*If you don’t want to read this post in its entirety, which is completely understandable, you might at least want to skip to the end for an announcement. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Have you ever had a weekend that’s so utterly fantastic that you just can’t stand for it to be over? And the beauty is that it was so great, you didn’t even waste any time worrying about the fact that it would eventually end. Every millisecond was spent in blissful enjoyment – in the here and now – and not an ounce was wasted on worry or dread over its impending end.
Now that it’s over and I’m coming down from the high, I feel less sad and more satiated.
Dare I say?
Content.
Did you know that it’s constant worry that does that to us? Worrying about the future and longing for happy times of the past takes our lives away, bit by bit, making us forget to just sit back and enjoy the ride.
I blame my recent lack of living in the present for the faint lines across my forehead and shadows beneath my eyes.
But the good news is that my eye crinkles can be blamed on laughter.
So I’m not a total loss.
And this weekend, I did enjoy the ride. Thoroughly. Friday was as relaxed as it gets, with nothing more than eating and dog-walking on the agenda:
Breakfast sausage casserole. Recipe to come.
When it’s hot outside, we all could use a dip in the lake.
Saturday was Justin’s graduation day, and it was filled with wonderful friends and amazing food.
And wine. Lots of wine:
I whisper-yelled, “Justin!” and they both turned around. Guess which one’s mine?
Beautiful mother-to-be, Alaina.
My favorite would-be brother-in-law, Dirk. And not just because he picked a great bottle of wine to go with lunch.
Later that night, the steak also did its thang. Mostly to my thighs.
(Dirk and Alaina bought a cow awhile back. Then they brought like half of it – in the form of three 800 lb. steaks – to our house for dinner.)
Besides wrinkles from worry and crows’ feet from laughter, I’m sure I’ll have a few more lines to blame on my own stupidity for going to the beach and forgetting sunscreen the sun. Due to a family emergency, Catherine wasn’t able to meet us at the lake yesterday. We were bummed, but we reasoned that we are in a coastal state, and it’d be a shame for Matthew to make it this far without seeing the Atlantic Ocean.
So we grabbed a few necessities – towels, bathing suits, sunglasses, and of course cameras, completely neglecting the most obvious of beach-going accoutrements for pasty white Midwesterners, which is sunscreen.
(And kids, when it comes to sun safety, I don’t like to play. No, I don’t find it amusing that I have a bow-shaped burn line on my back from the tie on my bathing suit top, nor do I find it amusing that I could die from melanoma. Fortunately, we all know I won’t have to worry about bow-shaped tan lines in Spain. Only burned nipples. Which might, admittedly, be worse. So it’s safe to say I won’t be forgetting the sunscreen there.)
Aside from our lobster-like appearance, our impromptu trip to the coast inspired the elusive joy that travel-on-a-whim never fails to make me feel. I was reminded that I don’t always need to fly far to experience a life less ordinary.
What is it about the beach, anyway? I mean, it’s hot and dirty and I always end up with little sand mosaics embedded into my skin and we won’t even talk about the other pitfalls of sand ending up in places sand really shouldn’t be, but still we go and we complain about the crowds and we dig in the sand and we crisp in the sun just to experience that wash of awe when we realize we’ve gone as far as we can possibly go without a little help.
Or a yacht.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be on the other side of that water.
Crazy, huh?
Speaking of crazy, Domestiphobia reached a milestone recently. A milestone I plan to celebrate later this afternoon. So. If you’ve made it this far in this post, you probably, definitely, for sure want to check back later today for something I’ve never done before.
I realize I started this post by telling you to live in the present and not worry about the future, but you should probably forget all that because this is something to get excited about.
But I have an excuse. See, first there were 2 days of painting.
Then a day of cleaning and grocery shopping.
So basically, it was 3 days of a domestiphobe’s worst nightmare.
And now?
Now we have a house guest. And contrary to how most people feel about house guests, I feel like I can finally relax.
Want to know what a leisurely Friday morning looks like to a couple of bloggers?
Yeah. It’s not too shabby.
Matthew (from Inside the Nice Guy) is here for Justin’s college graduation this weekend. So we knew each other way before our blogging days. In fact, I met them both on the same day – exactly 8 years ago on May 20th.
