I have the word “fight” tattooed on my left forearm.
I got this tattoo in early 2009, not knowing how much I would still need it 16 years later. It’s a reminder, on the wrist I used to cut, to keep getting up and trying again.
On that same wrist, still visible, is the scar from the first time I hurt myself on purpose, 30 years ago. That is not the only scar. There are many scars. But there is also a reminder to not let the darkness win.
I’ve had almost daily migraines since my brain injury four years ago, but they’re getting worse now. Most days, by the end of the evening, it hurts to even have my eyes open, or to be in anything but very dim light. Sound bothers me. Movement bothers me. My brain doesn’t work right, and I get severe nausea some days.
I am always exhausted. I take hot baths in the dark.
I will be 44 in April. I don’t want to live the next 40 years of my life this way.
I have tried new, just-approved medications. I have taken the tried-and-true migraine meds. I’ve swallowed thousands of pills and given myself injections. I’ve gotten Botox. Nothing works. Opiates help but I’m only given a limited number of those, and some days they don’t even seem to make a dent.
When I tell you that my pain gets up to a 5 or 6 out of 10 almost every, you might think I’m telling you that it isn’t that bad. But I’ve had multiple kidney stones, one of which had to be removed surgically. I’ve broken my clavicle on three occasions. I’ve had multiple toothaches at the same time. All of those hurt a lot, but none are a 10 on my pain scale. 10 was when I had an abscess in my face. 10 was screaming “what kind of fucking hospital is this?” when I had been given the maximum dose of intravenous Dilaudid and I was still in agony.
Pain that hits a 5 or 6 almost every day is enough to seriously impact my life. It’s enough to make me flirt with the idea of razor blades and high bridges.
I have good days, when the painkillers work and I manage to laugh and enjoy myself. But I have bad days when I feel truly hopeless. I keep picking myself up and continuing to fight, but it is getting harder and harder to do. Four years now of accepting my diminished potential, of letting go of dreams, of trying to dig my way forward and transcend, somehow, the absolute shitshow this brain injury has brought into my life.
I am stuck in a place of making do and settling for less than I hoped for. All because someone else decided he knew better than I did about how I tolerate a certain kind of anesthesia, and I reacted the exact way I’d told him I would– which is to say, Versed makes me try to fight off whoever is trying to operate on me. Rather than stopping the procedure, he or someone in his office slammed my head into something with such force that I am still affected every single day by the injuries they caused. And I will never know exactly how it happened. I just woke up with a bump on my head and a moderate amount of brain damage.
There’s nothing anyone can do, it seems. They can’t make the headaches stop. My therapist can’t help me process this so that it’s somehow okay. It’s just awful. It continues to be awful. It has been awful for almost four years now.
I have lost so much, held on to what I could, and only managed to gain a little through sheer force of will. I don’t want this to be my new normal. I don’t want this at all.
We are raised to believe that if we’re good people, if we follow the important rules and try to be kind, if we persevere and strive, we can arrive at a place of contentment and happiness. I know now that it simply isn’t true. You can get utterly fucked by the fates in an instant, and nothing will feel safe, stable, or whole ever again.
I don’t trust contentment or happiness. I don’t trust stability or safety. And I wish beyond my ability to communicate that I had never gotten this wise. I’d rather be ignorant of all of this. I’d rather be stupid, safe, and happy.
I used to think that an unexamined life isn’t worth living. Now there are things I desperately wish I had never had to see.
All of that being said, I had a very good day on Sunday. I had a very good session with my therapist on Monday. I am continuing to fight. I am looking forward to my next Bacon Blue burger at our favorite bar. I might visit San Francisco in March, and I’m tracking the prices of airfare to Boston, Vermont, and San Diego.
On my right forearm, I have a tattoo of a human heart, and banners over the heart bear two statements in Latin: cogito ergo doleo and dum spiro spero.
Have you ever had your car broken into? Or your house? There’s this sense that this space is not entirely your own anymore.
Worse, have you ever been touched by someone you didn’t want touching you? Have you ever been raped?
Now imagine that, but it’s your brain.
Waking up from anesthesia with a brain injury is like having your brain invaded. Someone rifled through the glove compartment of my mind. Someone squeezed the ass of my cerebellum on a crowded train. Someone didn’t want to stop at heavy petting and now my amygdala is feeling used and dirty.
