Button-pushing, compliments, feeling heard, body shaming & how to ask– how are you?

Trigger, kneejerk, hot-button– whatever you call it, we all have them, mental health diagnosis & crappy life experiences or not.  It’s our choice, once we become conscious of those hot topics, to decide how we react when other people start mashing those buttons, on purpose or not.

Sometimes it’s easier to control your reaction.  Sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes you can have a conversation with the person who’s pushing your buttons and ask them to stop, take another approach, whatever– fill them in, ask them to be mindful.  And sometimes your hot-button “do not want mentioned around me” topic is their “I have to talk about this all the time” issue, because for them, it’s a life-or-death issue they need to be active around.  And sometimes, they’re objectively reasonable, or just subjectively trying to keep their head above water.  In either case, if you’ve said your piece and they aren’t going to mute themselves, it’s time to start tuning them out.

It all comes down to making sure you feel heard, feel seen– and if you’re feeling ignored, you need to do what you can to protect yourself from feeling unworthy of being heard, of being seen.  You are visible.  You should be as loud as you want.  And you should distance yourself from whomever won’t let you be yourself on your terms.

Either the person you’ve talked to about respecting your own buttons is going to notice & back off, or they’ll get hurt, get angry, or leave you alone.  Maybe they’ll even be enraged that you don’t care about them.  But wait– didn’t you already have that conversation about how for you, the mention of their “have to mention it all the time” issue is hurtful to you?

Right.  That.

I give myself permission to walk away once I’ve had the conversation and the person continues in the problem behavior.  I’m not going to fight with them, but I am also not going to waste time trying to make people understand further.   If they’re someone I mostly deal with online, well, thank goodness for filters– I can interact with them about things other than the hot button where possible.  If they’re someone I work with or live with, well, I just walk away from that conversation. Excuse myself, every time.

Food & weight are something I have kneejerk reactions around.  Both my parents are emotional, unhealthy, really overweight eaters who eat whatever’s in front of them and directly contrary to their explicit medical diagnoses, even to the point of it landing them in the hospital, and their pathological “eat everything on your plate” and “eat your feelings” attitudes have made me really fucked up when it comes to not feeling like I have to finish everything, and making healthy eating choices.  At 39, they still criticize me for not finishing everything on my plate, or serving a meal that doesn’t have meat in it even if 7/8 of the other meals in the week have animal protein.

Add to that the fact that I was bulimic in junior high so that I could find a way to stop being the fat kid no one wanted to be friends with, and that none of my family or “friends” noticed except to say I looked “great” and that it took getting sick from Lyme disease and then uncontrollably losing weight as a result (and still being told I looked “great”), and I not only have a lifelong aversion to chef’s salad (my food of choice at the time, and it now tastes like vomit) but have a distrust of anyone who compliments my appearance, because it reads to me as only a surface read.

When I got fat again after law school and then lost weight through a combination of low-carb/PCOS diagnosis and then having no control over further weight loss because my anticonvulsant bipolar med made me anorexic and have active revulsions to most foods, a lot of people told me that I looked “great!”

I felt pretty shitty about it, to tell you the truth.  None of my clothes fit, and people who’d never paid me any attention were flirting with me as if I was some new magic person.  I wasn’t.  Just thinner. There was only one person who asked during all of that time if the weight loss was something I had intended, and listened sympathetically– thank goodness for her.

My sister-in-law, who was an objectively physically attractive lady no matter her weight & couldn’t hear that,  had her own self-identified weight problems and had never been sympathetic (or maybe willing to acknowledge the reality of) to my mental health issues.  She even joked that she was going to get antidepressants if getting skinny was the result.  Since at the time I was seeing a nutritionist to try to put weight back on, the comment wasn’t appreciated, but arguing with her was like bashing my head on a brick wall.  My husband was mostly non-committal along the lines of “mm-hmm, if you think it’s important,” when I tried to talk about it with him, though toward the end, when I’d moved out of the bedroom and into the back bedroom, almost a YEAR after I’d started having weight issues, he caught me wearing a towel coming out of the bathroom and said, offhand, distracted– “oh, you have lost a lot of weight, I guess.”

Talk about being invisible.

Living with my dad now is its own struggle because he’ll eat everything in the house, and if I bake a treat he will eat anything I don’t hide.  He is dismissive of anything that wasn’t a real thing when he was in college (food allergies, medical diagnoses, etc.) and we’ve had a few screaming matches, but at the end of the day he knows, at least, not to poke me because I will poke back even harder, and he at least knows that my tongue is sharp, because I learned it from him.

“Are you putting on weight?”
“I don’t know, I still fit my clothes, so I don’t really care.  What’s it to you?”

“You should finish everything on your plate.”
“I’m 39, I’ll leave leftovers if I fucking want, the refrigerator works and we still have tupperware unless you have something to tell me.” (Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t swear but sometimes I will.)

“Why isn’t there meat in this?”
“Because dozens of human societies manage to thrive without it.”

At work now, in my health-oriented (obsessed) natural foods & organics oriented grocery store, there tends to be an, ahem, bias, toward healthy eating and fitness among the leadership, even as we sell cookies, chips, cakes, desserts, all kinds of healthy junk food.  It’s a contradiction I find not funny at all.  There are certainly less than Olympic-level fit members of leadership at all levels of the company, but there is a definite thread of anti-fat, anti-meat, pro-veganism, anti-dairy, pro-youth, almost fat-shaming in peoples’ private hearts in the company, and at the store level, it’s a dangerous thing in one-on-one conversations– something I’ve tried to correct when I hear it, one “you know, I’m a fat kid on the inside” conversation at a time.  It usually works, and people are usually shocked to find out I’ve been fat, because at 5’6″ and 170 lbs for age 39, I look “normal” or “good,” or “hot” and they “never would have guessed” I was my age, much less had ever been “fat,” but that’s the point, it’s all that external judgment again.  I point out that it’s none of their goddamned business what I look like as long as I am 1) in dress code and 2) able to perform my job, and that they need to get out of the game of deciding whether or not someone looks “good,” because not only is it a violation of our harassment policy and going to get their asses sued one day or another when they can’t keep their traps shut, but it’s also just straight out psychologically scarring and hurtful.

