Dude, I’m not that deaf.

I do have some hearing loss in my left ear (driving for years with your window down (no a/c) and going in excess of the 70mph speed limit’ll do that to you), and for whatever reason I struggle to understand people when they are in front of me, and I often read their lips a lot for cues, but shit people say from my side or behind me? I hear and understand every. single. word.

Thanksgiving was rough this year. I made a truly amazing dinner for my clients at work but primarily with no help, and was on my feet for 10+ hours doing it. I am already stressed out due to various work stressors- a toxic environment from my bosses who expect absolute compliance and give no room for error, fire people in a hot second and then call them idiots when they really just didn’t jive for whatever reason, where I am salaried but have been told that it is expected I work more than 40 hours/week and “that’s why you’re salaried, so you can work extra” which, um, no? Pretty sure that’s actually wage theft, or at the very least, rude. Where my going to HR and bringing up that something was particularly triggering to me during a meeting somehow was turned into a performance review where my job was threatened. Where I’m afraid to say or do anything out of line, and I just hide in my building, and run my program… which is being evaluated by CARF to determine if I will be certified next week. No pressure at all.

I was originally planning to go to my parents’ house after work on Wednesday, but I was so emotionally and physically wiped out I couldn’t even. We were going to do a 5K the next morning, and I had to be up by 6:30 to get there in time. Last year my stepdad bet my mom $50 that I wouldn’t do it, and physical fitness is an obsession in my family, and I have never measured up or been found worthy in that domain. I was so anxious and stressed out I didn’t fall asleep until 4 am, so obviously I slept right through my alarm. I then decided not to go to Thanksgiving either. I was so triggered and anxious, I was a mess. I ended up calling off work FMLA on Friday, and still feel guilty about it.

So this brings us to today- Saturday. My mom started the tradition of going and cutting down our own tree after she remarried, for just us- my brother, sister, mom and I, so every year we go out the weekend after Thanksgiving to cut down a tree. I was feeling up to people by then, so I came out to participate.

I know I can be a know-it-all sometimes, really. And I didn’t hear everything that was said, due to multiple tractors, chainsaws, and various other machines being used to trim, shake, and bundle trees being brought in, but after a random comment about how emu tastes like ham and how I know that (my Renaissance Faire in Ohio, sells “turkey legs” but they’re actually emu) and a mild disagreement that this was actually the case, but I am pretty confident in this fact, as turkey generally does not taste like ham, and turkey legs aren’t that HUGE, and it’s something of an open secret among the Faire folk.

As I was climbing down off the wagon, helping my nephew so he didn’t fall, I heard my mom say “..it’s like the Disney-Pixar thing.” Earlier in the day there had been a conversation in the car about Diney and Disney-Pixar being two separate elements, and their movies are totally different, so I had been clarifying who made “Inside Out,” Pixar or Disney. So I guess someone asked mom about me being, well, me, and needing to be right or clarifying things or whatever, and it was just… said like that. It hurt, but I didn’t say anything, partly because I wasn’t sure who had asked the initial question (pretty sure it was my brother-in-law) and I wasn’t sure what the initial question *was* though there aren’t too many possibilities, given the answer.

I avoided people for two days and texted my sister to see if mom was mad at me, after I was only able to give monosyllabic answers when my sister called to see if I was coming to Thanksgiving. (Pretty sure the entire conversation on my side consisted of five words. “Are you coming?” “No.” “Really?” “Yes.” “Are you okay?” “Not really.” “Okay, well, try to come to cut trees on Saturday, okay?” “Sure.”) I have been very anxious about if people are mad at me, if they are disappointed, walking on eggshells to try to survive, and I finally started to let my guard down again and then… that. A reminder that I can be a know-it-all and we’re just going to whisper it behind her back.

Except I’m not deaf back there.

I’m not sure if feelings were trying to be spared or what, but I was so upset. I wandered off for a while and cried, avoiding people and bonding with a very friendly, very patient draft horse in the petting zoo area of the farm. I just shrugged and pretended it didn’t happen when it was time to go, and tried to go back to normal, but I was right back on those damn eggshells.

