Not Much Of A Weekend

This past Wednesday Jerbs left for San Diego, for Comic Con.  (So jealous).  Which means I've had the apartment to myself for 4 days, which means that instead of just chilling out and relaxing, I used the time to deep clean the whole place.  Like really, really deep clean it.  I can only do that when Jerbs is out of town because she gets weird about me moving her stuff to clean around it, so . . . yeah.  Needless to say I don't feel like I've had much of a weekend.

But the apartment looks amazing.  I didn't get to the bathroom or laundry room but whatever, those were low priorities.  I'm guessing I burned off quite a few calories the way I busted my ass too, so that's a plus.

I really wish tomorrow wasn't Monday because I definitely don't want to go to work.  At either job.  I think I need a vacation, but that's for another post.

For now, I'm going to sit my ass in my chair and watch one more episode of the X Files before bed.

Diet Betting

I'm doing a diet bet!

It's a thing that seems to be getting pretty popular lately; I know of a couple bloggers I follow who have either competed in one or run one.  Basically a diet bet is where a group of people pay x amount of money to participate in some kind of fitness challenge; at the end of the challenge whoever's met the goal splits the pot or whoever's lost the most wins.  I've been thinking of doing one, because money is always a good motivational tool, but I didn't really know where to begin.  Then my friend Theresa told me that her and her girlfriend were going to do one, and she invited me to join.  So I did!

It's a 4 week challenge, that started today, to lose 4% of your body weight.  Which for me is just under 8 pounds.  I paid $25 to join the bet/game/whatever.  I'm honestly not totally sure I can do it (2 pounds a week is hard) but I figure it's worth a shot.  And hey, who knows, maybe I'll at least get my $25 back, right?

Lately

I am more busy right now than I've ever been.  It's fantastic.

For the past two weeks my days (Mondays and Wednesdays, anyhow) have typically been going like this: wake up, get to MHC by 8:30, work until I take my lunch break at 2:00, run across the street to SHF and do as much work as I can in about 45 minutes, go back to MHC and finish out my day there, head back to SHF a little before 6, do my work there until about 7, hit the elliptical for 40(ish) minutes, and by then it's 8 PM and Jerbs is getting off work so I pick her up and head home.  It makes for roughly 12 hour days.  It's kind of nice but exhausting.  Fortunately next week should be a little easier because the billing cycle (ie super busy time) at SHF is pretty much done.

I got sick at work on Thursday.  A pharm rep had brought pizza for lunch, and I had a couple slices, and it just didn't agree with me.  I ended up leaving around 2, coming home, and not being able to keep down anything but water and crackers for the rest of the night.  Lovely.

But today was Saturday, and Jerbs was off, and I didn't have to go to either of my jobs, and it was rainy and cool out . . . basically a perfect set up for a day.  Jerbs and I had lunch, ran some errands, went to the mall and played with kittens at the adoption center there (because we're 5), took the dogs to the pond and let them run around, and watched Mean Girls on Netflix.  Life is good.

Kittens!  The two chasing the toy are flame point siameses, the one on the far right
is an orange and white DSH.  Her name is Strawberry.  Best hour of the day.

Monsoon-y evening at the pond.  It's a little blurry because I was holding Hollie's
leash and she was pulling to get to the ducks.

Independence Day 2014

I'm just going to go ahead and say that this was not my best 4th of July.

I was supposed to go to Kingman.  Which I'd been planning to do since that whole trip in May fell through, thanks to my sister.  And I told my sister, in May, that I would be there for Independence Day weekend.  But I got a call from my mom on the 2nd to tell me that my sister was going out of town and Austin was going to his dad's for the weekend.  Needless to see I was absolutely livid, and I'm at a point where I'm really just done trying to have a relationship with my sister.  But that's a whole other thing.

So since I wasn't going to Kingman, Jerbs and I met up with my parents and my other sister in Seligman for lunch.  It was very nice to see them, and we had a good time.

BUT I got pulled over on the way to Seligman.  I was going 91 in a 75.  I just got a warning and it really wasn't a big deal, but after he gave me the warning the Highway Patrol douche asked if Jerbs was my daughter.  My DAUGHTER.  I was so upset . . . that was definitely a blow my self esteem didn't need.  So up yours, Highway Patrol douche.

