The Answer to the Previous Post's Title Question: A Big, Fat, "NO"

It might have been a whole two weeks before I begged him to forgive me and come back.

I made the decision to forgive him for whatever he did or didn't do, and decided I wanted to just love him.

Meanwhile, I had relapsed with Bernard on weed in October.

There're a lot of meanwhiles....

1. My sponsor dropped me because she said I was fucking my life up, and my best friend decided to stop talking to me for the same reason.

2. Bernard quit at the restaurant because the restauranteur wasn't respecting him.

3. Bernard, my son, and I went to Northern California to my sister's for a vacation.

4. We decided to stay.

5. I quit the restaurant via text.

6. We realized we should at least go back to clear out the apartment.

7. I came back up to my sister's (what fake name did I give her? Until I go back and figure it out, we'll call her Angela) with my son Lucas (is that the fake name I gave him?) so he could start school when vacation was over.

8. Bernard stayed behind to finish packing up and selling the entire contents of my apartment for a total of $300.

9. Bernard went to court twice to try and transfer his DUI case to Nor-Cal but was unsuccessful.

10. I haven't seen Bernard in about a month; he's serving this weekend and next weekend in jail, and then he can come up, maybe.

11. Lucas' died dad a week ago today.

12. I don't have a job or a place of my own to live; I had gotten two jobs that turned out to be Craigslist scams, since apparently I didn't learn my lesson the first time I got screwed on Craigslist.

13. My sister and fiancé are annoyed with me because they think I'm fucking my life up.

14. I'm fucking my life up.

15. I'm now 13 days clean and sober again and have a new sponsor up here and have started over on the steps.

16. I'm applying to be a cook/dishwasher at an assisted living facility if I can get my depressed ass out of this trailer bed. 

Yeah. Here I go.

The Berklee School of Music Singer/Songwriter, part 3

Wow, I am a selfish biatch.

And I'm clearly an addict.

Here's my morning:

I text Jason at 10 am. (It was hard to even wait that long, but I didn't want to seem desperate.) I check my phone every five minutes for two hours. Then I text him again. He texts me back, and I can finally smile. Then more waiting, impatiently, on edge. Feeling worthless. Irritable. Discontent.

Meanwhile, I'm only half-present for my son.

That's pretty much how my whole day went. I half-played with my son, took Melia to the doctor and the pharmacy, took my son to a playground and to the airpark, but never was my attention fully on him, or her. All I could think about, all day was, "When's he gonna text me again? Come on!"

We did text a little throughout the day, but it was sporadic, and it was mostly him saying he was busy...he was as at work (duh), then he was writing music (which he does), then his grandpa was in the hospital, and then he didn't feel well. I called to talk to him, but he didn't answer. It was right after he had texted me, too. Then in a text message I offered for him to come over so he wouldn't be alone, but he didn't want to. He just wanted to go to bed.

But of course, that was me being selfish, under the guise of being of service.

Really, come on, Adora.

Meanwhile, I texted 3 other guys today. Two were in response, one was initiated by me. All 3 platonic, but still...why do I need attention from men in order to feel okay?

I also called 3 women, so I didn't just focus on guys. But with the 3 women I talked to, two of them didn't have time to talk, and the third one just wanted to talk about her own problems, so we did, and I offered her solutions that I pretend work for me.

Even my aunt with whom I live has noticed something's been wrong with me. "Are you okay?" she asked me today. "You've been quiet." It's true; I told her I've been depressed. I've begun to withdraw, more and more. I'm starting to hide from people. I'm glad I'm going to be seeing a therapist twice a week now, but I'm nervous about that, too. At our first meeting she brought up damn meds.

I remember before Margaret committed suicide, she shared with me her desire to get off her anti-depressants because she just didn't like not being able to feel. She hated being numb. A week later, she was dead.

It scares me, the idea of being medicated. Why must it be? Hell, my therapist is even talking about how my son may have ADHD. Fucking a', bitch, he's four.

I'm sorry. I don't know what's happening to me. I did all my spiritual guru prayer meditation shit today, but there's still this part of me that looks at everything in existence as totally meaningless. I'm driving, looking at road signs, and saying to myself, "Fuck that sign. What's the point of that fucking sign? There's no fucking point. Fuck it." Yesterday on the way to pick up my son I fantasized about pulling into a row of palm trees lining the middle of the road.

I'm so glad I have my son. He makes me laugh. He astonishes me with his brilliance, his innocence, his unconditional love. I want to see him grow up. I don't know the future. For some reason I expect every day to be my last day here -- I don't know why I'm just feeling like it's pretty much all over, all ready -- but I'm not suicidal; I have no REAL desire to end my life.

Still, I'm having a hard time enjoying anything besides laying in bed. Writing's okay. Singing's not so bad. But even with writing and singing, I'm like, "What's the point?"

I'm so glad I have things to read. I need to read a hell of a lot more. All this isolation just coops me up with my own ridiculously drab thoughts. I need to go to more recovery meetings, too. I'm at maybe three a week. But even then, I go to meetings and I look down my nose at people. "You pathetic, lying humans," I think to myself. I think everyone's full of shit. How I became Holden Caulfield, I have no idea. That persona is so played.

My therapist thinks I haven't fully allowed myself to grieve my losses. My parents, my siblings, my husband, Margaret, my boyfriends (or at least Evan, the one I was closest to). My son for half the week. My innocence...my identity...my inner child...or some shit.

She also has noticed that I don't have any girl friends. That is weird, I have to admit. I have some female friends in recovery, but they all have the qualification of helping me stay sober and vice versa...like they're not real friends; they just serve a purpose. I don't know what the hell it's like to be someone's friend, really. I've always been a loner. I've always preferred reading and writing over interacting with actual people. I don't like it when people don't like me. I give them too much power, and yet I can't seem to stop doing that. And yet they probably don't even not like me.

I heard myself say today, as I was getting me and my son into the car at 2:00 pm to go get Melia, "That's it - he doesn't like me any more," just because Justin wasn't texting me off the hook. I laughed at myself and thought, "What if someone thought that about me? 'She didn't text me back right away; she doesn't like me any more.'" The idea was completely ridiculous. Just because I don't respond to someone's every text doesn't mean I don't like him/her. Duh.

And so then I circle back around to, "Why the hell am I being so selfish? Why do I need to be liked? Why can't I just love people, and leave it at that? Why do I feel so damn deprived?"

I don't know. I need to widen my circle. Be less judgmental. Stop thinking my shit don't stink. Or stop thinking I stink like shit. Whatever extreme, neither are real. Stuff matters. Life has meaning. There's a reason for all this. I'm not gonna be a broke-ass student working two part-time jobs forever...unless I keep dropping my classes like I did last semester and keep missing work like I've done five times in the past couple weeks.

The Berklee School of Music Singer/Songwriter

So, it's been determined that I am, in fact, insane, but to what extent hasn't yet been decided by my therapist.

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).