I Should Be Doing Homework, But I’d Rather Blog

At the present time, I have lot of pressure to succeed academically.  I’m also gearing up to look for work.  Over the course of my college program, I have succeeded spectacularly, failed miserably, learned a ton of skills and improved the ones I already had.  I’ve thought I had answers to the future, and have completely lost all hope and faith in myself and the educational system.

My experiences have been as Bi-Polar as myself.

In the depths of my current depressive state, I’m still trying to head in the right direction, even though I’m blinded by my illness and stumbling around in the dark.

It has occurred to me that a big source of my dissatisfaction is stemming from me setting the bar too damn high, without any accommodation for the inevitable mental health collapse that always occurs when I push myself too much for too long.  It is frustrating to be capable of being in the top 5% of my class, but to be so dragged down by depression.  I should be graduating in the next 2 weeks, but I’m not.

I also am keenly aware that the clock is ticking away – time is whooshing by at the speed of light and I’m not getting any younger.  It’s like I am starting this journey 20 years too late, and it weighs heavily on me.

All I want is to have a life with my fiance that meets our needs.  I want to be able to help send my kids to college.  I wish I could earn enough to support us, so my fiance can pursue his own interests.  Every day I see his sad face as he heads out the door to a job that sucks his happiness away, and I wish I could just make him a little more happy.

Once again, it all boils down to the fact that I want to be more than I am, and when I’m not, I can’t deal with it.

I should be doing homework right now, but I’m so bummed out that it just isn’t happening today.  Blogging isn’t making me feel any better, either.  Maybe I should go watch cat videos on youtube and try to forget that I’m a failure at living.

I Am A Fat Head

Over the last couple years, I’ve noticed that fat-shaming has become slightly less acceptable, and that more and more people are speaking up and saying that it isn’t any more appropriate than misogyny or racism or homophobia.

Lately, it has been making me think about my own views.

I was raised by a christian fundamentalist, who only was able to find humor in making disparaging remarks about me, gays, black & brown people, and the obese.  Somehow, I’ve ended up as non-religious, with almost no straight friends, and I live in a multicultural neighborhood in Toronto.  I tend to quantify people by who they are or are not as individuals, not by things like orientation or race.

Some of the greatest people I’ve known happen to be obese.  I like these people a lot, and have never let their body mass dictate whether we would be friends, I’ve never made jokes at their expense, and would happily defend them against anyone who would make derogatory remarks against them.

But.

In my secret heart, I’m a fat-hater, or maybe a fat-disliker.  I’ve been feeling challenged lately to reevaluate my views on the obese.  No matter how many documentaries I watch, news stories I read, and wonderful, lovely heavy people I’ve met and loved in my personal life, I just can’t seem to shake it.

I recall telling someone a long time ago that I found it distasteful when big girls would dress provocatively.  That an outfit on a slim girl would look cute, but a big girl wearing the same thing would be horrendous.  I remember a job I held once, where a very obese young lady came in wearing spandex booty shorts and a string bikini top, who plopped her huge boobs right on the food service counter, nipples barely covered by her inadequate top.  Incidentally, once I served her, she went outside and dry humped her boyfriend on the picnic table.  i was so grossed out by the whole situation that I still cringe thinking of it now.  If she were slim, I still wouldn’t like her boobs on the counter, or the dry humping thing, but I know that her outfit on a hot summer day would have seemed acceptable to me.

I believe that a woman has the right to wear anything she wants.  I believe that a woman should dress the way she feels the most comfortable about herself, not to dress to be visually attractive to men.  I believe that a woman being comfortable with her own body is a goal we should all share, no matter what is considered “socially desirable”.  So why am I a secret fat-hater?  What the fuck is wrong with me?

