Mentally Healthy – Page 12 – A Most Unreliable Narrator

reverb

Those few hours between when I had ended my last entry and went to my shrinks were the longest in my life. Or so it felt. Once I had gotten into her office, I started bawling and I couldn’t stop. I had no idea what was wrong or what was wrong with me and why I could not stop crying.
What had partially happened medically is that I had started a new birth control pill called yasmin and had slowly started weaning myself off of Effexor. Dr. B. thinks it was a combination of the pill and the weaning of the Effexor that made me, um, lose control (if you want to call it that). She immediately gave me a low dose of Effexor and had me check back in with her Wednesday to do follow up.
On Wednesday I felt a bit more in control of myself when I went to see her, more composed and more willing to talk. She prescribed a lithium derivative (600mgs) so that my daily pill intake is now:

1 birth control pill
1 37.5mg of Effexor
2 150mg of Serzone
2 300mg of lithobid
1 multivitamin

I stare at all the pills in my hand and just wonder what the fuck I’ve done to get this far in life. A shelf in one of the kitchen cabinets looks like a pharmacy as I keep all my meds and vitamins (and for some reason, a bottle of hair dye — can you NOT see the irony with that one?) with half open bottles of various prescriptions I’ve had over the last few years. The good drugs, such as klonopin, are kept in my purse for ’emergancies’. The fucked up thing with klonopin is that when I was having panic attacks left and right last week, I popped the full pill and it didn’t seem to do anything. Which was odd because in the past, 1/4 of the pill was fine. That bothered me.
Even with all the goddamn drugs I’m on, I’m STILL having panic attacks. Had one today when I was playing video games with Alisha and my heart started racing (160bpm — I counted) and I excused myself to the bathroom. When I had gotten an EKG back in January, the on-call doctor had shown me a few tricks to slow my heart rate down, and one of the tricks is to ‘push down’ like you are taking a shit, which I was doing er well attempting while I was sitting down next to Alisha but I just excused myself and went to the bathroom any ways. I had this feeling my face looked like I was constipated. I went into the bathroom, and did the exercise for a few moments and my heart rate slowed down to less than half of what it was. I don’t think Alisha ever knew.

