Whew! What a weekend!!
Friday the office admin was out (and will be out until after Memorial Day) so I had to come into work early and stay late to cover for her. It didn’t pan out well, but that was just because I woke up way earlier than my normal routine and worked for about 10 hours and forgot to eat and ended up getting a major migraine. We had planned to go see the new Star Trek movie Friday night but with the way my head was pounding and the fact that brother-in-law was hunting we decided to stay in and rest up.

Saturday morning I got up early and started preparing for my photoshoot. I picked out a few frills but not a lot, showered and got ready to go. Reid came with me, we even got a few pictures together. The studio was about a half hour away tucked away in the country side. We almost missed it but the photographer flagged us down with his big reflectors. His house was small but cute and the studio was in a lil shed he had built himself. He had a nice light wall and different backdrops. I’ve never been in any sort of studio before, hell, I’ve barely ever had photos of myself taken my entire life (my family didn’t own any cameras and I’m generally against being photographed at all. It’s still amazing to me that I agreed to do a shoot at all, even if it was just for fun). He had a little swing that was suspended from the ceiling and we took a few photos on that to get the light and stuff right, then we moved on to different poses and lighting. My favourite part was when he turned on his projector and projected different patterns that would fall on me. Reid’s favourite was when he projected the The Great Wave Off Kanagawa and I was laying on my side with the back to the camera so the pattern was reflected off my body and made it look like I had a full body tattoo. We only shot for about an hour and a half but oh my goodness I was so tired afterwards! We ended up taking 1,001 photos on just ONE of his cameras. He even used his infrared camera and an old film camera. I’m so so so excited to get the photos back. I know he is leaving on business this week so it might be a while before I get to see anything but the wait will hopefully be worth it. Reid said he had a boner basically the entire time
Afterwards we came home and I passed out for the rest of the day. Reid tried to wake me up at one point to go and get dinner but I couldn’t even keep my eyes open for more than a second. I don’t remember the last time I was that exhausted and napped that hard.

Sunday was less fun than Saturday. We woke up early again and drove to UVA for my best friend’s graduation. We didn’t go to the full ceremony since she only had 3 tickets but we were able to sit in on the part where she got her diploma. That ceremony was very short, from the first speech to the last diploma handed out it only took 45 minutes. Unfortunately, because of the fact that A) I was in a place I was unfamiliar with, B) It was incredibly crowded I ended up having a massive panic attack and in the end needed to leave and go home before we could go to her graduation dinner. It was still fantastic to see her though and to be there to celebrate her graduation even if it was cut short by anxiety. Reid even had a moment when he got panicky (but when he gets nervous he just becomes a dick, I have never wanted to deck anyone worse than I wanted to deck him when he got dickish with me for a minute). Reid’s brother came along with us too even though he didn’t have tickets for the graduation, he used to spend a great deal of time there so he wandered about while we did out thing and then caught up with us after the ceremony and stayed for the small reception they had before we left and went back to his car to go home.

After we got home we broke in some new pipes we got at the Cavalier Pipe and Tobacco store. They have a special blend of pipe tobacco called the “Sherlock Holmes #2″ which apparently is the single highest selling blend in the world, and they only make it in that little shop. It’s soaked in coconut and has delicious flavor and smell. My favourite though was the Tennessee Sipping Whiskey blend. Very smooth and tasty. My house smells delightful right now. We watched Venture Bros and smoked for the rest of the evening before G wandered on home and we went to bed. Reid’s dad called him around 9 o’clock to tell him that his dog had passed away. She was very, very old, a week and 2 days away from 19 I believe. Reid got her on his birthday. He took the news well, we were basically all just waiting for it to happen anyways. Scully snuggled up right after he got off the phone, I guess she sensed he was sad so we cuddled with her for a bit and talked about the good times we had with Missy.

All in all it was an incredibly busy weekend with not a lot of down time. Reid is working every night this week so I won’t get to see him at all again. He says he’s going to come and have lunch with me some this week though since he doesn’t have any lunch shifts and he goes in to work just as I am clocking out to come home. I’ll miss him but after this week I’m kinda looking forward to having a lot of time to myself. I didn’t get to rest much and the anti-depressants are still giving me a little bit of grief. Yesterday was Day 7 of taking them. I am definitely noticing a difference now. I asked Reid if he noticed any differences since I’ve been on the meds and he said he had noticed and that he was pleased with the difference. I guess it’s worth all the side effects and the discomfort if he is noticing and experiencing less stress caused by me and my out of control depression. I still waffle back and forth how I feel about them but I’ve decided I’m going to give them a full month and just go from there.