Dear world.  No one else needs your validation.  Ever.  And if you feel compelled to give it, compulsively, I suggest you seek professional counseling because there is something wrong with you that makes you feel the need to go around handing out gold stars.  (Let your counselor give you yours, and stop assessing the goodness of others.  The world has enough problems getting through the day.  Leave everyone to their own messes, okay?)  None of my less than skinny colleagues need validation of their looks, either, because they come in and do awesome jobs, and to be judged for anything other than that is just crap.  Starting in on “but they’d be happier if…” and “they aren’t healthy when…” is infantilizing.  DID THEY ASK YOU FOR HELP?  No.  Did you offer it once and they said no?  Ok, then.  The conversation’s over.  Forever.  The end.

I have lots of curvy-and-proud ladies of non-white backgrounds and heavyset dudes from all over who love their mom’s/spouse’s/their own damn cooking, and one of these days one of my skinny (to me, malnourished-looking) vegans or musclehead Latino bois is going to put his or her foot in it because no matter what they might think, there is no one dietary right way.  There’s a lot of science out there.  The minute you start getting religious about it in the face of someone else’s disagreement, it’s time to shut up and reassess why you’re so angry about someone else’s disagreement.

When it comes to diets and “healthy” eating, there is what works for you and makes you feel happy.

“Good” is so laden a word– not just physical attractiveness but value as a person– stay wide of it. Be specific if you feel the need to make compliments as small talk.  “You did a great job today.”  “It’s nice to see you!”  “Have a great weekend!”  “Hey, I like the new t-shirt!”  Focus on the things people do, that come from their hearts and their brains– not from their shapes.

Bodies and the food we put in it should be about love and pleasure, not substitution for the love & pleasure you don’t get elsewhere.   Food should be an opportunity for creative expression and fun, for sharing and an outlet at the end of a day of paper pushing– it should be whatever you mindfully want it to be.  And your body should do all the things you want it to do.  If you don’t want it to run a marathon, then no one else should judge you for that.

On any given day you have NO IDEA why someone is the weight that they are, heavy or thin.  Maybe they’re heavy because they’re happy that way.  Or struggling with a medical condition.  Maybe they’re thin because they’re having a medical side effect and working hard to gain back the weight, and are feeling pretty out of control about their appearance & body.  Maybe they do NOT feel like they look good at all.  Offering your unsolicited opinion on their physical attractiveness is not the way to validate their existence as a human, and in fact may be a pretty shitty thing to do to that person because you’re just mashing their buttons about how they feel about their out-of-control body.

Do you really want to be helpful?

Say hello.  Smile.  Ask someone how they are, and mean it, and stop long enough to actually listen if they don’t just tell you they’re “fine.” Maybe they’ll even tell you.

And if you ask them to participate in something and they say no, please respect the fact that people don’t owe you their whole medical or personal history just because you have a cause you’re interested in that has some good reasons behind it.  Their no isn’t a rejection of you.  It’s an affirmation of them.

Crush

(Re-post from my fannish tumblr)

Up-front disclaimer— I don’t recommend just discontinuing your meds to anyone who’s bipolar and having escalating mood regulation problems.

That being said, I went off my wellbutrin (100 mg) last night, because I’ve been feeling more and more like crawling under a rock, quitting my job, and/or running out into traffic, plus everything, everything hurts. (Anyone who tells you depression is all in your head is a steaming sack of dog shit.)

I’ve been diagnosed bipolar since 2005.  I’ve blogged off and on about it as a way to get the thoughts out of my head and maybe because it’ll be helpful to someone else to know they’re not the only one feeling nuts and still getting on with their life.  It hasn’t been easy; I’ve had some real setbacks, including starting over in a new career path after I self-sabotaged my old one during a bad depressed phase, plus realizing I needed to end my marriage because my husband (who had his own problems) couldn’t deal with being supportive when I was being crazy.

But since 2009 I’ve been on a drug cocktail that has more or less worked well enough to give me good insight into escalating mood problems— not in a *ooh, lightbulb* kind of way, but at least in a *oh, I’ve been working myself into a lather and I’ve been crying a lot and I hate everyone and I’m really angry and I don’t want to go in to the job that I love and I just want to sleep* kind of way that takes me only a few weeks to see, rather than months.  Having a therapist who asks if it’s time to adjust my meds rather than tell me it’s all Freudian shit (fuck you, last therapist, for undermining the fact that I do have a neurotransmitter disorder as well as a fucked up family life, you can’t just turn off the biological disorder like that) helps, too.  Plus, there’s that whole blinding headache all the time thing, kind of a clue.

Accordingly, I’ve discontinued the wellbutrin, because the mixed states I’ve had before have always resolved when I’ve gone off the SSRI* for a few weeks & then either reintroduced it or switched out that med, while increasing by 25 mg. the anticonvulsant (topamax) I take and bringing more of the benzo-class drug that I take (klonopin, 1 mg nightly) with me for day time anxiety swings, .5 mg prn,2 mg. max. daily.

I feel better this morning already, with the crushing headache absent and the body aches mostly gone.  SSRIs* are controversial for bipolars and bipolar IIs (my particular diagnosis) because a little can maybe help but it builds up and then you get depressed— and me, I get depressed and angry and despairing and— hate everything, including myself.  But up until they don’t work, they do.*  It’s a catch 22.

We’ll see how the mood is affected tomorrow when I go into work and all those situational stressors reassert themselves.  I did leave a voice mail for my shrink (it’s the weekend) of what I was planning to do.  I did tell my dad, who I live with, how I was feeling and what I was doing, but that I was basically ok if he just gave me some real quiet time this weekend.

It’s a rollercoaster and a ferris wheel— because it’s both up and down, but also it’s a slow cycle around.   I’ve been here before, in this crushing, aching, self-hating place, and I have to take a step back and give myself perspective even as I employ all my coping skills.  I have to be my own best cheerleader and say— you’ve deployed your support system, you’ve let people know you might need time off, you’ve been proactive, you’re taking time to yourself, you’re balancing quiet time and coping mechanisms like reading fanfic and listening to music with normal adulting stuff like doing laundry and taxes.  I have to remind myself that yes, it’s up and down, yet again, but the relative volatility isn’t as much, and if I was a jerk to someone at work, I did apologize right away and tell them they weren’t at fault— and they accepted that apology and let me be human, which is also a credit to me because this time, this career change that was a little more voluntary, a little less self-destruct, I chose a workplace where, for all there is too much work, at least I am allowed to be human.

Maybe this time, out of the crush, there’ll be some wine to drink— not just me, feeling like pulp.

