Sunday, February 8, 2009

UGH.

You know, I had a few weeks there at the beginning of the year where I thought I was gonna be okay. The new year coincided with a new moon, which boded well for resolutions and whatnot. Usually I hold off on trying to accomplish anything until the astrological new year when the sun enter Aries, but this year I could feel the energy and I tried with all I had in me to harness some hope and throw it up into the universe, making my intentions known.

I stopped my anti-depressant pretty much cold turkey. Not the best approach, mind you, but with my prescription running out, a doctor who insisted on seeing me before giving me a refill (even though I've been on the stuff for like over two years now), and no health insurance to cover that doctor's visit, I decided to just let it lapse. It hasn't been helping me in a long while--in fact it may have been contributing to the problem. It's been hard to know for sure with my hormones so out of whack due to my inability to afford to buy the hormone cream I need as well... I honestly don't know how I live these days. In a constant state of frustration, anger, disappointment, heartache, and loneliness to be sure. And that's on a good day.

At any rate, I did manage to scrape up the money for my hormone cream just as I was stopping the Celexa, and so it seemed to make for a smooth transition. For a couple weeks I was feeling pretty good. Not fantastic, but better. Better than I had in a while. I'd weathered the holidays, and I had some optimism about the new year, and I was feeling determined to try and make a life for myself.

And then after those first few weeks it all fell apart. Little by little the crap of my everyday existence--the things which most people take for granted, over which I have so little control--started to creep back in and poke holes in my bubble of hope. As I started work on a variety of projects that I deemed necessary for moving forward, I realized just how much more work each of them would take in reality, and my lack of progress left me disheartened. I would schedule the time I thought it would take to accomplish a certain amount of foundation work, and in twice that amount of time only half of what I needed to do would be finished, and I would be exhausted, unable to go on to the NEXT task on the list, which was as crucial as the first. And it all started seeming insurmountable.

It all seems insurmountable. It's one step forward and seventy-two steps back. And I look down the road at how many steps it's going to take to get where I want to be, and I feel defeated already.

And I can't stop crying.

If I could just get paid for crying, I'd be rolling in dough and at least ONE of my problems would be solved.

From the moment I wake up--invariably HOURS later than I would like--I have failed. I tried flipping my crazy night schedule back to a daytime schedule, and after a miserably sleep-deprived week, I managed it. For a couple of days I was feeling pretty good, and productive, and like a part of the real world. And then one semi-late night threw the whole thing back off kilter and I haven't been able to "fix" it again yet.

And I had thought for a time that I was just going to surrender to being a night owl, and stop fighting it. It was briefly a relief to embrace the schedule and just live that way. But it also didn't last. Because there are too many things in my world that still have to happen during the early part of the day that it just becomes too much of a mess to give into the night owl schedule completely.

I feel suffocated by the four walls that comprise my "garret apartment" (a.k.a. "bedroom") at my mother's house. I can't afford to get out nearly enough, and even when I can I resent the lack of "home." I want to be able to spread out, to wander from room to room throughout the day... without having to worry about who else has camped out there first, watching TV, smoking a cigarette, having a screaming match with whoever else.

And I cannot stop thinking about Andy. Just when I think I might be getting close to getting over him, some random memory is sparked by some outside stimulus, or just my own traitorous mind, and I am off down the miserable path of resentment and despair. I don't understand WHY. I have yet to understand. And I miss him. I can still see him, smell him, feel him. I would still take him back. I still want him back. No one I know could possibly imagine or understand that, I'm sure, but I do. And then I realize it's never going to happen. And I think of his face, and his voice, and his hands, and the way he walked, and all the little things I will never have again, and I just cry and cry. And I struggle to figure out what the point of it was. What was I meant to learn? I don't know. I DON'T KNOW. I will never understand. It was cruel and pointless, as life seems to be, and I do not know why I even waste my time trying to plug away or get ahead most days because if I ever find a moment of happiness it will just be plucked away again as it always has been.

I don't feel like I'll ever have sex again. My sexual prime is being completely blown. Wasted.