Lately I’ve been having these weird tremors in my spine and the backs of my thighs– they don’t hurt. They don’t really do anything. Just shake shake shake for about 60 seconds. Like being on a vibrating bed. A 5.0 on the Richter scale but only for a square foot of my body. And then it stops.
Sometimes my hands work like those claw machines in the foyers of shitty restaurants. When part of my job was to open incoming mail, it was a challenge to get letters out of envelopes and unfolded. It took a lot of focus to do. I could do it, but concentrating so hard on each and every one meant that after 25 or 50 letters I was so spent that I could barely walk. And every day was like this.
My vision goes blurry. Sometimes it doubles. I have migraines almost all the time. I suffer from terrible insomnia and only one pill treats it effectively, but the side effects are worsening to the point that it is absolutely not worth taking anymore. I am terrified of not sleeping, but I’m not really sleeping anymore anyway.
I am in pain all the time. I am dizzy all the time. There are so many things wrong that if I tried to explain all of the things that are wrong you would think I was making shit up. My life is, in many ways, hell.
When I tell you that this injury ruined my life, I am not lying. Could things be worse? Absolutely. I know that I am very, very lucky that my injury was not worse. I work in government social services. I have had many opportunities to interact with people whose brain injuries were far more devastating than my own.
I am still employed, although that was really fucking touch-and-go for awhile. I am still married, but my marriage is under some serious strain. The cats are fine. I am not currently bleeding from the eyeballs. I am getting along with my parents. I am loved. I have friends. Shit could be worse.
But I didn’t know humans could be this tired, this stressed, this close to falling apart for so long, and not just scream and scream and scream until they had no voice left.
I have learned how strong I am, yes, but no one should have to be this strong.
I know about the holocaust, I know about Cambodia and Russia under Stalin and the American slave trade and the fucking Crusades, and man’s inhumanity to man. I know about comfort women in Japan and Ed Gein’s human lampshades and what Ted Bundy did to those poor women in Florida and Colorado and Utah and Washington. I know about the clients I’ve served here in Oregon and the horrific abuse they suffered that brought them to the attention of the government services I worked for. I know I am very lucky to have the support I have.
But I also know that my brain chemistry was already fucked up enough before this injury happened to me, that I was already in physical pain before this happened to me, that I had already fought hard enough before this happened to me, and that I didn’t deserve what happened to me.
I am an optimist. I have always been an optimist, I think. It is really hard to keep being an optimist after all of this. I continue to take my medication– so much fucking medication these days. My husband, bless him, has so many suggestions for things I should try to do to feel better– walk around the block! Enjoy the weather in the back yard! Drink more water! Cardio! And I just want to lob things at his noggin. Sure, those things could help. But in the face of all this hopelessness, it just sounds so pointless.
Today I’m trying caffeine. I have a bunch of caffeinated tea and also some Mtn Dew I stocked up on because at least it’ll keep me from falling asleep on the job. Looks like it’s sunny outside so maybe I’ll go squint with disapproval at the backyard on my lunch in a few minutes. T will approve.
Two years, eight months, and four days ago, I went to the oral surgeon. They put me under. I woke up. I was terrified. I was crying. I asked, did something go wrong? They said nothing happened. One of the assistants seemed angry with me. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t stop crying. My friend Jordan was my ride. He was waiting in the parking lot. They wanted to go get him. I wouldn’t let them. I wanted to calm down first. I didn’t want him to see me like that. I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t know why I was terrified. No one would tell me anything. Eventually I calmed down a bit. I was still pretty out of it. I don’t know how long it took, but if I had to guess, I’d say maybe twenty minutes. Jordan came in. They walked me to the car. Jordan drove me home. Jordan got my husband and they put me to bed. I slept and slept and slept. I was a mess. I had gauze in my mouth, and stitches, and I just wanted to rest.
That was on March 15th, 2021, which was a Monday. I think I worked that Tuesday. I can’t imagine how I worked Tuesday. Force of habit, I guess. I know I can’t have been feeling 100%. I haven’t felt 100% since before March 15th, 2021.
Tuesday night was when we found the bruises
These were obviously fingerprints pressed into my arm.