Then when we got back to Flag, we decided to take the dogs up to the pond.  It's monsoon season so we've been getting a lot of rain, and the grass land around the pond was pretty much one big puddle.  We usually stay on the cement path so it shouldn't have been an issue.  We were about a quarter of the way around the pond and had come to a spot where the sprinklers were running, so it was really wet and muddy off the path.  But there were ducks hanging out on the grass and naturally, Hollie went after them.  Like just WENT.  And since I was holding her leash I went with her, and before I knew it I was flat on my back in a giant mud puddle.  A puddle made of mud that is made of dirt, reclaimed water, and duck shit.  It.  Was.  Disgusting.

Needless to say we didn't finish our walk.  We came home so that I could take a shower.  And clean off my shoes.  And clean off my keys, sunglasses, and the lead to Hollie's leash.  Seriously, it was gross.

But then there were fireworks, which there weren't last year, so that was nice.  We watched them from our porch, and that was that.

Again, not the best 4th.  But I did have a 3 day weekend and that's always nice.  Silver lining, I suppose.  I'm just hoping that next year doesn't involve law enforcement or getting covered in mud.

Holding On And Letting Go

This post kind of goes hand in hand with my last one, but I feel like these thoughts deserve their own space.

This entire blog is a testament to the fact that the end of my engagement is very much a part of my journey to mental health. In a lot of ways I think that if the break up hadn't happened I wouldn’t have achieved all the things I did. Apparently I needed to be on my own to really get better, and while I used to hate that fact, I'm more or less OK with it now. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that a lot of the good in my life came out of a really horrible experience—so, understandably, my feelings towards my ex are complicated. On the one hand, he broke my heart; on the other, he put me definitively onto the path to being truly well.

I still have a lot of regrets where he and everything that happened with us is concerned. I don't think that will ever totally go away, because no matter how much I improve, I was still horrible to him. I hate thinking that I had something so amazing and that I sat back and watched it fall apart. It seems so stupid now. I'm at a point where I've mostly forgiven myself but that doesn't mean I wouldn't go back and change things if I could.

I don't blame him for ending it, I really don't. As I've gotten better I think I've been able to look back and see our relationship from something closer to his perspective and I get it. Maybe I take issue with the method and the harshness but I get it.

One of the strangest things about being mentally healthy is that it's both helped me to get over the break up and, at the same time, made it even harder to let go. Obviously getting better has shown me that I absolutely don't need my ex in my life, that I'm completely fine on my own. There was a point where I felt like my happiness really depended on whether or not I had him, and now I know how untrue (and idiotic) that is. At the same time, getting better has made me very aware of the fact that now I could be in a relationship, if that makes sense. It's one thing to want something but know you're not capable of having it, but it's another to want something, know you could do it, and just not be able to have it. I look back on our relationship now and realize how amazing it could have been if I was like this then.

Sometimes I still feel surprised at how absolute the break has been. It's no secret that I assumed we'd get back together at some point, and I guess I always thought that, even if that didn't happen, we'd at least end up as friends. I expected him to stay in my life somehow, not disappear from it completely. But we really haven't kept in touch. I've reached out and been ignored, and the last time I spoke to him was last July when he randomly showed up at my apartment. It makes me sad—really, really sad—that such strong feelings can end up being nothing.

Sometimes I wonder why we've never found our way back to each other.

At one point during the break up—like the actual process of the relationship ending, when my emotions were off the charts and I was a total mess—I told him that I had cheated on him. Specifically, I told him that I had cheated on him 5 times, with Jerbs. It wasn't even remotely true, I just wanted to hurt him, and in that moment infidelity was the most hurtful thing I could think of. As soon as I said it I regretted it and confessed that it was a lie, but I've wondered if he believed me and if that's what's prevented him from pursuing any kind of relationship with me.

I remember my ex telling me once about a girl he was close to in high school; she had mental health problems, he helped her through it, and once she was better she basically stopped being friends with him. He ended up feeling like she'd only needed him to get better and then stopped, and I wonder if he thinks the same of me: that now that I'm better he would be pointless in my life.

I've wondered if maybe seeing me last July, doing so much better without him, made him think that he had, in some way, been keeping me sick and that his absence is necessary for me to stay healthy. And I've wondered if maybe he just needs more time to work on himself and his own issues.

I've wondered if maybe he just doesn't want to deal with the long distance thing, because it was such a disaster last time.

And I've wondered the obvious: maybe there is just too much bad in the past that there's no possibility f or a good future between us. That maybe he's never had any intention of even attempting to be my friend or anything else. That maybe he hates me.

I know it really doesn't matter, but I still wonder.