*I have been on two other SSRIs from 2009-present before switching to wellbutrin in 2011-ish, and my shrink has always called wellbutrin an SSRI.  The wise ladyofthelog has noted, however, that wellbutrin is actually a DNRI, which I did not know until today, and which may well explain why I’ve been on it more or less steadily with two or three two-week-breaks, maintaining a pretty good mood state at low dosages (100 mg combined with the rest of my cocktail) for the last three years, when most of my other SSRIs usually only work for a year & a half at most.  Thanks, verity!  ❤

Wild and precious

It’s not summer yet– we’re barely broken from winter
but the days are starting to hold that verge of wet
of mud, of emergent green, and the breeze may still bite down to the bone
but the sun is just that smidge brighter, the light a little more gold.
It’s enough of a promise to make the tangle of brush littered under the
thornhedge, the long brambles themselves in dire need hacking
a challenge, not something so daunting to send me back under cold covers.
The just now full moon is low in the still twilight sky–
not day, not night,
but that inbetween state when everything waits,
everything’s poised.

I am finally ready to leap even though last week, or was it last night,
I was ready to fall, or was it to crash?
Still, each day is different, I’m learning,
and today I heard a poet reading her verse about whelks.
I remembered that time toward the end
when we took a walk and collected our own– beautiful, broken,
all hollowed out.  I left them in the bowl your brother’s wife gave us when I left,
along with so much else of our life.  In abandoning most of our things,
it wasn’t so much a clean break as the fact that you can’t take it with you,
and it’ll just break your heart if you try.
Those whelks, though– it’s strange, the things your memory holds on to.
I know there were good times enough to make me stay so long,
not just my own fear or yours that kept me hanging around,
but all those times are blurred versus those last few trips
all tinged with the last light of summer, that and the things
that still make me burn with rage.
In hindsight, I should have leapt in the spring, but I’d hoped
you would be able to make the leap with me, to try to hold on,
so I won’t fault myself for trying.  Someone had to.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
You, unable to help yourself, much less me, and me,
asking for help you couldn’t admit I was always going to need?
It wasn’t so simple a matter as clearing out the winter’s detritus
or waiting for spring.   It wasn’t as clean as admitting
that things had changed, like the way sand and tide
whittled those whelks.
I still don’t know what a partnership is,
but I do know to walk away
from those who cannot choose joy simply
because they will lose it some day– that knowing, at least
is a prayer that I be my own best companion.

People and things are evanescent, it’s true.
I don’t know what you were expecting
in a world where we’re all born to die.
It is all wild and precious and, for the moment,
part of our life.  I know how to pay attention to that,
even if the attention is caressing the brittle shells of late winter,
rather than admiring the slime trail the snail leaves in June.
The snail doesn’t know how long he is here.
He just takes his time, and enjoys each blade of grass
during his slow, messy, mucous progress.
Perhaps that’s the first kind of prayer, the steady snail crawl.
Slow, onward, with your home on your back.

(With apologies to Mary Oliver & The Summer Day)

Please let’s not talk about the weather

This is an all over the place kind of post.

I suppose, first off, my mom is okay as far as I know– she was discharged from the hospital after an overnight with some treatment, but I haven’t talked to her.  My brother’s in touch with her.  I don’t think I’m going to be, anytime soon.  I have been pushing her to get this problem dealt with for a really long time and she hasn’t, and I’m just furious– despite the fact that I know that she’s crazy, that she’s literally so nuts she can’t hear anything outside the stories she needs to write for herself in her own head– that she can’t trust or listen to me.  (Even if she lies and says that she does because she knows I am angry at her and that makes her uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit into the story she tells herself about us.)  I had a talk with my new awesome therapist about it and clearly, still lots of work to slog through, but right now when he asks me the question– what do I want from her?  The answer is nothing, because I won’t get the things that I want.  I won’t get an apology.  I won’t get someone respectful of boundaries or attentive to my interests and issues, much less aware that I am a distinct intellectual entity.  So, sadly, what I want from her is, precisely, nothing for as long as that can be maintained, because her refusal to trust, to listen, to acknowledge the adult competencies she herself thrust upon me by her infantilizing, victimizing behavior and her need to nevertheless whine to me because she somehow things that we’re friends or I’m her mother?  It’s too much to bear.  The only resolution is no.  I feel bad my brother gets to deal with her, but then again, I do get my dad, and he does infuriate my brother in a way I mostly ignore or poke right back on.  Even trade?

I will help with any legal or medical matters, either at hospitalization, institutionalization, or death, but I can’t bring myself at this point to bear more.  I can only turn off my furiousness at her when I have to put on my I WILL FIX EVERYTHING HAT, the one she forced me to wear as a child, and then I will high tail it out of there to get fucking drunk off my ass– one of those rare times.

I have been debating if my creeping anguish and apathy and everything everything everything has been SAD, too much work, too much stress from my dad, some institutional problems at work that need active rooting out and more support than I’ve had but some of which may change soon– not enough therapy, or all of those things.  It’s just been getting worse, though, and while there are lights in the darkness I am starting to dread going into work, getting snarly, putting off yucky projects, and feeling generally hateful of everyone and everything.  I talked to my personal boss (rather than my store boss) about it and that I wasn’t sure what I needed quite yet but that I was feeling messy and I might need a little time off– she was supportive and when I offered with my heart in my mouth that I felt like I generally knew what I was doing, she agreed– but it’s going to be weeks before the institutional stuff at work is fixed and I’m in no place to have the patience to explain myself without starting to cry or just be a horrible beast.  (Which I can’t be, because I am the one who’s supposed to be the source of counsel.)

I have been dealing with being crazy for a while now.  I suppose this is “easier,” in that I haven’t messed anything up yet, I asked a boss for help and she said “whatever you want,” and while my plans to leave early when completely to shit because of said institutional problems, a few more perceptive coworkers saw I was in a really bad mood/didn’t look right and slowed their roll long enough to ask if I was okay.  I even was honest with a few of then and said “No, but thanks for asking.”  But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m so depressed and feeling isolated and lonely that I feel incapable and in need of a goddamned parade and a hug from everyone in the store and I KNOW I am overreacting to stuff– and I am afraid if I take time off, I won’t come back.  I need this job, this one in particular, plus the money is good, because even if I am getting fed up with the store, I like the company and I have plans for regional and eventually global domination.  And I don’t want to start over again, much less be angry and sad all the time.