Thankfully I have one more day to avoid people. Next week is CARF and I imagine I’ll be a disaster next weekend as well, and then I have to make Christmas happen for my residents and I’m sure I’ll end up doing that all on my own, too.

So, so very tired.

I wrote a poem.

On Being Bipolar

The hateful voice wants me alone;
                         he wants me to die.
I don’t know how he doesn’t see
                       that we are bound, he and I;
When I die, so does he

A friend suggested that perhaps the illness itself is the one who wants to die, as I want very much to live (especially if it’s sans illness.) It’s an interesting premise, and one I might use. I sort of pity it in that respect; but it is self-destructive to the point that *I* am self-destructive, and that’s crap I can’t tolerate.

I am supposed to do a 5K tomorrow. I’m supposed to be up at 6:30. It is currently 3:30 and I haven’t been able to sleep out of anxiety about the aforementioned 5K. I am afraid my family will ridicule me for it if I don’t go. Being fit (and also not fat, but less that in recent years as my activism has gotten MUCH more vocal) is an obsession in my family. Last year my stepdad bet my mom $50 that I wouldn’t complete it. So far this year I’ve already missed another 5K. But I’m so tired now…

I don’t want to go to Thanksgiving. I don’t want to be surrounded by family and especially by noisy nieces and one noisy nephew (though he and I get each other.) I had Thanksgiving at work and am a bit Thanksgiving-ed out, to be honest, especially as I spent ten hours at work today, and at least ten additional hours purchasing and preparing food in advance. Not to mention all of the planning and logistics I had to put in all month, on top of my usual work. I am just so wrung out. I just want to be home, where it’s quiet, hang out with Chihiro, and binge watch Netflix or something.

Only one resident thanked me for my hard work, though most complimented my cooking. (Which is amazing, by the way. Everyone wants my recipes for my turkey, sugar cookies, and pumpkin pie.) The other residents ‘thanked’ me in their usual way; eat everything, complain about dishes that weren’t made despite the metric fuckton of food present, and then demand dessert before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy my own plate. Half of them wandered off before I got around to dishing out pie because they were too impatient to let me finish eating. (I didn’t. I was tired of being hassled for pie.)

The case manager helped me a great deal today, but she was the only one, and she was trying to get other things done in the morning so she could just help me this afternoon. Some of the residents helped with set up/tear down, which I am also grateful for. Some staff helped with serving but disappeared as soon as it was time to clean up afterwards, which took me, the case manager, and a resident two and a half hours to do. I am *very* thankful for that, I was so tired I could barely stand up, and I spent ten hours mostly on my feet today.

Next week is a CARF survey, Wednesday through Friday. They’re a huge accreditation program whose stamp of approval helps us function. We’re trying to get my day programming certified, which means I will be put under a microscope. I haven’t had a lot of time to really prepare due to Thanksgiving taking up so very much of my time this month. My program is fine; I do a fantastic job, I commit waaaay too many of my evenings and put in long hours making everything happen. My groups are good and well attended overall, the work program is successful, and all of my ducks are in a row. I just want to get things ready by Wednesday to show off, y’know? I’ve been tidying my office which is in a perpetual state of “mostly organized chaos” and I’ve got a lot of pictures to hang up/rehang in the craft room. Oh, and the leaky spot in my ceiling opened back up today, due to a lot of melt from the snow over the weekend. I’m sure our maintenance guy will be *thrilled* when I tell him on Friday. He thought the leak was fixed. HAHAHAHAHA no.

Going to the doctor is always *so* much fun.

So I had a manic episode Wednesday night/Thursday morning, likely from a combination of work stress and waaaay too much caffeine.  I finally passed out around 7:00 Thursday morning, after calling (emailing) in FMLA.  Been a month and a half since my last FMLA day, and I think I just went home early that day.  I really am doing better overall.  But it worked out, kinda, as I already had an appointment to see my primary care doctor today.  I hadn’t remembered to tell my boss or HR about it and was wondering how to sneak out of work for about two hours. >_>

So the main reason for going is I wanted to switch birth control brands to the one my insurance covers for free, instead of paying a $25 copay.  I’ve been duking it out with my insurance for a while, over multiple things.

