Month: August 2012

poor little rich girl

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I’ve long felt guilty for having had the indulgence of growing up both depressed and relatively wealthy. Society seems to have this message that “back in my day, we didn’t have time to be depressed! We were too busy walking uphill both ways in snow and we liked it.”

It’s only recently that I’ve realized that the only luxury my family’s money afforded me was that I didn’t die. When I collapsed, I didn’t end up resorting to homelessness or prostitution. There was a safety net. I lived.

The Catholics are going to be subsidizing my mental health care this time around. I’ll still end up paying a bit of money out of pocket, but not nearly as much as I would if I were going it alone. It’s one of the advantages to living in a city, there are programs for the poor and unwell. It’s hard to find, and you have to be patient and persistent and spend a lot of time on the phone, but it can be done.

If you’re dealing with depression, or have in the past, it’s good to do some research on one of your good days to find out where you can get help when one of the bad days rolls around. It’s hard to do the work required to get help when you’re really depressed. So get yourself set up when you’re well.

You’re worth taking care of. I’m worth taking care of. Stay alive.

love is a hell you can not bear/give me mine back and then go there

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L’esprit d’escalier (literally, staircase wit) is a French term used in English that describes the predicament of thinking of the right comeback too late.

–From Wikipedia

So about four months ago, I wrote an email to a guy I used to be quite fond of, and he wrote back. At the time, it seemed we’d said what needed to be said, and I was comfortable trying to move on from the whole thing.

But, if you’ve been reading this here blahhhhg, you’ll know that I’ve been doing some work on self-blame lately, and damned if what he wrote to me doesn’t stick in my craw something fierce.

Because: We dated for a year. A year of hanging out and drinking in bars and spending time together in our respective houses and going out and doing things and having lots and lots of what was, quite frankly, amazing and unprecedented sex. For a goddamned year.

And that whole time, he was embarrassed by me? Afraid to let me around the other people in his  life that he cared about? I was good enough to fuck but not good enough to bring around his friends? For a year?

Let me tell you, the audience, and you, the guy who isn’t reading this (but whose network of little gnomes probably are) what my life was like during that year. I was losing my shit. Pretty much the whole time. My life was made up of three things: The Boy, numbness, and panic. I was not well. The drugs I was on to help my depression had turned me into a numb, panicky zombie who couldn’t function or even manage to leave the house very often, at least not when it was light out. I’d dropped out of school because I couldn’t sit still. I’d alienated a lot of my friends. I slept all day and stayed up all night and was making art with my own blood and was completely, balls-out obsessed with The Boy. Yes indeed.

He would have been entirely correct to have run the other way. He would have been more than justified in never seeing me again. But he didn’t stay away. He kept on having (crazy, wonderful) sex with me. He kept seeing me. For a year, until I deliberately sabotaged things so he’d stop coming around for free sex and emotional torture.

What the fuck does that say about him?

I might be crazy, dear readers, but I am not and have never been that much of an asshole.

Arrest this girl

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…It’s also not my fault that I’m one of those people who occasionally suffers from debilitating bouts of depression and anxiety. I’m not a lazy, indulgent jerk for needing to take a break sometimes. It’s not my fault that I had to drop out of college. I’m not weak for taking antidepressants. I’m not just begging for attention our trying to seem special when I have panic attacks. There are some situations that I genuinely can’t deal with. That doesn’t make me high maintenance or a princess. It just means I might have to ask you to turn the music down, or go home early, or excuse myself. I’m pretty good at coping. But there are days when I can’t cope as well.

I wish it weren’t that way. But it isn’t my fault.

i’ve given all i can, it’s not enough

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I can be incredibly hard on myself.

I’m finally confronting this long-held belief that none of these great romantic tragedies would have befallen me if I had paid strict enough attention, if I had listened to my intuition, if I had been smarter or wiser or braver or whatever, if I hadn’t been so frightened or headstrong or young or jaded– that it’s my fault my heart got broken. It’s my fault I’ve been hurt. I was stupid and I was weak and that’s why things fall apart.

That’s why I picked the wrong people to love.

That’s why they stopped loving me.

That’s why I was left.

That’s why I was raped.

Except, no.

Sometimes bad things happen to smart, brave, wonderful people who have good intentions and good hearts. It doesn’t have to make sense. It isn’t karmic. I didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t my fault.

give me a week or two to go absolutely cuckoo

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I’ve been on an upswing. Not a steady one, and not without significant drop-offs here and there, but the last two years of my life have been a time of great improvement. I’m happier, more stable, and more at peace than I’ve ever been before or knew I could be.