about a girl

i was crying this morning while i was making coffee.
Considering that i had scratched and punched Paul on Saturday, that is somewhat of an improvement.
let me backtrack:
For the last few weeks, mentally, something had not been going right inside my head. I started coming home from work, eating dinner and almost promptly going to bed. Stuff like school, writing, NaNoWriMo, my journal, etc all went out the window. I felt like I was being dragged down into this cesspit of despair but nothing externally had changed. Paul and i were still, well Paul and I, my mother still hadn’t gotten her SSI yet and I was still supporting her and everything else gosh darn remained the same.
But then stupid little incidents started setting me off. Customers who were dumber than a box of rocks (nothing new, however, I seemed to be taking a new path on how to deal with them which wasn’t good), people on mailing lists I would blow up on and use this foul language that bothered even me. The woman who ran me off the side of the road on Saturday, every little slight against me sent me into this fury that pissed me off so much I was shaking physically. I was/am spinning out of control and I do not know how to stop it.
On Saturday, I was sitting at my computer all nonchalant like when Paul asked me to fix the printer. He was prepping the list for us to go shopping for Thanksgiving dinner and I just blew up at him. My movement was so fluid, that I had no time to think or to react. I got up, and started punching and scratching Paul. I threatened to stab him with something. All the while he is looking at me like “What the fuck are you doing?” I started screaming at him about why couldn’t he fix the printer himself and i tried to force open said printer when he started yelling at me I was doing it all wrong. Once I got the printer opened, I took the color cartridge out of its place and shook it all over him, leaving drops of blue and red ink on his white T-shirt. I just did not give a flying fuck. At some point, I went and laid down, to help calm down, and that did not seem to help either. All I kept thinking about was sliding a knife down my arm vertically and just fucking ending it all. Fuck you, fuck the world, fuck my mother and my family, fuck work and most especially fuck Paul.
But I didn’t grab a knife, I just laid down and slept for a few hours hoping that the monsters would go away.
They of course, did not.
Sunday morning, I woke up after a few hours of sleep and went to the massage therapist. All the work my chiropractor had done on me for the last year had gone to hell in a handbasket as all the pain i started suffering came rushing back within the last month or so. I can’t sleep, I’m angsty and i feel like stabbing someone. really. Charisma (yes, really, that is her name) started working on me and i felt myself tense up and eventually relax. By the time I had left her an hour later, my body was like rubber. However, later on that day, I was back to being pent up, angsty, angry Lisa. Nothing was working. Not massage, not going to the chiropractor, not drugs, not relaxing, nothing. zip. nada.
I’ve never thought of myself as a cutter and have prided myself on being ‘too smart’ to follow through with cutting myself or attempting suicide, but, I’m telling you, the idea felt warm and safe in my head Saturday and this morning, the fact that all this frustration and anger came welling to the top, I’m this close to wanting to hurt myself. I’m literally hanging on by a thread.
in over a year of being with my therapist, not once can i honestly say that i wanted to hurt myself until recently. Oh, i had bouts when on new drugs that the idea seemed to be golden, but, i rationally knew it was the drugs not how i felt consciously. My family, genetically, seems to dispel drugs like there is no tomorrow. My mother had been on various anti-whatevers for the last year and she would get to the point where she would be okay, she would be almost maniac but not quiet and then BOOM, she would fall. With me, it is almost the same. Prozac, paxil, Effexor, zolotf, now Serzone all seem to have the same effects one me — fine for awhile, then the drug does not work anymore. I’m tired of feeling out of control and like my life is spinning 180 degrees. I fought so fucking hard to not be where I was five years ago only to find that it seems worthless. I feel worthless and I feel like my life is not worth it.
My eyes are welling up with tears again, like they have been for the last few weeks or so. Everything, everything is setting me off. I feel so fucking helpless, because i AM seeing a therapist, i AM taking anti-whatever drugs, i AM going to a chiropractor, i AM seeing a massage therapist. NOTHING IS WORKING. I’m so fucking pissed because I’m doing all the ‘right’ things, and yet i feel I’m back where i started over a year ago. That fuels my anger even more and i want to hurt myself or someone around me.
I just got done making breakfast as I decided it was in the best interest that I not go in today. I’m lucky, in that, half my department is fucking loony toons and that they know my history that I can call in ‘sick’ and tell them really why i was ‘sick’.
I sat there chopping up onions and green peppers thinking I can make this omelette (which, I of course burn) and the thought of slicing my skin is still there. I watch the omelette burn and I have this special omelette pan in which when I flipped it over, a plastic part of the pan starts burning stinking up my kitchen. I toss the whole mess into a regular frying pan and end up making scrambled eggs with potatoes, onions, and green peppers.
My life could be described just like that: it’s a mess so i transfer it over to something else. I’m tired, oh so tired of fighting to stay alive. I keep myself in check all these years, busting my ass to do the right things, and to make up for all the things i feel I’ve done to slight people and myself and I can not catch up. I just can’t do it anymore.
For a long time, I wanted to be crazy, like really crazy , mental hospital crazy, but my mom’s experience this summer showed that what i saw in movies and what was real were wildly different things. I still want to be crazy, I feel worthless enough because I cannot accomplish anything feasible. Everything feels like this huge burden that I cannot even begin to touch.
You’re a child, and you are told from day one that you are special and worthwhile and bright and gifted. You are told you can do anything you want, that the world is your oyster and you cannot fail at anything.
Then the chemistry changes and at the age of nine you are seeing a therapist because “you’ve been a bad girl,” and your mother keeps yelling at you how everything is your fault, and you are grounded not for days or weeks but for months and years. You run and escape into books and feel paranoid. You feel like everyone is out to get you and you can’t understand why at the age of 9,10,11 why you don’t have friends like other people have friends. You’ve spent so much of your young life being grounded that you miss out on birthday parties and events with other kids. You don’t have friends. The people who say there are your friends only use you because you are stupid enough or naive enough to think they like you. But they don’t, not really. Kids are cruel creatures.
So you grow up, your family moves, and you start a new school where no one knows you. You think that you can be anything you want to be, but your attempts at making friends is feeble and you spend most of your lunch periods reading or writing, always alone. Your 13. Your body changes and you suddenly develop breasts and lose some of the baby fat, and suddenly guys want to date you. You still feel like this insecure be-speckled person you were when you were nine and 10. Fat, worthless, pointless. You don’t know what changed but now people want to be your friend, but they are they wrong type of friends. They are the ‘bad kids’, but you don’t care because someone finally pays attention to you and you feel happy because now you have ‘friends’, and that’s all you wanted. Everything becomes this big blur as you enter high school and everyone leaves you alone because they either don’t know you or assume you are a transferring senior when really you’re just a 5’10 150lb freshman. You still think you were so fat. Then you go on the special school trip where your class of AP students travel to Kentucky. You get lured into and locked into a cabin with the swim team where they get this bright idea to gang rape you. You fight and claw and run screaming into the bathroom and a friend saves you. But no one is told. Not the parents, not the guardians, no one. You sit through the going away party glaring at the boys who had tried to harm you and they act nothing is going on. Back to school, everything changes and suddenly rumors are spreading and the same boys who grabbed you are leering at you and making comments. Kids are so cruel, they didn’t mean it.
You start getting older, 14, 15 and things remain the same. You now feel like two people instead of one. One who doesn’t give a fuck and the one who does. She (me/i/her) still hangs out with the ‘bad kids’ and the other half goes and starts studying for the LSAT. The two worlds cannot reconcile themselves and the fighting at home becomes worse and your mother keeps taking you to separate therapists where you confess just what an awful child you are. You start a new habit of breaking things. You get angry and start breaking anything made of china or glass. Your friends get used to it and you laugh it off and your mother gets angry for breaking all the dish ware in the house. You had as a child taken a point of where you used to sew your fingers together with needle and thread, through the upper layers of your skin. You would sew and sew and then rip it out gingerly and start over again. You used to pull huge clumps of hair out. At 16,17 and 18, nothing has changed. You lose your virginity to someone you don’t love only to have him dump you four days later for a whore. You sleep with whoever and you don’t care, thinking your this badass who can deal with it and you know they are jerks and won’t call you again. You spend a lot of time hiding under your desk when on the phone, as if the wrath of your family is just that bad, but your family consists of a younger brother and a mother and how can it be so bad?
Anyone who was seriously into you, and I mean seriously into you, leaves because they can’t deal with the mania and the depression that follows. Sometimes you forget to eat and when you do eat, you gain weight. Except now you are cycling, between the mania and the depression. You move again and again with your mother and move to Toronto when your 18, only to find that the lessons you had learned as a child are still with you. You come back having only made a few friends, didn’t leave the house and nothing changed for you. It was still the same.
Then it cycles faster.
And as you get older, you notice that the so-called ‘adults’ you are supposed to be, still have the same tenacity as the children you knew. No one is interested in being ‘real’ or friends with you, they would rather lie, cheat and steal. Instead of hair pulling or sewing, you cry and don’t leave your room for days. Friends call and want to go out, and you have panic attacks thinking about leaving the house. Then a few days later everything is ‘fine’ and you pretend nothing happens.
Your world has become disjointed and you tell yourself you’ll pull out of this bullshit and move on. But you can’t reconcile the differences between reality and fantasy. Reality is much too fucking painful to deal with. Either that or your sense of reality is too fucking painful. You don’t see happiness or warmth in anything, it’s all gray and dark and dismal.
Memories keep shooting up to the forefront and you still cry. You cry when your mother left you with cast up to your thigh on the Christmas you were 22 and your 16 year old brother was with you to help you use the port-a-potty because you could not walk the 50′ to the bathroom. Your brother helps you up the stairs and you really bathe for the first time in a week and your next door neighbors come over on Christmas day and help you hobble over to their house for dinner. THEN the police show up at your door because your father is worried you were being mistreated (22, no phone in the house, no food and your mother and her husband are gone for the holidays). The following Christmas your mother gives you a bottle of washer fluid for your car, and you sit there crying. Your brother and you start a tradition where you go to blockbuster and grab burger king for dinner. You hate Christmas and all the fake cheer that is associated with it.
Now you are 29. Next year you’ll be 30. All through the years you’ve kept a pretty good handle on the monsters. You’ve kept them at bay and worked to not let them interfere with your life on day to day basis, but you know that is a lie of sorts. If you really kept them at bay, you would not be suffering this pseudo-breakdown you are today. You feel embarrassed and guilty for bringing it up, and the non-stop headaches you have lately does not dissipate with bringing all this information forward.
Part of you, a good chunk of you, has given up. It’s easier to automate your life and work on that than to work on what’s really bothering you, but even you don’t know what’s bothering you anymore. Everything seems so trivial and of a lesser extent than when you make it real. But if there were true, there would be no fucking reason why you would be fucking crying at Harry Potter or any other movie that shows some sort of goodness to the heart.
The other part of you, albeit seemingly feeling small and unimportant is hanging on for dear life. Sheer will is keeping you together as your body is trained to handle certain things, but, sheer will is losing out fairly quickly. Rationally you know that you won’t necessarily do anything to harm yourself, but that is fast running low against the monster that wants to hurt you.
The irony of the saying “god only gives you what you can handle” which has been drilled in your head since your Catholic school days is fast losing its hilarity.
———–
I’ve got a 3:30pm appointment today with my shrink.
x0x0x
lisa