Today will be relaxing. Filled with eating, dog walking (when it’s not raining), movie watching (the boys are seeing Thor while I sit blissfully through some brainless chick flick), more eating, and occasional drinking (coffee and orange juice included).
Saturday is graduation day. Friends are coming to celebrate with us, and it should be another excellent day filled with wonderful food and even wonderfuller (yes that’s a word according to me) people.
Then on Sunday, we’re meeting up with another blogging friend, Catherine, from Simply Solo, at her family’s infamous lake house. We’ve never met in person, but if she’s half as cool as she seems on her blog and Facebook, we’re in for a good time.
I’d love to write more, but when you bring two self-proclaimed geeks (who also happen to be lifelong friends) together in the same kitchen, it gets hard to type over the constant buzz of laptop movie trailers and George Lucas analyses.
But you won’t find me complaining. Right now I’m surrounded by close friends, delicious food, and excellent coffee.
Do you remember the time when I was maybe 6-years-old and you asked if I wanted to play hide-and-seek? My panic-stricken little mind wildly inventoried the best possible hiding spots while you slowly counted to 100, the anticipatory inflection at the end of each number causing my excited-yet-scared heartbeat to increase to an unprecedented pace.
Scrambling to the cobweb-infested basement, I mustered all of my bravery to worm myself into a zippered laundry bag and what was ultimately the best hiding spot in the history of ever, where, upon your imminent failure to find me and my subsequent failure to work the zipper back down, archaeologists would discover my body in 200 years and conclude that I was the young victim of a heinous crime, not recognizing that they’d just discovered the remains of the hide-and-seek champion of the world.
“Ninety-eight…ninety-nine… ONE HUNDRED!” I heard you yell from the top of the stairs.
“Are you ready?” you called, and I could tell by your voice that you were nervous that you’d lose this battle of wits to your dear baby sister who surely had the superior mental capacity combined with an advantageous small body frame to best you at the very game you taught her.
“Yes!” I called, my voice muffled by the fabric.
“Are you sure?” you asked. Ahh. You wanted to play fair – to ensure I’d found the best possible place so that, if you had to lose, you could lose like a gentleman, knowing the victor had earned her spot in the Hall of Hide-and-Seek Champions.
“Yes!” I assured you, giggling at the thought of you searching for hours, possibly calling Mom for help once the panic set in and you thought you’d lost me for good.
“Are you really sure?” your voice yelled even louder.
“Yesss!” I yelled. Are you seriously this deaf, or is my hiding place just so awesome that it’s difficult to hear me?
“Are you really really sure?”
“YES!” I screamed, my frustration getting the better of my lady-like charm.
“BOO!” you yelled as the zipper flew open and I screamed in surprise. And then you laughed. You laughed in my face after you CHEATED while playing hide-and-seek with a 6-year-old girl.
For shame.
In the 20+ years since, it seems like we’ve made amends. It appears as though we’ve gotten past your silly teenage antics and can treat each other like adults.
But I think you should know… I’ve just been biding my time.
Waiting for the day I’d taste the sweet nectar of revenge on my patient little tongue.
And today, dear brother, is that day.
The day that I can finally, with all the zest and spirit of a 6-year-old girl shouting, “I’m definitely ready!” across the vast and very public arena of the internet, say to you:
My eyes were full of crusties, my hair resembled a bird’s nest, and my mouth tasted like socks — the stinky, cotton, gym kind — not the silky, expensive, suit kind.
Attractive, no?
It wasn’t until I managed to fumble my way to the kitchen, fix a pot of coffee, and pour the first, steamy sips down my parched throat that I actually managed to have a coherent thought.
And this is where I’ll admit — though definitely not for the first time — that I’m a bit of a freak.
My first thought of this April 29th morning was, I wonder what the weather is supposed to be like today.
GASP!
I realize this makes me somewhat of an anomaly among 99.9% of the U.S. female population. You see, not only was my first thought not, I can’t wait to turn on the t.v. so I can finally see Kate’s dress, or, Now that William’s no longer on the market, I’m going to have to cancel my plans of creating a “chance” meeting where we’ll fall madly in love and he’ll dump that British commoner for a real American princess and I’ll finally have my fairy tale just like Cinderella and OMG WHY, William?! WHY?
