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So yesterday was my 45th birthday and I actually had a pretty good time. I did a lot of shopping--well, duh. Some of it was for the cats. The cats got a new condo for my birthday, heh heh. Some was for me. I got a new corset--I can really get into this corsetry thing now that I'm somewhat less blimpy looking... 
Not bad for an old woman, eh? The dinner wasn't great. Unbeknownst to us the restaurant I wanted to go to had changed hands and had an entirely new menu and the thing I wanted most to eat wasn;t on it. Neither was the chocolate cake I had hoped for. But I got some cool presents and had a good time anyway. I got socks! FINALLY heard from my mum today. She told me that she'd already read Dragons of the Mind--my sister gave it to her. Gee mom, you could have commented on this earlier, like several months ago, so I wouldn;t be sitting here wondering if I should send you a copy or if it would totally offend you. But that's my mom. It;s kind of my sister too--I have suspicions she had ulterior motives in passing the book along because there's one fairly true-to-life story that isn;t too complimentary about my family. Oh well, I'll never know. Now I'm sitting here waiting for DH to be tired of working on his paper so we can play a game together. Not THAT game. Heh heh. Just a game. You know, a computer game....oh never mind. I should drink wine more often.
Well, it;s been a sucky day. aside from the leftover grunge in my system from my psychiatrist appt. yesterday, all kinds of things have gone wrong. Let's see, from less bad to worse? Well, a game i've been looking forward to for a long time--months--crashes every time I try to run it on my computer. It runs on my husband's laptop just fine, so I don;t know what the deal is here. I guess that sounds trivial, but I have so little I really look forward to that it's a big issue to me. Second, I just talked to my husband and the bank has refused to refinanace our home equity loan. Honestly, I feel just as relieved about this as not--I didn;t know how we were going to keep up with the new payments and I worried about it every night in bed. But we were counting on that money to get us through a rough spot. Now we have no food and no money and no way of getting either. So I called the Social Security office to check on the status of my disability application. "Oh, they made a decision on that weeks ago!" the helpful lady on the other end of the line said. It was turned down. I can appeal, but I haven;t much hope anything different will come of it. So here we are--no money, no food, a bank balance that's way overdrawn....and my birthday's comin g up and i wanted to have a good time without al these worries on my head. We should have just gone to Texas--I could have charged the whole thing and we wouldn;t be any worse off than we are now. And at least we would have had some fun. Now I'm bored and tired and I think I'll finish this cigarette and lie down....
i just got back from my pdoc appointment. It was one of those that I came out of in tears. The first part wasn't so bad--I found out that the blood levels on one of my meds are half what they should be and so he upped my dosage from 1000mg to 1500mg--that might take care of a lot. But then I tried talking to him abut my anxiety. I swear this guy just does not get it. I'm afraid to leave my house and all he can say is, "The only way to conquer fear is to just do it." here I am having dry heaves when I have to go to the grocer, or even when I make a shopping list and he says, "Just do it?" I mean, if I had a phobia of snakes would he suggest I adopt a tank of snakes and bring them into my house? That sounds really good--bring the source of your phobia right into your house with you. NOT. And it makes me feel so weak and worthless to hear him say these things--like I;m just not trying hard enough to get better and if I really put my mind to it I could...just overcome all my fears and anxieties and be a better person, a normal person. I don;t agree with him on this one. He keeps saying, "Katherine, I don;t know what to tell you." Well, I don;t know what to tell him either if every time I try to describe my mental state to him he comes out with some BS like "Just do it." Just doing it can only go so far and it makes me worse, not better. My therapist says that in cases of trauma this kind of desensitization exercise actually does more harm than good because it re-trigggers your trauma and makes you feel like it's happening all over again. I think my pdoc does not understand the PTSD aspects of my condition. Would he tell a Viet Nam vet to go back into the service? I DON'T think so. And that's what it's like for me every time I think about going out of the house--going back into the place that abused me, the place that gives me nightmares about being tortured in various ways. Am I really supposed to do that? Is that what I really need? Now I'm crying and I've cried myself into a headache. I feel so damn worthless. I feel like I'm not doing it right and not trying hard enough and all those things are trauma triggers for me so this appt. was NOT a good thing to spend my Tuesday morning doing. I want to go shopping and make the pain go away for a little while. But all I can do is sit here and smoke and think about all the ways I'm fucked up. That's all I can write right now.