We were laying in bed. And The Husband-Bot said Oh My God Your Arm. And I was like What Are You Talking About. And he said “Look.” and I Looked. And I was like, T, those are fingerprints. And he said “Yes, they are.” And we marveled.
I had a knot on the back of my head. I had bruising under my jaw. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to put even featherweight pressure under my chin. Someone had obviously restrained me with great force. Multiple someones. Someone had obviously slammed me back in the chair. I had been injured. But I didn’t know yet how injured I was.
March 15th, I went to the oral surgeon.
March 16th, we found the bruises.
March 17th, I emailed the oral surgeon to ask what the hell had happened.
And on March 18th, I figured out that there was something really wrong with me.
That’s when I knew I had a concussion.
Today is November 19th 2023. It has been two years, eight months, and four days since my most recent traumatic brain injury, and I have been well and truly fucked by it.
I saw my amazing doctor on March 23rd. She verified that I had a concussion, which at that point was a mere formality. By this point I had
been bucked from a horse in 1985
attempted (and very much failed) to pop a wheelie in 1987
fainted and smacked my head against a wall in 1995
gotten t-boned by a truck in 2011
I knew what a fucking concussion felt like.
On April 8th I facilitated a staff meeting but then started hallucinating like I’d eaten some excellent shrooms. It was then that I decided to take the rest of the day off and not to facilitate meetings for awhile.
Work was very understanding, if by understanding we mean that they said that they understood while actually making everything much harder and tilting their head like confused dogs when confronted with the fact that, yes, I still had a TBI and, yes, that actually did change some things and no, that wasn’t something I could just kinda, y’know, opt out of on weekdays or anything…
(fuck you kristin)
(I have a new job now)
The first three months after my injury I tried to behave as normal. I tried not to miss work, not to make excuses, not to slow down or change my routine in any way, and it almost killed me. I was getting worse instead of better. I couldn’t really sleep– it’s a sick irony of TBIs and that they can cause insomnia when what you need more than anything else is rest. So I was working eight hour days and sleeping about 4.5 hours a night and experiencing ungodly migraines, dizziness, ataxia, paraphasia, hallucinations, issues with word-finding, short-term memory loss, and a host of other issues that made me feel like I was going senile at 40. I was worried that I was losing myself. In June I broke down and ended up taking three weeks of leave out of desperation and sleeping as much as I could.
Part of the reason it felt imperative to take leave right then was that things had come to a head with my mother about her continuing pressure on me to have a relationship with my brother which I did not (and do not) want to do. I had to really break that down with her and put her on a time out, and this was very difficult for me emotionally. I wrote a rather lengthy blog post about this at the time if you feel like hunting it down. It’s not hard to find.
In September I received a two day unpaid suspension for goofing around on my work computer on the clock. When I pled that a lot of the things they cited were work-related, that in many cases I was trying to stay awake and alert when I ran out of tasks, and that my judgement and awareness of time were affected by my traumatic brain injury it fell on deaf ears. This is when I started to seriously believe that management was trying to get rid of me.
So at that point I was six months into my TBI adventure!
Throughout all of that I was trying very hard to be upbeat! Hopeful! To maintain my belief that healing was just! around! the corner!
Spoiler: no.
I got a new therapist around that time who was awesome! Her name was Jacey! And she was very good at helping me see the bright side of things. She felt like a friend. Our weekly sessions really helped keep me going. So that was great. My work situation still sucked ass, but at least I had someone to talk to about it.
And now I’m sitting here trying to think of other things that were happening in autumn 2021 and I can’t think of a fucking thing… I think I was just in survival mode, you know? Waiting for the good things I was sure were just right around the corner. I know I wrote a Christmas letter that year?
So I guess we can pick back up in Spring 2022.
MARCH: A year after my injury. I threaten to sue oral surgeon. He sends money. It isn’t a ton of money, but it’s all I’m going to get. I had to sign a NDA. We start shopping for a house in earnest. [We did not have “buy a house” money. We have “Oregon has great first time home-buying programs and we had hubris and now have SO MUCH DEBT OH MY GOD WHY DID WE DO THIS” money.] I hired the first realtors I met up with because I got a good feeling. They were a team who I’ll call Carrie and Fiona. I only meet Carrie the once, Fiona was our point of contact from then on.