Not even close.
In fact, I actually forgot the whole thing was supposed to happen last night. I arrived home from work rather late, and didn’t get home until around the time when true fans of the royals were throwing back shots of espresso and sticking toothpicks under their eyelids. I didn’t think to turn the television on then, either. Instead, I caught up on some blog reading, wrote some ideas in my notebook, washed my face, crawled under the covers, fell into a coma, and apparently sucked on my feet all night.
I know. How un-American of me to forget about a British royal wedding!
I really don’t even feel like a girl right now.
There must be something wrong with me.
It wasn’t until I turned on the television to catch the morning weather report and was instead accosted by replay after replay after replay of that dry, tight-lipped kiss (though I imagine they must have been pretty nervous with only like a billion people watching) on the balcony of Buckingham Palace (yes, I even had to Google where the kiss took place) when I realized I missed it.
Huh.
For what it’s worth, yes, I do agree with the media that Kate’s dress was very pretty. Yes, it definitely was a grand event. Yes, I do hope they live happily ever after.
Now, can we get back to the actual news?
Well apparently the newlyweds haven’t revealed where they’re honeymooning yet.
So, no. No we can’t.
On a less sardonic note, I have a busy weekend and week(s) ahead. Another late night serving alcohol tonight, a day drinking wine tomorrow at a pottery festival in Sanford (I know, so delightfully “towny,” right?), a Saturday night free Everclear concert at the Dogwood Festival in Fayetteville (Jo Dee Messina is performing tonight for all you country fans), work again on Sunday, girlie party event on Monday, painting the living room and trim during the week, hopefully working on some more office projects, and overall getting ready for Justin’s upcoming college graduation and a visit from a dear friend (and fellow blogger), which I will tell you about soon. Oh, and I’m also planning a baby shower and a trip to Spain.
I’m kind of exhausted just thinking about it.
But I have to admit that it’s nice to feel busy.
I should have a lot to post about in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
Okay, so I’m trying really hard to not be that girl.
You know, that girl who freaks out when bad weather presents and I’m home alone with a couple of mutts and there’s no basement and I live behind a trailer park.
I’ve never been that girl before. I mean, I’m a military spouse. We’re built Ford tough. And we’re used to being alone. But those storms from a couple of weeks ago and then the ones that blew through Alabama last night and are currently swirling in the skies overhead kind of made me realize how much we’re all just sitting here all vulnerable and exposed like those little moles that pop out of the holes in that game at the fair and we’re just hoping we don’t get whacked on the head with a rubber mallet.
Or a tornado.
The tall, skinny pine trees in my back yard look like giant blades of grass blowing around in the wind.
There’s no rain, and that somehow makes it a little scarier.
We’ve been told the storms have weakened significantly since their run through Alabama, and we shouldn’t expect to see anything that we saw before.
But the thing is, before is still now.
I took these photos from a moving vehicle a couple of days ago:
Yep, that’s our Lowe’s Home Improvement store.
Lowe’s again.
Huge trees just snapped.
This used to be a nice little neighborhood.
Wow.
Nature is powerful and awesome.
And sometimes it wants to make sure we remember that.
I asked Justin the other day if he would buy me a bottle of wine (or six) when he stopped at the store to pick up stuff to make this.
So, imagine my surprise when I opened the refrigerator door to find this:
What. The. Hell.
He thought it was funny.
You know, because I kind of am a mad housewife.
For those of you who watch Sex and the City (the shows, not the crappy movies), remember when Charlotte’s husband got her a cutout of a cardboard baby as a “joke” when they found out she couldn’t have kids of her own?
Yeah. It’s kind of like that.
I mean… I can’t imagine why he saw this and thought of me.
It’s not like there’s a resemblance.
*The best part is what the bottle says on the back: “Somewhere near the cool shadows of the laundry room. Past the litter box and between the plastic yard toys. This is your time. Time to enjoy a moment to yourself. A moment without the madness. The dishes can wait. Dinner be damned.”
YES! Why make dinner when you can have WINE instead?