kinky afro

I have figured it’s high time i sent out an update. Besides, my updates are more important than answering the phone or doing actual work!
As many of you have probably noticed, modgirl.net has been removed including archives and what not. i am NOT going on hiatus and i am NOT removing modgirl.net perm. I got my grubby little hands on some really great web design software that allows me to be a bit more dynamic, and I gave myself two weeks to get everything under control. However, within those last two weeks, I’ve also had to work late and had lots of over time (which I’m not paid for, i was just doing it to get brownie points) plus we’ve had friends visiting and it would have been Huber rude if i said “hey, my website is more important than you”. So, I’ve neglected it by quite a bit.
I’m giving myself another one week extension to get the work finished. I’m implementing a lot of nifty things such as a search feature and a bit more interactivity. The new website should be unveiled by June 10th. Two days before my 29th birthday.
As I hold desperately to my twenties, I’ve been reexamining my self with Dr. B., the shrink. I saw her yesterday and made my everlasting comment of “I don’t know who I am” and did my song and dance about what roles I’m supposed to be playing in society and where I fit in. She asked me if i had any goals, and other than college, I have none really. She suggested that I read “7 effective habits of highly successful people” or some crap. Plus with all the other books she’s been giving me to read, not only is amazon.com and bn.com love me, but my reading stack has grown considerably. I’m looking at getting some goal and direction in my life. Considering i just plunked down 2500 for two classes including books, i do not want to be having another midlife crisis soon.
So yep, I’ve been accepted to UMUC.edu — which is pretty cool in and of itself since they have a complete program for online distance education and my two classes are completely online. If I do well at UMUC, I may not have to step into a classroom until I start work on my graduate courses. I am, of course, all excited about this. I even ran out and got my library card at the county library system and that gave me more joy than i have known in some time.
i know, a library card — i haven’t had one since I lived in GR back in the early 90s. I love having a library card — cos then books are free! 🙂 There are several public libraries within a few miles of our apartment in NoVa, and I can’t wait when I have to go do a paper and need to pack up my books and papers and study for a few hours. Paul will, of course, be calling the cellphone every two minutes, but that is what the power button is for. 😉
I usually do a big toodoo about my birthday — which is coming up in 13 days, about a month before hand. Lisa-Mas this year will probably be celebrated quietly (or not), but hey, if you feel generous, you can always get me a gift! 😉 wishlist: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/wishlist/2WAB63BL37XRG
Several have said with the amount of items added and the dates, it’s not up to date, but I can assure you, it is 🙂
more later 😀
x0x0x
Lisa

