Dear Internet,
Housekeeping:
- I’ve been keeping up with my Silly Pictures goal
- I’ve meditated for 236 consecutive days
- Wednesday 3/9 marks my 7th week of smoke freeness
- I’m making some headway into my 50 Things project
- I am still exercising, of some sort mainly yoga, a few times a week since November
- Job application status (Start date: January 24, 2016)
- Total: 25
- Academia: 21
- Public: 3
- Other: 1
- Rejections: 4
- Interest:
2 3 (As I’m writing this, I got an offer to do a video interview. Hell fuck yeah.)
I’m keeping better stats on my job hunt, mainly for my own edification. As for the “interest” bit, the “other,” which was a corporate gig, called me on Friday and left a message to talk about the position in question. I returned the call and two days later, nothing. The other interest was from a public library system that wanted me to complete a civil service test which would last an hour. THEN if I passed the civil service test, I would get a call back for an interview, however, there is no known time from the test to the interview. It’s a 10 hour drive, one way, to the city so I had to politely decline.1
But hey! It’s keeping up with my above average of 1ish in 10 on interest/interviews to applications submitted.
(I have been expecting the deluge of rejections / interviews to start happening around this time. The jobs I applied for at the end of January / beginning of February, closed near the tail end of February so decisions are coming out now.)
I drew up a plan for what I’m going to do on a M-F schedule to keep up with all of my projects. Part of that plan was to write once a week over at the profesh site and in addition to the weekly gratitudes, write here twice a week. We see how well that’s going, but for once I am not beating myself up because things are not on a tight schedule, which is a huge difference from where I was even a few months ago.
Speaking of ThePlan, I had a breakthrough with my therapist this week. For the first time in four months, I sat down and said, “These are the issues I am having and these are the things I want to change.” I know you’re thinking, “Okay, Lisa, you’ve been seeing a therapist for that long of time and you’re just getting to the meat of your crazy?” Au contraire my friend, I’ve been spending the last four months pulling my ass out of the giant hole that exploded back in October. Couple that bullshit with jobs, family, lack of money, and other large topics of discussion, I haven’t had a time to really think about that kind of stuff or really how to fix me. I was more interested in putting out fires.
Along with job hunting process, being crazy is a full-time gig.
I broke down to my shrink about this plan, telling her I was sorting out what I needed to do on a weekly basis (work on TeamTreeHouse, job hunt, DBT, journaling to name a few) into daily chunks and she said, “Lisa. You do understand you’re spreading yourself thin, right?”
Honestly? I thought I wasn’t doing enough. That sounds a reasonable thought, doesn’t it? If you look at my newly planned calendar, I have, on average, six things assigned to each day. Two of them I approximated two to three hours each (and I was being generous). The other four? No idea on time. Just glancing at the remaining objectives, they could last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour each and that is not including time to yoga, meditate, eat, shower, and housekeeping duties that add-on the daily lists.
My argument to her is, “Look. I need to apply for jobs. I need to work on refreshing / learning new skills using TeamTreeHouse. I need to check my email on a regular basis and I need to keep up with my RSS feeds to keep abreast of library trends. I can not not do these things.” “Maybe something has to go?” “Okay, what?” “That’s for you to figure out and prioritize.”
(This is not a verbatim conversation but you get the general gist.)
When I came home from the session, I gave TheExHusband the tl;dr and he agreed with my shrink. “You’re spreading yourself too thin. You don’t have to do everything right this second and at the exact same time.”
I agree.
Obviously the job hunt is top of that list and it buttresses neatly with the day to day stuff mentioned above. That’s the given. But as for the rest of it? I have no idea, right now, how to stagger it so I’m not overwhelmed. As I explained above, I don’t have TeamTreeHouse set for everyday, it’s for twice a week. Writing on my profesh blog is only once a week. Writing here is twice a week.
This type of balancing act is what’s been keeping me in my thoughts this week. I’ve been pretty motivated to keep pushing forward because I’ve now got a history of not giving up on projects. The exercise, the meditation, the quitting smoking, and the on going stuff for 50 Things. I am not as susceptible to starting projects and abandoning them as I once was. I’m not saying I’ve perfected the best balance for home / work, as that’s bullshit, but I have a better control on my life than a year ago.
I’ve always been a fighter, that pretty strongly evident through the course of my life, so it’s never been a big concern that I would not pick myself up by my Chucks. I’ve never thought I wouldn’t get out of here. I may have been pissed it was taking so long, but if anything this last 18 months has shown me, I can do this.
Where as before I would think myself as a loser or failure for not following ThePlan or the calendar or whatever I’ve concocted to a T, I get that I’m not perfect, life is not perfect, and if I want to be happy, I need to be fluid on many of my plans.
And if you read anything prior to the last six months on ThePlan, you know to be true.
So all in all, how I’m handling this makes me proud and gives me the hope I can get an even better grip on my life.
After that, “Go get’m girl!” speech, it seems a little spurious to switch gears, but that’s how I roll.
I’ve been pretty open I’ve been having bouts of depression these last few months or so. It’s different from the blow up in October (manic depression) where I was crying on the couch for hours on end, binge eating (skip breakfast, lunch, splurge on dinner or some variant), sporadically showering. No, this was subtle. Quieter. I wasn’t having suicidal feelings. I was able to do things that I needed to do without feeling much issues. I would feel, “Huh. It’s gray outside. I’m gray inside. Whatevs.” and continue on with my day.
It was super frustrating to know this was depression happening and I couldn’t meditate, yoga, or whatever my way out of it.
So when I saw my medicating shrink a few weeks ago, I gave him the above and told him I felt my depression was around 8 out of 10. He put me on Cymbalta, which is fast acting (takes a few days to kick in instead of a few weeks) and hoping this would be enough.
If you’ve been reading my site for a few years now, you know I’m super sensitive to drugs. I’ve had psychotic breaks on ADHD meds, suicidal thoughts on SSRIs, and a whole host of other problems. The currently bipolar cocktail (Lamtical (400mg) and Risperdone (not sure of the amount of but it’s the beginning dose)) works really, really well. The symptoms are in control and I am so fucking aware of my triggers it’s insane. (“You’re one of the most self-aware people I know!”) The anxiety is kept in check with Klonopin and Hydroxyzine, but depression, however, is a whole ‘nother ball of wax based on the aforementioned problems.
I won’t go into too much specifics but anti-depressant drugs fall into three classes: SSRIs, SNRIs, and Atypical. SSRIs are the ones most people know about (effexor, paxil, etc) and the ones that make me, honestly, psychotic. SNRIs is where Cymbalta lives and last week it showed that after metabolizing it for a few days, I felt awesome (3 out of 10) for a few days, and then the rage hit so hard, I would have beaten up the couch if given a chance. Atypicals, where Latuda and Wellbutrin live, are pretty much my last shots. I was on Wellbutrin ages and ages ago and I don’t remember how I reacted to it, but then again, I was on a whole different bipolar cocktail. Latuda, I’ve never been on.
So to finally put this to some kind of ending, the doc put me on Wellbutrin, which I started today, and I should see some kind of result in a few weeks. (And hopefully not in some kind of psychotic rage. 😀 )
Viva la crazy drugs!
xoxo,
Lisa
1. My clearly out of state address was on the app and the follow up email. I half expected they would reject me based on that information. But nope. Go figure.
This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2013, 2004, 2003, 2001
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