I have a recurring dream in which my teeth are falling out.
The dream offers no explanation – no background history of severe tooth decay, chronic tobacco chewing, gum cancer, or baseball bats to the kisser.
Just the horrible feeling of wiggling the tooth with my tongue, noticing the excess space in the sockets of my gums, and the slight pinch of pain as the roots detach themselves from the fertile gum soil – the sickening crunching sound of severed – what – nerves? ligaments? capillaries? as I pinch my fingers over the bone and it breaks free with only the slightest expenditure of energy.
I take really good care of my teeth. I floss every day. I want these puppies to last, you know?
So when I dream about them falling out for no determinable reason?
It freaks me the fuck out.
Aside from the disturbingly vivid teeth dreams, my subconscious ramblings in the middle of the night rarely leave me with a waking feeling of unease, because, well, I rarely remember them at all.
I might recall an image here or a feeling there, but it’s uncommon that they’re realistic enough to leave any kind of lasting impression.
We had power outages, severe storms, and tornadoes ripping through our town (and in some cases our homes). Walking through the ‘hood with my pups the next morning, I felt like the sole person to wake after the apocalypse – not a soul to be seen at 9:00 a.m. on a gorgeous Sunday morning because when people opened their eyes to the absence of ringing alarm clocks, whirring fans, morning television news casts, it’s like they decided the pain of it all was too much to bear and they’d best wait out the torment in bed.
I mean… there’d be no coffee.
I’ll admit that one had me down a little, too.
It felt like I was in a Stephen King novel when 2 guys came gunning down the deserted streets in their pickup truck, made an abrupt turnaround in a driveway ahead of me, stopped their vehicle in my path and proceeded to inform me of news from the outside world:
Yep, it would take at least 5-8 days to restore power to this part of town.
Yep, Fort Bragg is closed and they’re not letting any traffic through.
Yep, the Food Lion has a generator but they’re already completely out of nonperishable items, ice, AND BEER, so don’t even bother wasting your gas because the pumps aren’t working, either.
Yep, we most certainly are still drunk from last night. I burned my hand while trying to start a fire – SEE? – but it’s no biggie because we won’t even be able to get out of this neighborhood for like a month.
I told them to be careful and sent them on their way. I seriously would’ve been more worried if there’d been… you know… people around.
But they did come out eventually, blinking in the sun’s bright rays like bears after a long hibernation, the pallor stained by artificial lighting on their skin already fading with exposure to the outside world. Soon, the sound of children laughing and playing in the streets and neighbors actually conversing was even stranger than the empty streets of 9:00 a.m.
There was no t.v.
There were no video games.
We cooked our breakfast outside on the grill, the sweat from my dog walking venture dripping down the small of my back, and everything tasted good. Everything looked good. Honestly? Aside from the knowledge that others were suffering for the very same reasons, everything – to me – felt good.
The surrealness of it all was topped off when Justin woke me abruptly at 5:00 a.m. today to tell me he’d been called into work and was heading out. Because he woke me in the thick of a dream, I was coherent enough to remember it in vivid detail – something that almost never happens – and I immediately wrote it down under the covers with a book light like I sometimes used to do with my journal when I was a kid.
This dream took up 3 pages in my journal, which really isn’t a journal but a notebook where I write down ideas when they pop into my head. Mostly writing ideas and sometimes doodles.
I like to doodle.
Because I don’t have any other pictures in this post, here’s a doodle I did back when I had to take a really boring training class and I was losing my mind at my cubicle job:
So. Now that I’ve wasted eight hundred billion words leading up to my dream, I’m just going to give you the gist – not the full 3-page version – of the dream I wrote about in my notebook:
Basically, I followed Erin – remember her? – into a pet shop in the mall of all places (Erin and I went thrift shopping together, by the way – never the mall), except the pet shop was mostly filled with childrens’ clothes. But, below the hanging onesies and bib overalls and teeny wittle ruffled socks were these plexiglass bins filled with kittens.
I picked out a tiny little gray and black kitten to hold while I made my way back to what I really wanted to see, which were the puppies. While I worked my way through the ridiculously crowded store, the kitten’s claws were digging into my skin as it crawled all over my sweater and bit my hands and chewed my ears and just became an all-around mildly painful nuisance. I eventually put it on the floor, where it latched its uncannily strong feline jaws onto the strap of my flip-flop and let me drag it to the back of the store.