Why am I like this?  is it my upbringing?  I don’t share any of the same views as my parents, so I doubt it’s that.  Is it society influencing me?  I go out of my way to avoid herd mentality at all times, but maybe it is none the less…kind of the way that disparaging the mentally ill and smokers is still okay for a lot of people, even though it really isn’t.  I bitch and whine about how being mentally ill isn’t a sign of poor self control or a character flaw, but I catch myself thinking the exact same thing about obese people who I already dislike for other reasons.  Maybe it’s just that I feel so flawed myself, and that I’ve never been obese, so it’s an easy way for me to feel slightly better about myself in some perverse way.

My youngest child struggles with his weight.  He lives primarily with my ex and his new wife, who couldn’t recognize a vegetable in a police line up.  They are both enormous, and since I already hate them for being despicable humans, its an easy reach for me to see their fatness as a character flaw…which in their case, it probably is.  You can’t eat 6 huge meals a day of deep fried goodness plus never ending snacking without negative effects.  Their shitty eating habits have impacted my son, and thanks to them, he will now always have to deal with his weight.  I love my son, and I want him to be happy, and he isn’t happy with having boobs and a tire around the middle.  Maybe he always will, who knows – I don’t want to have a dark area in my heart that thinks less of him because he is overweight.

I don’t want to be like that.  I want to be cool with it inside, just as I am with all the other differences between humans that make us all unique.  I just don’t know how to get there.

I’m going to try, though.  Fat people deserve love and respect, too.

Being Depressed: A Half-Assed Writing Thing

Being depressed is like having a heart attack, except that when you’re depressed, nobody cares.

When it interferes with the normal functioning of every day life, you are just lazy and not trying enough.

If you seek medical help, no one will help to resolve it, especially when you can’t access a regular, family doctor.  Getting any sort of psychiatric help is out of the question when you are poor.  A month of medication costs as much as a month’s worth of groceries, and when you already can’t afford to eat properly, it really impossible to get better.  Meds or food?  It’s a hard choice, but it’s your own fault for being crazy.  And poor.

When you’re depressed, you find it almost impossible to tell your loved ones, because so few of them understand it.  It’s worse when they seem to “forget” this is something you deal with every day, and that it wasn’t just a “one time thing”.  This discourages you from even bothering to mention it the this time, forcing you to invent more “plausible” reasons for your difficulties.

Being depressed has numerous physical effects, and no one cares about those, either.

When you’re depressed, it becomes impossible to focus and preform academically.  Professors don’t give a shit about what problems you have, no matter what kind of doctor note, school councilor letter, or whatnot that you provide them.  This only applies to mental illnesses, because a hung-over student with a doctor note will receive all sorts of accommodations.

Being depressed is like having your piano dropped on your soul.  Your spirit is dead.  The future seems hopeless.  The grief felt is similar to the death of a friend, is all-consuming, and is devastating.  It is unlike the death of a loved one because again, no one cares.  This point cannot be emphasized enough.

When you’re depressed your enemies will label you as crazy and will use it against you every chance they get as soon as they find out.  You live in fear of ever having to go to court for child custody hearings.  All your old friends believe you are crazy and unworthy of friendship.

The guilt is unrelenting.  The most insignificant things hound you every moment that you have the misfortune to be awake.  The guilt placed upon you by those that don’t understand your situation is even worse.  Your failures become magnified, and life becomes a never ending cycle of self hatred, guilt, sadness, and fear.

You wish you were dead, but know you can’t kill yourself because your significant other and your kids need you in their lives.  Then you feel even guiltier for feeling that way.  Then you wonder how much could your loved ones really need a fuck up like you.  Then you feel guilty.  Repeat infinitely.

When you are depressed, you have to pretend that everything is okay with you, all the time.  You have to keep making career goals, plans for the future, and look like you are doing something “productive”.  Of course, you can never mention it when you are looking for employment, and certainly not after getting hired, unless you want to be eliminated from the position…for some other “reason”, of course.  if you were diabetic, it would be different, but something as life-threatening, if not more, than diabetes, must always be kept a secret.  Because you’re crazy and it’s all your fault, apparently.