APRIL: Jacey the therapist decides to leave the practice she’s at but super super pinkie swears she’ll totally for sure going to start up somewhere else to continue the super important work we were doing. I never see her again. This devastates me. I go into a terrible depression. The depression goes way past April. I am still in the depression. I do have a therapist currently, though.
MAY: HOUSE HUNT! We find a great-looking house and are about to bid on it when we discover that it was pretty much the site of a gun battle the year before and decide “nope.” We decide to confine our search to a certain part of town where we really want to live, which limits our options but makes us focus more.
JUNE/JULY: More house hunting. I have become obsessed. Travis keeps telling me to chill. I MUST HAVE A REWARD FOR ALL THE BULLSHIT I AM GOING THROUGH. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES KATE A DULL PSYCHOTIC MESS. We find a house which is MEH but for some reason Carrie the realtor (who T has never even MET) really wants us to buy it. It is dark and dank and a homeless dude lives in the shed and it isn’t at all what we want and there is no driveway and no back yard (and an awesome back yard is on our MUSTS list) but for some reason Carrie is like THIS IS YOUR HOME BUY IT. We do not buy it. There’s this other house that we wanted to look at but the residents got Covid so we couldn’t. But then a couple weeks pass and we’re like what about that one…….
So it’s July 27th and we go and we look at it and T is like DO NOT GET HOPES UP DO NOT FALL IN LOVE and we drag our friend Dan along like we usually do and I’m just walking through this house like uh-huh…. uh-huh……. hmmmm……. uh-huh….. and then I go in the back yard and I sit in this Adirondack chair and Dan walks out and we make eye contact and we just, like, nod.
So we bid. And they came back a little higher. And we said Mmhmm okay. And then and then and then we have a house. We moved in September 21st, 2022.
Dan does not live here. We just rely on him to be rational and see things we don’t. It’s good to have a friend like that. I fall in love with everything. T is a ball of cynical anxiety. Dan is level-headed.
So I fucking love our house. Original 1958 oak floors. Not pristine, but solid shape. Central heating, no AC but we can dream. It’s in great shape for its age, good foundation, new roof, new huge deck. It’s charming as hell. We love our neighborhood. Quiet. Great Mexican restaurant a few blocks away. Friendly people. It’s just… nice. We’re still learning how to be homeowners. But it’s great.
But there’s nothing, nothing, nothing that can compensate for the TBI. $10k wasn’t enough. $10mil wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be enough. Nothing.
We’ve been in the house for 14 months. We wouldn’t have the house without the catastrophic head bonk. And I think I was so obsessed with finding a house because I thought it would make up for the head bonk. And it doesn’t. It couldn’t. It was stupid to think that it could. It’s a great house. But nothing could.
I am mostly “back.”
I am doing way better than I was a year ago. I am doing immeasurably better than I was two years ago.
But I will never be like I was before I was injured. Looking at me you might not know that. But I know it. Every day I know it. I feel it. And it bloody kills me.
I spent the first, like, 29 years of my life in the pits of despair, man. Agony. I had good days and bad days. I had good years and bad years. And when I was 29 I had to move out of my rental house in Portland and I had nowhere to go so I went to my mom’s house in California because I was out of fucking options. And I got a job and I got a nice boyfriend and everything was temporary but it was sunny and it was tolerable and I was happy for just a little while, and I knew then that it was possible to be happy.
And everything went to shit again, and everything stayed shit for quite some time, but I knew it was possible to be happy so I fought like hell and I eventually got to a good place, a stable place, what felt like a really sustainable place, and by the time I was 39 I was married and I was on the right pills and I was employed and I was fucking healthy and everything was coming up Milhouse.
I guess I still believed in the American dream, that with enough sweat, luck, and bootstrappin’, you can do anything, you can be happy. You can succeed. I believed that I was away from the yawning chasm I’d camped next to for most of my life and I’d never get that close to it again. Suicidal? Not me! Not anymore, not ever again.
I thought I’d fought hard, and I’d won. I thought I could stop fighting.
I guess you’re the new Office Assistant. Welcome to the team! Okay, that’s a weird thing to say since I’m not on the team anymore, and I’m sure everyone else is making you feel very welcome– they’re a great bunch! The dedication and skill of the people you’ll be working with might knock your socks off. Gary and Keith are(almost) endlessly patient and will be very kind about explaining things if you get confused. There’s a lot to learn, so don’t feel bad if you need to ask a lot of questions! I still had to ask questions three years in! It’s fine! It’s expected.