So yeah, that was my weekend. Hope everyone else had a pleasant one! And I’m hoping to do the video for the Q&A blog tonight! So keep your eyes peeled for that!

Isn’t she the cutest?

I was tagged by both @laytexduckie and @foodhog for this survey. I’m not good at following rules and I don’t know how many people have already been tagged so I’ll skip that part.

1. I’ve moved 27 times. I’m only 24, but no, I’m not a military brat.

2. I love critters of all shapes and sizes, but especially the fuzzy ones. I’ve had hedgehogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, and even a Brazilian Short-tailed Opossum who I miss so very much (he died 4 days before Christmas and just 2 days after my first dog had to be put to sleep. He died in my hands, it was not pretty).

3. I was in love with a boy from the time I was 5 until I was 19. We lost contact with each other between the ages of 9-17 and then reconnected and he was my first boyfriend and my first kiss. I was convinced for 13 years I would marry him and be “Mrs. Beige” (my last name is White, his was Brown, I figured we would just mix the two ). Needless to say that didn’t happen. :/

4. I’ve been locksmithing since I was 7.

5. I’m incredibly bad at initiating conversation. I’m totally fine with people texting or calling me out of the blue or if they need me for anything, but I will hardly ever be the first one to reach out. I’m too afraid of bothering people, even those who give me their number and say to text them anytime. If I lose touch with someone, I feel to guilty to reach back out to them and just settle with the fact that they think I’m a horrible person/friend. Because I am. :/

6. I’m a HUGE masochist, but it’s not necessarily sexual to me. I just love pain, and the bruises that follow rough play.

7. I’ve only ever broken 1 bone, and that was when I was 3. I fell down a flight of stairs and landed on a concrete floor and broke my collar bone.

8. I never took the SAT’s. I don’t think I can ever forgive my parents for that.

9. I love ballroom dancing. I gave it up after my first few boyfriends got all upset over me dancing with other guys. I understood their concerns at the time because we were all raised in the same “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” courtship craze. Thankfully, I have overcome that nonsense and am ready to get back into dancing (and Reid is very excited to learn)

10. I’ve been known to watch the same movie over and over, or listen to the same song for hours and hours at a time. I listened to “Hide” by Red for 14 hours straight once.

11. I have not made a bed since BMT. I don’t plan on ever making one again either.

12. I didn’t know what oral sex was until I was 20. I thought it was just french kissing.

13. I’m really rather boring.

14. I am weird about playing video games with/in front of people. I prefer to play by myself with no one watching. I really miss playing 1 vs. 100 on the 360 though. That was my game!

15. My first kiss was on Valentine’s Day just a few weeks after my 18th birthday. I literally saw stars.

16. I’m a spoon kleptomaniac.

Today is my second day on new medication for depression. I caved and called my doctor to get an appointment. I had to wait a week but by the time my appointment came around I was ready to go in. The weekend before this last one was easily the lowest I’ve been in a long time. I would wake up and before I was even fully awake I was crying, and not my usual silent sobs, I’m a silent cryer. Not last week though. Last week was the full blown, agonizing wails, screaming at the top of my lungs for someone to end the pain. Someone. Anyone.
When I went in to see my doc it only took him just a couple of minutes to see how quickly I had gone down hill. I was just in to see him not that long ago, maybe a month or so. “You’re not doing well,” he said. “I can tell that just by the fact you’re in here at all. You’re strong and you like to take care of things yourself.”
I guess it pays going to see the same doc for 20 years, at least he was paying attention. Seems like no one else has been.

Yesterday, was my first day on the new medication. They said take it early in the morning because it tends to make people stay awake. I woke up and ate and took the meds and promptly passed out for about 5 hours on the couch. I woke up and everything was silent. It’s never silent in my head, but now it is. I don’t know whether or not that’s a good or bad thing. For the first time in my entire life I felt bored. I have no one else to talk to, I have no way to keep myself occupied anymore. If I wasn’t feeling totally crazy before, I do now. Now that it’s silent. Some would think that this is a nice reprieve. Sure, some of the not-so-great voices are gone, but so are the ones that kept me company. That kept me going. That told me to stop when I didn’t want to. A part of me is afraid of what might happen now that they are gone. I don’t have anyone to argue with me when I want to make stupid choices.

