Endurance.

I keep revisiting the most basic advice of my therapist: think about what is bothering you. Think about what you can change. Make those changes.

Some of them of course, I can't make right away. After acknowledging and mourning that reality, I'm feeling more productive. My mind is actively churning. I feel a glimmer of nameless hope. A glimmer, but that's enough to keep my mind busy.

I also spent an entire evening alone last night...and have spent all of this afternoon and evening so far alone as well. And it feels: GOOD.

As I think of things that, when the time is right, I can change, I begin to feel free. I lighten a bit. I feel my endurance increase. My clarity on my own needs increases, slightly...I need more time either alone, or with the healthier people in my world. I need privacy.  I need some quiet. I need to reaffirm permission to give myself what I need. Well alllllrighty then!

I have been spending the majority of my time in direct contact with some extremely noxious energy, and I have allowed that noxious energy to invade my emotional landscape, and spur me to doubt myself.

Still thinking on that one...and thinking about how I'm not really stuck...but I do need to hang on a little longer, and I'm allowed to dream while I do it.

...okay fine, I'm depressed.

With depression, come my attempts to add levity to the situation. I know I wrote once that depression jokes aren't funny, but sometimes depression induced thinking or situations are.

Exhibit A: Yesterday at my therapist's office I spent several minutes trying to determine what grade of depression I was experiencing. I realized that I was just miserable, but not suicidal, and that I just don't know if it's situational, or if my body chemistry is just out of whack...or both. So I told my therapist that it wasn't so much that I don't see the point of living, but that I don't see the point of life. That's often a good indicator for me of whether or not I'm depressed and to what degree. I always have a little voice in the back of my head that finds life in general odd and sometimes a little pointless, but when I'm not depressed, it's a small voice, and it's generally outweighed by the fact that I don't actually care what the point IS. I am engaged in the adventure enough to just let the question slide.

When I'm depressed, the voice becomes larger and everything looks stark. If it happens in the fall or winter, when everything is dead or dying in my landscape, the point is only driven home harder and it feeds my morose thinking like a bellows. The voice starts saying things like "Jesus Christ. Why the fuck do people even bother to reproduce...we're just creating more people who will grow up and realize that life is pointless and they'll be miserable.". Or Peggy Lee invades my mental soundtrack...asking the question "Is That All There Is?":

Is that all there is?

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing.

Let's break out the booze and have a ball, if that's all there is.

If you know the song, you know that she's not actually suggesting that the dancing or the booze will improve the situation. But you also know, that the song is hilarious. Because depressed thinking is so absurd sometimes, that it's funny shit. At the end, she muses on the possibility that people might wonder why she doesn't just end it all and she says:

Oh no...I'm not ready for that final disappointment.

Classic.

Clearly, sometimes when you're depressed you still have a sense of humor. Exhibit B: My sister telling a story yesterday about a dominatrix in her class at pastry school, who a) is not a very pleasant person and is sexually invasive even in ordinary daily situations but who also b) looks like Peggy from King of the Hill if Peggy was a man. With eyebrows fully plucked out and drawn back on in...magenta. My sister has taken to calling her: Peggy Steve. Everytime I read the name "Peggy Steve" I just about die laughing (including as I'm trying to type this). It's not because I like to make fun of sexually ambiguous people, but a cumulative effect of the whole story, and my sister's dry Peggy Lee-ish delivery.

So what have we learned here...

1) I'm genuinely depressed but

2) People named Peggy apparently have the ability to throw me into hysterics, even when I'm depressed.

3) I really hope I'm not depressed like this for much longer because I'm really tired of thinking so hard about the meaning of life.

Ima go listen to more Peggy Lee while I attempt to seem "normal" and "socially appropriate".

Micro-urban renewal

I am absolutely on the verge of some really amazing things but I'll be damned if I have the patience to wait out the psycho crap in the meantime that I have to wait out.

Ever feel like your patience is stretched thinner than a...okay I can't come up with any comparisons there that aren't potentially offensive on at least two levels so let's just say my patience is stretched much further than I thought it capable of, and yet I know I have to hold on just a little longer for my own best interests and for my family's best interests.

Ever been there?

An argument in favor of daily pill reminders...