I think you’ll find that the job is very challenging but also very rewarding. Getting to help people in the ways that you’ll get to help people will probably be as great for you as it was for me. Everyone will be very supportive while you’re learning, and soon I’m sure you’ll fit in wonderfully.
You’ll get to know our clients’ quirks over time. Some of them you’ll groan when you see their names on caller ID, but others you’ll be excited to talk to. One of my favorite things is getting to shop for people– sometimes you’ll bear back how much Joe liked his winter coat or Jane liked the poster you got for her. That feels great. Other times, you’ll be drafting correspondence from templates, making calls to Comcast, or filing. Those things are less fun, but if you keep in mind that it’s all in service to the clients, it makes it easier.
Just never get injured. Never get sick.
I don’t mean “don’t sprain your ankle.” Or “don’t catch a cold.” I mean don’t ever get anything chronic. Don’t ever get hurt hurt. Because if you get hurt you’ll be told that you shouldn’t talk to the team about it because it makes your coworkers uncomfortable. You’ll be told that it’s not a good excuse for fucking up. You’ll be reminded about how hard it’s been on the team that you got your life messed up by something out of your control. Management will make it very clear to you what a problem you are now. And they will push you out like they pushed me out.
They’ll act like every ADA accommodation is a favor they’re personally doing for you. They’ll tell you how hard it is on the team when you need to take time off because you can’t walk straight or feel like someone’s hammering a nail into your forehead. They’ll celebrate your birthday and your work anniversary but you’ll never get a “get well” card. You won’t be able to mention your illness in your yearly review, because “that’s not what they’re for.” If you make a mistake, they will condescend. If you make a real fuck-up, they’ll punish you as much as they can without the union making them stop. You’ll be told over and over that what happened to you, the limitations you have now, don’t matter, aren’t a factor, why can’t you perform like you did before the horrible thing happened to you and liquefied parts of your brain.
They will treat you with pity and call it compassion.
They will make it hell for you to stay.
So enjoy your time here and never, never get hurt or sick.
My husband and I toured a house yesterday. Immediately when we got inside, I smelled mildew and fresh paint. That was not a good sign. We walked through a few times and told the realtor we’d think about it. On the way back home, we impulsively stopped at a Japanese restaurant and got a light lunch. We decided at that table that we would not buy the house (which did have some lovely features, but several more ticks in the “no” column than in the “yes.”)
And while we were sitting there, me noshing on edamame and sipping water, I told T that I think I’m spiraling a little bit. I’m impulsive. I don’t have a lot of control over my emotions, and I hate it. I have worked very hard to have control over myself, but lately I am snappish, mercurial, sullen. I speak without thinking and am overly friendly with people who (it seems to me) give me weird looks and then try to go back to what they were doing. I ache for connection but shrink away from it, full of doubt.
My normally pretty-damned-good self-esteem is faltering. I don’t think I’m a worthless pile of crap or anything, but I do have my moments of intense self-doubt and calling myself weird, stupid, or crazy, even if it’s only in my head. I can usually manage to push those feelings aside and move onto something else. But yesterday, I felt a sort of melancholy that I haven’t felt in quite awhile– this feeling that the ground was falling away from underneath me and I was in freefall toward… I don’t know. Some sort of emotional doom.
I know myself pretty well, so when I was telling T about all of this I said “I’ll probably feel better tomorrow, because I usually do feel better after a good night’s sleep.” And I was right, I do feel better today. Not all the way better, but no longer like the abyss is looming.
The past 14 months have been one of the most difficult periods of my whole life– and if you know me, you know that my life has had a lot of difficult periods. Already plagued with health issues, I did not need the addition of a traumatic brain injury. But that’s what I got, and I am doing what I can to make the best of it. In a life that’s probably about half over, I’ve learned that often that’s the best thing we can do.