It is always awkward, being checked in. Thankfully, the nurses accept my polite “No, thank you” to being weighed, though I have requested they flag my chart somehow so they know not to even ask, as it is very triggering for me and likely is for other people as well.  For some reason it doesn’t bother me when my psychiatrist does it, but he does it himself, never comments on it, and I know he’s watching for changes due to my psychiatric drugs, which makes it actually a medical necessity, as often weight change is the first sign that something’s not right with my meds, or my overall mental status.

Then came the fun part, where I explain what I need, and asked if there was any way I could also get an IUD put in, or a tubal ligation, as I have no plans to have kids, and launched into my list of why it is A Very Bad Idea for me to actually birth children anyway, as with my current medications, by the time I would realize I was pregnant, very irreparable damage would’ve been done to the kid’s brain.  Not to mention the horrible genetics I’d be passing down.  (And with my new boyfriend, *his* genetics are equally awful, so the poor hypothetical kid would never have a chance.)  She didn’t think my insurance would do both an IUD and hormonal birth control, but they might consider a tubal, as I am now 31 and now magically able to really decide what I want for my reproductive future.  Maybe.  I don’t know if it’ll be covered, of course, but she said she’d be happy to make a referral to a surgeon.  I’ll have to call my insurance and see what they would be willing to consider.  I’d rather go the IUD route than actual surgery, but either way, I just want that extra layer of backup, y’know?

I actually made my doctor cry, though, when I started in on my It’s A Bad Idea schpiel and she could see my overall level of frustration.  She’s really nice, I like her quite a bit, and felt badly when she got choked up.

Oh, the best part of my visit?  As I have been out of birth control for three weeks, and had *protected* sex about two weeks ago (I’m not an idiot) I still had to do a pregnancy test before she could actually prescribe me birth control.  As much as I knew it was a veeery low chance, I was still nervous.  She was happy with the negative, especially given how adamant I am about not having kids, and she prescribed it.

Of course, then the pharmacy discovered that while I had the correct *brand,* the little numbers after it were wrong, so the brand I switched to *still* wasn’t free.  Gotta call my doctor’s office AGAIN tomorrow to correct that.  (It’s supposed to be Junel Fe 1/20 and she’d written for like, Junel Fe 28 or something.  I couldn’t tell you what those numbers mean if my life depended on it.)

Seriously, someone shoot me.  At least my pharmacist found my pent-up-rage ranting against my insurance company funny, and she agreed with my frustration, as insurance companies rarely send formularies to pharmacies so they don’t know what is covered, either.  She appreciated my frustration with how the birth control formulary I received- that had to be mailed to me, as it wasn’t even listed on my insurance company’s website- only listed the brand names they covered.  No chemical information whatsoever.  So I had to do my own research to match the brand they’ll cover with the chemical formula I am presently prescribed, that works juuust fine, thank you.  Evidently the ACA only requires the insurances cover one brand of each compound, rather than just, y’know, paying for all of them.  UNIVERSAL PAYOR SYSTEM, PEOPLE.  IT IS A THING THAT WORKS IN QUITE A FEW OTHER PLACES VERY NICELY.  If only America wasn’t positively allergic to anything that smacks of socialism/communism, we’d have nice things, AND save money, and this last month of absolute nonsense of trying to change and fill a prescription wouldn’t have happened.

I also remembered to stop at a lab on the way home to get bloodwork done that I’ve been forgetting since February, too.  I was just full of medical compliance today.

…And did I remember to mention I have a boyfriend?  That’s a topic for another post. XD

Nothing to see here

Ugh, hit a bit of a rough patch for a few weeks (good lord, has it been that long?) where work was long and draining, the weather was hot and humid, and I just had zero mental, emotional, and physical energy by the time I got home.  I was also not sleeping well, which did not help whatsoever.  Thankfully I did nothing but sleep this past weekend which was a godsend, and I feel human again.