...oy.

So my lack of sleep and stress level got the better of me as of yesterday. At the end of the work day, I walked directly home, and I took a whole ativan tablet. I never do that, but I needed nothing more than to sleep. The rest of the evening is a nice, relaxed blur. Unfortunately when I woke this morning, I had no recollection of if I had taken my nortriptyline.

I took my normal dosage this morning.

And then found out the hard way that I HAD already taken it the night before. The most prominent sign was that it made me EXTREMELY drowsy...to the point where I had to leave my weekly event in the middle of the day and I went home and zonked out for four hours. It took nearly two hours to wake back up, and even afterward I was grrrrroggy. Talked to a friend this afternoon and told her how drowsy I was...she said "well you texted me last night and told me you had just taken it". Ha. Didn't remember that either.

Oops.

I have a pill keeper with the days of the week market on it, but I lost track of it (I'm not sure when). Time to find it - and I highly recommend them to others. With so many details in life to keep track of, why tempt fate?

One big exercise in humility...

Have you ever felt like you needed something to keep you humble? Something to make you realize that you are fallible, human, fragile and imperfect? Let me suggest blogging. Some would argue that bloggers are self-absorbed and a little full of themselves, posting to jerk themselves off and because they really think their words are tres importante.

Few things in my life have ever made me feel less "important". Less "all-knowing". And more human. Than going back and reading my posts from earlier in the week...like yesterday's.

Here at 18 Channels I try to capture the honest day to day experience of living with ADHD as an adult. A lot of moments in my life and the life of my family are hilarious, kooky and fun...but then there's days like yesterday. Yesterday I was nearly eaten live by depression and impatience - by a pile of completely understandable concerns that had taken me apart in pieces, one cell at a time, deconstructed me to the point that at the end of my workday, I no longer recognized myself.

I called and left a message for my prescriber and said my medication wasn't doing shit (in the nicest possible way). I called and left a message for my therapist. I can't tell you how glad I am that the therapist was the one that got to me first.

My therapist really is great. I've been seeing her long enough now that we really have a common language for framing my world and I appreciate that. When I talked to her yesterday I said "for the past year and a half life has been so overwhelming...first I'm depressed, then I'm disabled, then I have a little renaissance and feel better but now I'm anxious, then I'm depressed again, I'm tired of being unhappy and I'm just exhausted and I'm sick of feeling this way".

She said "what can you change"...then "how can you change it".

I know the answers to these questions. I ALWAYS have the power to change my life in any way that I wish. Always. I realize that not everyone is that lucky. Some people have more permanent factors to contend with...but all of us always have choices. So she asked me what I can change, and to identify ways to change it. Of course right now, there are things I cannot change right away. That's the wall I'm up against at the moment.

"Then you have to file it away in your radical acceptance folder."

Sigh. This is nothing new. But she was right. I had to. And at this point it's a matter of survival. I cannot function if I continue to let these things eat away at me. My choice is continue to be miserable, or work to file these things away until they can be handled in another way. Patience of this type has NEVER been easy for me.

Have I blogged about radical acceptance? Probably. It's worth a brief revisit...radical acceptance is the kind of acceptance you have to employ when logic and desire will not get you what you want. It's perfect for all of the unwinnables in life. Crazy parents? They'll always be crazy. Health issue that drives you nuts? Radically accept it. Work with an asshole but can't quit your job? Radically accept that you are choosing to do what's best for you by putting up with that bullshit just a little longer. Have ADHD? Quit beating yourself up. Radically accept it and move on.

In my experience, radical acceptance can be a very rich experience...it can feel freeing or it can feel awkward...or it can feel bittersweet. Right now, it feels freeing AND bittersweet. I have a pile of crap driving me crazy that I have to accept or I will lose my mind. But I have that choice available to me, the choice to file it away for a bit. Something about that felt better than letting it continue to drive me crazy. I'm still sad...I'm still frustrated. I'm still dissatisfied...but I am choosing radical acceptance...which then makes it a little easier to see the small sparks of "fight" that I have left (and to then seek ways to feed those sparks). It also helps me step outside of my misery for a moment to see that I was brought to this moment by choices that I MADE. And that those choices were actually really good ones that made a lot of sense.