One of the store clerks, who was lazily lounging around on the floor, shot me a mildly irritated look when I arrived at the empty puppy bins, but I spotted my brother Joel, who is 11 years my senior (you’re welcome, Joel), happily playing with a puppy towards the back. But before I could get to him or say anything, the clerk told me I had to put the kitten back where I’d found it.
I finally found the bin from where I’d grabbed the thing in the first place, my skin feeling severely scratched and threads on my sweater were coming loose, and I couldn’t put the kitten inside the bin because this lady – this crazy lady – had her papers scattered all over the lid! She was a teacher or something, and while it wasn’t strange in the dream that a teacher should be going over her attendance sheets in a children’s clothing/pet store in the mall, I wonder now what exactly was in those Negra Modelos I’d so zealously consumed the day before.
In my haste to detach the kitten from my skin and put it back safely behind plexiglass where it belonged, I lifted the hinged lid before she’d removed the last of her papers, and an extremely important attendance sheet slid back behind the bin and onto a hard-to-reach space on the dirty floor. I apologized profusely while a store clerk – one who was decidedly less lazy than the girl at the back of the store – used one of those schmancy reaching/gripping tools to fetch the paper and return it safely to its owner.
In my relief at the paper’s safe retrieval, I looked at the woman for the first time in the dream to offer her a smile and my sincere apology for almost losing one of her precious records. And – I swear to God – she looked just like like the mom from the Goonies.
Whiskers and all.
She returned a heartless “thanks,” and just as I was turning to head back to the puppies, she made me turn back towards her with a cough.
Very seriously, very realistically, she said, “They give some women the death penalty for doing something like that, you know.”
And I did know. In the dream, it made perfect, sickening sense.
It gets a little fuzzy after that. I remember that I started to argue but she told me that it happened frequently in Iraq, and then I went off on some tangent about Big Brother and Russia and Communism and how people would never be motivated to perform well at work if they weren’t allowed to keep any of their hard-earned money, and then suddenly (except it seemed normal in the dream) I was alone in the food court, and Jimmie, a guy I work with at the bar, was behind the counter of one of the places but I couldn’t tell him about the crazy lady in the pet store because he was too busy to talk, and at the Asian place next door, someone was ordering a wheat wrap with asparagus, spinach, and broccoli (except they were out of broccoli which turned out to be okay with the girl who was ordering) and red beans.
I noticed the beans were very, very watery.
It mattered NOT that this was supposed to be an Asian food court restaurant.
What.
The.
Fuck.
I know what you’re thinking.
You’re thinking, She didn’t shorten that dream AT ALL.
But I assure you, I did.
So.
What the hell am I supposed to do with my life now?
Be wary of crazy old women sending me death threats? Buy a kitten? Order takeout? Eat more broccoli?
Maybe – maybe – I should cut back on the weekend power outage binge drinking. Or stop telling Justin it’s okay to wake me up when he has to leave in the middle of the night.
Because this – and the creepy, inky feeling that’s now sitting at the base of my spine – officially makes me realize that some things are simply not worth remembering.
A tough-but-fun one filled with old friends visiting from out-of-town, drinking lots of beer, a 2-year-old’s birthday party, a 19 hour power outage, a power outage during a 2-year-old’s birthday party, drinking lots more beer because it’s good beer and it’s about to get warm and because you’re at a 2-year-old’s birthday party, and oh yeah – the power is out.
It was a little like this:
Yes, the mother of the 2-year-old could very well kill me for posting this photo. But she doesn’t read this blog. And if you do read this blog and you happen to know her, let’s just forget about this little incident and think of the greater good. I think some people could really use some smiles today, you know? Thank you for your cooperation.
But really, electricity or no, the party was a lot of fun.
As far as I’m concerned, any time cake and beer come together is a good time.
