Springtime

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz ...

That can only mean it's time for me to start my yearly search for clothing that covers my entire body and yet keeps me cool. Easy, right? Why not! Especially since I live in the desert.

You see, I suffer from the worst of the worst case of vicious body image hatred imagineable. And because of this, I assume that everyone is a) looking at me, and b) feels the same way about me that I do.

It's an exhausting and interesting way to live, really. I spend hour upon hour finding just the right top, just the right pair of jeans. No pants shorter than calf-length, no matter HOW hot it gets. No shorts, ever. And shirts: nothing that shows any belly skin, nothing that is remotely see-through; no shirts with sleeves shorter than elbow-length. I will, however, wear shirts that emphasize my cleavage because that's what I consider my only positive point, aside from my feet. Oh, I do love to shop for shoes!

High heels, open toe, brightly coloured shoes! Soft leather, supple leather, patent leather, oh yes! And always with a wonderful pedicure, my one concession to an otherwise failing body: my feet look nice, and I'll aid them in any way I can. Besides, I figure they draw the eye away from my behind, which has burgeoned 30 pounds in 4 months ...

Goddamn seroquel. Goddamn Seroquel and the minions and monkeys who make it. It works, and I hate it. Some day I'll stop taking it and I'll be able to walk into a store and buy a regular, cute junior shirt, off the rack with cap sleeves and say FUCK YOU, Seroquel .... this one's for you.

Sorry, I Forgot ...

Just for fun, my body has taken me on a roller coaster ride for the past few weeks. You see, this is why I would never bother to pay for it: I get it for free. Well, not really free. A better description would be, I get the ride as a bonus with the medication I take.

On top of the normal side effects I used to have: fatigue, dopiness, moderate shaking and others I've described in earlier posts, I've now developed some that are so severe it makes me think I've got either Parkinson's or Multiple Sclerosis.

Maybe I do. Who knows? But we get to add so many mental issues to this.

I cannot carry a full cup of coffee anymore. Or soup. Or anything hot and dangerous. Or cold and messy. In the words of a dear friend, "watching me eat peas with a fork is hysterical". The more I try to hold something steady, the more I shake. It affects my typing as my thumb and forefinger seem to be the most affected, since they're the ones used the most. My left hand is shot to freakin' hell.

My energy level is down most days. Not all days, but some days, leading me to believe that this is a "down cycle", as my shrink has said. But who the hell knows? I'm on so many medications now that I have no idea who or what I've become, or who I used to be. I'm simply the sum of psychiatric medications. JUMP, Puppet, JUMP.

But worst of all is the mental effect it's had. I can no longer concentrate. My short term memory is shot. I don't remember things I've been told 30 minutes ago, or yesterday. I've been working on a website with a friend of mine. She'll explain to me how to do something, and ten minutes, have to explain it again. To her credit, she hasn't called me stupid or untrainable, but rather accepts my explanation that it's the drugs ...

When I was growing up, I learned to cook with the rest of the members of my family. Now, I can't remember recipes I cooked last week. Meals are becoming more and more mundane all the time. The simpler they are, the better. While I know he understands this, I still feel wretched having to explain this to a man who works and commutes 13 hour days and deserves oh-so-much better.

Going to a grocery store is just a nightmare. Why? Because I can't remember what I'm supposed to buy. Sure, a list would help, but I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT IS I SHOULD PUT ON THE LIST. And because I'm fatigued so often, by the time I should be cooking dinner, I'm too tired to put much effort into making it. How's THAT for a chronic Catch-22?

I don't know what to do. I need the meds because while all of these side effects are making me feel like a shadow of my former self, I also know that with a few brief episodes, I'm more stable now than I have been in months. But how bad does it have to get? Would it be better to simply give in to the up and down of mental illness, the depression, the anxiety, and deal with it episodically and regain some mental acuity, or stay on an even keel and feel like I'm 75 years old and well into my declining years, or suffering a debilitating illness? I don't know.

There are no easy answers. I no longer feel good about myself. Going out isn't fun for me, and in fact is terrifying. Unless I'm with my husband, I simply stay home. This isn't ME. At 45 years old, with a wonderful, loving husband, it's starting to feel as if life is winding down. What a waste.

The Return of the LRHG

For those of you who are new, the LRHG has more or less been out of my life for the past two months; LRHG means, "Little Red-Headed Girl", and she's my son's tramp.

In a brief recap, when she became homeless because her parents disowned her, I ever-so-foolishly gave her a place to stay. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA at me. Can you say "gullible" folks? It was supposed to be for a few days, maybe a few weeks, while she got life sorted and a place of her own. Well, that turned into eight months of her laying on my sofa doing absolutely nothing and turning my spare bedroom into a den of sour-smelling catastrophe. She refused any and all rules (there were only ten for shit's sake), and flaunted most in our face, including the one about not crawling on our son in front of us (oh hell, I'm going to lose my lunch).

Now most of you are saying right this second, "you should have thrown her out!" but it was never as clear cut for me because each time this threat came up, my son would come to me and beg, "just this much longer, please, mom ... or explain why she was doing what she was doing. He's basically a good kid, and after talking to him, he did try to keep most of the rules, and would gently push her to the side to a certain degree, but I think deep down inside he's rather afraid of her reaction if he actually rejects her advances (if you think *I've* got BPD, you should see her). Anyway, the long and the short of it is that she makes our house so miserable for us that my husband and I mostly spend our time in our room when she appears, or we disappear.

