M.I.A.

Sometimes there good reasons when I go for long periods of time without blogging. I'll be honest, though, sometimes the "good reason" is that I've been trying too hard to make it through the day to think about sitting down and composing a blog post.

A little bit after Dew broke up with me, I took down all the posts on depression. I took down all my posts actually. Slowly, some of them have started to reappear in the blog archive, but a lot of them haven't. I felt so much shame about what I had written and what I had gone through that a lot of the words haven't been reposted. It made sense that when I linked my blog up to my facebook account that I would keep the talk about depression to a minimum, since new people that actually had met me at one point in my life or another could stumble across this site and read this. Saying something along the lines of, "Hi! It's great hearing from you. It's been a long time since 8th grade algebra class. P.S. - I'm crazy" didn't seem like the best way to win friends and influence people.

But I feel inauthentic, like I'm hiding something. Most of the time, I keep my feelings from my friends and almost always from health care professionals. It's easier to say that I'm doing fine than to tell them about the relentless thoughts that troop through my head -the thoughts that make me cry and want to sleep for hours and hours and hours. When I told the family care practitioner that the pain I was feeling in my body left me feeling overwhelmed and hopeless, he took one look at my chart and said, "You're already on anti-depressants. There is nothing else I can do for you," and quickly turned away.

Sometimes I wonder if the stress is too much for me. I've had two cars towed in the past three weeks. The last one was last Monday. I hit a curb and the front tire exploded. I pulled over to the entrance of a hotel and turned on my emergency flashers. Cars were swerving around me, but I was relatively safe. I had spent twenty minutes trying to jack up the car when the car moved forward and the jack fell. It was approximately 95 degrees with 90% humidity and my sweat was dripping down my back. Someone that was pulling into the hotel stopped to help me. He had the car jacked up (this time on the frame of the car) and the tire changed in under 15 minutes. Unfortunately, he put the lug nuts on backwards and I was too clueless to notice. I drove about 200 yards into Galleria traffic, when the wheel separated from the spare time. This time I was in a turn lane for the freeway and couldn't pull off anywhere without damaging the wheel. This option was especially bad considering the car I was driving wasn't mine after towing the first car the weekend before. I did the only thing that I could think of doing, which was turning on the emergency flashers again and calling 911. A police officer arrived about 10-15 minutes later and blocked traffic around me while we waited for a tow truck. When the tow truck got there, the police officer had a quiet conversation with him that involved the price of the tow. The police officer said that he wouldn't do any paper work if the tow truck driver didn't and I could pay $50, in cash, instead of the full $140 fee for blocking a lane of city traffic.

The car was towed and I rode with the police officer less than a block to where the car was dropped off. The tow truck driver asked for the cash, saying that he would accept $40, and I had to tell him that I didn't have it. I asked him if I could write him a check and he said no. We just kind of stared at each other for a while and I said I could try the ATM, that maybe some of the checks I had written hadn't cleared my account yet. They hadn't, so I handed him the last $40 in my account and watched the next day as I accrued over $75 in bank overdraft fees with the checks did clear. I spent two hours at the car repair shop while they looked for a 14" tire. They finally found a used one that they gave me for free if I paid for the mounting and balancing. I got home an hour later.

Something inside me has been broken lately. Between the cars, the pain, school, Zac, work, and mandatory volunteering late into the night, I have just felt incapacitated and ineffective. I'm surviving, at the barest level. No one wants to hear this though, so I lie when someone asks me how I'm doing.

So, really, I'm fine. Just haven't been writing much.