One thing I do know is that it would work between us now. That if he got to know me again, that if he got to know this real version of me, he would fall in love with me all over again. I don't doubt that for a second. All the things that made him believe I was his soul mate are still there, and now there's nothing hiding them. I know that his feelings for me were real (I mean, he asked me to marry him after he'd known me for six months, so there was definitely something there). I've talked before about how my mental illness symptoms improved drastically in the first two months I knew him, how for those first couple months I was normal and happy. That me he saw is who I really am, and who I am now.

I've held on, and held out hope, for two years. And I think it's time to let go. The truth is that I don't think of my ex all that much anymore; he crosses my mind from time to time but not like he used to. He'll always have a piece of my heart, and a part of me will always love him. And I think I'll always wonder, no matter where my life goes from here and how far away from him I get, what it would have been like if things had worked out. There's a box of mementos and keepsakes from our relationship in my hall closet; I know I don't need anything in it, and I know I should just toss it, but I can't bring myself to do it. There are still songs I can't listen to, that I haven't been able to listen to since we broke up, that I skip past when they pop up on my iPod. I think of him whenever I hear jazz music (which is rarely). I'd still like to talk to him, if only for my own sense of closure. But by and large, I think I'm over him.

2 Years of Evolution

So I was actually going to write this post back at the end of the May (around the 2 year break up anniversary), but then . . . I just got busy and it got pushed to the back burner and I ended up not getting around to it then.

But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that today—the first of July—is actually a more appropriate anniversary for this journey I've been on. Because, even though it was on May 25^th that Ex-Fiance told me he didn't think we should get married, that relationship didn't truly end—and I didn't truly start to focus on myself and getting better—until I moved back up to Flagstaff. And that happened two years ago today.

Honestly, it's hard to even know where to begin when I talk about this. I've changed so drastically since that day two years ago that I barely know how to put it into words. I've talked about it a lot on here, in bits and pieces, but summing it all up is a challenge.

The day that Ex-Fiance drove me to Flagstaff felt like the worst of my life. To say I was miserable would be a pretty major understatement. I remember the anxiety and numbness coming in waves: my stomach knotting up, palms sweating, heart racing, and then a sudden detachment, a sense of almost nothingness, like I was outside of my body and all around not a part of what was going on. I didn't want to be in Flagstaff; I kept thinking that there was no way I was ever going to get better in the place where my life had completely fallen apart. I kept thinking about my nephew and and saying goodbye to him and how awful that had been, and how bitter I was at being forced out of my hometown and away from my family. At the time I had a crappy job and really didn't know how I was going to survive financially. I knew I needed a full time job, but I also knew that I wasn't mentally well enough to hold down a full time job . . . and I wasn't going to be able to afford treatment without a full time job. (How's that for a vicious cycle?). I didn't have a car and I was dreading having to depend on the bus system. And on top of that I had just gotten dumped; I was with the man I loved, the man I had fully intended to spend the rest of my life with, the man I was supposed to have married just the day before, and I knew that at the end of the day he was going to leave. I remember that he stuck around for a few hours, and that I felt like I was going to throw up when he finally said he needed to get going. He kissed me and told me he loved me before he left; I stood on my porch and watched him drive away and wished that I was dead.

On that day my life just didn't make sense. I looked at it from all the angles I could, and it sucked from every single one. I don't think I'd ever felt more defeated than I did that day. My future—to me, at least—looked bleak. Very, very bleak.

Today, two years later, I am happier than I've ever been. And it was just a normal, busy day; I got up, went to work (at both jobs), and came home to Jerbs and my dogs. That's probably the best part about being mentally healthy—that the normal, uneventful, everyday kind of days are happy ones. When I was sick I hated being alive, hated having to live through every day, but now I'm truly engaged in my life and myself. It's such a good feeling.

I've come so far in two years. I got an amazing full time job, and I've been excelling at it for almost 18 months now. I feel like a lot of my personal growth has come from my job at MHC, for a lot of reasons. The financial stability has been great, and has led to a lot less anxiety about money. I've also been able to start getting my credit on track. Aside from that, I feel like I've become a lot more confident about myself since I started at MHC. I've taken on more responsibility there than I ever imagined I would; some of the things that have been added to my work load are things that, when I first started, I didn't think I could do or would want to do. But now, I'm pretty sure I could do anything that was asked of me at work; I'm very confident in my abilities. And the confidence that's come from everything I do at MHC is what let me to be sure I could handle a second job. And let me tell you that having two jobs makes me feel absolutely amazing.