Or not? I'm not sure. There are things I still can;t do like read or play my flute, but other things I canj do like keep this blog and update my website. By the way, if you follow my website you migh tbe interested to know that today I posted a page of the original Locked poems: pieces I wrote years and years ago that describe the experience maybe even better than the prose does. There are only five of them, but I think they;re pretty good. So you might want to check them out. Link at the bottom of the Excerpts page! But other than that...I feel like I'm having a depressive day. Nothing has any colour in it for me. It was nearly impossible to get out of bed and nearly impossible to function when I did. In fact, it's 2:38 by my computer clock and I just managed to take a shower and get dressed. Maybe this is something I can expect. Maybe I can;t expect every day to be a good day. But not getting dressed until two doesn;t seem hedonistic to me: it seems wrong and unhealthy. So does ignoring things like gardening and housework. Maybe all these agendae are things that have been put on me by other people. No one says I HAVE to garden. I just feel...I like things to be nice and tidy and when they;re not and I don;t take responsibility for it I feel bad. So I'm sitting here having another cigarette and a cup of coffee and wondering if I'm depresed or not. Maybe my Pdoc can tell me--I see him tomorrow. That's all, really. Mostly I wanted to tell anyone reading this to go to my website and check out the poetry. It was the last poetry I wrote, so I value it. Hope you do as well.
No, it;s not my birthday, but it;s coming up later in the week and I've been thinking about it a lot. Honestly, I never thought I'd get this far. I was sure I'd die somewhere in my thirties, either from suicide or depspair. But now I'm coming up on 45. I have a lot of people to thank for that, not least my husband and my current therapist. But I don't really know what it means. I guess it means I'm middle aged--my family is long lived and ninety or more is not unusual. But I don't feel middle aged. If anything, I feel younger and happier than ever--if you discount the recent "Mixed State" affairs. I think I look better, I wear bettter clothes. Sure, my hair is going grey but that's nothing a little dye every month or so can;t fix. Still, there are things I want from life that I haven't been able to get. A steady mood that allows me to work. Steady income from some source; I don;t care where. I'd like the aches and pains of middle age to miraculously vanish overnight. I'd like my weight to come down to a managable level and stay that way without my having to watch it all the time. I'd like to quit smoking but that doesn;t seem to be in my near future with all the stresses of my mental condition riding me all the time. Most of all, I'd like to have a book published by someone who would pay ME. I'd like to be able to work without pain. I'd like to be able to leave the house--or even think about leaving the house--without having an anxiety attack. I'd like a relationship with my family -- like that's going to happen. Still, I'm alive and I guess anything is possible while that remains the case. Like the story says, the horse might learn to sing....
