating. I’m just exploding about once every two months and trying to explain this to the people that love me. I cannot not write. I know that is a double negative. I don’t not care. I’m just too busy to clean it up. That’s one thing I’ve figured out. I don’t have to be perfect. I got scared because I wanted to be perfect. I NEEDED to be perfect.
I needed everything that came out of me to fit neatly in a box, preferably 900 words in length with very little cursing, an uplifting message, and a catchy last sentence. I wanted situational comedy. Situational comedy isn’t in my genes. I was raised in The Delta. God game me depression and a large vocabulary. You figure out who has the sense of humor. A lot of this doesn’t matter. What DOES matter is that I stopped writing. ALL WRITING. For the past too long to count my fingers used this keyboard to do nothing but type in the words “Perezhilton.com” and then went straight back to sleep.
My nails are perfectly manicured. I do them myself every two weeks. I keep them short and when people ask why I don’t have nails I always answer, “I type a lot. It just makes it easier.” That’s a load of horseshit. I haven’t been typing. I haven’t been typing in so long my word count per minute has actually fallen. I suck. In terms of actually doing something that one loves, I have heaved my proverbial ball and chain off the Cliff Of 9-5 Jobs and am just waiting for its falling weight to yank me off the precipice. I’m pretty sure the ground at the bottom isn’t covered in flowers and soft places to fall, either. It’s probably covered in IRS agents, student loan payments, and barfed-up cat hair balls. I left the vestiges of my one true love-lines and words-on the side of the road somewhere a while back and promised I would be back to pick them up. I lied to them.
There were many factors leading to this action. I could never pinpoint just one. I changed jobs, I lost some friends, I lost a second brother, I moved, I found The Man. It was never just one of them. And, if I am going to be perfectly honest, I could probably also say that it might not have been any of them. It might have just been ME. I got scared. I got scared of everything. EVERYTHING. It wasn’t just writing that was affected. I got the closest to agoraphobic I’ve ever been. I stopped leaving the house. I stopped going out. I stopped attending community events. I developed horrible social anxiety and I was diagnosed with Panic Disorder. And, if I am totally honest I will have to be vulnerable enough to say that losing a second sibling was such a seemingly horrific joke that I didn’t know how to talk about it for a long, long time.
I didn’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone, explain myself, or really have to worry about “saving the world” for a bit. I needed to save myself. Every single day was spent making sure that I could make it through that single day. There were no fancy tricks. It was just breathing in and out. That was hard enough. The Man trudged with me all of the way. Even on days when all we could do was drag each other. He plodded. I plodded. Because, sometimes, you just plod. There is no poetry in plodding.
Right after my second brother’s death a very nice doctor gave me lots of medication to help me “calm down”. I took this medication and “calmed down”. I took this medication and became a Good Little American. There is a very large difference between suffering from depression and needing benzos. Hey, don’t get me wrong…benzos are GREAT! They are like Frosted Flakes for adults. I think that is why at least fifty percent of people in the population are taking them. They make life make sense. Mainly because you just don’t CARE if life makes sense. You just live and stop worrying about it. But, you also stop trying to fix it. The day a doctor heard my story and decided that anyone actually enduring it MUST need sixty Xanax a month is the day I decided that this was unacceptable.
Okay, that's a total lie. I definitely indulged the Xanax for at least three months before I decided it wasn't acceptable. That's the problems with Xanax...there are lots of things it makes acceptable.
This is not acceptable to me.
The Man and I keep a copy of the dictionary by the toilet. Yes, we are
those kinds of people. One should really try to learn at least one new word per day. Most days I sit and open a random page to comb through them for one I don’t know. Often, I can’t actually find one. This freaks me out as I know that I don’t know half the words that actually exist but finding out that Webster’s doesn’t know them either has really led to me losing faith in the dictionary in general. I actually usually know all the words on a single page.
Today I did not.
The word was “numinous”. I'd never heard of it. It’s an adjective that means “having a deeply spiritual or mystical effect.”
I think I’ve been waiting on it.
I am in desperate need of a numinous event.
Labels: whiney bullshit