Almost as a one-off, my new therapist asked me if maybe my meds needed tweaking once we ran through the was I eating & more or less sleeping routine, and OF FUCKING COURSE.  Lots of carb cravings, increased appetite (when they work, my meds make me very unhungry and anorexic in the clinical “lack of appetite” sense), mixed anger and sadness, no sense of humor, no time for any small talk or bullshit (and rage at any waste of my time) apathy, procrastination, anxiety, increased sleeplessness & anxiety dreams– and I’m so used to my old therapist being all MEDS AREN’T THE ANSWER that I haven’t been thinking that way.  (Maybe I should report her to the board of licensing, bullshit billing crap to the side.)  It’s been 5 years on this regimen, wellbutrin plus an antiepilectic and klonopin– it stands to measure that the SSRI has ceased to be effective, in the way that they do for bipolars, and that I need to wean myself off the wellbutrin and try something else.  (Yay, rapid cycling mixed states, kept under moderate control?)

Soooooo… do I work during that time?  In a fit of wisdom, I signed up for short term disability at annual enrollment, and I am sure that my therapist would write me a note, and that I could wrangle my shrink into writing something as well, though I don’t see her as much except for refills.  (And I should call her this weekend to set up a check in appointment for sooner/this week.)  I am worried the place would burn to the ground in my absence, but at the same time one of my institutional problems is people both taking me for granted and not paying attention, so maybe it would serve the damned bastards right.  I am concerned, though, about stigma when I return, and yet– if I can’t take the time off to get my shit together at a place like my current employer, then there’s no hope for anyone, anywhere, ever.

It’ll be spring sooner or later.  I’m just worried it won’t be soon enough, and after 5 years on this regimen, I have lots of worries about starting new meds and seeing how they will work.

Change is good– it has been.  I fucking hate it anyway.

Therapy homework (1-b)

 

I did a better job after a good, cathartic too-many-drinks with strangers gettin’ my drunk on & long, much-needed twelve hour sleep at listing some things that my dad has done right to be appreciative/positive/non-critical, or has done things that have made me uncomplicatedly happy since I moved in with him.   (Yeah, every four years or so I get four-drinks wasted.  I’m a cheap date.)

And now that I’m writing this I can think of two more:  buying me my DSLR and my smartphone, with which I took the above photo.

Something’s got to give

I don’t remember when I bought those old PJ bottoms– sometime before Victoria’s Secret stopped making things in simple, pretty, feminine, flannel– so, at least a decade, because they’re also sized extra-large.

Suffice it to say, as I was hauling the vacuum around the house at 8 or so this morning, cleaning up the pine needles from the tree I finally had time to take down, something about some way I bent was too much– not the girth, because I’d kept hiking them up– but the mere fact of the motion, and they gave way at the seam.

Really gave way, too, flapping in the breeze and all that metaphorical jive.

I finished what I was doing, first, because I had a robe on, over, and my dad was studiously ignoring the fact that I was doing all the hard work downstairs by pretending to be engrossed in the paper online, upstairs, but then, eventually, I made it upstairs and took a look at the rent.

They weren’t really reparable, and the only thing to do was ball them up and throw them away.  The house is already eaves-deep in dust rags.  (Every time I throw out more unearthed piles, I find even more, even more vintage ones.)

The whole time I was untrimming the tree and dragging it out to the back for hacking apart to lay on the beds, I was fuming– maybe the steam contributed to the seams’ loosening.  Because how can you not hear someone taking a tree through two rooms and the front door?

I don’t handle my anger well, and humiliatingly, I’m an angry crier.  I hate it.  I have been so stressed out with the nonstop at work and a few petty things that aren’t anything to get worked up about except that I’m feeling amplified by all my personal stuff– and my personal stuff looms large right now, because my father is being a fucking toddler about the fact that he has to follow rules about food and take care of himself.  Every time my back’s turned, he’s trying to eat himself into his grave with something sugar or salt– or being a bully about my taking the T and then yelling at ME about the damned traffic when I try to pacify him by letting him drive.

I can’t get in a word edgewise about work, can’t vent about something or share something about my day, either, without getting a lecture: the fact that I work for a hippie-dippie Fortune 100 company with an entirely different business culture where, by and large, I can say what I think and share what I feel does not compute.  Therefore, I must be wrong, and I must be lectured.

It’s made me be more and more silent at “home”, because the temptation to say “You know, I’m starting to think the only time I’ll get a word in edgewise is after you’re dead” is awfully strong.  Add to that the fact that he doesn’t listen, can’t fucking hear, and isn’t paying attention more than half the damned time, and I want to move out even though he needs me more than he has.  And is being as gracious about my presence here as a velociraptor.

I’d planned on taking a vacation this week– a little mid week trip to the Berkshires for some slow-poke art museum and craft shop poking around, some writing, lots of sleeping in, and lots of cheap eats– and then things slammed back into high gear at the same time that my backup decided she’d had enough of the job, and where I’d had a hiring freeze now I had 18 people to hire and NO ONE WAS DOING THEIR JOB INTERVIEWING THE PEOPLE I’D SCREENED.

Enter, pants ripping.  Cue me deciding, all teary eyed and ready to crawl back into bed (yes, I am on my meds) that maybe I’d better not go on my vacation at all, a feeling of creeping dread I’d been having all day yesterday, too, during the extra work I put in to get more screenings done because left to their own devices, bless them, my team leaders are horrible judges of candidates and everyone they hired during my last stint out of the store have ALL, to a one, been fired for sucking.

I actually went so far as to call in to talk to one of my nominal bosses about not going because there was too much to do– I’ve been feeling like (warranted or not) I’m behind the eight ball and that I just don’t jive with anyone there, and he didn’t precisely sing kumbaya but he did at least give lipservice to my vacation being deserved and to sitting down tomorrow to put together a specific task list of what had to get done while I was away so that things didn’t slip.  The fact that I’m feeling isolated and stressed of course has NOTHING to do with the fact that I’m overworked.  The fact that I work with adults who don’t do my particular job as well as I do doesn’t change the fact that– they are adults, and if they screw it up by hiring someone I said was iffy, or not waiting until I come back (because goddamn, they’ve been sitting on their thumbs all this time, anyway), well, it’s not like I haven’t been working my ass off and it’s not like I haven’t been trying.