I;m not feeling so well tonight. My stomach hurts and my head hurts and all I want is to get a dose of a major narcotic and go to bed. But I don;t feel bad enough to go to the ER and have them believe me, so I guess I'm stuck in this situation. probably two of the reasons I feel so bad right now is I'm trying to work on two things that cause me pain and grief: Locked, which you all should know about by now if you read this blog regularly, and a letter to my mother. Locked is easier. I often wonder why I go to the trouble to keep in touch with my mom. This is a woman who caused me untold pain in my younger years. She never beat me or anything--she hardly touched me, when it comes to that. But she's cold emotionally and her own traumas really prevent her from sustaining any kind of satisfying relationship with anyone, much less her children. Plus, she is a woman who is full of blame. Blame for the things that went wrong in her life. It's never her fault; it's always something else, like bad kids, that cause her grief. I can't count the number of times I was told that my two older sisters were bad and caused her pain and I was bound to turn out just like them. (I wonder if my middle sister ever heard this? She was the "Good" one, I guess). because I had problems no one could fix and thoughts and feelings no one wanted to hear about. That made me bad in her eyes for some reason. I still don;t understand thesde things and I don;t think I ever will. We went through a period of family therapy but all that got me was my mother denying she'd ever said to me things I KNOW she'd said--I'm not THAT crazy thank you--and my father telling me again that I was terrible and treated my loving parents like mud. I don;t know what the therapists thought of this; they never told me. Yet I still keep up with her. Asmuch as she;ll let me. I write her a long letter every month or two or three and I never hear back from her except at times that it would be no trouble and in fact is a requirement that she respond. Like my birthday or Christmas or my wedding anniversary. And she never says anything real. Just the same old stories of how her garden and cat are doing and what she's doing at church. But I told myself long ago that it was my choice to keep up and not my responsibility to make her respond or not. I wish sometimes I could have a real mother, one who really cared. One who would give me love and attention, who would have had some kind of reaction when I told her I was Bipolar. One who would have written right back when I told her I had published a book and was thinking of publishing another one. But mine never goes into those things. I don;t know why but I do care and I hate myself sometimes for the caring. I cant let go. I know lots of people who have divorced their families over less and I have thought of doing so. But frankly, all I have to do is wait for my motther to pass away because I have no contact with any of my siblings and I doubt they'll keep any up once she's gone. Besides, coming out and divorcing my family would be like kicking a puppy. They would never understand beccause they have never taken the time or put in the energy to understand me. I imagine their sad little faces and then the blame coming down: well we always knew she was a bad 'un. Of course she'd go off and do something crazy and hurtful like that. I'm not a hurtful person. I keep writing. I keep sending the Christmas cards and the birthday cards to the sibs who send them to me. I just have to stop hoping someone will understand some day, because that's not going to happen. My stomach feels a little better now but I feel like crying. I wish I could.
I;m feeling frustrated right now because I can;t do my job, that is, writing. My therapist says that my job at the moment is to get healthy, but I can;t buy it completely. I'm a writer, I should be writing. Of course I do SOME writing--like I wrote this blog every day in October and I've lately been creating diaries for my cats on catster. Is that lame or what? I don't know; i don't really think so but sometimes I do. but the big projects are ecsaping me. I had an inquiry today on Locked. She wanted to know when it would be finished so she could buy it. Well, I had to tell her I don't KNOW when it will be finished because trying to write on it right now is like wading through a pool of maple syrup. I wrote 15 chapters without a break and now I'm totally stuck. I have the first few lines of the next chapter revolving in my head like some kind of insane carousel but I don't know where it goes from there. When I started writing it, this didn;;t bother me. I meant it to be totaly stream of consciousness. My stream, however, seems to be dammed at the source. And She Moved through the Fair. I still have those same five pages on my hard drive and nowhere to go. Or rather, I know where to go but I don't seem to be able to make it go there. I think about writing and I just get all nauseated and shivery. I guess I'm having some kind of writer's block about it. I guess this is a natural part of the process. I guess that when you;re trying to get stabilised from Bipolar Disorder it's normal to put other things on hold. But Dammit I WANT to be writing. Not just blogs and cat diaries, but stories. How can you want something so bad and not be able to do it? This is what I don;t understand. I;m afraid. I know I;m afraid of writing these things and I don't know why. Fear of failure? Fear of success? i dreamed again last night that I got a message from Tor that they were going to publish The Unquiet Grave--again it was quite surreal, but it was a positive dream. S why am I so afraid? I long for the days when writing was not only an escape but a joy for me. Mayeb that's it--I just don;t experience joy at all. When I look inside myself all I see is this festering pit of old pain. I gues it's not done with me, or I with it, yet or something. Maybe I should do something else for a while like paint or draw or needlepoint...
