Daily Archives: January 24, 2015

I am on sensory overload after a week full of sensory overload.
Every sound is like a hundred voices through a megaphone. My eardrums cringe in pain.
Most of the noise is coming from my kid. I don’t know how one 5 year old can fill every single moment with loud idle blabbing. I couldn’t talk that much if I free based speed while drinking Red Bull.
Plus I like to take a breath. She apparently doesn’t require air.

I’m grumpy. My entire body aches. I am hungry but can’t motivate myself to cook. I just feel drained.
Weekends are a time for people to go do things.
I spent the week doing things. I feel a little bruised, like I went a few rounds with Tyson.
The more noise I am subjected to the more unnerved and bruised I feel.
I do not like being this way. I wish with everything I am I could be anything but so sensitive to outside stimuli.
It’s not a behavior that can be unlearned. It’s simply the way I have always been. Even as a small child I did not want to attend large birthday parties or crowded events. It’s too much for me to process and the price I pay is high.
I have tried so hard to find a happy medium.
But it seems to be about extremes. I sit it out and stay within my tolerance zone. Or I try to assimilate even in a controlled fashion and I end up overloaded and overwhelmed.

As the morning progresses, I find myself having lulls in my agitation. They are brief respites because the instant my kid’s chatter starts up again…My ears literally cringe with pain caused by the sound. It’s an awful feeling when the sound of your child’s voice hurts you.
I hate being this way.
I don’t mind quirk or dysfunction or even imbalance.
But to be this fragile over mere sound…This is ridiculous.

Fragile…And irritible and hostile. I am snapping over every little thing. I can’t stand this. If this is what high functioning results in, then low functioning should be my goal. I don’t want anything that taxes me to the point of being a grouchy monster because this is not who I normally am.

Much as I wanted to bow out of, well, life today…I had promised my kid I’d take her to Pizza Hut so she could get her reading reward pizza. it wasn’t busy and I wasn’t panicked, but there were some men at another table basically yelling with laughter. It was obnoxious. I’m not opposed to having a good time. I just don’t think it should infringe on the ability of those around you to hold a quiet conversation. Nor should it be so loud and obnoxious an anxiety ridden stressed out trainwreck wants to leap up and stab you in the eye with a salad fork.
I had to take a xanax. I was seriously getting bent, to the point I loudly snapped, “Were you people raised by wolves?” In this town, that might get me physically assaulted.
So while we waited for our food I kept my kid busy with games of Hangman.
I am proud of her. She behaved well, not one fit. No, that would be on me this time. i hate stupid people. They are a trigger.

But we are done with the dish outing, I kept my word to my kid in spite of my own issues. Oh and we saw her sperm donor standing outside a gas station talking to his girlfriend. I said, “Say hi to your daddy.” And she asked, “Is that the one that left us?”
Meh. How he holds his head up is beyond me. I mean, I break a promise to take her to the park, I beat myself up for days. Having a conscience can suck.

So…done with the dish. Hoping no family visits. I have had a busy full week and I really need to destress.
Which means the stress is just going to keep coming at me.

And yes, I know, I have made a big display of my social anxiety issues. It is not a bid for attention. It is my way of keeping track of just how drastically the anxiety issues hinder and affect normal life for me. It’s easy for others to see you do well a couple of times and assume you’re fine, just a lazy malingerer. I want this blog to tell the truth. There are good times. There are bad times.
Mostly, it’s just a rapid moving merry go round of both and rarely anything in between.
I have a lot to be thankful for so I can’t say I am without quality in my life. It’s just diminished at every turn, by the anxiety, and the aftermath of me battling that anxiety.

Aftermath. What a way to live life.

that “Caught” was my 100th post on this blog!  Thanks to all of you reading and following me; I’m at 2,056 page views and almost 600 visitors for the life of the blog.  I appreciate each and every one of you reading and commenting, encouraging me in the faith.  Here’s to 100 more posts before we’re through!

This is the fifth book by Miriam Toews that I’ve read, and the fourth I’ve reviewed on this blog. Because of the theme and motivation of my blog, I only review mental/neurobiological illness related stuff.