I think that when I come back I need to sit down and ask for feedback and see if there are places I need to refocus– with 300 team members, I’m always spinning my wheels and sometimes I just need to say no and put things off some, delegate more, and remember– I hit the ground running in August and haven’t stopped since.  I need to stop taking care of everyone else, even if it’s only for three fucking days.  Because I’m ready to rip, too, and I am not in a place to accept feedback and refocus, because I’m strained at the seams on my own.

Now I just need to find a way to tell my dad I’m leaving town for three days without him losing his shit.  Or not crying when he does, anyway.

He taught me to cook; if he wants to eat crap while I’m gone and then not understand why he feels like shit, I need to let him.  Because he does not want to learn, and I’m exhausted of beating my head bloody on the wall of his stupid self-disconnect.

I don’t want to work myself into that disconnect, myself, ever again.  I need to go, before I can’t ever come back.  I need to go, so I want to come back.

When does it start?

I’m at that age now (39) (older, have more insurance, long live Fried Green Tomatoes) where I not only know but accept and sometimes even bless the universal truth that no one really knows what they’re doing, even when they’re supposed to be an adult.  I find that truth freeing, because it lets me laugh (internally) at the poser assholes who pretend that they do know it all (and inevitably get knocked off the pedestals they built for themselves), feel less insecure generally about my own talents, and get on with the general figuring out of what I think I should do in any particular situation/problem/whatever.  It also lets me feel Zen enough about things that I don’t feel the need to get up in poser assholes’ faces just because anymore– now, I only do it when there’s a reason like– they’re fucking over one of my employees, or me, or someone in my family.  Some random jerk being a jerk otherwise mostly garners an inner laugh with a side of compassion tinged with a soupcon of you poor miserable bastard.

However, I’m also at that age where I’m sort of in between lots of other age groups– the people born when I was graduating from high school, to whom I’m an authority or even a maternal-type (hah, hah, hah, hah) figure, the people 5-10 years younger than me who for some reason think my no-bullshit crankiness is actually cool (?) and seek out my advice, the people my own age who are also in the hohshit, all these people think we’re adult boat, the people slightly older than us who really don’t know that much more but whom we’re supposed to respect but really, sometimes we want to punch in the face because they’re just being a dumbass– and then, then there are the people who’ve known us over the whole course of our lives, be they siblings, spouses, parents, old friends, who refuse to let you be the person you are now that you don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, and they still insist and get really upset when you don’t care what they think– not because you don’t love them, but because you finally, finally, really love you, even to the point of letting yourself make mistakes and being willing to forgive yourself for them, because making mistakes at least betokens action, not stasis.

The looming precautions these long acquaintances wave over our heads are too claustrophobic– the feeling that you can never really be free of criticism for trying to find and be whomever your real self is– at least not until your loved ones are dead or you cut them the hell out of your life. It’s not unlike college or the first time you move out of the house and you have that chance to be just as you present yourself, except now, at this certain age, certain is what you’re finally beginning to be, and everyone’s calling that into question, saying you’re wrong to think, act, feel as you do.

It’s depressing to repeat same arguments over and over again, when family and old friends treat you like you are 9, not 39– and you can see all the behavioral patterns you’ve discussed in therapy so that now you’re aware of your triggers.

I’m not triggered, precisely– but I am tired of fighting with people for the right to be someone other than who they think it’s safe for me to be, based on their own fears and projections, and I am tired of not fighting with people for the sake of harmony, too, because, for the moment, affection outweighs my need for personal freedom.  The definition of psychopathy and masochism tend to intertwine here, because I can’t possibly expect anything different to come out of allowing the same behaviors over and over, and I’m definitely putting up with bullshit that hurts my feelings and makes me defensive and sometimes more than a little bit crazy.

It’s why I cut off my mother for good this time.  I was tired of fighting for attention I’m never going to get, tired of holding up both ends of a conversation and then being betrayed by her need for attention.  I was tired of having to be nice to her so she could reassure herself that she was a good mother, when really, her self-absorption and mental illness are so exclusive that I only register as a mirror, not as an entity in my own right.  It doesn’t matter if she’s not a bad person or if she doesn’t mean it.  It does matter that she can’t stop, and that she hurts me, a lot, every time I see her.  That’s the stop to that interaction.

It’s why I left my husband, because he didn’t want anything other than a fully functional wife who didn’t complain or ask for emotional support (and who made dinner and did the shopping and did the driving and didn’t nag him about anything unpleasant, whatever X=unpleasant that week.)  I wanted the freedom to be intermittently crazy, to ask for help, to complain without being told I was wrong to complain, to vent without being stopped mid-rant to be told I had no “right” to be angry because my situation was my fault when I never asked for advice, I only wanted someone to listen, to have emotional reactions to things without being told I was either wrong because of some intellectual reason or because I was crazy.  You don’t get to have it both ways– either you make an effort to understand and partner with me in my anxiety and depression and listen to me, or you shut the hell up and keep your thoughts to yourself when I need to vent, because your refusal to help denies you any right to interpret my actions as sane, “right,” or anything else.

It’s why I shut off needy friends who couldn’t see that they’d crossed boundaries again and again. There wasn’t a fight, I just let things lapse.   It’s why I shut off apathetic friends, who didn’t hold up their end of the communication, friendship, socializing, BFF bargain(s).

It’s why I try to keep reaching out to those friends who make an effort, even if we’re all busy & crazy at times.  Trying’s the thing, even when they have kids or I have a workaholic job or they have opposite hours from me or etc., etc.  Trying’s important.

It’s why I limit, now, my interactions with my brother, who doesn’t ever want to engage on an emotional level, because he is the king of denial, and he will not help out.  Ever.  I engage with his wife and his daughter instead, and if he wants to change it, he can make the first step to remove that iceberg I’ve put on my desire to have a real bond with him.

It’s why I am going to have a conversation with my Dad, though I cringe in advance about it, to remind him about the way he and his mother interacted the last few years of her life, and the way she would drive him batty with her constant questions and paranoia and interruptions.  It’s why he needs to understand that he can either treat me like I’m 39 and stop projecting his own fears for his own health onto me and stop being controlling and stupid about things like how I am getting to work and whether I’m going to be out socializing with friends during the week.  Because his having a shitfit about my riding the bus and calling me crazy at the top of my lungs is crazy, and I told him so last week.  I said it very, very, calmly, when I asked him to listen to himself and his tone of voice, then asked him again– who was the one acting crazy?  It did shut him right up.