Well, she stopped coming around a couple months ago. My son is in college now, and he stopped coming home on weekends and started partying rather than being here with her all the time. Oh the excitement of it all! I knew he was probably drinking and getting into all manner of trouble, and I didn't even CARE! It was all so much better than being hen-pecked by HER! He was allowed to go out! He could party! He could talk to other people! He could (gasp) STAY AS LATE AS HE WANTED!!!!!!! ?How exciting is this? Well, for us this is exciting after watching two years of their dating that was pretty much just lying on sofa (her on top of him), licking at him.

And he was happy.

Two weeks ago, it all changed. He came home, and she came with him. While she doesn't sleep here, it's back to sucking on his face, hanging on his neck, lying on top of him and licking his face while we try desperately, desperately to avert our eyes, to the point of neck injury. The boy waits on her hand and foot while she wraps up in blankets because she NEVER WEARS ENOUGH CLOTHES and we keep our house at a normal 72 degrees. And I do mean waits on her. "Get me a drink", "get me dinner", "get me a snack", and he's up and down like a Mexican jumping bean. Does she not know that sometimes, the WOMAN can get things, too? You'd think she'd learn from watching me.

But then, this is a girl who last week:

Laid on top of him, on her back, with her knees apart, wearing a pair of baggy shorts. All my poor husband had to do was turn his head to get a stellar shot of her coochy. We left the room. After all, at that point, what the HELL was the point in pretending we wanted dinner?
And why don't I tell them? Well as soon as he comes home again, I will, but there isn't much point: he's afraid to tell her, because she freaks out, and if I do, she waits til they're in private and complains for up to two hours at a time that I hate her, I'm trying to break them up and that I'm a bitch for doing it. . His head hangs and he has no balls. I recognize this. Although in his defense, the longer he stays away, the more we see bits and pieces here and there. Heh. Bits and pieces of balls. How appropriate.

Mostly, she doesn't speak to us, and we don't speak to her. When she does, she's rude and insolent. So we just don't talk to her, even to greet her. There's no point in pretending. If she needs something, she'll often ask me through my son. I answer honestly because ... I'm a suck.

Now, my son is coming home again after spending a couple months staying at college. I'm wondering if they had some kind of falling out and have finally fixed it. Damned shame. We enjoyed not having her here, and having our home back to call our own. At some point we're going to have to develop our own set of gonads and put our collective foot down, as I don't know how much more DNA our living room furniture can stand (oh yes, that's after we go to sleep at night). Aside from that, the boy isn't helping at all around the house and that's irritating the shit out of me, too. SHE taught him that since he's past 18, he doesn't have to help anymore. So they come in, cook, leave a mess in the kitchen/family room, and leave. That's stopping this weekend if he comes home. Unfortunately, I was in bed this past weekend before I noticed that he'd done that little stunt.

I'm not paying for this wedding when it happens (and it will). And as soon as the engagement is announced, we'll also stop co-signing his student loans, cut off his cell phone, quit paying his car insurance and registration. I don't care if he's still in school. Being an adult is a bitch, isn't it, boy?

Yes, this is my fault. I allowed it to develop to where it is, but have decided as of now to start taking steps to fix it (we shall see: I'm all talk).

What does he see in her? She's hornier than a seven-peckered billy-goat and smart as a whip.

So now you're up to speed. If you want to hear what she's really like, go back and read some previous posts, particularly my very first post. I think it emphasizes my frustration quite well.

Spectacular Destruction .... Is There Anything Else?

Ya, ya, I know, it has been a while. So screw me. I have been doing othe things, believe it or not. One of the things I would like to do is figure out how to turn the goddamned search off at the bottom of my post that will not allow me to post a fucking contraction within a post but must type out both words, because each time I type an apostrophe, the box at the bottom comes up and it searches. Stupid piece of shit.

After a fake step towards sanity, where I had a brief two months of what I consider to be semi-normalcy due to the addition of yet another mood stabilizer, my mind has taken a new leap into the unknown. It has been coming on for quite some time, but this time is much worse, as I discovered today when I learned that I had to potentially attend a meeting alone that I had thought I would go to with my husband. It is a large meeting, full of mostly people I do not know. We share a common interest: that is the extent of it.

When my husband emailed me and said, "I will meet you there", instead of, "I will come home and get you", my head imploded. I could not think or speak coherently. I experienced panic like nothing in a long, long time. WHY? I do not know. I can only imagine that it is something akin to the illnesses people get when they can no longer go outside their own homes ... what do they call that again? I cannot remember. So I sat here and panicked, then fell apart in the most spectacular of ways, all snot and tears streaming everywhere, crying and gnashing of teeth, striding around the house, pacing back and forth. I immediately recognized that this was a medical emergency (yes, I was in danger: from myself) and medicated.

When I calmed enough to think, I just got angrier and angrier. Where the hell am I? Where has my life gone? When did this happen to me? I do not understand how a perfectly normal person can continue to get sicker and sicker over the course of the years, while taking the medication that is supposed to stop it.

And it continued. Later on, I discovered I had to change to google to use my blog. I have tried google for things before and am not enamored of it. I LOST IT, PEOPLE. I LOST IT. I screamed profanities like a Turkish sailor, I slammed my hands on the computer, I stared at it, I tried to read the page and could not, and did everything in my power to avoid what I could not: I did not want to change the way I had done things successfully for so long. Why? Unmitigated terror. Terror like you cannot imagine. Terror of the unknown. Terror of what I cannot do. Terror that I am stupid. Terror like death.

I ripped at my skin, pulled at my clothing, wished I could go cut, cut, cut. I cannot. I am cut-free for four months and am trying desperately not to use that outlet. Ignore the booze. What the hell is left?

Back to the bottle of pills, medicate, sedate ....

And try to get myself to that stupid meeting ~ full of fear.

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