I’m still employed and getting straight A’s in school. But it’s dragging. I’m dragging. My verve and enthusiasm that I worked so hard to cultivate are failing me right now. When we got married, T said he wanted to buy a house within five years, so I fixed my abysmal credit score, paid off debts, and started trying to save. When I enrolled in school, I decided I was going to kick ass and I have. I have done so much with hope and willpower, but now there are things in my life I can’t just power through. There are things, like buying a house, that are in many ways out of my control. Knowing that my goals are years away from being achieved is really taking a toll on my psyche. And I just don’t have the energy to go fast fast fast all the time like I always have. I get tired so easily. I can’t coast by with intelligence and willpower, I have to utilize that skill that I’m still trying to build and has never come naturally to me: patience. I hate patience.
Things have been better, and I’ve gotten stronger. But eventually strength isn’t enough. Smarts aren’t enough. Humor and pretty green eyes, unfortunately, don’t mean much in an insane housing market. They won’t give me a Masters degree for being cute. Work doesn’t accept “well, I’m trying” as a substitute for getting stuff done or answering the phone. And there are some days when the effort of just getting through is so exhausting that I sort of cease to function by 5pm. For awhile, grit, determination, and my eternal/infernal optimism were carrying me. But those things aren’t inexhaustible. I am so, so tired.
I have this image pinned to my cubicle wall at work. It amused me but now I’m seeing through the gaslighting! What’s step 2?
The despair I felt yesterday was something I used to feel much of the time. And I kind of marveled at it, like how did I live this way for so long? Because for a most of my life I saw myself standing next to a vast canyon, feeling the wind try to push me over the edge. Feeling parts of my brain telling me to just jump and get it over with. And for the past few years, even after my injury, I sensed that the cliff was still there, but that I was no longer standing at the edge. I’d moved into a clearing several dozen paces away, and I could not gaze into the bottom any longer, contemplating, wondering, tempted.
Yesterday I was closer to the edge again. The wind was whipping. The canyon loomed. And as I always have, I turned my back away. I looked toward the clearing. I kept my eyes on the hope, the potential, life. Because some days, that really is all you can do.
I used to be someone who cried a lot. Happy or sad scenes in movies, frustration or sadness in my own life. I used to cry probably more than was healthy. But it was good to cry.
Something changed. It started when I was 20, during a very difficult summer. I dropped acid and slept with my friend’s 33-year-old boyfriend while she was away on a trip. Then I went on a 40-day vacation to Boston, Vermont, and London– and on my second-to-last day in London, I fell down the stairs and sprained my ankle. Later that summer, I found out my parents were divorcing. I was a mess. Everything I thought I knew to be stable was suddenly shaky. A lot of the drama was self-created, but a lot of it wasn’t. These are just the highlights.
I had always been an exploder. I became an imploder. Instead of striking out at others I mostly punished myself. I guess I still blew up at people from time to time, and even before this I tended to take things out on myself– and I have the scars to prove it. But one thing that changed was that I stopped really being able to cry, no matter how sad I was.
I took an Eastern Philosophy class at the local community college (My Pretend College, for my hometown readers.) I don’t remember it being a very good class, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing that makes one silently sob behind their hands. But one night, when I was 21, that’s what I did. I started crying and I just couldn’t stop. I wasn’t making any noise. I don’t think anyone even really noticed at first. But I just could. not. stop leaking water from my eyes. I wasn’t really sad about anything in particular; I was sad about everything. And at this point it had been about six months since I’d been able to cry, so this one night I just couldn’t stop. I had friends in the class, and someone had to drive me home because the leaking would not stop.
Over time, and because of an abusive relationship that made me cry a whole fucking lot, I eventually regained the use of my tear ducts. But because my ex was so awful, I stopped fighting back because I’d learned it didn’t do a whole lot of good. The times I did strike out, it was mostly physical. He got in my face one day, mocking me when I said “you won’t let me have any friends.” He said it back sneeringly, “you won’t let me have any friiieeends.” And I scratched his face so hard that he bled. Another time I whipped him in the face with my leather jacket when he had me cornered and was screaming at me. But I did not tend to yell. And when I hit him, he tended to stop. The day I made him bleed, he told his shocked coworkers “you didn’t hear what I said to her.” You’d think that would have made him reexamine his treatment of me, but it didn’t.
When my brother did the bad thing when I was 30, I didn’t yell back at him. I collapsed into a heap of tears, because I’d learned that’s what we do with abusers. We make ourselves at pathetic and small as possible so that maybe they’ll stop.