I don’t feel like myself. Saturday was a good day, without the need for medication. I was myself, and I had a good day. Now, I’m not so sure who I am. I told my partner I feel like I need a new name already because I just don’t feel like “Meg” anymore. It’s disconcerting. To top it off, both my partner and my paramour had a bad day yesterday. Both of them asked me to keep them company for a while to help ward off the bad feels. It was just so weird and unnatural feeling. Don’t be mistaken, I was glad that I had the opportunity to return the favor to both of them. They’ve been there for me countless times, especially in the past few weeks/months. But it felt so off to try to be there for the people I love and care about when I was in the middle of an identity crisis. How was *I* supposed to be there for them when *I* have gone AWOL? But thankfully, it appeared the husk of my former self was all that was needed to help alleviate their stresses for a few moments. At least I am still useful I suppose. My girl called me last night, I hadn’t talked to her in a long time, too long. She had talked to my paramour and he told her that I was struggling with adjusting to this new… whatever this is. She was kind and reassuring and said that she felt the same when she started her meds (which is basically the same as mine). She said with time the other ones will come back and my head won’t be so lonely, that’s what happened with her. I still can’t help but imagine dozens of little me’s bound and gagged in a closet labeled Celexa.

The point of all this? I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything anymore. I don’t even know if I care. I may not be around much, or I may be around a lot more. I simply don’t know anymore. Everything feels so foreign and boring. So apologies if I disappear, and apologies if it gets to the point where people wish I would disappear.

Apologies all the way around.

I will start out by giving this place a 3 out of 10 on the Abu Ghraib prison torture scale.

I had 2 studies done a this place in the course of 24 hours. The first was a complete sleep study at night. They hooked me up to 15 different electrodes on my face, a microphone on my neck, 2 EKG monitors on my chest, a belt that went around my chest and another that went around my stomach and then 2 electrodes on each leg, and 2 tubes up my nose.
The night study went well, the techs were great, they were attentive, they answered my questions I had, when I needed assistance they were quick to respond. I wish I could say the same about the day time crew.
They woke me up at 6am and said they would provide me with breakfast. For the day study they took off the belts and the electrodes on my legs but left most everyone on my head/face for the day study (I had to take a series of naps during the day for them to monitor and look at my brainwaves or whatever). I wasn’t allowed to have my cell phone and there wasn’t a clock in the room, but the night tech said at 7am that the day people would be there soon and they would give me breakfast.
Total lie.

The day tech guy didn’t come in til 9am he gave me a form to fill out what I wanted for breakfast. Since they didn’t have a nutrition guide and I still have to be careful about what I eat because I’m lacking a gallbladder I chose a toasted plain bagel with jelly.

2 and a half hours later (almost noon) I got a halfwarm slimey bagel that had butter on it (I can’t eat butter) I told the tech this and he took my food and never came back. Now, it is ALL over my medical records that I have super bad problems with migraines, or I have had them in the past (they have been much MUCH better since I started to take a preventative since I’m allergic to EVERY rescue on the market. I get all the side effects, much of them are worse than the migraine itself. For example: Treximet makes my muscles seize so badly that it dislocates my fingers and toes. Yeah, it’s that bad. So IF I get a migraine I have to go straight to the ER to be hooked to an IV with highly powerful painkillers to knock the edge off. When I get a migraine that bad I usually can’t see out of my left eye and start vomiting uncontrollably).
I told the guy I was starting to get a headache because I needed to eat. He was all like, “Well you can’t be hungry we just had breakfast.” (Sorry, any food near the 12pm hour is NOT breakfast, that is LUNCH and I didn’t actually get to eat ANYTHING because it took you 2 hours to give me food I can’t eat and then you failed to come back with something I could).

Then he had me go down for another nap and said my “lunch” (really dinner because at this point it’s almost 4pm) would be ready. Now, the night crew told me that if at any time I need assistance to sit up in bed and call out because there is a microphone in the room and they have a thermal camera in there that they could see me on and if I was sitting up they would come in and help me (I was hooked up to a box that they had to disconnect for me to get out of bed to use the bathrooom and stuff). I tried to go to sleep hoping sleep would knock the edge off the pain but at this point I’m extremely nauseous and in so much pain I’m seeing bright white in a PITCH black room. Yeah. So I sit up in bed and started calling out for assistance for TEN MINUTES. I could have been having a seizure or something, it could have been much worse but I still feel like that is completely unacceptable treatment. By the time the guy came in to unhook me I was to the point where I needed to throw up even though I had nothing on my stomach and my sight in my left eye was incredibly limited. I had to leave the center immediately to get home and take a double dose of my preventative and some of the left over painkillers that I had from my gallbladder surgery (THANK GOD I still had almost a full bottle of those or else I would probably still be at the hospital on a painkiller drip). And it turns out whatever they used to put on the electrodes I’m allergic to because my face, my scalp, and every place that had stuff on it is burned/having an allergic reaction. It’s so annoying but at least it isn’t the blinding pain of a migraine.