for each other

my latest session with Dr. B. covered two main things — sex and food. Two of my obsessions, both of which currently have been pushed down into the void of my stomach. literally.
when i was younger (13/14/15), i was very very very insistent that i would not lose my virginity. my own curiosity about sex and the actual act lead me to believe that i would eventually become a nymphomaniac. I’m not kidding. as time went on, and i did eventually have sex, it was not under the best circumstances and it wasn’t until i was a tad bit older and had started dating Alan had i realized what making love was all about.
in the years that have followed, sex has become both the curse and the gift that i have carried [this is not meant to sound pompous — it just is]. i gave myself physically to everyone i slept with, thus making it seem like i was the best lay around, but on the other hand, i was emotionally absent and distant from my lovers and sometimes deriving no pleasure from the act or the foreplay or anything sexual that surrounded me.
there was a time when things such as mens magazines (hard and soft core porn magazines, etc), toys, “erotic” movies and what not would lead me unto temptation with my current lover. i was aggressive, i was demanding and i started getting to the point where sex with my boyfriend usually had to be rough and with me usually NOT facing him in any position. i preferred doggy style or some other ‘humiliating’ position in order to even feel remotely turned on.
as i started getting older and started becoming more aware of who i was, sex was the gift i gave and used to tantalize men while i withheld it on some levels from myself. in my whole entire life, i have only orgasmed less than 1/2 dozen times with a partner and there has only been one person whom i have been able to masturbate me and orgasming with them masturbating me.
exotic and erotic love making has always been my forte. i saw nothing (and still do not) with being a bit rough.
‘rough sex’ is one of the reasons why paul and i got along so well when we first started dating — and it remains one of things we giggle about into the night. but after the first six months of mad passionate monkey love — it came to an almost abrupt stop.
in a lot of ways, it coincided with the death of my father and as the summer of 2000 wore on and the anxiety became worse — the last thing i wanted to think or feel or do was have sex.
within my discussion with Dr B, we talked about how food and men and sex and everything else always wraps up to some of the same ideas — ie, about how i eat to be fat because i don’t want men to be with me, how i hate the way i look because I’m fat and how i don’t feel sexy enough because I’m fat and so on and so on, with the same circular argument happening … and it’s been going on for years.
Dr. B. suggested that paul and i read For Each Other, a book that helps explore sexual intimacy between couples. She also suggested that I read the companion book for females For Yourselfwhich explores sexual intimacy within yourself. I bought For Each Other and started reading it in the tub, skipping over all the main stuff thinking “hell, this doesn’t apply to me” — and paul came up to me and said “You do that all the time. You get something and you start in the middle thinking it doesn’t apply to you when it DOES apply to you” — which is true. It’s like anything I do, I start in the middle, thinking it doesn’t apply to me — when it does in fact apply to me and I don’t want to admit it.
Paul and I settled down that night and started reading and started practicing the exercises in the book.
I’ll let you know how it works out.
x0x0x0x
lisa

