Mise à jour D'Octobre
So, yeah. Um, sorry I haven't been around much. What with the moving and the working and the garage sale-ing and the painting of the bedroom and the rearranging and the not having access to my sweet blogging crack at work, I just haven't been able to get over here and write. Yeah, yeah, I'm at work right now. It's ten after seven (YAY FOR REGULAR OLD PLAIN REGULAR TIME, NOT DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME SUCK SUCK SUCK) and slow, and I have decided I'll just email my entries to myself at home and post them there. I used to blog from here Every. Single. Day. It's like they've taken away my left hand. I didn't really pay attention to how awesome it was until it was gone. GONE. <> And I can't even get access to an online dictionary now. I can go to News 8 Austin (link, for those of you who are curious) and I can go to yellowpages dot com, and the company website (clubcorp dot com, and no, I am not going to link to it)--but,interestingly (or stupidly--you choose), I can't go to some of the links on the company page. I get a big ACCESS DENIED pop up, like I am trying to follow a link to golf-resort-related porn or something. The front desk girl kills me, she had the language on her ACCESS DENIED page changed to French,and so now it screams ACCÈS REFUSÉ, which we find rather disturbingly funny, so I did the same thing. Here, I'll include a screenshot for your amusement:
Yes, I just typed in google. It was fastest.
I can't go anywhere online. Not to educational websites, nothing. NOTHING.
*weeps*
I have decided that, in order to possibly circumvent the miasma of gossip that surrounds me, I will write a monthly update. It may be Norbert-related, it may not--but it usually will be, I would imagine. You have to sign up with Vox to comment, but if you don't want to do that and you want to comment, feel free to send me an email (lorilizbeth@gmail.com). You can also absolutely use my real name address if you'd like, and you have it--it would actually be quicker.
There are, of course, certain things that I don't want to share with just everybody, so they'll stay on the private side of this diary, where only those who 1) signed up with Vox, and 2) I chose to add to my neighborhood, can read about. Sorry, but I can't go baring my soul to everyone in the world. That's what best friends and therapists are for. Also, there are people, even in my family, who might make fun of my condition in some way, or otherwise be an asshole about it, and therefore I must keep some things just for the eyes of those I know won't hurt me or use it against me. Then there's those who will worry obsessively, and I'd rather not add to their burden(s).
Anyway. On to October!
This has been an interesting month in terms of Norbert (for those of you who don't know, Norbert is the name of my Brain Issues). I was re-hired at Barton Creek on October fifth and have been working steadily ever since. It didn't take long for me to get back into the groove. I am struck constantly by the change in myself since I last worked here. July of 2004--I had signed a contract with the school district that would shortly make going to work as fun as walking on red hot nails, pointy side up. I was Burned Out from being a hotel operator--I'd done it full- and part-time for exactly nine years, as well as attending college and attempting to hold a relationship together. I was a college graduate! I graduated with HONORS! I had a New Job--a Real Job! Pfft on all this filing and rolling towels and dealing with Rich People Crap! I was a TEACHER! I was TOO GOOD FOR THIS JOB.
Ahhhhh...hubris. Ye are a bitch.
I have since learned, and learned well, that I am not "too good" for anything. I also learned I am not cut out to be a teacher. I thought it was a gentle profession. I had it candy-coated and dipped in chocolate with sprinkles, and it came after me with thumbscrews. Not to be melodramatic or maudlin or anything, but I will never be the same. I never, ever want to teach again--I hated everything about it but the kids themselves. I hated the long hours, the constant standing, the making sure the children didn't color/paint/spit/pee on each other, the children who brought in cigarettes and beer bottle openers, the art shows, the decorating the hallways, the demands on the weekends, the agony of worry about children who didn't have food or beds or adequate clothing or parents who gave two shits about them. Add to this mix a principal who seemed hell-bent on driving me to suicide and my own tendencies toward believing I am
worthless and hopeless, and you have a recipe for Girl, Interrupted.