I am sort of freaking out about bills.  It seems that whenever I pay them online via my bank the payments aren’t actually going through for one reason or another, and now I have late fees.  I need to call around tomorrow to all of them when I get home and see what I can work out, and set up bill payments via their websites, I guess.  (I prefer my own bank so I can track everything more easily, but if the money isn’t going to actually GET SENT, I should do it the other way.)  Not sure who I need to yell at about the bill payment system, though I did send a message about what was going on and hopefully I will get some sort of resolution.  Pretty pissed off and tempted to ask them to pay the fees since it is their fault for the payment not going through, but I’m sure somehow it’ll be chalked up to “user error” and they will just laugh at me.

Random anecdote: my first car insurance guy down in Cincinnati was so cool, when my account was double charged by mistake and I got an overdraft fee, he paid it for me out of his own pocket.  I stayed with him for YEARS for that simple act of awesome.  Nothing quite like knowing someone’s got your back.

Hopefully someone at my bank will have mine.

It’s the little things

I have a suet feeder on my porch.  There is a conquering sparrow horde that eats most of it, along with grackles and starlings, but I have one little downy woodpecker that visits a lot.  I love seeing that little guy.  (To the point where I’ve started to get woodpecker-specific suet.)  I also get the odd blue jay and cardinal.  I forgot how HUGE blue jays are, especially compared to the usual birds that visit.

I just sit in my chair, pet my cat, and watch the birds on my porch, along with my lovely flowers and handful of statuary pieces.  It’s nice to just… be, sometimes.

Hello, September.

You vile, vile month with no redeeming qualities.

Seasonal downswing ahoy!

Though I am hoping my recent increase in Lamictal (up to 300 from 250) after my manic spell when I got back from TFCon will negate the effects a bit.  It’s starting to show on campus; folks are getting squirrely as they always do when the seasons change.  And the holidays are always THE. WORST.  My residents generally have poor or nonexistant relationships with their family, so the family holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas are particularly painful.  I try to keep them busy as hell with other things as a distraction, but I can’t occupy all of their time.  Those feelings will be there, in the background, just like they are for me.

At least Halloween comes first, and someone thought it was a good idea to give me an Oriental Trading catalogue.  BWAHAHAHA ALL THE HALLOWEEN STUFF WILL BE MIIIIINE!  I will have the most kick-ass party!

I love Halloween.  And I really do love fall, once it’s actually, y’know, fall.  It’s the transition period (read: GODAWFUL SEPTEMBER I HATE YOU) that is awful.

In other news, some of my hair is purple.  I dyed a section green for my Rhinox costume at TFcon, transitioned to cyan as a middle color, and have finally made it to my target color of purple.  It took two bleachings and three dye sessions to get the blue down to a manageable amount and the purple to the shade I wanted, but damn, it’s worth it!

And now there will be a VIP on campus tomorrow so of course I will be in hiding.  Unnatural hair coloring is such a faux pas in the more srs bsns portions of the mental health world, so while my boss is cool with it, I don’t want to make us look bad.  Though my clothing for dress-up purposes take advantage of the purple to match my outfit. ^_^

Yelling into the void

That’s what I feel like I’m doing these days; yelling into the void.  I hate social media.  There are so many people at my fingertips and I feel so very alone, but it’s all I’ve really got.  I don’t have local friends to spend time with.  I don’t even know how to go about making local friends.  I don’t drink, I don’t party, and Lansing is dying, I’m not sure how to go about finding other people like myself here.

So I post on Facebook some more, and continue to be ignored.

…*facepalm*

So I wrote a post about having missed writing… and then forgot to write a post for Monday.

Batting a thousand, me.

I’ve been working on getting back into a daily cleaning routine.  unfuckyourhabitat.com is my favorite blog for cleaning, and I use it to teach groups, too.  The system’s easy and being able to swear in groups is awesome.  I’m particularly remiss about my laundry, which is currently mocking me in the living room where I have dumped it so I will remember to wash it, a load at a time, this week.  I did a load Monday, but tonight (Tuesday) I was busy doing grocery shopping and didn’t get home until almost eight.  The washer/dryer is communal and the apartment it’s against has two little guys living there, so I don’t know what time they go to bed and I don’t want to disrupt them.

However, grocery shopping is a chore in and of itself, so I could that as a good day.  And dear lord but it’s humid out, so just carrying my stuff in from the car had me worked into a good sweat.