Little did we know, things like this were happening not too far away:
Lowe’s store in Sanford, NC. Photo by: Ted Richardson, Associated Press
This is definitely not Kansas. It’s the Lowes where I shop regularly. I pass it on my way to work. Thanks to the store manager who ushered people to the back of the store, none of the 150-some employees and customers were injured while Nature, during her epic tantrum, hurled their cars like so many Hot Wheels at the front of the building.
I could go on.
A dear friend who lives very near the destruction said I should come document it with photos. I was tempted. Very tempted. But the thing is, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to stand there and freeze a moment of someone’s devastation. A stranger’s pain. It could’ve been someone I serve at the bar. Someone I get mad at for driving too slow. They don’t need me there now. At least not in that way.
I’m happy my friends are safe.
But I’m sad for the people who aren’t, because while I don’t know them, they could’ve been my friends at some point. But now they won’t. You know?
Also, I had a dream last night. I wrote it down at 5:00 this morning because it was so vivid, and I didn’t want the fog of consciousness to later make it seem less significant than it did at 5:00 this morning.
It could just be that anything that happens at 5:00 in the morning seems significant.
I don’t know.
But I’m pretty sure I’m going to share it with you later today. It was one of those dreams where people from different facets of my life appear in little cameos throughout. It makes no sense now, but it made perfect sense in the dream.
Picture Dorothy waking up from the land of Oz, saying, “You were there. And you!”
And that’s how this was. All over the place. A glimpse of what goes on inside my head.
Yet there seemed to be a point – one I can’t grasp. There’s the very real possibility that sharing it might change how you think of me, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take if someone could shed some light on what it actually means.
IF it means anything.
It could just mean I had too much beer and cake this weekend.
Right this instant I have a brisket with southwest seasonings doing tantalizing things in my slow cooker and the smell is driving me crazy because I keep finding myself drawn from the office to the kitchen, my hand reaching for the lid so I can stir things around and get a healthier whiff of the stuff, but NO! I need to leave the lid in place and just let the magic happen.
It’s a test of will I have going on over here, and I only have… oh… 8 hours to go.
Shit.
I’m hoping the end result, southwest chipotle brisket tacos, will be worth the turmoil in my already unbalanced psyche.
Speaking of unbalanced psyches (how’s that for a segue?), my moods have been all over the place lately. And by “lately,” I mean like the last 3 years. But especially recently.
One minute I’ll feel elated, high as James Franco at the 2011 Oscars, infused with anticipation and joy from the plethora of choices I could make with my life, the friends I have, the places I’ve been and have yet to see.
And then I’ll be down. So, so far down inside this rocky hole, and I climb out every time, but there’s nothing to stop my fingers from bleeding from the effort. Because right now – not in the end, but right now – I’m a 28-year-old waitress with a college degree. I’m essentially a stay-at-home mom without the “mom” part and what does that leave? And, aside from the occasional decent dinner, I’m not even good at the stay-at-home part. No matter what I do, the house always seems dirty, the laundry baskets are always full, the junk just keeps collecting everywhere, and the dogs are being so horrific today that part of me wants to leave the back gate open and be done with it.
Not that I would ever do that.
But I think it.
Does that make me a bad person?
I realize what I’m describing sounds like some type of horrific bipolar disorder that can only be satiated with drugs and extreme psychotherapy, but bear with me for a minute.
Maybe – just maybe – I’m not alone in my “crazy” thoughts.
Maybe we all have our ups and our downs, our moments when our subconscious is trying to tell us something is terribly wrong but we continue to ignore that voice because listening to voices really is crazy, but is it?
And before you call the nice young men in their clean white coats, hear me out.
I’m not talking about voices voices, but your subconscious. Your you. The thing you’re referring to in the rare quiet moment when you’re all alone and you ask yourself,
Who am I?
The thing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when the creepy man across the street is watching you a little too closely, or the thing that makes you feel bad when you say something mean to another person.
I’m pretty sure we all have it. This internal voice we sometimes find ourselves arguing with but most often ignoring because I certainly know better than myself, right? Who cares if myself is telling me that something doesn’t feel right and maybe I should get help? Myself isn’t a doctor. Myself doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
But maybe she does.
Because, whether I’d like to admit it or not, she knows me better than anyone.
If you’re still reading at this point and haven’t rushed off to unsubscribe, thank you.
