While trudging through the Dark Night of the Soul this past month, I finally decided to go ahead and make a damn appointment. I hadn't seen my therapist in over a year. I called every day from this past Tuesday to this past Friday, trying to get the appointment. I was being persistent because I was being told that she (my therapist) would call me back, and each day I was falling deeper and deeper into a sort of depression that I'd forgotten could exist, and she wasn't calling me back. Thankfully, she did, finally, and was even able to have a phone session with me on Saturday. The session consisted of me talking for an hour, catching her up on the past year, and her talking for 15 minutes, suggesting a couple things for me to do, as well as setting up another appointment for Wednesday (yesterday). And yesterday she set up appointments for Mondays and Wednesdays, based on my apparently tragic condition, so she can see me twice a week and try to figure out what the hell is going on that makes me want to do absolutely nothing.
I've heard about people seeing the world in shades of gray. About not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, or do anything, or go anywhere, or talk to anyone. I missed four days of work and my world was the color of feces. I just didn't want to be in it any more. No matter where I was, it just wasn't where I wanted to be. Nothing in the world was good - not even being with my son, which is the thing that's saved me so many times before. I even freaking got baptized. But it only got worse.
Today's finally sort of a little okay. I'm missing work again (my boss is sick, so there isn't anything for me to do there any way since they took all my responsibilities away saying that I'm over-qualified and that now I need to train my boss so he knows how to do his own damn job since I'm going to be graduating from school at some point and will move onto bigger and "better" - not 20 hrs/week $10/hour - things). My work situation has contributed to my depression a lot, for sure. They just made me stop doing all the things I do because I'm so much better at doing them than my boss is, and instead of letting me do them, they want me to show him how to do them, because don'tcha know, I'm a "temporary" employee, and since they can't afford to really actually hire me, they're gonna keep paying me less than this guy who I'm training. Yeah, it's depressing, all right.
Of course, you know that's not the only thing getting me down. Ahh...what we're all here for...relationships. This blog began as a relationship inventory. Relationships just haven't gone too well for me, understatedly -- namely, relationships with my parents and their significant others, relationships with my other family members, work relationships, relationships with "friends", the relationship with my husband, relationships with all the men I've somehow managed not to be successful at not getting involved with...these have all driven me completely insane, apparently (and well, again, the therapist and my doctor are going to decide the level of my insanity).
When I last posted, I had gotten back into a relationship with the boyfriend I'd left my husband for (the boyfriend with whom I'd broken up over and over in order to be with other men who'd wanted to be with me, before going back to him over and over when it didn't work out with those men - for two years - until he took off to Canada in September for three months and I finally had to face these demons without him).
I like to rewind and recap: So this boyfriend's name is Evan (#1) (and not his real name, of course). Those other men I just talked about are #2 through #26 (DAMN). After Evan left to Canada in September, I went and dated and had sex with a guy I'd pined over for like a year, who, afterwards, told me he had herpes (#27). I considered that a good enough rock bottom to want to really be done with men (and what choice did I have, I thought, if I might have contracted an STD?). I told my friend Margaret about it and she started taking me to meetings for sex and love addicts. Margaret's boyfriend was cheating on her, she thought, and he didn't want to be with her any more; she was so torn up that she decided she might be a love addict and thought 12-step programs would help her. They didn't (she didn't really try, IMO). After Margaret committed suicide (I had completed 42 successful days of "no men" and was going for 90), I ran into a guy who'd composed music for a video about suicide. When I talked to him about my experience with Margaret, he asked for my number, asked me out on a date, and we had sex even though I didn't want to. He was #29 (I'm counting Jesus as #28).
So, I went back to "Day 0". I've still been going to meetings, but I just haven't been able to get back to the whole "no men" thing. I haven't been able to put even one day together without some kind of pursuit of them (or at least without responding to them favorably). Margaret's death flipped me completely upside down; she was the one who was helping me with this "guy stuff"...or maybe I should say her death just put me back where I was. It was helping me to write about it...but once she died, I didn't even have the desire to do that any more, and it's been hard to get back to this inventory stuff.
I managed to stop seeing the suicide video/satellite communications engineer guy, but then Evan came back from Canada in December and asked me to the movies. I accepted, because that's what I do. But after a couple weeks I remembered, again, that I don't like him that much, and, more importantly, I don't like how unmanageable my life gets in my "relationship addiction", so, I operated via the standardly oft-repeated modus, and I had sex with the suicide video guy again, just so that I could get out of the relationship with Evan again...because gee, don'tcha know, I can't just be all, "Oh, yeah, sorry, dude, I forgot, I'm too fucked up for all this, and I don't want to be with you - my bad."
That was on January 1, go figure. Way to start the New Year, eh? I totally avoided writing about it, too, until now. But I do feel a bit better, doing so.
Oh, but - there's more.
I had called #23 (refer to the inventory to the right, somewhere) back in November when Margaret died, and we started talking again. His story is, when his wife left him six years ago, he wanted to kill himself, but instead of pulling the trigger of the gun that he was holding to his head on the pier, he checked into a psych ward and then a rehab and got sober. I hadn't talked to him since April, besides a few tens of obsessive emails I'd sent him after I stopped dating him (and I had stopped dating him because I got painful withdrawals from being away from him, and I figured it would be better to just end it and let go completely than to keep enduring those withdrawals...they sucked a lot of ass and hurt really, really badly). When I called him in November I used him like a therapist and spilled my guts, and would do so about every couple weeks, until a couple Thursdays ago, when I asked if I could see him in person, because I was depressed and needed a friend.
When I spent the night with him, I told him that I didn't want to have sex. He actually respected me. I think that's the first time that's ever happened with a male. (That statement belongs in bold.) So, the following week I went and spent the night with him again (this was last Friday, the day before I finally talked to my therapist on the phone, which I did from his apartment). And this time he was sick, so, we didn't even hug. We just talked. He just...totally...cared...about me...both times. It was shocking.
My obsession for him was lifted back in May, so these days he really is more of a friend. And he just showed me what a friend actually looks like. But I have developed a new obsession.
Of course, we'll call this one #30. He's the real reason I got rid of the other two guys (the Pizza Delivery Boyfriend and the Satellite Communications Engineer), in one fell swoop, 22 days ago, by the way. It wasn't just me not liking those other guys, or actually finally trying to change for real now. Nope - along came Jason.
I've "known" him since July, when I started singing at the church he works at as the sound engineer. I added him on facebook on Dec 29, he said hi in a facebook message, we messaged each other for hours, and he suggested we "jam" because he's also a musician (he sings w/piano). The jam invitation, over these past few weeks, turned into daily texting, which turned into sexting, which turned into us hanging out, which turned into us having sex, which turned into him becoming my boyfriend a few days ago (on Jan 19).
Okay, I can't write about this any more for now. I'm glad I've gotten this much out so far, though. I hope to get back into writing again, even though my classes have started - I have three of them. And two jobs. And meetings. And a four year-old. And a boyfriend. And now...therapy that I'm paying for and will probably end up taking some kind of medication because of -- oh, but, well, I guess I shouldn't say that I'll be taking meds because of the therapy, but because of whatever "disorders" my therapist and my doctor decide I have. General anxiety disorder has been mentioned. The depression may be situational, she says, but she's not sure yet, so we're gonna keep meeting twice a week to figure this all out.
But I'm really depressed about it the whole damn thing, if you want to know the truth (sorry, I do love Salinger's Holden).
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