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.

*crawls out of hole and slumps back into chair*

Ugh, what a week. Double “ugh” for having a post written out and accidentally hitting the back button and losing it all. Makes me wish Xanga was like WordPress which saves your draft every few minutes.

ANYWAYS. I’m here. I’m still pretty miserable but the numbness that left me in a foggy daze is starting to wear off. Starting to “feel” again, even if it’s mostly (justafiable) rage, anger, and bitter disappointment.

I hate how I’m literally and figuratively been the whipping boy for my partner’s miserable failings at being a responsible adult. 3 back to back MAJOR areas that he completely, and utterly failed in that ended up costing ME not only almost $1k but also my vacation this weekend. You know, the “get away” that I’ve been yammering on about for the past month. Yeah. That one.
Honestly, this was one of the first times since the beginning of our relationship that I actually considered breaking up with him. I was that angry. No one would have blamed me, even though his parents agreed with me that he was treating me like *I’m* his mom, they wouldn’t take him back. GEE I WONDER WHY?

So instead of this week/weekend being one of the most monumental and joyous occasions for me and my partner, it has been a series of steps backwards. A series of alternating who sleeps on the couch, of me barricading the living room with punji sticks. A contest of “Who Wants to be the Biggest Douche?” (Spoiler alert: He won. My apologies to anyone who had money riding on me; I gave it my best shot). From Monday until just last night I haven’t been able to keep any food down. 1 can of Dr. Pepper and 7 M&M’s have been all I’ve lived off of this week. Hopefully, tonight I’ll have my first decent meal of the week. My body just does not respond well to conflict. My mind doesn’t respond well for being taken for granted, for being grossly under-appreciated, and also for basically being blamed and punished for things that were absolutely not my fault. It was not my fault at all that my partner decided to ignore everybody who was trying to remind him that he lives in a time-based reality, a reality where things HAVE to be done by a certain time or suffer the consequences. For some reason, this week I feel like I’m the only one who’s suffered the consequences. I dislike being the whipping boy.

I also realized this week that I need something more substantial to work towards. I’m an extremely goal-oriented person, and so when things like this happen (I set a goal, ie. vacation, and bust my @$$ for it only to have it taken away right when I was at the finish) I just kinda lose it. I begin to question why I do anything that I do at all if this is all I get. I question my very existence. I *need* something to work towards. I feel like if I don’t, then what’s the point to life anyways? Healthy mindset? No. Definitely something I need and want to work on.

In a way, I’m almost glad things went the way they did now that I’m able to think clearer and more rationally, and also since it seems that he has FINALLY woken up and has seen the damage that his irresponsibility causes, the stress it puts our relationship under, and how frakin easy it is to fix. It’s not really that big a deal to learn how to be on time, and learn how to do multiple steps yourself instead of relying on your saint of a girlfriend to do all your legwork for you if there are more steps than just Step 1. I’m done bending over backwards for this kid at the moment. I told him I wasn’t going to just chuck him in the deep end alone but he’s going to be doing his own swimming. I’ll be watching close by in the boat if he needs help but for now, he’s on his own when it comes to his affairs. If he wants me to not kill him when he goes back to school, he needs to learn to get things done without me standing on top of him or worse, doing it for him. I just don’t have time for that anymore. I tried to show him this was a problem for a few years, but he’s ignored it. Not getting to go on vacation anymore was a wake up call for him. Even though as it stands right now we could go on vacation like nothing happened and we would actually still be able to pay the bills and eat, I don’t even want to go anymore. At least not this week. I need time. I need time to get excited about this again instead of just wanting to die thinking about it.

For now, I just need rest. Rest and maybe a long drive tomorrow afternoon to clear my head. I’ve decided to go ahead and take the time I’ve requested off, even though I could work, because I deserve a break. I deserve my 3 day weekend, even if it is nothing like I had planned it to be for the past month.

Let’s play a game of Guess Who.

Guess who didn’t do his taxes on time?

Guess who did them to avoid penalties AND got to pay the $400 he owed for state?

Guess who got pulled over this morning for having expired tags?

Guess who gets to pay for his car from the impound AND take him to work AND renew his tags?

Guess who isn’t going on vacation anymore…

:’(

Me: “I can totally see why everyone and their mom just wants to jump your bones all the time. I can’t really blame them either. Just as long as they go through me first… Okay?”

Reid: “You are the gatekeeper, or keymaster; in charge of the rapiness. You get the final check or no on who gets to do the raping… which is a Ghostbusters reference…”

Me: “Duh, I know the reference. The bigger question is who is the ‘settler’ and who is the ‘reacher’”?

Reid: “If we are continuing on answering that question in the theme of the last reference, then I would be Sigourney Weaver. Which would make you Rick Morranis. In this particular scenario, that is. I’m just sayin…”