The Job

About three months ago I started looking for a new job. I didn't tell many people about it, but I had a growing feeling that I wasn't going to be successfull professionally or personally at my current job. There are many reasons that I don't want to go too far into on here. The good news is that I found a new job and have given notice at my old job. My last day of work as a Grants Manager of social service non-profit in East Houston will be Wednesday, January 20th. I have two floating holidays that I don't get paid for, so I'm taking those on Thursday and Friday.

Now the drama with the new job is that I was recommended for it by a woman on my team in grad school. She reads this blog and my team has decided that I should refer to her as "Sunshine" from here on out. After my post on duality, I was terrified that Sunshine would regret recommending me for a position on her team. After all, didn't she have some kind of duty to tell her employer that they were considering hiring a crazy woman? Fortunately, Sunshine didn't do that and my fears and worries were for nothing.

I have four more working days to wrap up my job as a Grants Manager. It feels almost overwhelming when I think of all the deadlines that I have to communicate to people and all the final projects I need to wrap up. Everytime I do some menial, administrative task I think: "And that will be the last batch of thank you letters that I need to write and get my boss to sign" or "This is the last time I'll have to go through this contract." It's kind of beautiful really, just a bit tiring.

At my new job, I'll be working with Sunshine and four other people on a team as a Project Manager for a corporation. The business has about 1,000 employees and 50 branch and satellite offices in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. It's my first corporate job and I was officially welcomed to the team with a tour of the office that included the refrigerator full of soda that is stocked by someone in the office for everyone to drink and hot water in the bathroom. I have to confess: I've been washing my hands in the bathroom in cold water for two-and-a-half years because my non-profit doesn't have hot water. I can't wait to leave that behind.

In honor of the occasion, I've made a list of everything that I won't miss at my current job:

1. Incredibly loud pages in English and Spanish over the phone system for someone to move their car out of the loading only zone.
2. Feeling like I'm constantly in college during finals with all the papers I have to write and submit by their deadlines.
3. My coworkers switching from English to Spanish when I walk in the room so they can discuss the workings of the photocopier in "private".
4. Being called the white girl
5. Reporting on everything I do and am working on a regular basis to my boss.
6. Constantly worrying about if the agency is going to have enough money to stay open.
7. Being blamed for the agency not having enough money because I didn't write enough grants.
8. Feeling like my work was never good enough.

I think that about sums it up. Am I nervous about my new job? Definitely. The former direct supervisor (it's a long story) that interviewed me says he considers the team I'm joining some of the best and brightest minds at the company. He uses them to solve problems and smooth out relationships between distributors and suppliers. It's a totally new field, but I'm excited about learning something new and moving on from my current position.

Did I mention that the job comes with all the Diet Coke I can drink? How could I not be excited?

Worries and Anxiety

I worry that my worst fears about my writing on this blog and how it would affect me outside the computer may have already come true. To take anything down at this point would seem redundant and silly. All I have are worries, anxiety, and one episode of Criminal Minds before I fall asleep.

Just a Little Late

But still very cute. I went and saw him after therapy today before I went in to work. I rubbed his back while he whispered that we needed to be quiet because all the children were sleeping. I miss him so much when we aren't together.

I Hate Therapy

It's time for me to admit that going to therapy is like me going into a darkened room with a hammer and being told there is a nail somewhere that I should pound into a wall. Somehow, someway...I'm sure it makes sense to the person who gave me the hammer, but to me, I'm clueless as to where to find the nail. Maybe I'm just tired of hearing all the same things, recycled and reformatted in different ways, and feeling like a failure because one of my coping mechanisms for depression doesn't include "positive affirmations of self and situation".