Anyway. I can yell now. I have regained that ability. But I usually have my temper under control, and I tend to write letters when I’m really pissed off. So I can yell, if I have to. I just can’t cry.
As I’ve said in previous posts, this year has been really damned hard for me. Health issues, family issues, work issues, oh my.
I can’t remember the last time I had a good cry. And holy hell, I need one.
I still feel like things are mostly good, or will be mostly good soon. My marriage is astonishingly stable. My cats are astonishingly cute. I’m pretty good at my job. The head injury is finally loosening its grip on my brain. I had oral surgery and was in pain for longer than seemed reasonable, but that’s getting better too. I have a little more energy now. I feel less defeated.
I don’t know why my tear factory laid off all its workers. I don’t know how I can be profoundly sad and not shed a single tear. I well up sometimes, but my cheeks stay dry.
I feel emotionally constipated. This is not my usual state. Maybe it’s because of the vast number of pills I have to take to be a functional adult. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up. I don’t know.
I don’t have a good ending for this. It’s just on my mind today.
Song in title is from a musical called Brownstone, but I’m familiar with it from Bette Midler’s cover.
In 2016, I got a temp job working for the Bureau of Labor and Industries. I worked front desk there for about six months. During my time there, I met Amanda, who first got my attention because she wore amazing lipstick. I decided I would be her friend. We both moved on from BOLI pretty quickly, and once we were both out, I invited her to lunch.
Because I’ve had some bad luck with friends in the past, I made it a point not to put much pressure on the relationship. We hung out about every six months; we would shop at the MAC counter and/or go to lunch. It worked. It was simple. I’d made a friend. She came to my parties and bought us towels for our housewarming a couple years back.
Last year, I got married. My husband and I had a simple, Dude-ist ceremony officiated by our friend, Jordan. We needed witnesses, so I asked Amanda. She came with her husband. And she decided her gift to me would be personal training sessions, because that’s what she does now.
We met for sessions a few times, and then Covid happened. We resumed in the summer, masked and distanced. When cases started going up again, we put the sessions on hold. And then we started meeting about once every week or so on my lunch breaks downtown, just to chat and get some (masked, distanced) social time.
Around Christmas, Amanda stopped texting me back as often. I noticed. I brought it up to my husband, and he said “Maybe she’s busy. Don’t think too much of it.” So I tried not to.
But in the past couple of months, I couldn’t shake the feeling. She’d respond to messages eventually, but she wasn’t volunteering anything. She wasn’t asking to meet up, and she wasn’t initiating conversations. Last week I was pretty worried about it, and so My husband said I should message her. I did. She responded. It seemed fine.
But I still couldn’t shake the feeling. So this morning I sent what was intended to be a lighthearted message, and I got the response you see above.
When I was in California from 2010-2012, I had two parties at my Mom’s, where I was living. Both of them were very well-attended. At the second one, a few people came up to me to tell me that I had awesome friends and sure knew how to throw a party. There are people from that time whom I still talk to, which is nice. But none of them live close by. And I’ve fallen out of touch with most of them. I’ve been written off by a few of them, too.
The past eight years have been awful for friendships. In March, 2013, my sister-in-law (who was also one of my best friends,) cut me off very suddenly and said a bunch of terrible things to me while doing it. We were living together at the time, so I moved out as quickly as I could. My brother also stopped talking to me for awhile, but I’d gotten pretty used to that by that point.
In May 2013, I moved in with my friend Dee, which was pretty much a disaster. I couldn’t keep a job, and I had trouble paying rent. In August of 2013, one of her friends said he’d replace my brakes and I’d only have to pay for the parts. I drove over to where he lived, and as soon as he got the wheels off my car, he started trying to extort more money from me. On the way to the ATM so I could take out cash to pay for the new brakes, he told me that someone had once refused to pay him for his work, and he’d cut that person’s brake line. I was freaked out. I gave him another $40, which I had to call my mother to have her send to me. He wanted an extra $200 or so. Over the next few weeks, he kept trying to intimidate me into giving him more money. I refused. And on Friday, September 13th, my brakes failed on the highway at 50mph, and I steered my car into a ditch so as not to hit anyone else. I’m pretty sure that this friend-of-a-friend tried to murder me. I was lucky that my only injuries were from trying to get out of the car, which had flipped onto the driver’s side. Love that Volvo engineering.