Honestly, I’m going to complain. And I’m about as non-confrontational a person as you can get but this was just too much.

I definitely would not recommend this place to anyone I remotely like; so you know where you stand with me if I tell you to go there
/rant

I’m really bored today so I figured I would post pics of what my normal day-to-day at work looks like through pictures.

This is my office today. Technically, I have 3 different desks I move around to at different parts of the day/week. Today, I am archiving so I’m in the “Drobo” room. It’s really small and cramped as you can see. Good thing I’m tiny!

I had to modify my desk by taking out the keyboard slidey thingy so my legs would fit under the desk.

This is my view of our parking lot from the archiving room. It was prettier when the tea roses and wisteria were in bloom.

Exhausted, I stood beside you in the dewy wood
As you gently turned the dirt with your hands
Until the bed was made
Gently, you took my hands to lay me down
And covered me in a blanket of loam
And there I found rest.

But this just isn’t what imagined it would be
With these random people just asking the most personal things
And to think that somehow I could always come clean
And you shake your head just like you know what I mean.

This past week has been so incredibly rough. Last night was my breaking point. I tried so hard to have an okay evening after just a hellish day at work. Reid knew I was having major, major problems with keeping it together yesterday. He tried so hard to make it a better evening for me when I got home. He had bought me pretty orange daisies, he took me out to dinner to our regular Friday night haunt because he knew how much I loved their food and how it always makes my Friday night to go out and get burgers and fries with him that I can actually eat (what a miracle!).

And then my mom called.

I knew when I read the caller ID that I should have just let it go to voicemail, but since anyone in my family so rarely contacts me I decided against better judgement to go ahead and answer the phone and talk to her while Reid was re-heating out carry-out dinner.

And that’s when the wounds started to bleed again.

She had called because my sister is in hysterics, I knew she had been for a few days and had tried talking to her and doing my best to be supportive while being hundreds of miles away. Apparently, my sister had told stuff to my grandmother. Stuff that I’ve been trying to move on from past these few months. She wanted to know if some of the… abuses that happened while she was in a semi-comatose state after having most of her left frontal lobe removed were true.
I don’t know why I am unable to just say, “Now isn’t a good time to have this conversation. I’ve had a really, really bad week, followed by another horrendous week and now isn’t a good time to start bringing all this up.”

But I can’t seem to be able to do that despite knowing that I should. And so we got into it. She asked me if certain things that were said to have allegedly happen were true, and I couldn’t lie. It happened. Everything she asked, down to the details, it was all true. Finally, I was able to muster up enough strength to ask for the call to end because my food was getting cold. I couldn’t eat it anyways but it was the only way I could get out of that conversation right then. She said we’ll talk about it another time and that twisted my gut into a Gordian knot.

I’ve been out of sorts since. I want so badly to just move on. I don’t see the point in bringing any of this up with my family anymore. It’s over. It’s the past. Talking about it with them is not going to solve or fix anything. I’m at a point now where I really do what to go to therapy or something, the only problem is finding the right therapist, and not lying in therapy. That one will be the hardest part for me because there are always those first few questions they ask that there are right or wrong answers to, and I’m afraid if I answer truthfully, the truth will bring me problems in the end. I’m afraid of what it might do to my future. I’ve had more than one person suggest that I go back onto medication. I agree with them, I certainly should be on meds, I just hate them. I hate taking medication and in a way I’ll feel like a failure if I have to go back on them. It’s hard to shake 18+ years of being told that depression was all in my head and was just a sin that I needed to confess and move on from and that psychiatric help was just about the worst thing you could do (because it would be “justifying” sin. Don’t ask me how this makes sense, it never did, I was just told that was what the “truth” was).

I found a book in Highly Sensitive People that I plan on buying and reading, possibly even getting the work book to go with it. The more research I have been doing and self-examination, I’d say that my likelihood of being an HSP is extremely likely. I fit into that category more than I do for bipolar disorder (which I still won’t rule out yet, not without professional examination and testing and all that). I would just like to do the most I can on my own so when I do find a therapist and I do go to therapy, that way I know where we can start instead of having to figure everything out from square one. I figured it might be easier to find a therapist that would suit my needs if I knew what I needed first instead of “I am generally XYZ with a pinch of 1 2 & 7.” I accept that I could be going about this all wrong but I really don’t have the money to go through the entire process of therapy. I want to get straight to “How can I deal with this better/what can I take to make me more stable”. I want to get to the treatment instead of going through the whole diagnosis part. Wishful thinking I’m sure.

I’m just trying so hard to keep it all together, but my strength is failing, and my will is weak. I need a break. I need some rest.

I just want a dreamless night.