dear old mom

earlier this evening, after speaking to my mom for about a half an hour, i hit the “end” button on my cell with a heavy heart. this has become a common occurrence when speaking to her as of late.
>it seems that earlier this week, when she was visiting my brother in Peoria for his basketball game, she had awoken up the morning after the game with a burst blood vessel in her eye. This was due, i find out from her, to her diabetes and this was not the first time this has occurred. When she arrived home back to grand rapids, she had emergency laser surgery done on her eye to repair the damage.
it was then she dropped the ball to me that she had wanted to up our plans and move in with us this year.
paul and i had talked about this previously prior to the bombshell this evening, and while i accept my mother is getting old and sick with her diabetes, i don’t know if i can accept the responsibility of her issues. i know, that the guilt deep down inside of me is pushing to do this out of fear and out of the fact that it feels like (to me) i neglected my father during his last few years on this earth. i know i know, everyone says it is not my fault and things work out the way they are, but i feel that the longer i fight to save my mother from herself and from killing herself (she was on suicide watch mid-last year), i find myself sitting in my car alone going, “I’m too fucking young to handle this”.
please don’t get me wrong, i love my mother. and i will admit that my fathers death was a blessing in disguise as we have been working on being close as a mother/daughter for the first time in years, i feel like i can’t breathe and i feel like I’m being suffocated every time something close to commitment of anything comes on. it doesn’t matter if it’s taking care of her, or paul or the goddamn dogs, i just want to break free and be alone.
on Friday afternoon, i drove to my shrink’s office with a heavy heart. after my conversation with Dr. B the previous week, i have been more silent than usual. not silent in writing but silent in communicating verbally to those around me. she and i had talked about this all the previous week about how when I’m asked what is ‘wrong’ i say nothing. the perfect example is when i walked into her office that afternoon and she and i sat there doing the “stare” for a good five minutes before i opened my mouth.
in all honesty, when I’m talking to her or to paul, or hell to anyone that cares, when asked what is wrong i always say ‘nothing’ because it is true — there is nothing wrong. my mind is often blank (so i think) and i just stare off into outer space. this has become more apparent as of late and those around me say they want to know what’s up and why I’m not communicating with them.
i don’t have an answer and i don’t have one major issue that if i talk about it, it suddenly becomes this catharsis of “wow, don’t i feel just fucking better”. it just simply, to me, isn’t that easy to discuss.
i had said to paul in many ways i was angry at my shrink for talking about things in the past — because it brought them up to light and it was issues i didn’t want to revel. things that are in the past and better left unsaid. however, my own behavior in the last year or two has shown that keeping it down deep inside is not the best solution, no matter how much i try and say it is. i often tout that I’ve worked past all those previous issues when I know i haven’t. it’s like, as paul pointed out, there are two me’s. the one that is angry and the one that is calm.
this got further discussed between Dr. B and I as I had told her that the words “hurt” “kill” and “stab” often pepper my vocabulary more often than I like. When I don’t like something or feel intimated, i often say “I’ll hurt you” and most particularly to paul “I’ll stab you”. I’ve often had thoughts of hurting people when I was angry and in the past I used to hurt myself. I remember when I was a child I used to sit there with needle and thread and only going through the first few layers of my skin, sew my hands together. I used to pull out big chunks of my hair (often from behind my ears where it wasn’t noticeable) by twisting and pulling. Dr. B. said I sound like a bully and she was right. But why was I acting like a bully?
In my younger years, I was often intimidated by those physically and mentally stronger than me (so i thought). I wanted to be liked so bad that hell, when I lost my virginity, it was due to peer pressure and not due to the fact that i had actually wanted to fuck that guy. Of course, years of beating myself up over it coupled with what I truly wanted were used to punish myself for what i had done.
Dr. B. says that having a vivid imagination or fantasy life is sometimes very healthy. If you do not act out in that fantasy life (you know, like i wouldn’t really stab paul even though I keep using it as a line of defense) it can help deal with anger. Many people say there is a fine line between fantasy and reality — and while often I feel that I often cross that path, acting it out inside my head is often a good release for whatever I’m feeling.
i never understood people who are ashamed or afraid to admit hey are seeing a shrink or are on drugs of any sort to make their lives easier. I have not qualms about facing reality and knowing that i have “issues”.
definitely something to think about.
x0x0x0x
lisa