(Dee treated me like I was crazy for thinking her friend had tried to kill me, even when I told her he’d bragged about doing it before. When I confronted him about it a few years later, right in front of Dee, he said “I don’t want to talk about that.” Apparently that didn’t make much of an impression on her, either.)
Eleven days after the car accident, on September 24th, I lost my job, and on the 25th I checked myself into a psych facility because all I wanted to do was die. I spent the next few months in a hell of unemployment and (catastrophically) failed medications.
In January, 2014, Dee kicked me out. Someone else took me in. That was a disaster, too.
I hooked up with my husband in July, 2014, and we’ve pretty much lived together ever since. My housing is finally stable, but I haven’t really succeeded in making new friends. Some of his friends like me. But if we got a divorce, he’d get them in the split.
Amanda was the first person in a long time I’d made friends with all on my own.
My heart is broken. I’ve spent the past hour or so googling “why don’t people like me” and “how to make friends.” It’s pathetic.
I know that there are parts of me that could use a bit of a polish. I tend to talk too much when I’m nervous, and I’m almost always nervous. When people tell stories I have a tendency to say ME TOO and then elaborate, and some people feel like I’m one-upping or talking over them. I’m working on that. My humor can be abrasive, but I’ve toned it way back. Former coworkers who I considered friends dropped me without telling me why. I feel unlovable. I don’t trust anyone not to turn their back on me or ghost me, because it’s happened so many times now.
Last week I told my husband that there’s a voice in my head that says “nobody likes you, and they’re right.”
Ten years ago I was a fucking disaster of a human being. Holy Moly.
But I feel such sympathy for that fucking disaster of a human being. I didn’t know yet. I just didn’t know. I hadn’t been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and wouldn’t be for three and a half more years. That diagnosis was like a magic lens that make all the fucked up shit pop into focus.
I even wrote about how I’d get hooked on people and not be able to let go. I wondered why I was built that way. I obsessed for yeeeeeeeaaaaaarrrrrrrrsssss about poor, poor K who was, yes, kind of a dick sometimes, but did NOT DESERVE years of fucking birthday emailsfrom me in addition to me joining a Meetup group because he and his wife were in it. Even before I knew what flavor of crazy I was being, I should have known that I was being a creepy fucking stalker.
OOPSIE.
I was so angry at anyone who didn’t love me back the way I thought I deserved to be loved. I thought I was special and everyone else was cold and shut off. Turns out I was, like, super mentally ill. My shrink says all of those things can be true, I’m a special feelings princess, other people are cold and detached, and oh yeah I’m also like super mentally ill.
I see my BPD as being in remission. Like cancer. Like you gotta keep an eye on it and keep seeing your medical professionals on the regular, but you are not actively growing tumors or bleeding into your brain or anything. Woo hoo.
But there are nights like tonight when I feel nostalgia like indigestion in my gut, when certain songs bring back certain people. The only girl I’ve ever loved is a prostitute in Tucson now. The boy who went on vacation and never came back but didn’t ever tell me we’d broken up. My high school sweetheart who got married again and isn’t speaking to me again probably because his wife doesn’t want him to. Fucking Bruce who hasn’t talked to me since I told him that I didn’t really want to hear about his wet dreams through the medium of text message. And so on, and so on. My ghosts.
To paraphrase the late, great Carrie Fisher: Nothing’s ever really over. Just over there.
I turned 35 two days ago. I was pretty freaked-out by that number, but I’m feeling okay about it now. I still feel about 16, deep down. I’m trying to treat this birthday like a New Year, in that I’m making resolutions and trying to just… make my life better. You know?
It’s been months and months of sitting on my ass, feeling decrepit and sorry for myself, and I’m sick of it. I’m not back to 100% and there are things I can’t reasonably do, but there are a lot of things I can do and should at least try.
So I’m visiting doctors to try to get better, and taking my pills to try to stay sane, and I still feel like crap and kind of like dying, but there’s hope here as well, and that’s keeping me going.
When I turned 30, I freaked the hell out. I’m glad I’m not doing that now. Getting older is so weird. I don’t feel different, except in the ways that I do. Older, wiser maybe, a lot more exhausted. Today I’m swinging between panic and excitement.
So this post is just checking in, I guess. Hello, Internet. I’m still here.
Self-Indulgent Drivel 