The only things people care about in this world is money, youth, beauty, conformity, narcissism, and Apple products.  If you are creative, intelligent, well-read, kind-hearted, introverted, or sensitive, it is irrelevant unless you fit into the herd.  If you are mentally ill, then there is no place for you in society, regardless of your other qualities, which are stupid anyway, because the only thing that matters about a human is their ability to become rich.  If your career & life goals involve anything that isn’t defined by piles of cash, fame, or both, then you are considered a delusionary sociopath.  Which totally helps when you are depressed.

As a depressed person, you may think it’s a good idea to try and sort through your feelings by blogging, or some other therapeutic way.  It really isn’t.  Nobody cares.  it’s like talking to yourself in an dark, empty room.  Sometimes you can look forward to a misspelled, uncapitalized and unpunctuated comment telling you to get over yourself, or to kill yourself already that you get to moderate.

Finally, when you are depressed, you start to hate everyone else more and more each day.  You know that other people have parents who love them and support them, and were never emotionally, physically, and sexually abused.  They had opportunities handed to them that you will never get, an easy, financially secure life, and never seem to question anything.  They fit in socially, and have no problem with being vapid and stupid because that’s what you need to be to get anywhere in life.  All you want is to make them suffer the way that you suffer, and you wish pain, hardship and petulance upon them.  You start to live for the day when something terrible will happen to them, instead of you.  You daydream about their burning houses, about seeing them develop terrible illnesses, you hope their spouses beat them and that their pets will bite them and then go into traffic to die.  You wish that just once, something would go your way instead of theirs.  Sadly, it won’t happen.  Life will keep on tormenting you in every way, and they’ll have an easy ride.  If you are poor they’ll tell you they worked hard for what they have, even if mom & dad paid for their college education, bought them a house, and gave them seed money for a business, so why can’t you get ahead?  They are incapable of caring or understanding, and they actually believe they deserve what they have.

Being depressed is really great.

Too bad nobody cares.

I know this is a horrible, rambling mess, but so am I

In the past few weeks, it has been made clear to me that in order to succeed in the world of design, I have to be someone that is someone else entirely.  I could do well if I was 20 years younger, or if I was my current age but the opposite gender.  I have to become an engaged participant of social media and start networking, even though I have nothing say and can’t stand the pointlessness of it all.  I always say wrong/controversial/awkward things because I’m introverted and nervous and rather anti-social.  I am supposed to “dress to impress”, with full hair and makeup every time I leave my apartment, but I’ve been impoverished for so long that I only have a couple passable outfits, outdated makeup, and none of that hides that fact that my teeth are hideous.  I’ve been warned that I’m not hireable at any serious company, because I am not young enough, pretty enough, and I’m not able to intern for nothing.

I thought I would start my own little freelance company and build up a client base slowly, maybe on a part time basis while I work and become my own boss eventually.  This seemed within reach, but after listening to the industry experts that come to speak to my class, maybe it isn’t.  They make it sound like you need years and years of experience and mentor ship before attempting a business, and that you are doomed to fail if you do it any other way.

I feel like such a failure, and I haven’t even started out yet.

I always thought college was the answer, but maybe it isn’t.  My school has provided me with a great education, and I have a ton of skills, but it has completely robbed me of hope.

I’ve Been So Busy I Forgot I Have This Blog

Life is intense. So intense that I actually don’t even have the time to spare to write this, but I’m feeling rebellious today, so fuck it!  And why is my life so intense, you may be asking because I never update my blog?

Because everything ended up going as planned and I’ve been a full-time student from January until now.  I am just past midterms in semester 2, and I have assignments coming out of my ears, which eats up every spare second I have.   As a plus, I made the honor roll last semester, and have a shot at it again this semester.  If it happens, I will be in the running for academic scholarships.  Sadly, I have accumulated some student loans, so now the province of Ontario owns my soul, so free money is welcome!  Me and Biff are still poor enough to sometimes consider eating the expired canned goods my mother gave us, and I’m really getting weary of poverty, so I’m going to try really hard.  Keeping 6 courses above 90% isn’t an easy thing, though, so I am going to try for a scholarship that I can get for being mentally ill just in case!