I went to an intensive outpatient program (conveniently known as IOP) today with no less than 14 other crazy people in a room the size of a small office. That's a lot of crazy in one space. It took over two hours to go over our daily check-in sheets where we list if we are currently having any suicidal urges or hallucinations. Or maybe where we report if our voices are telling us to hallucinate more. I'm not sure. The daily check-in logs always seemed a little silly to me. Same with the question, "Do you have a plan to hurt yourself?" That has to be the dumbest question I'm routinely asked. Really, you should ask something along the lines of, "Do you know exactly how you plan to hurt yourself and what your back-up options are if something goes wrong?" That would be a more precise question. I'd also like to point out that you don't actually NEED a plan to do damage. Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes you are just sitting there, feeling like shit, and the idea comes to you. No planning. No flow charts. No excel spreadsheets with forecasts on probabilities of success and the division of property.

I annoy my sister because she says that I complain about every place I go to as not being therapeutic enough for me to actually get any benefit out of. It's a little surprising that my sister is even still talking to me, six years after moving to VT/NH and entering into my first program. During that time it's become apparent to me that I have a very firm idea as to what is "therapeutic". I imagine that my nirvana of therapy would involve soft music, extended meditation on comfortable pillows, and gentle cognitive behavioral coaching and guided reflection in a small group setting, no more than 5 people. There would be hot tea, honey, and locally-grown mandarin oranges, when they are in season, of course. We would eat salads and drink mineral water for lunch, without having to worry about how much money you're losing by not being at work.

What I got today was a brightly lit room crowded with people in straight-backed chairs. There was a woman in her late teens, early 20s that dominated the group with some serious ADD/Anxiety/I-have-no-idea-what, but it caused me to leave the group 30 minutes early. She screamed and gasped without any apparent provocation. She would hold her breath and have to be reminded to breathe. She talked on and on about ex-boyfriends and how famous they are, which made no sense to me. I was trying to practice my "non-judgment of others and self" skill that they teach in DBT, but I'll be honest, I was ready to evict that girl from the group within the first hour. I'm out of vacation and sick leave and have to work eight hours AFTER my three hours of therapy, so I'm already annoyed and trying to focus on getting the most out of my time when I hear her yelp to the right of me. Finally some of the older clients (it was a mixed group of adolescents, adults, and seniors - two out of the three therapists were sick today), told her to quiet down.

In individual therapy at the new DBT place, I've taken to wrapping myself in a throw blanket and lying in the fetal position for 50 minutes. I feel like I can be an active participant in my recovery, while I ward off potential invaders to my sub-conscious. My brain is busy and it's tired of wondering how I'm going to pay for the therapy that I'm receiving. Taking a nice rest sounds much more productive and less expensive.

Clearly, I either need more napping and less therapy or to become a Buddhist monk. Those are the options I'm looking at right now.

Duality

"You've been through a lot of pain. And it's hard to trust anyone, hard to believe that anyone could care because you've always hated yourself. On one level, you've wanted people to believe your tough facade. But on a deeper level, you've wished that someone would be able to get past it, to get inside you and listen to your heart. But you've been afraid that no one in the world would understand - or worse, that you would drive them away." Rachel Reiland

This whole blog has been my demolition of my facade. All of my writing here is the crazy side of me, the side that unrelentingly points out: "I'm still here. Still sick". It's the reason my family can't stand half of the things I write because it's so much easier to imagine me as the fully-functional woman that gets up, goes to work everyday, performs her tasks easily, and goes to sleep with a contented heart. I understand that it's easier to see me that way because that is what I present to the "real world", - the world that lives outside this computer screen. At least most of the time. I've cried so often at work that people don't even seem to think it's strange anymore...it's just B....crying again.

I have a potential lawsuit against the FOB and a family that I rely on and need in so many ways that I can't even begin to count. When they ask me to take down a post or move it to my private blog, I honor their requests. Yet, there is this almost masochistic drive to prove to the internet that there are two women living inside me (without the dissassociation of a multiple personality disorder, fortunately).