The Flying Troutmans is the sort-of-sequel to A Complicated Kindness. The narrator is Hattie Troutman, who goes home to Canada to look after her sister, Min and her two kids, Logan and Thebes. Min is taken to a psych ward and we see very little of her for the rest of the book.

All her life Min had been surrounded by pills and sometimes she took them and sometimes she didn’t and sometimes she took way too many of them.

We know she is psychotic and we know she is suicidal, but that’s as far as the diagnosis goes. Her children have had to mature fast and take care of their mother.

Bright, precocious and completely averse to washing, Thebes is an absolute delight, and a good contrast to her moody but likeable 15 year old brother.

She talked about her friends. We’re all mostly white nerds, she said, with minor physical and emotional flaws that do not require medication but do brand us as losers in the bigger picture.

With Min out of the picture most of the time, the narrative centres on what impact her instability has had on those around her. Hattie is an old hand at it and worn out by it.

How do you love someone who wants to be left alone to die? How do you stay? How do you walk away?

After Min tells Hattie she doesn’t want contact with her or the children, she decides to distract them by fabricating a mission to locate their father in the USA. All three of them try desperately to be strong for each other, and of course all three of them are fragile.

Thebes, I said, are you okay? Why aren’t you talking?

I don’t know, she said. I think I might be depressed.

Logan and I both whipped our heads around to look at her and the van veered towards the dotted line. Nobody gets away with using the D word in our family without a team of trauma experts, a squad of navy SEALs, Green Berets and a HazMat crew appearing instantaneously in the midst.

The roadtrip takes them on a metaphysical journey too, as roadtrips should – and the plot unwinds with the winding road.

I liked it a whole lot. From the start, it reminded me a bit of Catcher in the Rye and a smaller bit of John Green’s Looking for Alaska. Despite those comparisons, the book holds its own with ease. Echoing her own life, which you can read about in Swing Low: a life, Toews’ recurring themes keep recurring in distinct and interesting ways, as if she’s working stuff out. Sisters, suicide and mental illness are the three that feature most strongly in The Flying Troutmans and as usual, the story proceeds with gritty reality, grace, heart and intelligence. Again, I can recommend her book with less than no hesitation.

The other books I’ve read are:
All My Puny Sorrows
A Complicated Kindness
Swing Low (a biography of her bipolar father, who committed suicide.)
Irma Voth

I published a little fiction in my last post and several of you were very positive about it. A few of you asked for “more” so today I thought I’d tell you the story of the manic author. (This is not fiction, but I sort of wish it was.)

You know how a lot of people dabble with writing in high school? They might keep journals, write poetry or stories, or just write for fun. That was NOT me. I remember having to write something for an English lit class and practically getting sick. Fiction was not my thing. Poetry was REALLY not my thing. I would just sit and stare at my paper. (Yes, in those days we used good old fashioned handwriting.) I had writer’s block forever.

This all continued through college. I always had great grades and could write any non-fiction or technical paper but forget fiction. It just never happened.

Fast forward to age forty. Yes, that would be about twenty years or so out of college.

I had had manic episodes before and had done all sorts of things but I got centered on the computer. The whole internet world was new to me at that point and I couldn’t wait to try it out.

One night I was watching television and I saw this celebrity on there. He was about 28 or so and looked pretty cute to me. (Remember, I was 40, married, and had three kids at this point.) So with my hot desktop computer, I decided to look this guy up on the internet. Well, lo and behold, there was a huge website about him. There was information on things from the kind of socks he wore to how he liked his eggs. It was pretty extensive.

At first, I just read a lot on there. I saw who some of the “important” posters were and which threads were popular. Little by little, I decided to post a few things of my own.

Now I did not want to seem weird, so I passed myself off as much younger than I really was. I liked this internet thing. You could be just about anyone you wanted. This was back in the day when it was hard to find out where someone lived from their IP address. And everyone else was pretty anonymous, too. We were all scared some psycho would get our info and show up at our door with a machete.

