Anxious and Excited

I think the depression that hit me like a brick wall last week is disappearing - maybe gone altogether. Got some antibiotics for the evil infection that has taken over my body. A good thing.

Upcoming surgery and school tests have me feeling mixed emotions - go figure someone who is bipolar feeling mixed about something. It is major surgery and while I have health insurance I will have to pay for some of it - of course I never know how much until about three months afterwards.

I would not have imagined I would have any positive feelings about my tests, but I can see how they will be not merely a hoop for jumping through like so many dogs in tutus, but a learning tool. A good way for me to look at them in these last few months before I take them.

I am concerned that I cannot get a certain someone out of my head, and it isn't the person in my broken relationship. Part of me is not sure if I want this person out of my head, although as I found in my depression last week it can be heart wrenching to have him there, especially when I am not in his head or heart. Ah, human emotions.

Transformed

Okay, maybe that is too strong of a word, but thanks to friends with immense patience, compassion, advice, and willingness to listen to me talk, cry, and rant I am on the mend. I have much work ahead of me in terms of figuring out how I handle this issue of an absence of father-figures. Also, as a friend pointed out, I have had issue for some time with people not following through with what they say - being let down has always been a major issue for me and one that has often come up in my relationships. This is a moment for me to look more closely at this and see how I may be reacting in such situations. Am I looking at this "let down" of my surrogate father in isolation? Am I making decisions about other aspects of my life because of what he has done/not done for me? I need to think about these issues. This is only one of many reasons why this insightful friend means a great deal to me and why his recent seemingly "disappearing act" on me hurt as much as it did. He has a way of looking at things in my life from angles that I cannot see. His willingness to bring these up with me in non-judgmental ways amazes me. Rarely do I talk with him without feeling better about my life when we are finished. When I act shitty/weird around him in person (because I have near overwhelming feelings for him) I feel worse - mostly because I have wasted time with him that I almost never get to have in person. It is seeing him, watching his mouth move when he speaks, his smile, his winks, the way he laughs, his eyes sparkling - yea I'm smitten.

I have another call scheduled tonite with yet another amazing man who has always been there for me when I have called on him. I think I should be grateful for this a bit more than I am.

Over the weekend I got to hang out with a supertalented woman who moved away a year or so ago. We talk often on the phone, email, etc and having her across the table of pan-asian food from me was awesome. We talked about life, tattoos, food, men, clothes, the future, families, and much more. It was a much better evening than was originally planned. And she burned me some supercool discs!

The same night that I had the fab dinner my fairy godmother invited me to jump in the car and drive to her house to have a fun-filled evening of tacos, football, and Xmas trees. She called to help restore me and she did just that. Talk about someone who has been in some of the same places I am right now. I am not sure I would have made it through the night without her phone call. Literally.

Have no fear, the woman of despair will return again. For now she is gone.

I am, I suppose, thankful at this time of year for such people in my life.

Falling off

I am not sure that is an adequate metaphor for the way I feel. I doubt I was ever firmly planted anywhere long enough for me to feel like I was truly falling off. The ground always seems one or two steps away from cracking beneath me. I want so much for someone to come and care for me - not like a butler, concierge, or even p.a. How is it that for much of my life there has been no one who knew what to say to me when I was upset, how to calm me down when the tears turned into hyperventilation, how to make me feel safe, how to keep me from feeling utterly alone in a world of strangers and dark thoughts? Is this true for everyone? What is so special about those who found this in another person? Why do they get this when so many of us do not? Where do I stand in line to buy a ticket because I will wake up early and sit on cold concrete for days if that fulfilled promise awaits me at the will-call window.

I think maybe there is no point in taking my medication. If I feel miserable when I take it,why bother with it. All it has done lately is make me feel dizzy and cost me money that I could spend to hang out with friends tonight - instead I will be at home trying to keep it all together. Ironically, I felt this exact same way even when my failed relationship was still actively "working." My sorrow isn't about the split, it is about me.

I am feeling much like I did a few months ago when I was almost sent to the hospital. I managaed to convince my therapist that I could handle it. Happily, she also knows that sometimes hospitals do more damage than healing. She understood that having someone there 100% of the time to listen with open arms is really what I needed. She cannot write me a scrip for that. So now I am in a new place of my life and feeling that way again - I know it is dangerous I am aware. What am I to do? Wait it out? Hope for a soft landing when the journey ends? Cry to friends? Cry in silence?

There are no answers to this - or none that I have found yet.

Tears of a Clown?

I thought I had given up blogging a year or more ago. It was causing issues in a relationship that is now, most likely, at an end. So now I am back, not because I am some avid reader of blogs. Mostly because Livejournal was not working for me. I needed an outlet, a more public space for sharing what goes on inside me, in my head. Why public? I ask myself this and cannot quite answer it. Perhaps if I can send my thoughts out into the airwaves they will no longer be churning inside me tearing at the core of who I am and who I hope to be. Sometimes that hope means little more than a decorative urn and a journey down the Ganges. At least today that is where I am.

Everyone has rough patches. Yea, I get it. I, unfortunately, have a brain whose chemicals have chosen to make my patches less predictable, sometimes triggered, other times random, and dependent on medication in order to have any semblance of "normalcy." I have Bipolar Disorder II and it bites. I also cannot imagine life any other way.

With recent life being what it is I am now low on cash - okay out of it - and cannot afford to refill my anti-depressants for another week. Is that why the tears seem to flow at even low flickering thoughts of absent father-figures, failed relationships, abusive s.o.'s, the dead lover, and the overdose that was thwarted by hard-handed nurses, wrist restraints, and a thick rubber tube. Or is it the holidays? Or the stress of changing one's life in drastic ways within a two month time frame? Or the looming tests that will determine the fate of my career in the one place where I feel that I belong - well, sometimes.

Then again, is it just feelings of desire, friendship, unremitting lust, ever-present longing for someone who I do not, and probably, cannot have. Is that all it is? I want it to go away like a child's bad dream that haunts her night after night with no parent hearing her cries, no comforting arms to chase away the fear. I hear that I am intelligent, capable, clever; yet I cannot outthink, outrun, outwit this loneliness that has become all-enveloping.

This is why there are moments, fleeting, but not harmless, in which I think that peace may reside at the bottom of a lake, in a bottle of pills, over the side of a bridge. Funny, I don't cry when I think of these as possible solutions. I cry when I know that there is no one to wrap arms around me and tell me it is, it will be, okay.