There is the me that can bathe and dress a child in under 15 minutes and enjoy the beautiful peace and love of my son's smile when he cuddles up to me the morning, in bed together. There is the me that can be an A-student in a MBA program and sit through hours of unrelenting pain to learn subjects that I can't immediately apply to any conceivable work situation. Then there is the me that just wants to disappear. The me that says, "You've fucked everything up. Every decision you've ever had and every choice you've ever made has led to nothing but pain for yourself and those you love. Anything you haven't fucked up yet is just a matter of time. Leave now. Go. Just go now and you won't have to be around to deal with the mess you've made of everything. You're so pathetic. You've alienated everyone whoever trusted and loved you. They're sick of you and your so-called illness"

That's usually how it goes in my head before I end up in the hospital. On Thanksgiving I decided that I wouldn't make my Dad find me in my apartment. I decided to hide behind a restaurant and wait. Then the phone rang it was like Fate/God/Life/Universe was giving me a game show lifeline, one of those "Phone a Friend" gimmics. I answered and smiled. It was one of my best friends, telling me how much she loved me. Then suddenly my Dad was on the other line, demanding to know which parking lot I was in. I clicked back to my friend and told her that it was a neat trick to call my Dad while I was still on the phone with her. She said she was worried. I made an incredibly stupid decision and decided that my Dad would never find me if I was on the freeway...that I would just pull over when I got tired. It didn't work like that though. I drove almost 30 miles south with no memory. I woke up in the ICU the next day in the seaside town I drove to, vomiting, alone with a nurse that cleaned me up afterwards.

Four days and many pages to a psychiatrist who never answered later, I was released. I went back to both of my jobs, like I've always done. Sure, after two weeks of bickering back and forth about insurance and deductibles, I got a new therapist and felt excited about the possibilities of actually recovering. Nothing had actually changed though. Nothing ever does from an event like that. It takes all your problems and magnifies them by about 1,000 until you're lucky if you can make it out of bed every day without feeling like a worthless piece of shit that brought all of this down on yourself. I mean - if you feel like a failure, try failing at death. It's one of cosmos' cruelest jokes. On the screen of life you see the same message flash over and over: GAME OVER! You've failed at both living and dying! GAME OVER. Try to find someway to live now, sucka. Sucks to be you.

Fast forward to Sunday. I can feel it all happening again. I'm crying uncontrollably and I decide that I want to break the pattern. I decided to proactively go to a hospital that my new therapist recommended. She said that there was a unit there for highly-motivated patients. After several phone calls, I found out that the unit was closed and I would be placed into the general population in a locked unit. During the admission process, they took my blood pressure and heart rate. I was having chest pains and a BP of 149/93. My heart rate was a steady 110 beats per minute. I should be burning calories at that rate, instead I'm clutching my chest wondering if it's possible for a heart to beat so hard that it damages the muscles surrounding it.

I was taken to a large hospital in the Med Center. Ironically, it's the hospital that Dew now works at. I thought for a moment to ask for him, but I was deemed a threat to myself and put in a room with no medical equipment, save for a bed that moved up and down and table that rolls bedside at 7:30pm. The lock was on the outside of the room and required a key to enter. The light switch was also on the outside of the room. I was there for three hours before I got a glass of water and was able to go to the bathroom. I called my Dad. I asked for him to come down to the hospital and stay outside the door - just to remind them that I was still inside. He decided not to come. It was late. The nurses and doctors took my blood, did two physical exams, a EKG, and chest x-ray. They fed me a sandwich and locked the room back up. At 5:45am the next morning, I left the hospital, again in an ambulance, back to the hospital my therapist recommended. Apparently I had been medically cleared. My anxiety was the culprit to my chest pain, not anything vaguely related to the cardiovascular system.

At 6:15am I was back at the hospital. I had to wait until 10am to go up on the unit. I'm not exactly sure why, something about the nurses not being ready to admit me. The unit is the loudest, most choatic place I've ever been. Everyone is either yelling, listening to music, or singing. Nurses are shouting orders at each other and the patients. The patients are mostly ignoring them and I'm wondering where the closest bed is so I can go to sleep. I left, AMA, 48 hours later into my parents' custody. Although everyone from my psychiatrist to my sister thinks that I'm crazy for admitting myself one day to discharging myself three days later, I knew I wasn't going to get what I needed from that situation. Hell, I couldn't even get a decent nap in that situation, let alone intensive therapy.