Which is why today sucks so much.

Because, oh no, not again.

I have been depressed and anxious much of my life. Well-meaning friends sometimes ask “what are you depressed about?” which says, to me, that they’ve never been clinically depressed. I can always come up with reasons why I don’t feel good, but I’m depressed because I’m depressed because my brain is broken because the gods hate me because I was dropped on my head because my parents liked my brother better because the stars were misaligned on the day of my birth. Whatever. It’s biological. It’s no one’s fault. My body makes too many HOLY SHIT EVERYTHING IS FUCKED AND EVERYONE IS OUT TO GET YOU chemicals and LOVE IS DEAD AND YOU ARE UNLOVABLE AND ALSO UGLY chemicals and not enough YOU ARE HAPPY AND WARM AND EVERYTHING’S AWESOME chemicals to crowd out the screaming from the ones who are constantly flipping the fuck out or trying to get me to slit my wrists.

I take pills. I take them every day because they keep the evil brain chemicals at bay and let the happy brain chemicals skip through the alleys of my addled mind. I’m learning how to be an adult human! It’s interesting! Life is easier when your brain isn’t screaming at you or sobbing at you or telling you that the extremely attractive triathlete who is naked in bed next to you probably doesn’t want you there and wishes you’d go away even though he’s already invited you to stay for brunch in the morning.

The brunch went well. I hardly even embarrassed myself in front of his friends!

I am panicking, and it’s not the fault of or caused by the guy I’m seeing. He just happens to have come along at a time when I seem to be particularly susceptible to panicking.

From an IM conversation I’m having with my friend Michael:

My crazy decided to come out and say HI KATE I AM STILL HERE IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING!!! WERE YOU ENJOYING YOUR LIFE BECAUSE I WAS THINKING I WOULD LIKE TO SHIT ALL OVER IT.

So that’s happening. And I’m working a temp job, and I want to be working a non-temp job because I’d like to not be living in a garage anymore. And I should be sleeping right now but I’m not sleeping right now because panic attacks are like speed! Not that I’ve done speed! Hopefully getting my feelings out will allow me to relax. Sleep is important, even for the insane.

Last time I started losing my shit, about a year and a half ago, I knew I really needed help because I started feeling like my mom’s cleaning lady was deliberately following me around trying to annoy me by choosing to clean whatever room I was in. Also, I was bursting into tears all the time. That’s never a good sign. So I went back into therapy and got on pills. I think I need to find a doctor and a shrink here in Portland before I start to feel like my roommates are deliberately moving my stuff when I’m at work.

And I need to stop flipping out on the extremely attractive guy who’s been gracious enough to put up with the flipping out I’ve done so far. Awesome Stable Kate isn’t too distant a memory. I’m hoping she comes back soon and kicks Crazy Kate to the curb. For good this time.

only something new

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For those of you new to my self-indulgent ramblings, here’s a summary:

Four and a half years ago, I met a guy and fell head-over-heels in love with the unfeeling bastard, and we dated for a year before I sabotaged the relationship on purpose because loving him and not being loved back was killing me.

Two years ago, after moving back to CA from Portland, I met someone else and dated him for 15 months before he suddenly and without explanation dumped me. That happened about ten months ago.

All caught up? Okay.

Well, for starters, I’m back in Portland. SURPRISE. I’ve been back for about a month. I love being here, and I plan to stay. I have a job, I’m staying with friends, life is good.

And I, uh, met someone, and he’s really neato, and I like him. It hasn’t been going on long enough for me to have any idea if it’s going anywhere, but caring about someone is dredging up a whole bunch of old shit that I apparently haven’t finished dealing with yet. Hooray.

So I’ve been watching Justified because it’s awesome, and Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins make it so I don’t have to think about how broken my heart still is, how sad I still am, how hard it is to trust, how much giving a shit about someone terrifies me.

But I realize that this isn’t about the guy I’m seeing. It’s about me. And I need to deal with my massive trust issues before I give myself an aneurysm or scare off this very nice person who seems rather fond of me.

Gaaaaaaaah.

But I’m back in Portland. I’ve gone swimming in rivers. I have a tan, or what passes for one. Life is good. I’m happy. And I believe that my life is going to go well, whether or not I have a boy to fawn over. Or even if I’m haunted by ghosts of lovers past.