white trash party

if i had a buck for every time i started mucking around with the design of TLC, I’d be a rich woman today.
I also realized that I could probably name several weeks worth of chronicles with afghan Whigs song titles and not repeat myself once.
They (Whigs) broke up earlier this year — Dulli is apparently going to be working full time on The Twilight Singers — pffft. Now we will bow our heads in silence for 60 seconds in memoriam of the Whigs’ breakup.
*crickets chirping*
moving right along, it’s been a quiet Sunday (you know, no fighting or anything) — and paul and i watched a few crappy movies on teevee while i dicked around looking stuff to do. we adopted another pug, this one is called Lili, and is Wednesday’s sister. They are paternal twins but from far away look identical. I call them the girls, and paul keeps saying when i move out, lili is going with me.
so thus begins our story.
a few weeks back, upon seeing my shrink, she and i started talking about sex, when i started opening up more about how i was feeling sexually — which is nothing. she suggested that i see her in a few weeks instead of a month and start talking about these issues at hand so that grow past them and carry one. i agreed.
last week, i took a spin in my new car up to see her, and things started pouring out. things i knew that i hadn’t discussed with anyone, let alone paul, in a very long time. i sniffed few times, i used urn charm containing my fathers ashes as a touchstone as i talked. fear. abandonment. lack of commitment. these were some of the issues concerning my and things that needed to be addressed. paul and i had tentively brought the wedding up to 5/01 instead of 9/01 and my shrink (correctly) was detecting that the closer to the wedding we got, the more put i closed up inside. which is true, I’m not going to lie about that — it’s like there should be a club for my ex boyfriends (such as in the show drew carey when all of kate’s boyfriends held a support group for her at the warsaw) to comment on my past behavior and how i have hurt/affected them in the past.
but i digress.
and i digressed a lot when i spoke to my shrink that day as well. i found myself jumping from one issue to another and yet in my mind it all made sense. here i had thought i was getting along marvelously well but inside I’ve been screaming for something (anything?) to get out.
i know a lot of it has to do with how paul and i interact with each other. a friend of mine had notated that in our office, our computers were facing away from each other — which he said seemed odd. i had obsessed about that one for sometime and brought that up to paul, when paul mentioned that it had been my idea to place our computers away from each other as i had wanted my space. which, of course, i had neglected to mention when i had spoken to said friend.
if i could spell out paul’s and i’s relationship, it would be under a lot of misunderstanding (on my part), misinterpretation and sometimes lack of an overall picture. paul wants to move forward and i want to stay here (where here is, is sometimes hard to distinguish). i used to think, when things got bad, that it was because of the boyfriend, and not something within me that had to change. but with paul, it’s different, how different i don’t know, it just is. i know that sometimes things seem to be more perfect when I’m with him and when I’m away from him i miss him like crazy. but in everyday situations, it always seems to be when i get antsy and it takes extreme events to make me realize that i love him.
which is bullshit, i should be thankful I’m with him everyday and not stirring up trouble to see his reaction.
but in all honesty, the only fault that i found with him is that sometimes his own lack of confidence in himself in the regards of us. it’s like, why torture me with the whole argument of “when you leave…” scenarios when you are just creating another wide open door for me to step through?
we wage this war on ourselves sometimes, and I’ve started working on being more calm within myself and not jumping the point when it came down to who was right or wrong in silly stupid arguments. but you know, as they say, pimpin’ ain’t easy.
x0x0x0x0x
lisa
ps: I’ve sent emails on starting a reading club on yahoo, and the response was pretty fucking overwhelming (honestly, I’m surprised that many people still WANT to read – considering the advent of the interweb and such). If you want to join us, you can find us on yahoo as the lisa chronicles book club. I’m on yahoo as modgirllisa, so shoot me an email, sign up, just have fun.
pps: what i had also forgot to mention, was a funny (to me) incident at the shrinks office. she had said to me “do you write?” when in speaking with in means about other methods of therapy, and i just gave her this level stare and she responded with something like “you don’t like to write?” and i said something like “it’s not that, i have been writing a journal on the internet since 1995 or so”. i think, in all my times with her, I’ve never spoken about things that made me happy, including writing. so with her permission, she’s on the TLC mailing list and with my permission, she can browse my archives. i love therapy 🙂

i’m a star baby

an idiot that i know (who, even though i have him banned on aol IM, icq and generally toss his emails — he’s *likes* the abuse) did email me about a clever site that ranks journals/blogs into proper order. so i put mine in and became a star! baby! yah!
it’s silly. i got the most hits and the lowest rating. hahaha.
that just cracks me the fuck up.
are you shrunk yet?
i actually got up on time.
this is a major shock to me, my dog and paul as i rolled out of bed at 7 to get ready to head to the shrinks office. i was nervous. i chain smoked and checked my bank account [ob: to prove how much of a procrastinator i am, i will get up at 8, sit in front of my computer till 8:30 checking email and my online bank account, jump in the shower at 8:30 and leave at 9. I have to be to work at 9. Apparently, my yo-yo of a bank balance is more important than work.], surfed for a few minutes. Left somewhat on time (i thought 7:45, i left at 8:05. Appointment was at 8:45].
I was scared.
I lied. I hate shrinks because I’m afraid I’m going to admit something i don’t want to admit. pauls the best thing that has happened to me in a long time and i don’t need some scholar to tear down this relationship because he is 8 years younger than me. i fidgeted in traffic. i called my mother and spoke to her for 20 minutes as i weaved my way around the beltway. i park and walk in the office and fill out paperwork and she brought me into her office at 9.
I broke down.
This was the consultation to determine if i needed counseling. I cried. I cried when talking about my mother, the passing of my father and my very fragmented life. I cried for the first time in a long time (okay, not that long time) but I cried because I finally felt the relief that I was going to be okay.
Dr. Buyse wasn’t that bad. In all honesty she was really nice and I could easily speak with her. My mouth did drop open when she asked me about Paul and I’s sex life (something I had not expected, though Paul and I had made light of it the night before). We spoke and touch on so many issues, it really was a wonder that I hadn’t pursued this before.
I didn’t feel like the big bad bitch anymore.
I felt so good after the session that I had immediately gone to starbucks and gotten my usual raspberry mocha frap and a few cookies since I had skipped breakfast. But I felt motivated for the first time in a long time. Motivated to get work done on issues and to finally start putting my life in place.
I knew though, from her comments, she regarded me as a pet project. Who wouldn’t with a cornucopia of crap bubbling inside of me (anxiety, depression, alcoholism, child abuse, suicide, divorced family, etc). I’m a freaking field day for any day doctor worth their salt. She calmed my fears about klonopin, the drug I’m on now. Turns out it’s the *least* addictive of the somethingoranothers family it’s part of. My taking .25mg a day (the period is not a typo) is like, for some people, having a cup of cawfee a day. it’s my crutch, and i know it, but it helps.
I’m frustrated by the utter lack of support and information about anxiety available on the web. I’m frustrated by how often it is misdiagnosed and how often (from reading) that anxiety brings out other problems. I’m frustrated by some of the doctors I’ve read about who have a carefree attitude about it.
it’s a disease. it makes my life hell and has been for the last 15 years (if you go back to when i had my first attack at 13). it’s misunderstood, misdiagnosed and mistreated. I do not have a heart problem, depression, thyroid problem or anything else. My name is lisa m. rabey and i have anxiety disorder.