I quickly made some friends on the site. One of them I got really close to. (I actually wound up sending her money, but that is another manic story.) One day, someone suggested that I check out the “fanfic” part of the site. I had no idea at all what this was. I had never heard of it. But I found out it stood for fan fiction. All sorts of people wrote fictional stories about celebrities. Some of these were pretty steamy, other were about the person and aliens, others were just G rated. You name it, it was on there.

I started reading some of these stories. Many of them were incredibly long. But they were addictive. Once I started reading one, I couldn’t stop until I finished it. I quickly learned that some people on the internet are really bad writers and some were pretty good. Every once in a while, I’d run into someone excellent.

Most of these stories were written in a serial format. The author would post a chapter every day or two and people would post a lot of feedback. All kinds of feedback. Some people would tell the author what they wanted to come next. Some would critique the hell out of the chapter. Others would just say “oh, it made me cry…..” I can’t really explain how emotional people got over these stories. I have to admit, it did make this guy come alive in a weird way.

The romantic stories about this guy were sort of a joke. I mean the authors would give the character incredible attributes. No man could possibly come close. I always wondered if this guy ever read any of this stuff and what he thought if he did.

Well, you probably know what happened next. I decided I had to write a story. I knew I could write a story at least as good as half of them because I could put a sentence together and I could spell. And I didn’t have to worry about plot: girl meets celebrity, they fall in love and get married (after having chaste sex), they have a kid or two…you get the idea.

So I started writing. And I really got into it. I posted a chapter a day. And these were not short chapters. I would get up in the morning, get the kids off to school, and start writing. It would take me an hour or so to put the chapter together. And then I would hang around the computer desperately waiting for feedback from my readers. I never edited this stuff. I had no overall plot or theme. I just sort of let the story come to me as I went.

I got lots of feedback. Most of them wanted more sex. I hated writing about sex and I avoided it like the plague. This was a wild group of women! But basically everyone liked the story. I had quite a following. And this was from someone who had never written a story or anything before.

I attribute it to mania. There’s just no way I could do this now. Making sense out of nothing and writing intimate details about some guy I don’t even know.

This story went on and on and on. I can’t totally remember how long it got, but I know it was some amazing amount. (I will try to find out for you before the next post. A friend of mine actually saved a copy of this thing.)

Don’t you just love mania? You can’t make this up. Part Two will be on the way soon.

lily

These were the days before cell phones, so Darren had to way to call my parents  But some how Mom get it in her head that I’d had my own denstist’s appointment that day and was probably there waiting.  The desk called me to the phone, and it was my mom on the other side, telling me that my dentist appointment had been canceled and rescheduled to another day.  “I’m coming to get you in just a minute,” Mom said.

It was all I could do not to break down right then and there in the office.  I still wanted to run away; I still didn’t want to live at home; I still didn’t think my parents cared about me—except I could tell mom had been crying before she got on the phone.  I was angry that my plans had been disrupted and I was going to be going back home after all.  But I held back those tears of frustration until that night when I was supposed to be going to sleep. If she ever figured out that I had tried to pull a stunt like running away, she never let on.  SO I escaped punishment but still had a long time to go before I could leave home

Before the fun…

Less than an hour til we are due to leave for my birthday outing.
My stomach’s been in knots all day.
My heart rate is speeding up more by the minute.
I am dressed “up”.
Most would be excited to go.
I am excited only to get it over with.
I sometimes wonder what on earth made me this screwed up.

Five minutes later…
All my brain can do is screech GET IT OVER WITH, MAKE IT END.
The anxiety fucks up everything.
I want to kick its ass.
I just don’t know how.
makeitendmakeitendmakeitend.

Ten minutes before go time…

My kid is being a fussy mouthy bratbeast.
My anxiety level is through the roof.
I just want comfy pajamas and a warm blanket.
Novacaine for the brain.