I won’t be infantilized or controlled, because he’s scared about getting old or because I’m doing something he’s afraid of.  But I’m tired of feeling like I have to wait until he’s dead to finally be free of the last person insisting I be someone I’m not– because I don’t want him to be dead, I just want him to either like me for who I am now, or learn to keep his goddamned mouth shut.  I wish he was less of an asshole, because I find it hard to be compassionate to him as a poor, miserable bastard. For the first time in his life, he’s got a stable job, a decent income, and he doesn’t have to do all the work in the house.  It’d be nice if he’d try to start to find a way to be happy– and act 71, instead of 17.

It’d be nice to start over.  To start at all.

The year I went as Quasimodo for Christmas

I’ve always had a crappy immune system, ever since I was a kid, even before I came down with Lyme.  And I’ve always been prone to psychosomatic illness, so that I’d end up with the cold or a flu after finals or a really big paper (and one, spectacular year, during finals, boy that was fun) or after I was done with a trial.  My body has really grotesque ways of expressing its displeasure at the ways I mismanage my stress, from GI disorders to, well, I’ll get to the rest.  I blew it out of the water this weekend, reminding myself again that I hate this time of year.  Next year?  I’m rereading this post, so I can look at ways to opt out, early.

Neveready (solo flight)

I’ve been reading a variety of self-help books in and around trashy sci-fi and research for the NaNo I probably won’t write this month (between work and family fights and now my Dad’s being in the hospital with a complication he’ll get over, but it’s going to take most of a week).  While I’m not a fan of the genre, per se, I’ve felt the need for a different perspective than therapy (and something besides writing in my journal, which I suck at) to supplement all the therapy I’ve been doing until just the last two weeks.  The good self-help books share some things in common– they underline the essential truth that we are all human, that we make mistakes and can’t be omniscient, and that this is okay in the long run, even if it sucks in the moment.  The best books, self-help or otherwise, underline the even more essential truth that I think anyone who’s really going to be ok at the “adult” thing has to accept: everyone else is as messed up as you, at one point or another, whether or not they’re better than you at hiding that fact.

The minute you really, really grasp that absolutely everyone in the world is or has been as fucked up as you, and that everyone– everyone, unless they’re, you know, a delusional psychopath or otherwise not well in their minds– runs in circles in their own heads, all the time, saying oh my god I don’t know what I’m doing I’m not ready for this I don’t know what I’m doing someone else fix this for me I don’t want to deal with this why can’t I go back to bed until it’s fixed like magic?  That feeling, that hide-under-the-covers-from-the-real-world sensation– it’s as universal a truth as death and taxis never coming within the time they say you’ll hail them.

But accepting that truth, that everyone else is as messed up as you?  It’s a double-edged sword. Because in one sense, it’s freeing– you can be as human as you like, be as you as you like, because anyone who dares to judge you is just a hypocrite and they can go straight to hell.  The flip side of that token, though, is that at any given moment that you’re having your own “this adult thing really sucks” meltdown, someone on whom you would like to rely is doing the same thing– which winds you up even more, because how dare they?!? Don’t they know you’re trying to hide from the world, and you were trying to get them to help you fix things?

It’s hard to maintain compassion when you want someone else to help you and maybe even have gotten far enough in your shitty self-help books to be honest about it, and then people let you down– you feel like a kicked child, betrayed in the vilest of ways, because you were open and honest and got rejected, instead.  Even when the reason had more to do with someone else’s failures and less to do with their indifference to or dislike of you.

That feeling of rejection is exhausting, hard to bounce back from– it’s a feeling you’re neveready for and the shock of it drains your batteries, leaving your limp.  You feel wiped out because you’ve done what you’re supposed to: been honest, up front with your boundaries/needs/expectations, and instead, you’ve gotten nothing, not the something (anything) that you had hoped might result. Hope might be that thing that wings, but rejection is that solo crash when you’re flying blind, too close to the sun, and not at safe cruising altitude with a competent copilot.

And it’s ok to feel angry at that rejection, at that failure; in some cases, it’s okay to decide that persistent failure or unreliability by the other so-called adults in your life is reasonable enough basis to limit your interactions with them or cut them out all together– but goddamn, does it suck, the loss of somebody else whom you’d hoped maybe, might help.

I don’t regret the row I had with my mother and brother around my birthday, because it was a tempest in a meta-conflict that represented my entire childhood’s role reversal dynamic and my refusal to be made to be the mom anymore.  I made my expectations clear to my brother well in advance, and he chose lack of conflict with the crazy mother over actually doing something considerate for the person who actually tries to be helpful and not a pain in the ass.  I don’t regret, either, the words I had with my mother, because despite the fact that I’m essentially beating my head against a brick wall and she won’t ever get it, the fact still remains:  why the hell did I turn my whole life upside down if it wasn’t to stand up for myself, no matter what?  I am standing up for myself, because no one else will, regularly.

I know what I want, and I know what I feel even if I don’t know where that leads in terms of “want” in the long term.  I can be relied on to buy myself flowers.  I can be relied on to take a mental health day when I really need it, and not cast aspersions on my general ability to do my damned job.  There’s nothing wrong with my expressing that I’m done with somebody’s bull, even if it means deciding that I’m going to be narrowing my social circle, or what I trust to tell others.  There’s nothing wrong with telling people to go to hell when they betray your trust, especially when you’ve specifically asked it of them and then they blithely stomp on it (you).

I don’t regret the row I had with my therapist, either– she knew I was in a wound-up place the last several weeks but chose to push all my money buttons and essentially deliberately trigger a panic reaction in me because my insurance company wasn’t responding quickly enough to the claims she’d submitted and which I had diligently been working on and following up with her about– by email, out of session.  The fact that she essentially manipulated me into freaking out about it during a session I was paying her for– I was paying her to talk about her not getting paid, instead of her actually paying her own billing person to do that for her– and that it was only after I had gotten my higher-up benefits folks sicced on the claim and forwarded the response to her that she “apologized?”  Well.  We hadn’t been agreeing about several things for the last while, and while there are things I’ve learned while working with her, I’ve also been fed up with her resistance to my attempts at telling her that certain “therapeutic” tendencies of hers drive me batshit, and that sometimes I just need straight talk.  So– while I am still furious about her lack of professionalism (even if in general I agree she had the right to get paid) because I think she knew better but was reckless about how I would respond to her putting the screws on me– in a session I paid for– in the end, while it sucks that I don’t have anyone, currently, to talk and vent to, I suppose it’s just as well, because she wasn’t really fully listening to me.  Still.  It’s a lost relationship, and one that I’d fought hard to keep, one that I worked at because I hate talking aloud about feelings, and now it is gone.