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

it’s going on 11pm and I’m already thumbing my nose at the shrink.
you see, in approximately 9.5 hours, I’ll be sitting down with one Dr. Buyse to discuss my issues.
At 250 bucks an hour, she better be good.
But i have issues with going to the shrink.
It’s long been suggested to me that I see a shrink. in fact I’ve been in and out of therapy since i was NINE. but no, I’m too strong to see someone. why do i need a shrink? i mean, most of them are full of crock pot theories and BS anyway. I’ve been to so many doctors, *I* should have the Phd, not the other way around. according to them, i have seasonal depression, manic depression, obsessive/compulsive disorder, anxiety issues, separation issues, first child issues. need i go on? I’m not making this up, if in all honesty i were really that sick, i would be locked up somewhere banging my head against the wall.
but i digress.
so I’m sitting here wasting time instead of writing this new journal because I’m trying not to think about why I’m having issues about some woman whose as expensive as a Vegas hooker (i have “woman” issues as well it seems).
see, it’s really really simple:
a couple of months ago, when it all came down to the wire with my health and i was having panic attacks on an HOURLY basis, my doc suggested i see someone. so i said fine and i made an appointment. I make the appointment through Kaiser’s “behavioral health” clinic, where i pay my cheap ass co-pay to some person who is not a specialist but an overall therapist and that freaked me out. Because it freaked me out so much, I started doing some research on social and general anxiety disorders and came across some website for the such and such anxiety disorder group of America. i checked out Virginia and got a list of some shrinks in my area and call them to get more information.
Dr Buyse was the ONLY one who called me back.
which stands to reason, if you are serious shrink, why would you not call someone back — even to tell them you caseload was full? what if you had obsessive/compulsive disorder — you’d be sitting there having issues about it left and right.
right?
right.
so for the last month we’ve been playing phone tag. i call her, she calls me back. i call her back.
you get the drift.
A few weeks back, i go into work on a monday morning and get a message she had left me the night before. she called me at work. on. a. Sunday. Her voicemail explains she has an opening coming up and wants me to give her a call back. Since monday’s are ultra busy, I didn’t call her back that day. Tuesday I was out and Wednesday I was in back to back meetings. I call her early Thursday and leave her a voicemail. again.
she calls me back *at home* that night and attempts to chastise me. she proceeds to tell me her time is valuable and she gets TEN new referrals a WEEK. that the cost and time of such anxiety behavior is not beneficial to anyone if one is not making responsible decisions and especially when one is wasting her time (ie not calling her back on HER schedule).
I wanted to tell her “then why do you leave me voicemails on Sunday at my WORK number if it is so freaking important. Why didn’t you call me at home?”
but i didn’t. so I’ve been obsessing about not telling her that. I’ve been replying my conversations with her over and over in my head for the last week, because i was pissed off that here was a potential patient she was speaking with (me) and she’s basically putting the smack down on me for not calling her back on her schedule, which I was not aware of to begin with! When the conversation ended I asked her coldly what was the appropriate call back period when she left a message. She said “end of business day”.
I had been mulling this all over all week when she calls and leaves me a voicemail on my home machine the past Sunday that she had a monday appointment available at 8:30am. I call her back and leave her another voicemail telling her that I cannot make it, thank you for the offer and please call me back.
So her brusque receptionist calls me back a few days later and tells me that she does have an appointment on Friday at 8:30 am and that would i like it?
Which fucking ate into my chiropractor appointment at 10am.
So do I finally go see this woman or do I go get relief by having my back cracked. The chiropractor was getting irritated because I keep canceling and changing appointments around. I was getting irritated with the shrink.
Someone hates me up there.
I opted for the shrink appointment to finally get it over with. Telling this woman off, even at 250 dollars an hour, will make me feel better. Plus, I do have an appointment with the cheap (10 dollar) shrink later on next week.
How many people actually shop for shrinks?
In all honesty, I’m beginning not to care who i talk to as long as i talk to someone. i need to get some issues resolved and I’ve been putting it off for a long time. but there are a lot of things I’m sure she’ll tell me is not healthy (such as having a relationship with someone 8 years my junior) or what not. stuff i really do want to hear.
maybe I’m just projecting.
domainslut dot org
a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.
i got an email the other day from someone who wanted to congratulate me on writing such a strong first journal. i had to start laughing, because in all my efforts to shed certain personas i had finally gotten it right and someone who was unaware of nearly four years of archives from TLC was sitting mere hops away from where he is.
but it made me feel good in some sort of loved way as well.
but in case you haven’t figured it out, modgirl.net now points to the same ip as modgirl.net. I had moe just change the ips to point to modgirl’s so that there would be no more redirects. In essence, anyone who had bookmarked modgirl.net will not have to update them. However, this is not the lisa chronicles. but I still do suck the chrome off of a trailer hitch.
the archives and a new site design will be coming in the future. I’ve been concentrating on content and not visual beauty.
schwa.
i had something else important.
oh yah. i got a promotion.
woofuckingwoo.
or something.
Excuse me for being in a dry wit mood. lately it seems that’s the only mood I’ve been in.
i prefer for it to be called bitter and cynical, but I’m sure someone will point out I’m having issues again.
x0x0x0x
lisa