I should mention that my mental health these days is remaining manageable.  I put a lot of effort into staying positive, motivated, and receptive to knowledge.  I will admit that I’ve had at least two minor periods of depression since school started, but  I found that allowing myself some extra “me” time during the intense, difficult weeks kept it from turning into a real hindrance.  One of the (many) benefits to being properly medicated has been that I notice those small changes within  when depression begins and can immediately react while there is time to turn it around, which is so much better than to try and struggle through it and then caving under the pressure.  It turns out I am actually good at being a student, and that ability has enabled me to keep on top of the work and classes while balancing my responsibilities to my kids, time with my amazing Biff, etc. while still giving me just enough time for me.

For almost twenty years I believed I never would be a college student, good or otherwise.  I’m still surprised at odd times by all this.

Until I was 30, I yearned for death.  I didn’t know how to have dreams or goals beyond my children, and now I can see a future filled with opportunity.  I have the support of a good man.  My children, at 15 and 12 now, are turning into interesting and cool people and are fun to be around.  I hate myself less than I used to.   I’m not even crazy.  No wonder I forgot about my blog – I’ve never had a blog and been happy before!

Maybe now I’ll start putting up pictures of cats that I find on the internet or something.

I Think I Know How To Pretend To Know What I’m Doing (Or Something)

I haven’t been good at keeping up to date on my blog.  Whenever I think about blogging, I get all anxious about it, and I have to stop thinking about it. I don’t know what that’s all about, but today it didn’t bother me so here I am.

Its been so long I can’t remember for sure what was happening last, and I’m too lazy to check on it, so I am going to assume I wrote about what happened last February when I left my shitty pizza job and spent time at the mental crisis unit. Good times.

So. After that. We moved. Out of the basement apartment that always looked dirty, even when clean, and left me terrified of running into a cockroach for the rest of my life, even after we conquered them. The place where the crackheads upstairs stomped around all hours of the night and day.

Our new home is the upstairs of a 4 bedroom house converted into apartments. It has windows on 3 sides, and overlooks the Humber Valley, with the access trail right beside us. Sometimes in the afternoon I open the curtains and let in all that light, which reflects off the shiny parquet flooring and makes me happy to be out of the dungeon still, though we have been here since July 30.

I did a bit of office temping through the summer, and then started a correspondence course to earn my high school diploma (O.S.S.D.). I am almost done the course, and I am registered at Humber College, beginning in January, to start the process of getting a college degree.

I have always felt that I had a lot of barriers to education. I lived too far away. I didn’t have a diploma, and I hated school, so I assumed that an education was for “other people” and went my own way. College has always been the elephant in the room for me, maybe because I was (am?) half-way bright, and I have always wanted more than can be achieved without an education.

I also have a fear of success. I realized that most times that I had the opportunity to succeed in something, I either ran away from it as fast as possible, or I outright sabotaged my efforts. What kind of fucked up person does this, anyway? Sheesh. I really fucking hate myself, sometimes.

Anyway, these are the things I am struggling with. I really hope I can do college. The correspondence course has really helped me to see that if I try a little bit, I can actually make good things happen. I can learn. I can do it. Because I didn’t know I could before.

So now the barriers are almost gone. I’ll have my O.S.S.D. before the year is out, I dealt with all the stupidness that happens when dealing with Financial Aid and O.S.A.P. and have been approved, and I’m accepted into my program and already reserved my seat. I’m even registered for orientation! This is really going to happen. To me.

Its weird to have hope.

Travels Through Hell

Its been way too long since I have updated my blog, so here it goes.