Most of you know that, along with the rest of the story: that I went to work for the Gestapo, after three months of being Without Paycheck and complete reliance on my parents, at thirty years old. Recovering from the worst physical injury of my life, then being faced with the aftermath of the worst emotional/mental injury. Trying so hard to slog through it, but working at a place where I dealt with people who were dying, fighting a terminal illness, or experiencing the death/terminal illness of a loved one made it worse. I was so grateful for that job, despite it all. I was grateful to be away from Tomball, grateful to be responsible for nobody's actions but my own, grateful...grateful. I had a breakdown--I have not called it that before, but I am now seeing it for what it was: a breakdown--and I sought help out of horror and desperation. Even now, that mean voice in my brain whispers to me that it wasn't that bad, you are blowing it out of proportion, nobody cares that you were unhappy (and that's all it was, you were just unhappy, because you are self-absorbed and spoiled), and nobody cares that you are unhappy now; plus, they all think you're weak. And you are, you're weak. You need to get over yourself. You need to buck up, snap out of it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Just get over it already, they're all sick of it and they're sick of you and your incessant whining.
I fight with that voice, because...I have no bootstraps. I can't snap out of it, it's like fighting my way out of the middle of a tangle of rusty barbed wire without getting completely torn up in the process...and the antidepressant is the tetanus shot that might prevent my death but will not prevent the scary wounds and bleeding. I've said this before. I have to
keep saying it because it's true, and the second I start believing that voice I will be in Shoal Creek or dead. As it is now, if I cannot fight it hard enough, the hopeless, worthless feelings come rushing to the surface and I wonder why I even try to keep living, because oh, God, it's such a struggle.
I was feeling a little better after I started therapy and got myself under the care of a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with a multitude of disorders, the collection of which y'all know I have since named Norbert. I was so, so happy to have the diagnoses...because that meant I wasn't making it all up. It was PROOF that I wasn't just a crybaby--I am seriously, scarily depressed. (I knew I had "depression," a vague, trendy-type condition which made me a qualified member of the Prozac Nation, but I didn't know how serious it was.) Severely anxious. I have ADD and social phobia. And a going-away present from my former principal was my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of which I am strangely, morbidly proud, because that means YES IT WAS TOO THAT BAD, YES IT WAS. I was so relieved when the psychiatrist told me I had all this that I cried. It meant I was right. I was sick, I wasn't imagining all the shit that was happening in my head and to my body.
In a fit of honesty, because I had missed so much work and I felt my supervisor deserved an explanation--and to know, should there be future absences, why I was gone--I told her about Norbert. Two weeks later, while she was off for the day, I was called into her boss's office, where he and HIS boss waited for me. I was then told I had routinely (compulsively) misused a phone line and was unceremoniously dismissed.
Right now, I'm fighting with that voice that insists I am whining. It's not that bad. Right? Yet, writing this down, I am taking myself into a bad place. So I need to back up...climb out of this and go back to the Happy, to the Content.
I'm transitioning between antidepressants right now. That could explain why writing about all this shit just made me hit the wall. Damn.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
So I've been on Zoloft since mid-August and it wasn't doing the trick. I mean, I wasn't suicidal except for a couple of times--the day I was "dismissed" and the day my dad inadvertently made things worse while trying to make them better. That's partially why I'm talking about this now...I want y'all to KNOW--especially those of you who don't have a Norbert of your own. You can't possibly understand, and it's not your fault that you can't. In fact, thank GOD that you can't. I wish nobody knew what this is like, including me. I think about my grandmother--my mother's mother--who handed me this legacy, and how she lived her whole life with what amounts to a fire-breathing dragon in her brain, and she did not have access to the soothing effects of psychotropic drugs and therapy. My mom says she prayed a lot. I guess that kept her alive. I couldn't do it. Praying helps, for sure. I would have given up a long time ago if I didn't have my faith...but I think that God brought along these amazing, unbelievably intelligent people who found out why this happens and mixed up these little potions to help. They aren't cures, but they do help. My heart bleeds for my grandmother when I think of what she must have gone through. But like I was saying--you need to know, if you don't have what I have, that I am broken. And if you care about me, even a little bit, at all, you can't treat me like you treat normal people...you just can't. Something you say that seems totally innocuous to you can make me want to die.