insomnia strikes again

it’s apparently 2:33am and I’ve spent the better part of these early hours whittling down my email inbox from close to 60 personal emails to below 20. Some of you may think this is nothing — but — some of these go back over six months ago. I’m horrid, I know. So what happens when I whittle down my email? Inbound mail is spool’d and Moe is sleeping so I can’t kick him to unspool it. Murphy’s law #1.
As many of you may have noticed, modgirl.net is now up and running. however, while the main page looks okay, the archives and everything else i was salvaging from modgirl.net hasn’t been moved over yet. I’ve updated a few things on the premise that when i do the site redesign sometime this week, I’ll have everything up and clean. fresh start. what is even funnier is that modgirl.net is still getting massive hits but very few are trickling over here. which is fine by me i guess — i was getting disturbed by how people were finding me via my entries. what was interesting to note was that the NUMBER ONE THING for keyword that brought people to my site was “obsessive/compulsive/anxiety”. oh of course, sex ranked up there in the top 5, but i was just astounded by how many of my hits were coming from my cryptic discussions on the above diseases.
i am doing — okay.
that is about the only word i can describe at 2:37 in the morning right now. I’m on this mania high. my goal was to return all the email my cousins had sent me after my father had died (which i never did) and all the personal email in my inbox that i had not replied to in eons. one person (who thankfully has three email accounts) had his email bounce back to me twice (from two of those accounts). i was sitting there adding my “rings” to my brand spanking new yahoo id! (gotta love creativity — i refuse to have any “name” with numbers, underscores, hyphens or any other alphanumeric in it).
lately there has been this rash of “self-help” in the people who i know. everyone seems to be either sick, getting over themselves or making attempts to get better whether it’s physically, emotionally or just over all well-being. I’ve got five people using breathe-right strips after i told them it helped with me stop sleeping with my damn teeth grinding.
people are going to chiropractors, doing yoga and generally feeling more feisty.
the change in the weather has helped me calm down enormously. i no longer feel angry and when i do — it’s over something silly. I’m attempting to kid myself that I’ll wake up in three hours and be able to function.
but on the other hand, while i attempt to take a look at life and things around me (like noticing the sky the other night driving home and the sun filtering between the break in the clouds) or designs I’m seeing everywhere in nature, man-made and what not, slowly, very very very slowly; I’m starting to relax.
not much mind you.
but enough.
now only if i can stop eating Mickey d’s, my life would be complete.
x0x0x0x
lisa

anxiety

ed note: i want to thank all of those who email me about their own anxiety problems. i greatly appreciate all the feedback I’ve been getting from people, however, please PLEASE do not email me with “what do i do” because i am not a physician and nor can i tell you if you have any sort of anxiety or not. Please seek medical help so that someone can diagnose you PROPERLY. if you email me with “how do i know if i have anxiety or not” your email will be deleted. thank you.
i had my first “recorded” anxiety attack when i was 13.
i say recorded because that is the first memory i had of an attack. the image is still so clear in my head, it’s disgusting. i remember walking down the hall towards a class and coming upon a group of girls who were in my grade. the popular ones. the ones everyone loved. the ones that were getting asked out by the boys to dances and had “dates.” i remember my heart pounding so hard that you could watch it through my shirt. after passing the girls, my heart rate slowed and i felt better. but i didn’t understand what was going on.
during the next several years, the anxiety attacks worsened or lessened depending on the context. the time i had stayed out all night with Alan and had come home at 8am in the morning to be chastised by my mother. the attack in NYC this spring when i was out with friends having a cigarette because my relationship with paul was so new that i was afraid of the consequences. the lead on attacks last October on my way to Virginia. They are like a college in my head because depending on the situations and the severity, I can only remember the ones that stand out but thinking back, while laying on my back, i can recall almost all the more important ones and how they lead into my life.
the last year of my life has provided enough stress to take on the world. clearly i can see how the breakdown began with my breaking up with Justin, the stress of living with people I did not like and could barely tolerate, to moving to Virginia, to finding out that friends are not really friends, to my father dying, the reuniting with my mother.
—–
i wrote the above at 4am this morning when i had first gotten up. or actually since I didn’t go to bed, just from laying there hearing paul snore. my sinuses were dripping and my face felt like someone was banging on it slowly due to the intense pressure. i got up and walked around and started writing.
I’m still angry for a lot of things. I’m angry at time and how fast things go by.
i made it my objective this morning to get up early, work out and get to work on time. which, considering i had 3 hours of sleep, never occurred. now it’s nearing 11pm and I’m tired and exhausted having spent majority of the day playing “diagnose lisa issues”.