I started a minimum wage job last fall, and was told at the outset that there would be no raises.  Ever.  They just “didn’t do that”.  The owner, who I worked with on day shift, was prone to mood swings and was a very aggressive, confrontational and verbally abusive type of personality.  She was so disorganized that I had to grind my teeth together just to keep from losing it.  As an example, I would work all day from 9-5 at this slave job, check the schedule and see that I am to return at 10 the next morning.  I would come in at 10 and she would have changed the schedule at home during the evening, reschedule me for 9, and then freak out when I was “late”.

I was all set to quit.  I was declining mentally, and having trouble coping.  After the boss would leave, sometimes I was so upset (I held it in the best I could when she was around) I would hyperventilate, barely able to continue but yet having no option but to do otherwise.  I attempted to change shifts so I would not have to work with her so often, and I tried to talk to her about the issue but there were no positive changes.

My last day was horrible.  It was February 3rd, and after completing my shift of her throwing shit around, seething with misdirected rage and behaving like a two year old, I knew I needed to get help.  Immediately.  I was at the point where I would rather jump out into traffic than go back to that hell, and I had the most desirable urge to take myself out of that frustrating equation.  After seeing my walk in clinic doctor, who gave me no assistance, I went to the emergency department and got some help.

As a result of that visit, I spent 2 days in a mental crisis ward.  This was one of my biggest fears:  being admitted to the hospital because of my mental health.  While waiting to be assessed prior to my admittance, I saw other patients waiting in the same lock down area.  I saw a man with tangled long hair, barefoot, and utterly incoherent.  I heard another man being restrained and needled by several staff, yelling and crying.  I locked myself in the washroom and just cried.  I felt like I was on an unavoidable course towards levels of mental illness I had never traversed before, and I was extremely upset.

Eventually, my man, Biff, arrived from work.  The staff gave me Adavan to calm me the fuck down and I settled in to wait for my assessment.

When the social worker came to do the initial assessment, I was shocked.  The sweater she had on was an abomination and was more likely to cause insanity just by looking directly at it than not.  She was overweight, short, donned in the ugly sweater, and completely unsympathetic.  After talking with her, I was ready to leave, because she didn’t understand a thing I was telling her.  But I waited.  Eventually, the Psychiatrist arrived.  Dressed in galoshes and a rumply suit, he could have been one of his patients.  He had a psychiatry resident with him, and the two of them were awesome.  Between the two of them, they convinced me that a hospital stay would be the best thing for me, so I swallowed my fear and did what they suggested.

As a result of this, I have a psychiatrist.  I see the resident that I saw the night I was admitted, and my last time to see him is later this week.  I still have no family doctor, but I have leads so that’s something I guess.  I am also on a waiting list for psychoanalysis and finally am seeing a gynecologist for other fun issues that I am experiencing.  The one medication I was taking has been doubled.  I have a new one as well, and have been taking high doses of Iron to reduce my Anemia.  I am feeling better every day and hope that I don’t suffer any more serious relapses.  I have to watch stress, and especially avoid conformational, angry assholes.

Part 2 is coming.  Eventually.

Blah.

I spent the evening today with a good friend of mine.  We hung out, vaporized a shitload of pot, and played cards.  After she left, I thought it would be a good idea to smoke more pot and listen to 80′s hair bands and metal stuff I really was into back in the day on my iPod.

As fun as that sounds, I’m not so sure that was the best plan.  Not a terrible plan, but I am rather surprised at the emotional reaction to some of these songs.  Its so much more dramatic to me than the mellow Estranged-ness (1:10-in) I had in mind.

But whatever.  I need to get to bed.

Mental Health Update

I have been working my new job for a little over a week now, and I am pooped.  I can audibly hear my back weeping, my toe hurts because I got a rather minor ingrown toenail and had to dig around to file it down, and I keep forgetting to breathe as I sit here to blog.  I think if I blink too long I’ll pass out.  This is problematic.  I desperately need to go to bed so I can function at work tomorrow but its important to me to try and write…something.  Anything.   So I’m going to try!