Now. I promised my mom I will be okay. As long as my parents are alive I think I will make it. I can't promise anything after that, unless they find a cure for this. So while I won't die by my own hand during my parents' lifetime, it doesn't mean I won't want to. It doesn't mean that a careless comment won't cause me unbelievable pain. It doesn't mean that if, for example, you have Issues of Your Own and you tell your child that I am fat because I eat too much junk and she then innocently asks me, "Lori, why are you fat? Is it because you eat too much junk?" and I manage to think of some answer that will make sense to her, I won't cry my eyes out later and want to throttle you for the next five hundred and sixty two years. YOU DON'T KNOW WHY I AM FAT, BITCH. And you don't know what I live with. You're only skinny because you starve yourself and throw up--inside of you lurks a woman way fatter than I will ever be. You can go to hell--I hope that while you're purging, you choke on it.
Wow. Rage. Okay.
(And yeah. The aforementioned "hypothetical" situation? Wasn't so hypothetical.)
Anyway. Just...be gentle. Please.
Hi! Lori is Crazy! News at Eleven.
Breathe. Wooooo...deep breaths.
Gee, I have digressed a bit. Where was I? Oh yeah. My psychiatrist didn't want to switch me off of Zoloft...I think he owns stock in the company or something. So now I'm weaning off of it and going on Cymbalta, which is like Effexor but is not so plagued with side-effects. He did admit, rather reluctantly, that it is an excellent antidepressant. So we are going to see how this goes. I think I'm going to switch to Katherine's psychiatrist, who apparently doesn't own stock in Zoloft and isn't on the Board of Directors for Humana, and see what she has to offer me. Honestly, I trust Katherine's judgment in this, because I had my first session with her therapist last...Thursday?...and I LOVED her. She GOT it. I see her again this Friday, and it's the first time I've ever actually looked forward to therapy.
I am amused that two years ago I thought I was "too good," "too educated," too whatever for this job. I am struck by how unbelievably glad I am to be back in a place that is so familiar, so homey to me. I get up every morning and I go to work and I don't dread it. With both the school and the Gestapo, the dread suffocated me. I hated going to work. School was worse, but the constant monitoring and critiquing and micromanaging, not to mention the cameras in the ceiling and the program innocently called eTalk which recorded your calls--supposedly without you knowing (but I figured out how to know)--and you've got the same stress level as school, just without the principal and the large groups of pre-teenagers.
Right now, this job is exactly what I need. It's a place to heal. Funny how life works.
This has ended up being kind of a synopsis of the past three years rather than an October recap, but now you know. And I'll continue recapping every month from November on.
Yes, I just typed in google. It was fastest.
I can't go anywhere online. Not to educational websites, nothing. NOTHING.
*weeps*
I have decided that, in order to possibly circumvent the miasma of gossip that surrounds me, I will write a monthly update. It may be Norbert-related, it may not--but it usually will be, I would imagine. You have to sign up with Vox to comment, but if you don't want to do that and you want to comment, feel free to send me an email (lorilizbeth@gmail.com). You can also absolutely use my real name address if you'd like, and you have it--it would actually be quicker.
There are, of course, certain things that I don't want to share with just everybody, so they'll stay on the private side of this diary, where only those who 1) signed up with Vox, and 2) I chose to add to my neighborhood, can read about. Sorry, but I can't go baring my soul to everyone in the world. That's what best friends and therapists are for. Also, there are people, even in my family, who might make fun of my condition in some way, or otherwise be an asshole about it, and therefore I must keep some things just for the eyes of those I know won't hurt me or use it against me. Then there's those who will worry obsessively, and I'd rather not add to their burden(s).
Anyway. On to October!