At that point in the day I still had several hours left in my work day...we had a night-time show coming in. It just so happened that this show featured a band that is really emblematic of everything I love about the music that I love...they're legendary, truly. So I got to enjoy an amazing night of music that triggered all the good stuff in me...that really fed my soul. It breathed a little life back in me.

I am still hovering in a cloud of bittersweet mist but I can hover here a little longer. I'm not asking for my meds to be changed right now. I turned down a beer last night when offered. I didn't sleep any better but hey, what's new. I DID get to climb in bed with my lovely husband, lay there in a warm, safe house, and breathe.

And I wrote it all down in a blog post so I can go back and read it later, and remember how imperfect I really am, but that it's okay.

This is when you know it's time to call your prescriber...

For the last few several months I have come more and more to rely on alcohol to make me feel...not even good, just more sane, slightly closer to able to "deal". It's like this...I go to work and barely function...and then I go home and drink a beer to make reality more palatable. Nothing really excites me anymore. I had a little spurt of enthusiasm at the beginning of the summer but it's clearly expired.

Then last week I didn't want to eat. I thought it was because of an antibiotic I was taking. But...no. This week it's evolved. I feel a little darker. Like a cloud rolled in. And the self-medication has evolved too. At least it's delicious. Yesterday I chugged a large order of hot and sour soup at my desk (crap, just talking about me makes me NEED IT) and just now I trucked over to the gas station to grab a container of the best fucking Ben and Jerry's I've ever had in my life (Bonaroo Buzz...I can't even tell you what's in it because I'll go get what little is left and finish it). Then I go home and chug a beer.

Aside from that I have no appetite at all.

I feel no joy.

I have zero optimism. I actually keep trying to think of "fun" things to write about but...meh.

I know to a lot of people a beer or two doesn't seem like a lot but I'm an extreme lightweight that actually gets a buzz off a half a beer.

I know my prescriber would have been telling me to take an ativan but I know that you shouldn't take that every day either. If you feel like you need to, something is clearly wrong.

And something really is clearly wrong.

I have been sort of ignoring it because I have genuine "socio-environmental challenges" right now and I've been patiently hoping they would evolve so that I could see if my dis-ease was related to that or related to body chemistry. Truly, I want to take some dynamite to my socio-environmental challenges...I need and deserve a break. But I don't have the luxury right now.

Am I sick? Is my environment sick? Yes to both. Is patience going to kill me? I'm starting to feel like it.

So...yesterday I went to a store that sells Happy Lites. Priced them. Not in the budget for the paycheck but my husband agrees it's worth the investment. And as soon as I'm done typing I'm going to call my prescriber.

Problem is, my anti-depressant (which clearly isn't doing shit for me) is also my migraine vertigo medication. If I stop taking it, I may very well lapse into disability.

Gah.

GAHHHHHHHHHHHH. But I'm making the call anyway.

Yeah so I wrote another post...

...but because I violated one of my own rules, I hid it. I didn't delete it. I put my conviction behind every word, and I really feel the way I do. Anyway, we don't need to get into it, but I violated one of my own rules. When a person reaches a certain point of frustration, it's hard not to sometimes.

Everything in my life right now requires extreme patience. Extreme for me in any case. I have pieces of everything that I can work on, but I ultimately have control over none of them. I just have to wait.

I think the house-buying was what tipped the scale just a little too far for me to handle with ease. Yes, we are working on buying a house. It's a lovely house. An old New England house with lots of cool retro features that we love. Buying it, because of its age, involves coordinating a bunch of contractors to come in and out and give us ginormous numbers that we're trying to finance along with the mortgage. Really, it's all in good shape but a few critical items could use an update...better to do it now than have the ancient furnace kick the bucket in New England in January!

You can't just let anxiety tell you "don't buy a house because it's too hard!". But it does feel like I took on another job on top of the two that I already have. On top of family life. On top of you know, every other damn shebang.

I guess the only thing to do is just keep working on the pieces. I don't anticipate enjoying it. But I'm going to keep working on it.

I talked to my therapist today and she said "remember you are not alone...other people feel these things too in these situations". I'll just go with that.