I had a not-row with some people in my work group on Friday– we were supposed to go out to do something that didn’t involve my crazy family for my birthday, and for one reason or another they all bailed or flaked and didn’t do the work to realize where we were going or how long it would take– and I got all the way there, then had to turn around and come home, alone.  I am not going to have a big “you all suck, you let me down” conversation with them, but I won’t be asking for any help or to socialize in the future.  It makes me sad, because I had hopes for that group, but I don’t have the patience or time to keep expending effort on people who can’t pay attention.  The end.

In the meantime, though, my busy but grown up friends and some of my family did send me nice wishes, including folks I miss like all hell, and people I haven’t done all that well keeping in contact with.  My friend Dani even sent me the most beautiful flowers, which were the perfect thing Friday night when I got home ready to crawl into bed– and instead got to spend a half-hour arranging a giant bouquet of gerberas.  I have slowly been sending responses, and am going to try to catch up, because all these folks are family of sorts, friends and people worthy of love & loving responses.

My dad, of course, was responding to my blues in an overdemonstrative manner that proves another point in those self-help books:  we have to learn how to say thank you, even if the praise makes us uncomfortable and we don’t feel worthy.  We’re being hypocrites to ourselves, elsewise– you can’t tell someone to butt the hell out of your life because you’re worth something, then protest too much in the next breath.  You’ve got to learn to accept that praise and attention are their own form of help, and if they’re not in the form you specifically asked for, well– you don’t refuse to look at a rainbow just because it’s not happening on the day of your wish.

In the end, though, all the self-help books won’t help you accept– you can get as old as you like but inside your head, you’ll never feel ready for the things life throws at you, and you’ll often feel angry or depressed or self-righteous or some other amped-up feeling when something that’s really, truly not fair happens to you and you have to deal with it all by yourself, because that’s just the way that life is.  And that is what it is– but you can’t wallow.  And even though you’re not ready, you’ve got to leap off the cliff and hope your wings are on right, maybe, this time, and flap, flap like hell and head for the horizon and try to ignore the ground because looking down doesn’t get you forward.

This week, the flying freakout is dad getting older, and getting him what he needs in the hospital, even if that means dealing with my self-absorbed avoidant shit of a brother, because it’s medical and therefore not feelings but clinical for him, so he feels free to butt in even though, at the end of the day, I’m the pertinent historian and caretaker.  (Ok, so I’m not yet done being mad at my brother for being a tool.  That’s ok, as long as I fight with him where my dad can’t see.)  It includes returning emails and calls from friends and putting off plans for this week but setting them up for next week and not trying to hide in a hole just because I know I’m going to freakout about becoming a caretaker and desperately want to say to someone with the power to make it so: please, don’t make it slow, whatever you do.  Because I can wish that all that I want, as awful as that thought may be on one hand (and as miserably hopeful for everyone’s lack of suffering on the other), but life is all the freakouts and missed connections and temper tantrums, not just the plans you’ve postponed to have a nice time some day.

You’ve got to have the nice time when it’s there, even if it’s not when you planned, and you weren’t ready for it.  Here’s the thing:  you’re never ready.  And that’s sort of okay.

Care, or do not. Just decide.

I feel like this is the lesson life’s going to keep hitting me in the head with until I really, really learn it.

(edited 11/5)

I absolutely don’t blame the people I still count my friends who’ve decided that I’ve been too self-absorbed with the oh-wah-I-am-changing-my-whole-goddamned-life separation and career change(s) and general emotional thrashing and drama that comes with me trying to work through this (and clearly not very well), and while I grieve that I’ve hurt those peoples’ feelings and really wish I could fix things, if it’s clear they think I’m bad news, I’ll step off.

But just when I feel like I’m done grieving one thing and can finally celebrate something else, fate or just the shitty luck of the draw or my lack of planning comes along and slaps me in the side of the head.  I’ve had some tension with my therapist for a while, and she, a solo practitioner, has some weird billing practices that make it very hard for me to keep up with everything (which is saying something, since I did insurance law for how long?)– between her pushing my money/shame/payment buttons (during sessions I paid her for, ostensibly for the purpose of discussing my mental health, and not her accountant’s inability to pick up the goddamned phone and call the fucking insurance company) and her disagreement (without having any kind of dialogue about what she’s thinking, even when I tell her that Socratic questioning drives me batshit because it triggers all the ways my Dad’s been a critical jerk in times past) that I a) need medication b) am bipolar c) another laundry list of shit– anyway, it all came to a dramatic head during a session where I really wanted to talk about 1) how my dad drove me nuts in Italy and how part of it ended up him just being old and how that was distressing for lots of reasons, including the fact that I can barely take care of myself 2) how my mother was coming to town and I didn’t want to deal with her and her obtuseness and feebleness and passive-aggression and 3) how my whole fucking family is so passive about planning my birthday, that even though I’d already said I wasn’t going to do it and why, now everyone was asking me what we were going to do, so that I was ready to knife the first person to bring it up again (I REALLY hate my birthday, holidays in general, I end up being in charge and I hate it)– and I never got talk about any of it because it was all a giant confrontation about when she was going to get paid, the answer to which was– I don’t know, and I’ve already called them three times in the last two weeks, why don’t you try?, which she didn’t like.  After about 20 minutes I just decided– fuck it.  She cares more about getting paid than about the fact that I had to email her during my vacation because I was having a crisis– so I wrote my copay check and walked out.

It sucked.  Big time.  This is the person who has listened to me, even if I’m not really sure she’s been all that helpful, while I have attempted to get over all the major shit of being ashamed at giving up law, getting a “real” job where I feel appreciated, leaving my husband, and otherwise deciding that I was going to do what I thought was important, and fuck waiting around for other people to tell me that no, I wasn’t capable of it because they needed to feel superior, or they were ableist shitheads, or they had no concept of who I really was or… whatever.  So even though I am furious with her, I am also really, really sad and angry at the same time– it’s really hard for me to talk in person with people about my feelings without completely falling apart, and I had at least gotten to the part of telling her things voluntarily sometimes, even if it could take the whole session to wind up to one real confession amidst a whole lot of venting.  (But venting’s important, and having an outlet is too, and now I don’t have that, either, and where am I going to put my getting too worked up about stuff I know I need perspective about, but first I need to be a blowhard about it in private, because that is how I process?)  I feel betrayed because she couldn’t be a grown up therapist with a grown up billing agent who could focus her energies on therapy, not payment.  And I feel really fucking manipulated because I think she took advantage of my anxieties about money to wind me up about getting her paid by the insurance company so that I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else.  I really, really, am so furious that I feel like writing a complaint to the licensing board.