This has been an interesting month in terms of Norbert (for those of you who don't know, Norbert is the name of my Brain Issues). I was re-hired at Barton Creek on October fifth and have been working steadily ever since. It didn't take long for me to get back into the groove. I am struck constantly by the change in myself since I last worked here. July of 2004--I had signed a contract with the school district that would shortly make going to work as fun as walking on red hot nails, pointy side up. I was Burned Out from being a hotel operator--I'd done it full- and part-time for exactly nine years, as well as attending college and attempting to hold a relationship together. I was a college graduate! I graduated with HONORS! I had a New Job--a Real Job! Pfft on all this filing and rolling towels and dealing with Rich People Crap! I was a TEACHER! I was TOO GOOD FOR THIS JOB.
Ahhhhh...hubris. Ye are a bitch.
I have since learned, and learned well, that I am not "too good" for anything. I also learned I am not cut out to be a teacher. I thought it was a gentle profession. I had it candy-coated and dipped in chocolate with sprinkles, and it came after me with thumbscrews. Not to be melodramatic or maudlin or anything, but I will never be the same. I never, ever want to teach again--I hated everything about it but the kids themselves. I hated the long hours, the constant standing, the making sure the children didn't color/paint/spit/pee on each other, the children who brought in cigarettes and beer bottle openers, the art shows, the decorating the hallways, the demands on the weekends, the agony of worry about children who didn't have food or beds or adequate clothing or parents who gave two shits about them. Add to this mix a principal who seemed hell-bent on driving me to suicide and my own tendencies toward believing I am
worthless and hopeless, and you have a recipe for Girl, Interrupted.
Most of you know that, along with the rest of the story: that I went to work for the Gestapo, after three months of being Without Paycheck and complete reliance on my parents, at thirty years old. Recovering from the worst physical injury of my life, then being faced with the aftermath of the worst emotional/mental injury. Trying so hard to slog through it, but working at a place where I dealt with people who were dying, fighting a terminal illness, or experiencing the death/terminal illness of a loved one made it worse. I was so grateful for that job, despite it all. I was grateful to be away from Tomball, grateful to be responsible for nobody's actions but my own, grateful...grateful. I had a breakdown--I have not called it that before, but I am now seeing it for what it was: a breakdown--and I sought help out of horror and desperation. Even now, that mean voice in my brain whispers to me that it wasn't that bad, you are blowing it out of proportion, nobody cares that you were unhappy (and that's all it was, you were just unhappy, because you are self-absorbed and spoiled), and nobody cares that you are unhappy now; plus, they all think you're weak. And you are, you're weak. You need to get over yourself. You need to buck up, snap out of it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Just get over it already, they're all sick of it and they're sick of you and your incessant whining.
I fight with that voice, because...I have no bootstraps. I can't snap out of it, it's like fighting my way out of the middle of a tangle of rusty barbed wire without getting completely torn up in the process...and the antidepressant is the tetanus shot that might prevent my death but will not prevent the scary wounds and bleeding. I've said this before. I have to
keep saying it because it's true, and the second I start believing that voice I will be in Shoal Creek or dead. As it is now, if I cannot fight it hard enough, the hopeless, worthless feelings come rushing to the surface and I wonder why I even try to keep living, because oh, God, it's such a struggle.
I was feeling a little better after I started therapy and got myself under the care of a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with a multitude of disorders, the collection of which y'all know I have since named Norbert. I was so, so happy to have the diagnoses...because that meant I wasn't making it all up. It was PROOF that I wasn't just a crybaby--I am seriously, scarily depressed. (I knew I had "depression," a vague, trendy-type condition which made me a qualified member of the Prozac Nation, but I didn't know how serious it was.) Severely anxious. I have ADD and social phobia. And a going-away present from my former principal was my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of which I am strangely, morbidly proud, because that means YES IT WAS TOO THAT BAD, YES IT WAS. I was so relieved when the psychiatrist told me I had all this that I cried. It meant I was right. I was sick, I wasn't imagining all the shit that was happening in my head and to my body.
In a fit of honesty, because I had missed so much work and I felt my supervisor deserved an explanation--and to know, should there be future absences, why I was gone--I told her about Norbert. Two weeks later, while she was off for the day, I was called into her boss's office, where he and HIS boss waited for me. I was then told I had routinely (compulsively) misused a phone line and was unceremoniously dismissed.