So now I'm back. No one trusts that I made the right decision to go AMA. Yet once, just this once, I believe in myself. I stopped the destructive, abusive pattern that I've been putting myself through. I didn't give in to the urges of the dark side. If I could have seen into the future and known what life on the unit was like (it's not like they give tours before admission, ya know?) there is no way I would have admitted myself there. But I did, then I had the presence of mind to get out. I don't see it as a failure. Even my dark side doesn't see it as one, even though she desparately seeks the approval of her friends, family, and doctors and realizes that she won't find it.

I'm scared about the future...almost horrified that I've yet again fucked something up with this confession. Someone, somewhere will find it and I'll be embarassed and horrified to have my dirty laundry on display, but if I've learned one thing from the past six years, it's that you can't deny the existence of the duality. To do so leads to disasterous consequences.

Happy

(and I'm told that he made this sentence by himself with the wooden letters. So very Montessori, no?)

I'm picking Zac up from his preschool in a couple of minutes and I couldn't be happier at the thought of going home with him and settling in for the night. We are going to decorate the apartment tonight for Christmas, although I was just told that Santa needs to come for ALL members of the family, not just the kids. Basically, that means that I have to buy stocking stuffers for myself, which is somehow demoralizing. I find myself walking around stores going, "Now just what would Santa get me anyways?"

At least this fight is over for now. I can relax and continue fighting every other battle that I have on my plate. More to come...

Pause

Sorry about that. I get the feeling that my pause in blogging was being interpreted as rather dramatic. I didn't intend for that to happen.

So much to catch up on. I guess the first thing that I'll clear off my plate is an explanation of where I've been for the past two weeks. I'm not sure exactly how to answer that, other than a basic outline. I was in the hospital in Galveston for four days following Thanksgiving and discharged on Monday, November 30th. I worked at Pier 1 that night, to avoid missing even more shifts there. The rest of that week is a blur from trying to write a couple of grant requests, complete the 2010 Development Plan for my "department" (which is me, managing me, and forecasting on my productivity), trying to prepare for an accounting test on Friday, sitting in school for 9 hours on Sunday, and working for five hours at Pier 1 on Sunday. That brings us to today. If you ask me, as many people so kindly have, if I'm "OK", my answer will change depending on the day or time. After work on Sunday, I was most definitely not OK. I've been really down today at work today as well and I called in sick to Pier 1 tonight. Am I likely to go back to the hospital in the next 24 hours? No. Should I be in an inpatient or intensive outpatient program somewhere? Possibly.

What else? Well, I did see the Infectious Disease doctor. She thinks that the acineobacter in my mouth is a red herring and that I've probably had it for sometime. The fact that I've never known that I've had it can be attributed to the fact that nobody has ever cultured me for it before. In her opinion, you tend to find what you go looking for. She thinks my mouth problems are caused by my sudden weight gain (+35lbs in less than six months, that has to be a record), sleep walking, and sleep eating as a result of sleep apnea. She's ordered a sleep study for me, which I hope to complete by the end of this week. I'll go into the sleep study at 7:30pm, hang out while they hook me up, watch tv until 10pm or so, go to sleep (Ambien aided, which surprised me), and get woken up at 6am - sharp. I can shower or leave at 6am. I was also told that my nasal passages are almost completely closed and that I should be using a steroid nasal spray. So, there's that.

Big surprise! My back didn't hurt at all while I was in the hospital...unlike the days during the weekend where I would hurt from lying on the couch or in my bed too long. Nope, not like at all. I had no pain. Now that I'm back to typing and sitting upright in a potentially non-ergonomic office chair, I'm in all kinds of pain. My forearm and my wrist hurt. My ribs hurt. I generally hate life in this position, yet this is where I find myself 8-10 hours a day.

I have one more accounting test to complete before the end of this module of grad school. I have a week to complete it, so here's hoping that I can do it this weekend. Until then, I'll try to make my pauses a little less dramatic and shorter in length.