And then, of course, my mother was here.  She was mostly here to see the grandchild.  Now, this is the important part.  I love my niece– she is awesome, wonderful, unequivocally so, and I think it is darling how my brother relates to her, how my dad is besotted with her, how she and her Mom grin at each other.  I don’t spend too much time thinking about kids of my own.  I am not jealous of her,  and I don’t particularly regret not having kids.  Like I said.  I have a hard enough time taking care of myself.  And I get a lot out of helping the folks at work.  Three hundred employees is a nice round number of people with shit to sort through and make me feel useful.

But I will never forgive– I’ve decided this much is true, I guess– my mother for telling me, outright, that she was moving to California because I wasn’t giving her grandchildren, and I really, really don’t want to forgive her for the fact that I have had a hell of a lot of shit going on that a caring mother theoretically might want to come visit a daughter and be supportive about.  The fact that I don’t want her to try to be my mother, nor do I want her to come visit, because she is a narcissist and can’t be trusted with the kind of confidences you’d tell a mother is beside the point, somehow, in my illogical, adult child brain.  Add on top of that her entitlement around the trip, and her shock and surprise when she learned that I wouldn’t be squiring her around in the car I no longer owned (which she didn’t know about because she doesn’t call me because that would be putting out for long distance, and that would mean spending money), nor would I be renting a car on my own dime to squire her around, her incredulity that I just wouldn’t give her a handout so she could do that, her huffed “well,” when I told her that it was her trip, and that she should plan it, not call me and leave passive aggressive voice mails on my machine expecting me to be the cruise director about when and how long she should come, blah blah blah (yeah, I got mad and used those words, more or less).  

Well.  I should know a thousand times over by now that she will never be capable of comprehending how much I resent her and how there’s a part of me that would be perfectly thrilled, really, to never speak to her ever again, because she winds me up, all the time, and I am incapable of building walls high enough to withstand her.  I know she will never change.  Will never comprehend the need to.  Will always think I am being mean and unreasonable for criticizing her, because don’t I understand that people were mean to her as a child, or as a young woman, or 36 years ago and she’s forever scarred?

And yet a part of me still manages to feel heartbroken when she and my brother sit around like bumps on fucking logs and want me to plan what I should do on my own birthday when 1) I have to work 2) they’ve vetoed all my ideas and not suggested anything else 3) I told my brother, beforehand, that I HATE my birthday for this very reason, and yet he let it happen anyway, because to do otherwise would involve confrontation and feelings.   I want them to know me well enough to know that I am sick of being the mom to us all.  (Pro-tip: they don’t know me, and they don’t care to.)

Somehow, they were both surprised when I just walked out right before supper the other day rather than start punching my brother in the damned neck.  Somehow, my brother still managed to be a condescending bag of dicks jerk who was “sorry I felt upset.”  You know what?  FUCK YOU, stop being faux-clinical, you pretentious-not-a-doctor-yet ass, and either make a commitment to this family or stop pretending to be so goddamned polite and doing all the family stuff out of mere obligation.  Do the real thing that you feel– be honest and say– nope, you know what, y’all drive me batshit, I’m out.  Instead, of all things, he called me to try to guilt me into seeing my noncomprehending mother and pretended to be sorry using faux-clinical language that was about as sincere as a Tea-Partier at a Teamsters meeting.  But my mother did want to see me.

I spent a painful hourlong dinner with her tonight as a result, wherein it was abundantly clear, yet again, that she has no idea, whatsoever, why I decided to leave my nice husband, or my nice legal career, (she’s still stuck on this, really, it has been years, 2009 and 2011, and still, still…) so I rerouted it so the conversation revolved around her and her physical ills.  She was just so baffled in the face of my rage at my brother, who I had TOLD to come up with a plan– and instead, he’d let her mope around the house the whole weekend because he had consulting work to do and that was more of a priority than either getting the work done ahead of time or after she’d gone back to the hotel, or just saying– you know what, now’s not a good time to come.  Because why would we ever stand up for ourselves, even to blood relatives?

Not because you don’t care (even though you probably shouldn’t) but because they don’t.

So.  Yeah.  No more blood relatives whose only claim to closeness anymore is mere blood.   And adieu again to husbands and college best friends and alleged good friends who want advice they won’t heed.  Therapists I’ve spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of my life on can go fuck themselves when money is more important than their clinical duty.  If they can’t be brave enough to have real feelings and express them around me, or respond to the ones I’m having (ooooh, feelings are scary?  No shit.)– they don’t care enough to make up their minds, and they’re not worth my time, not anymore.

Today, I turned 39.  What I really wanted for my birthday was someone, anyone, to curl up with me in bed and let me sob into their shoulder because I am tired  from all the good work I’m doing at work and at paying back all my debts (OOH, I’m paying back money, someone give me an award!!!), I’m tired of fighting with people I love and who don’t love me enough to pay any attention at all, I’m tired and just needing some time to cry and grieve because sometimes you need to do that.

Instead, I got newfound resolution to not waste my time on anyone who can’t handle my request that they participate in a little thinking, a little interested interaction, a little making of decisions that would indicate some human interest, brother, mother, therapist, whomever the fuck they may be.

I did get some lovely facebook and text messages from internet and real life friends and cousins and even my stupid, oblivious ex (who means well but doesn’t seem to understand I partially loathe him for his oblivious cost-consicous asshole health insurance shenanigans, since I’ve paid over 7000.00 this year for insurance between all the job changes, deductibles and COBRA), as well as a few people at work who knew I didn’t want people to know and who instead just stuck their heads in to say hi, and then left.  I got some people who knew enough to say hi, and reach out– thank you.

And my dad, though he may drive me nuts, made me my favorite supper after I’d gotten home from the mom supper of akward-ish heck, plus cake and ice cream.  And warm boiled wool slippers, that he saw me dogear once in a catalog, then knew me enough to order and guess at the right color.  (They were the right color.)

We all make our choices.  Sometimes hanging in there isn’t the right one.  Sometimes, even if it’s only one person, it is.  But you have to decide.

I’ve decided.