Right now, I'm fighting with that voice that insists I am whining. It's not that bad. Right? Yet, writing this down, I am taking myself into a bad place. So I need to back up...climb out of this and go back to the Happy, to the Content.
I'm transitioning between antidepressants right now. That could explain why writing about all this shit just made me hit the wall. Damn.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
So I've been on Zoloft since mid-August and it wasn't doing the trick. I mean, I wasn't suicidal except for a couple of times--the day I was "dismissed" and the day my dad inadvertently made things worse while trying to make them better. That's partially why I'm talking about this now...I want y'all to KNOW--especially those of you who don't have a Norbert of your own. You can't possibly understand, and it's not your fault that you can't. In fact, thank GOD that you can't. I wish nobody knew what this is like, including me. I think about my grandmother--my mother's mother--who handed me this legacy, and how she lived her whole life with what amounts to a fire-breathing dragon in her brain, and she did not have access to the soothing effects of psychotropic drugs and therapy. My mom says she prayed a lot. I guess that kept her alive. I couldn't do it. Praying helps, for sure. I would have given up a long time ago if I didn't have my faith...but I think that God brought along these amazing, unbelievably intelligent people who found out why this happens and mixed up these little potions to help. They aren't cures, but they do help. My heart bleeds for my grandmother when I think of what she must have gone through. But like I was saying--you need to know, if you don't have what I have, that I am broken. And if you care about me, even a little bit, at all, you can't treat me like you treat normal people...you just can't. Something you say that seems totally innocuous to you can make me want to die.
Now. I promised my mom I will be okay. As long as my parents are alive I think I will make it. I can't promise anything after that, unless they find a cure for this. So while I won't die by my own hand during my parents' lifetime, it doesn't mean I won't want to. It doesn't mean that a careless comment won't cause me unbelievable pain. It doesn't mean that if, for example, you have Issues of Your Own and you tell your child that I am fat because I eat too much junk and she then innocently asks me, "Lori, why are you fat? Is it because you eat too much junk?" and I manage to think of some answer that will make sense to her, I won't cry my eyes out later and want to throttle you for the next five hundred and sixty two years. YOU DON'T KNOW WHY I AM FAT, BITCH. And you don't know what I live with. You're only skinny because you starve yourself and throw up--inside of you lurks a woman way fatter than I will ever be. You can go to hell--I hope that while you're purging, you choke on it.
Wow. Rage. Okay.
(And yeah. The aforementioned "hypothetical" situation? Wasn't so hypothetical.)
Anyway. Just...be gentle. Please.
Hi! Lori is Crazy! News at Eleven.
Breathe. Wooooo...deep breaths.
Gee, I have digressed a bit. Where was I? Oh yeah. My psychiatrist didn't want to switch me off of Zoloft...I think he owns stock in the company or something. So now I'm weaning off of it and going on Cymbalta, which is like Effexor but is not so plagued with side-effects. He did admit, rather reluctantly, that it is an excellent antidepressant. So we are going to see how this goes. I think I'm going to switch to Katherine's psychiatrist, who apparently doesn't own stock in Zoloft and isn't on the Board of Directors for Humana, and see what she has to offer me. Honestly, I trust Katherine's judgment in this, because I had my first session with her therapist last...Thursday?...and I LOVED her. She GOT it. I see her again this Friday, and it's the first time I've ever actually looked forward to therapy.
I am amused that two years ago I thought I was "too good," "too educated," too whatever for this job. I am struck by how unbelievably glad I am to be back in a place that is so familiar, so homey to me. I get up every morning and I go to work and I don't dread it. With both the school and the Gestapo, the dread suffocated me. I hated going to work. School was worse, but the constant monitoring and critiquing and micromanaging, not to mention the cameras in the ceiling and the program innocently called eTalk which recorded your calls--supposedly without you knowing (but I figured out how to know)--and you've got the same stress level as school, just without the principal and the large groups of pre-teenagers.
Right now, this job is exactly what I need. It's a place to heal. Funny how life works.
This has ended up being kind of a synopsis of the past three years rather than an October recap, but now you know. And I'll continue recapping every month from November on.
posted by Lori at
5:22 PM
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