Fairly recently, I have started dyeing a portion of my hair different colors.  It started with green for my Rhinox costume for TFCon, which has been shifted to cyan in preparation for going purple at my next dyeing.  I wanted to do it tonight but a) I forgot to go to Sally’s before the grocery store and I had frozen stuff in the car and b) the bleach/dye process takes me about two hours to do it correctly.  Doing it on a work night would inevitably make me want to rush so I can get to bed on time, so it will need to wait until Saturday, where I can take my time.  For only having done it three times, I’m getting really good at it.  The first go not so much, but friends who dye their hair weird colors provided some info to help me do it right after that.  So yeah.  Being able to express myself through cotton candy hair feels good.  Work is cool with it, and now that I feel like I’ve got some stability there, I feel a bit more free to do stuff like that.

My psychiatrist was thrilled to see me back at my baseline today.  I scared him pretty bad when I showed up manic after TFCon.  I need to make sure I schedule a break day in there where I’m not driving anywhere and I can just rest and center myself.

…I also need to figure out where to finish exchanging my Canadian money.  I’ve got a couple hundred dollars hanging out because nobody in the States will touch it.  My credit union won’t, banks won’t because I don’t bank there, so I guess now I’m going to have to go to a coin shop and see if they’ll give me decent exchange rates.  It’s frustrating that if I miss the exchange at the border due to it being closed when I get there, I’m SOL.  Last year I didn’t have much in Canadian so I just kept it for fare to cross the bridge the next time, but the rate was almost even.  This year it was about $1.26 CAN to $1.00 American, so I’m sort of waiting for it to go back up before I exchange it, too.  Biggest bang for my buck and all that…

I missed writing

It’s funny how you don’t miss something until you start it back up again.  For example, writing my blog.  I initially stopped when I started to really recover last time, as it sort of felt like it was hindering me.  I’ve tried a few times since then to pick up the mantle again, but it didn’t feel quite right.

I feel like I’m back in the saddle, as it were.   I’m back to writing several posts in a sitting, and remembering to write in advance.

I wish I could say the same about my yoga practice, which is rarely consistent and has pretty much just stopped.  Or my daily cleaning routine… or just about everything else.  I am the BEST at starting things, but not so great at finishing them.  The Queen of Procrastination is I!

Still here, just tired and spoonless

I was able to go to work on Friday.  I had an ominous email from my boss waiting for me:

“We need to talk about this when you return on friday. These absences are not going to work for our company as it is creating a hardship.”

So after a few minutes of hyperventilating, I decided to go talk to my boss, rather than letting my rather fertile imagination run away with me.  I poked my head into her office and she was immediately asking “What is that look for?” because I guess I looked terrified.  I was very quickly reassured that I wasn’t losing my job, just that I needed to work with the other two clinicians -the therapist and case manager who has taken on the other half of my job- to make sure things worked well if I had to take FMLA days.  She said whatever I chose to share was completely up to me, but she did encourage me to at least explain that I have FMLA status, to at least help dispel any hard feelings about my absences.  There was meeting later in the day, with everyone present- the CEO, HR, my boss, the therapist, case manager, and myself.  It wasn’t just about me, either; the CEO wanted us (the three clinicians) to formalize a few things, rather than the informal format we usually have when we talk about groups and what direction we’re taking things on campus.  We planned to start having a weekly clinical supervision, led by the therapist, which looks good on paper and also will give us a paper trail, which always makes CARF and the state licensing board happy.

So, everyone at the table has known about my illness for a while, except for the case manager, who just came on about a month ago.  So I took the leap and clued her in, because I work in mental health, goddamnit, if anyone’s going to get it it’s going to be my coworkers.  I had hinted that I had a chronic illness but she was sort of blown away with all of my actual problems, and seemed impressed at how stable I am.

And I am, really.  When I think back to where I was two and a half years ago when I lost my job, and just how sick I was back then, I can’t believe how far I’ve come.  I can have a really bad day and come back swinging the next, rather than ending up down for a week.  I still wonder at times about my future, but I’m trying not to let myself dwell on it.  What happens, is what will happen.  I’ll be ok.