It's also been a great experience to work with people who don't know me as being sick. My co-workers like me, and just think of me as me. And it's been nice to be looked at like a normal person, to have been able to make friends and just . . . I don't know, show people who I really am. When you think about it, my MHC co-workers are the first group of people who have ever met me without knowing anything about my mental health history. And I'm definitely not saying that I feel like other people in my life have been judgmental; I'm just saying that it's kind of nice to have people in my life who never saw me like that. They make me feel normal.

I've stopped overreacting to things. I feel like in the past, things that were pretty small and insignificant would make me freak out. Like changes in schedules or the store being out of something I needed or whatever. Those little things would just make me go ballistic and ruin my whole day. Now, those things just don't bother me. And even bigger things that happen don't bother me as much. Like the flat tire on my way to work last month. Old me would have lost my shit. I'd probably have cried and screamed and kicked my car. I wouldn't have had the money to pay for a tow or new tire and I'd have made Jerbs wake up and meet me so she could take care of it. I probably would have been so upset that I'd have called in to work because I wouldn't have been able to focus after freaking out. And then I'd have come home and thrown myself a huge pity party and thought about all the reasons my life sucked. But instead, I rolled my eyes, grumbled a little bit (because no one WANTS to get a flat tire on their way to work on a Monday morning), and took care of it. I joked with the tow truck driver, passed the time at the tire shop playing Angry Birds on my phone, and then went to work. And that was just that. It didn't even remotely ruin my day.

I've stopped focusing on other people's lives and letting them effect me. Before I dreaded reading Facebook statuses because every little thing just . . . I don't know, made me get all over analytical about my own life. Any time a friend would get engaged or get married or move or get a job or really succeed in any way, I'd have an anxiety attack about the fact that I wasn't succeeding. I felt like a failure and everyone else's successes just reinforced that over and over again. It got to points where I wouldn't be able to focus on anything else and would get far too wrapped up in other people's lives for my own good. Now when I hear about good things happening to other people on Facebook, I'm just happy for them. I'm doing well enough in my own life, at this point, that I can come back to it easily. And even more than that, I want to come back to it. No matter how well anyone I know is doing, I like my own life better. I used to dread the future but now I'm excited about it. I see so much potential in myself and I know I'm going to accomplish great things.

I've stopped feeling like I need to define myself and become more OK with all of the parts of my personality co-existing. Before I felt like I had to pick who I was and whenever I did anything I wondered about how that fit into this over arching definition of me. For example, I remember once I got to thinking that I hadn't done a sewing project in a while. So I decided I wanted to sew something. And what should have been as easy as picking a pattern, grabbing some fabric, and setting up my machine turned into a massive anxiety attack because I just didn't know if I was the type of person who sewed. Does that make sense? My head made it a far bigger thing than it was, I guess. I just didn't know how to reconcile all the things I enjoyed into one personality. It seems so ridiculous now but it was a very serious issue at the time. And now I really get that I can be all the things I like and it's all just part of who I am. I sew, I write, I read, I hike, I work out . . . and it's all fine. I can do all those things without worrying about what they mean.

In general, my mind just feels more mine than it used to. I feel like I didn't used to have a lot of control over where my thoughts would go and what they would do; it was to the point that I couldn't really read books or watch TV or movies because I never knew how they'd effect my thought process. It sounds crazy but it's true. I was so afraid of the anxiety or depression or mania or whatever might come up that I just avoided anything I hadn't read or seen before. And it's silly but I missed those things, and having them back is a small victory but a victory nonetheless.

One thing that I haven't talked much about on here is that I've found my faith since I started this journey two years ago. I used to be a staunch atheist. And while I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all, my views in that area have definitely shifted. I don't know that I'd call myself a Christian, and I haven't read the Bible, and I don't go to church, but I do believe in God. I feel like my faith is something I want to experience on my own terms; I pursue a personal relationship with a higher power and that's that. I will say that I pray a lot, and that I feel very blessed. I see God at work every day in my own life. Like I said, I don't talk about it much, because it's very private.

Right now, I really do love my life. It's not perfect but it's wonderful, and I'm happy. I love where I live, I love what I do, and I love who I am. I am aware, every single day, of how fortunate I am to have gotten where I am from where I was. And I am thankful, every single day, for everything that got me there: for God, for my family, for Jerbs, for my ex, and for my own determination.

It hasn't been an easy journey, but it has been a beautiful one. As much pain and struggle as there's been, I don't think I'd change a thing.