I have nowhere to go. I hate being home. I hate being out. When I go out and see my musical friends play I just feel inferior next to these people who can play seven different instruments when I still haven't mastered the ONE I play. I look at their gig schedules and I don't understand how they are free to travel and play when I know they're not always making much money. Or if they ARE making money I wonder why I can't get those same gigs? The people who have friends who constantly play with them, or bands, make me crazy because I don't have the resources to run a band right now. The people who have agents and managers working tirelessly on their behalf... where did they get them? Why can't I attract that kind of interest so that all I have to do is show up and play, instead of working two jobs and then trying to squeeze in the full-time job of managing my own music career on top of it?

I feel like I have no friends. I HAVE friends, but it's hard to relate to the ones with husbands and kids. Every time I catch up with someone from my past on Facebook they are married with children. I ran into one of the in person at a party recently and I could have just slit my wrists right there. I was in this gigantic, beautiful house in this unbelievable neighborhood of gigantic, beautiful houses (the kind I would kill to live in) and this woman I went to junior high with started chatting me up. "Oh, I live right across the street," blah, blah. "What are YOU up to?" And I have nothing to report. I mean, I try to make it sound interesting, but it's not. And when the question of WHERE I'm living comes up I just want to dig a hole and tunnel through to the other side of the world.

Because I live with my mother (and the rest of the siblings who never left home--though I tried to tell them I wasn't setting an example worth following) I have nowhere to invite people to. So I have to either invite myself or wait to be invited. Which is fine except that once I'm at my friends' houses I am miserable because I just sit there thinking about how much I want what they have and how I'm just never going to have it.

I'm never going to have it. I'm 39 years old. The economy is tanking, my finances are a wreck, and by the time I get my shit together enough to maybe make a go of it, I'll probably be dying of some kind of cancer or in the loony bin. Every stupid decision I have made in the past is coming back to haunt me and preventing me from doing the things I want. Hell, even just the basic things that are BARELY what I want.

A year ago I thought I was going to have it. Because I had a partner in crime, and everything seemed possible. He told me he loved me, and no one had ever done that before. And then it turned out that he hadn't meant it. And so now I don't even believe in it anymore. The one thing I always felt like I'd have one way or another is something I just don't believe is possible anymore. So I'm really not sure what I'm living for at this point.

Every day I want to contact him. EVERY DAY. I want to tell him how much he killed me. How much my whole world has crumbled and how far-reaching the consequences have been. I want to know that he is miserable--even though I don't think he is. But I want him to be. And I always want to tell him that I want him to be. Even though I know he wouldn't care and it would just make me look like a bigger loser.

Tonight I actually paid $1.95 to one of those people search places to get his current address. He is living exactly two blocks away from where he lived when we were together. It doesn't make any sense to me, but then none of it ever has. Did he meet his new girlfriend (the one he was supposedly with when I last spoke to him in May) in his neighborhood and choose her condo over his? Was it just a really good buy at the time? Who the hell knows. Like it matters?

All I know is that every second of my life is a nightmare. I feel worthless and rejected and small and immature and trapped and I don't know what to do about it.

I can't even go back to therapy because of the lack of health insurance. And I can't afford to buy any. It's $400.00 a month for a good plan without insane deductibles, and I just don't have that. I will never have that. And if that's what it's going to cost, then forget about ever adding like RENT onto that, even if I THOUGHT I could get out of my mother's house.

The more I think about it all the more I just end up in this circle of doom, overwhelmed by my complete lack of control over any of it, and by the sickening amount of time it will take to gain control over any of it, and then I have to accept that one way or another it is all ultimately my own fault, and it's just a nightmare.

1 comment:

Dave Schipper said...

Hey kid, March 15th I'll find out if anyone has bought our song from iTunes.... I told you that you get all the proceeds... you might want to put a little youtube video out for it... maybe it could generate a few bucks your way.

I have friends that I can hug close by pretty much in your position. Truly you can't do it alone... and some times medication is the only way... but think about finding a good ELCA Lutheran Church... they aren't all happy clappy, and maybe the right pastor and community can build you back up.

Dave