I have a point.
And I think it’s this:
We all have a self. A conscious. A soul. Whatever you want to call it. It’s the thing that makes you, you and not me. And, for whatever reason, we’ve trained ourselves not to listen when it’s trying to tell us something.
And we certainly don’t talk about it.
We’re afraid what others might think. I’m afraid of what you think.
But I’m saying it now because maybe these “issues” aren’t really issues at all. Maybe these bouts of depression/anxiety/self-doubt are something we’re all capable of contracting if we ignore the voice for too long. At this point, I have nothing to lose – except maybe a bunch of blog readers I love – by admitting it. But, maybe explaining my process of dealing with it could help someone else.
I have my second appointment with a counselor tomorrow.
Sure, I could just pop a couple of prescription happy pills (which I’m sure I’d have no trouble getting at this point) and go on acting like everything’s peachy, but living life in a fog and suppressing the one voice I know is 100% on my side doesn’t really seem like a way to live.
At least not for me.
I need to know why I feel the way I feel and then figure out a way to fix it. I think this counselor might be able to help me with that.
Don’t get me wrong. What you “hear” in this post isn’t the real me. It’s not my normal tone. I’m mostly a pretty positive person. My inclination is to be happy. My laugh lines are real. I smile all the time. Except lately, a little less. I know that the wrinkles, the sagging skin, the spots on my hands are inevitable eventualities of getting older. It’s going to happen one day, whether I like it or not.
But my happiness? That is something I can control, even though lately it feels like I’m losing that control. I know it’s a choice I can make.
So I’m making it now.
*I promise this blog will still have my usual posts – recipes, random humor, rants… it’s still me. But I’m choosing to “go public” with this other issue and will refer to it on occasion because I think it’s important. Some people need to see that the healthy way of dealing with emotional problems is not to ignore them. We all experience them from time to time, and sometimes we heal naturally, and sometimes we need a little help. You can judge me if you want for putting this out there and making everyone feel uncomfortable, but if it brings comfort to one person, I’ll consider it worth it. And don’t be afraid of me. I’m not going to break. I thrive on feedback. So, if you have thoughts about depression and the ways people deal with it, I’d love to read ’em. UPDATE: Click here to read Step 2.
I am thoroughly confused right now, because I’ve always believed in karma or at least that karma-esque things can happen, meaning if you send good vibes out into the universe, the universe will send you good vibes in return.
So imagine my surprise when I could have turned all piss ‘n vinegar this morning when my neighbor woke me up by calling me on her drive to work because she was worried she’d left her hair straightener plugged in and she’d end up burning down her house while her husband’s deployed and he’d never trust her to use hot things again and would I please, please go check and instead of getting mad, I remembered that I had told myself I’d be getting up at 7:00 from now on anyway and it was already 7:15 and it wasn’t so bad putting on a sweater and shuffling across the street because I got to see this:
and I thought it was really pretty and I wanted to steal a cup of coffee from my neighbor because her kitchen smelled so good but I didn’t because I didn’t know how to work her Keurig and oh yeah that would’ve been wrong so I was feeling pretty good about myself when I got home and started thawing out in my kitchen (and I even found an old-ish but still good container of yummy-flavored coffee her Keurig had me craving instead of my usual plain stuff and it didn’t even matter that it was decaf – although why would I have ever bought decaf? – because I’ve been trying to wean off the stuff anyway) but I felt good because I’d made the choice to be happy this morning and it worked and then it was time to let the dogs in from the yard.
Then – then – I slammed my finger in the storm door.
I’m still not sure how it happened.
Or why it happened.
And now I know where they got the term burst my bubble because that’s exactly what happened. My happy little morning bubble popped just like that and sent soapy splatters across the kitchen as I sent every curse word imaginable – in English, German and Spanish for good measure – out into the universe, because you know what, Universe? If you’re going to send shit my way for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I’m going to send it right. back. atcha, sista.
So check yourself.
*I will have another post for you sometime today. But I think it’s best for everyone that I wait a bit to build up the bubble again as I try to work things out with karma, sip my flavored coffee, remember once again why I stopped drinking that stuff to begin with, and wait for the throbbing in my finger to subside.