10:38 p.m.
The aftermath.
Well Mrs. R was a half hour late getting back so I was left at their house, to my own devices, with R who has so little social grace I had to ASK for a drink rather than be offered one. And ok, maybe on some level, (mostly his wife’s) I am supposed to feel free to make myself at home. It was awkward as hell, especially when I learned R’s eldest daughter and her husband were going to meet us there while R watched the kids.
I was in “rip off the bandage mode”. It sounds gutsy but it is really the ninth circle of hell where those around me seem so happy and light hearted…I feel like a grinchzilla. And as is always my fear, my low mood made R jump on the defensive. I have NO idea why men assume when a woman is in a bad mood it’s all about them.
My mood was low today. My kid was very defiant and trying. It took a toll. Throw in hour upon hour of anxiety…It doesn’t take a physicist to do the math.
THEN came the car ride chat and walking into the packed restaurant. Four people at a table, three of them yapping and tapping away on their iphones while I look at the floor and pray for a fiery ball to land on me. They were all a flutter about wedding plans for the son of Mrs R…Like I care about coral bridesmaid dresses or whether the nazi bride will allow the moms to wear navy. It all made me feel thankful my weddings were at the courthouse. My give a damn is busted as far as dresses and color schemes go. It’s pretty much a given were I to have a formal wedding…It would NOT EVER involve pastels or bright fruity colors. I did get my snark in when R’s wife and daughter commented, “I don’t like black, it’s such a funeral color.”
And me, head to toe in black, I said, “My life is a funeral then.”

It was Friday night supper hour so the place we went to was packed. It took a half hour to get our Mangoritas. Which meant a half hour of more anxiety and social awkwardness and fighting off the overwhelming urge to go postal on the 50% of the restaurant all on their smart phones. RUDE.
But hey, by the third margerita I was relaxed enough to get the stick out of my ass. I think that’s one thing alcohol does that xanax does not. Xanax calms the anxiety, but it doesn’t relax. Once relaxed and my mind had slowed down, I was able to fake the social experience. I even enjoyed my meal since I was able to order something bland that wouldn’t cause digestive warfare. Now I was still painfully aware that I was out of my element. It’s like that when you’re friends with people on a surface level but really have nothing in common other than happening to know each other. It’s not a matter of like or dislike, it’s just…well since I’m the oddball most conversation revolves around their interests because no one wants to hear from funeral chick.
And that’s fine, I don’t want to waste my best macabre snarks on those who don’t appreciate them. Snarky banter is an art form lost on mundanes.

But alas…we went back to Mrs R';s house. R survived the hour watching the little ones but she was irritated he let the girls use her “good” throw pillows to build a fort. Really? Well, it’s that class thing, I guess. I was born middle class poor and well, others weren’t. Different priorities.
I had a couple more drinks. I wasn’t getting drunk, that was the weird part. Not so much as a tingly buzz. Just a relaxed “Okay, I’ve got this” mind frame.
Of course R had to ruin it by asking me to come in on Saturday to help make room at the shop for a sixty inch TV coming in. Seriously, dude? I was there four days last week. I promised to take my kid to Pizza Hut today with her school’s reading reward certificate. I may not have much of a life but I do have a bit of one outside his obsessive compulsive world of busted stuff. And I won’t even point out the bruised rib that will cause me agony if I have to lug heavy TVs around. (And I do that all the time there, it’s not an issue but at the moment, it is.)
Just…Grr, for once, shut the fuck up about that damned place and have a good time. Or let me.

Anyway.
I survived.
I won’t say I had fun, but I will say it was a nice gesture. T and her husband even bought me a box of chocolate and a gag gift of a pink birthday princess sash. Which I put on proudly when they had the restaurant employees put a big sombrero on me, sing happy birthday in spanish, and they all took pictures and video to beam out my humiliation.
Whatever. I wanted to crawl under the table but I just went with it. If those pictures end up on Facebook tagged with my name, there will be bloodshed. I pride myself in having almost no fooprint of my legal name on the internet. I’d like to keep it that way. Pen names are used for a reason.
That and Facebook is eeeeevil.
Hey, we all need our villains. Mine are Facebook and apple products.

I survived.
let’s do it again in another…five years.
I just want to breathe today.
And fantasize about how nice it must be to truly enjoy such outings and not need alcohol to endure it.
Something I may never know.