Regarding BPD: I have decided to make my recovery a priority in a way that I never have before.  After much despair, uncertainty and the pretty major depressive episode that I experienced prior to moving, I really wanted a fresh start in the big city.  I think I have that underway:  I have a job, money is finally starting to flow in my direction, and I am getting a lot more excersize.  Before the move, I purposefully had become very secluded.  Agoraphobics get out more than I did…It wasn’t good for me – I see this now.  As a result, I have been trying to do more, which is hard, because I could spend every moment of my life doing nothing!  I have slowly been reconnecting with friends that I shut out of my life for the couple of years.  I attended a support group dedicated to Bi Polar Disorder, which was enlightening enough to me that I would like to attend again.  I am back to taking my full dosage of meds daily, and I am working my way up to eating more than once a day.I still need to see a doctor, however.  Although the Cipralex (a.k.a Escitalopram) I am on helps me tremendously, I know it isn’t quite…right.  One thing at a time, though.  Its hard for me to keep this in the front of my mind because I tend to ignore the fact that anything is wrong with me the moment that I am feeling better.  I find being Bi Polar is a huge inconvenience to what I want to do with my life, and I don’t know if I’ve fully come to terms with it.  I just don’t want to overwhelm myself with this while I am still trying to adjust to working again, because I know I’ll go back to ignoring it completely until it gets so bad that my life in endangered.  I can predict the abnormal things that I will do and then I attempt to circumvent those events…fuck.  I just lost that thought.  I really need to sleep….but first, in an effort to get used to more positive thinking, I decided to end my posts with three things that I am either thankful for or that just make life better.

1.  Biff.  He is my rock.  He makes me want to be a better person, and he makes me want to be as healthy as I can be so I can be with him in this life as long as possible.

2.  Our bed.  One of the very few new purchases we’ve made together:  its a queen size pillow topped rectangle of comfortableness, a refuge from the cold hard world, and the place to recharge before facing a new day.  We love it so much we named it:  Herman.  No joke.

3.  Kitties!  

Turning Over A New Leave

A number of new things have occurred lately, and as much as I love to bitch and whine about how shitty my life is was, I think I need to take this blog in a new direction.  Or I plan to, anyway…we’ll see how it goes I guess.

I was in a really bad place mentally/emotionally for awhile, and as a result, all my posts were equally as dark.  Its a great creative outlet for me and it helps to keep me out of the ER most of the time, but I’m really not that person.  Well…okay.  I am that person…but I’m not just that person.  I am so much more than what I have chosen to write about up to this point and I think I need to start over.

So…hello to anyone who is out there and has stopped in for a visit.  I’m kind of a downer, but I like cool music and I say random and amusing things from time to time and for once I have more to drink than just water, so you are welcome to come whenevs.  I’m really going to try and be more…well rounded or something.

Also…

I got a new job.  Its a shitty one and I’m overqualified, but it has a lot of really great perks, including free and/or discounted food, zero responsibility and it is in walking distance.  I was terrified that I was going to be too ill to make it happen, but so far so good.  I think the boost in household income and the novelty of leaving the house for an actual purpose has been enough to yank me out of a depressive phase and into what passes as a manic phase for me.  Awesome!

And…

We are moving.  Again.  Same general location (we are really loving our little corner of the city) but somewhere better.  We need to get away from Stompy above us, who stamps around hard enough to rattle the ceiling fixtures all day and all night, every day and every night.  Every single step she takes is way too fucking loud (late at night all I can think about is wood chippers and chainsaws and it stresses me out).  We are not getting anywhere enough sleep and are actively looking…its sad that its only been 39 days since we moved in, but at least this is something we can control.

I have a lot more to talk about, but I’m really tired and need to get to bed so I can lay there and listen to the stomping for a few hours before work happens.

*Fuck.  This ending isn’t very positive, especially after I just said I would be less negative.  I guess I need to practice more.*