I can’t

I love my mom. She is my personal hero. She is amazing.  But she’s not perfect. My mom doesn’t like to do things outside of her comfort zone. When we were kids, if my dad tried to force us to do something we weren’t comfortable with (read : organized sports, anything that involved hand-eye coordination, science camp…) my mother would step in at some point (probably at the point of tears since both my brother and I are easy criers) and talk my dad out of it.

The consequence of this is that I don’t usually try things I don’t know that I can be successful at. With this comes a certain amount of confidence – false or otherwise.   But if I got into it in the first place, you better believe that I thought that I could handle it. I’ve never interviewed for a job or position that I didn’t get. But I’ve also not made a lot of effort to chase jobs that I might want, but aren’t sure that I’ll be good at.

Until this year.

I work for a family owned business that I doubt will ever graduate from the school of hard knocks. If there’s a way to do something that is confusing and backwards – they have figured it out and become experts in it. It’s taken 5 years but I finally have them using email to communicate with one another instead of carrying written notes and putting them in people’s physical inboxes… (YES. That is true.) Everywhere I turn are things that need improved. I love that. I can handle that.

I currently hold at least three job titles. I’m still performing the tasks they originally hired me for, plus I took over an aspect that was half of a position when someone else left the company and was never replaced. That job has since grown as the company has grown and could almost be a full time job for someone alone. But this year I decided that I would be really insane and go into something that I have no idea what I’m doing with : marketing. The company had no marketing person and things were a mess. There’s an aspect of it that is creative – which I’m always drawn to – so I started to ponder whether or not I could handle it. I read a lot online. I politely asked to have access to the info that was available and to my surprise they said yes. I wrote a 40 page proposal that covered what I thought was wrong and how I would start to fix it. When I went to present it to my boss and the owner, I realized that by purely caring enough to make an effort – it was mine. Very few questions asked.

Last year’s health upsets made me think about how I want to live my life and one result of this surprising bout of introspection was that I realized that I missed hiking and being outdoors and sunshine. I live in Oregon, so that last one is kind of in dispute, but I did some things that made me uncomfortable this year; things I didn’t really think I could do.

I stood gasping for air on the side of a shale field (if there was ever a sight that strikes fear in the hearts of clumsy people, a whole downhill slanted field of sharp precariously stacked pieces of rock that have fallen from above is totally it!) and might have said to my husband “What the *&#@!?! …. Up THERE?!?!? …. *^!% you, dude!”

But climbing (on the non-steep/fall to your death side. With plenty of switchbacks- also known as ‘pant break corners’) up this was worth it to see the view.

 

My husband had attempted this hike two times before. (That makes it sound like it is particularly difficult. It really isn’t. It’s more like a comedy of errors story for another day.) When asked at his staff Christmas dinner what was one of his favorite moments of the year – he cited this hike. Scaling this mountain (or if you are an Oregonian, ‘Ehh… Big rock, maybe. Not a mountain.”), something he had tried and failed before, with ME – that was his big high point for the year. I was incredibly flattered and surprised that he said that.  Three years ago I never would have tried this hike. In fact, I dropped him off for a couple of days of backpacking in the area once by himself. But I stopped questioning whether I should or shouldn’t hike because I would embarrass my husband, faint from lack of oxygen to the brain,  fall off of a mountain, sweat on passers-by, have people think Darth Vader was suffocating someone right around the bend in the trail….

I just tried. 

 

I can only remember one time that my mom decided that it would be good for me to attempt to force me  into something. She begged, bribed and then finally demanded and drug me to a try out for a play with a local children’s theatre organization. At the time my mother was homeschooling two late grade school aged kids and had a new baby. Being a parent now, I realize maybe she just wanted to take a nap a couple of days a week with only the baby to worry about. Or maybe she got sick of my constant complaining about not having enough friends and being ‘homeschool lame’ and thought this was my solution. (The Arts are always the solution to being lame. I would just like to add that tidbit in.) But while she stood in the background bouncing my sister and attempting to smile encouragingly at me, I spent most of my group/circle audition willing my face to look more pathetic so she would take me home and stop this endless torture. When they asked me to make sad faces, that was easy. Mad? NO PROBLEM. Happy? The lady directing our group glanced around at all of the happy faces of the would-be actors and repeated herself. Several times. Thinking I just didn’t get it, she then called me out. “Honey? You, there. In the house sweater.” (My homeschool group had sweatshirts and a logo of a happy dancing house with a graduation cap on. We were pretty cool…) “I think you didn’t hear me. We’re doing HAPPY now! You won the lottery! Someone gave you a kitten! You got new clothes! You’re going to Disneyland! You got an A on a big test!” At this point I am teary eyed from pure embarrassment because all of the kids are staring at me. My mom has given up and is winding through people to my rescue. And that woman leaned in my face and compassionately whispered “I think you get to leave now. Do I at least get a smile for that?”

So I gave her one. And then I think I mentally flipped her off.

This entry is beyond SAD…

I started writing in this blog again last year. It was pretty crummy. I was really doing it only for me, and I think that’s the only reason I should probably ever blog. But then priorities changed again and I once again left a blog with a dozen entries just sitting there. And that feels a little… embarrassing. It’s Google-able evidence that I don’t finish things. That I’m fickle and a wee bit crazy. So I took all the entries down and just let it sit there with the error message up. “No content” error seemed less embarrassing than what I had to say off the cuff.

The last few years have been a weird journey for me. Last year’s winter brought with it a battle with depression. And a dawning realization that maybe I’m always a bit depressed in the winter. Season affective disorder, being an Oregonian… whatever. As the fall dissipates and daylight hours cease, I being to unravel. It starts with laziness, lack of motivation and eating. (Oh, the eating… I think I eat more carbs in December and January than I eat the rest of the year. And I love carbs.) It makes sense that I’m never that jazzed about Thanksgiving or Christmas. Who can focus on baby Jesus when your brain feels like it is melting into a pool of “who really gives a —-?!”? Or that my mom always used to describe me as ‘growing out in the winter and growing up in the summer’. No, mom. I was probably always growing ‘up’. In winter I was just eating my feelings on top of my love of eating.

Around January I get restless to the point of frenzy. This is when I’ve classically done borderline insane things – chopped all my hair off, dyed it a bright color, painted a llama on my wall, started dating someone I probably shouldn’t have…. Seriously, no one should be letting me make decisions in January. At all. This year I’ve been shoving cookies and breadsticks in my mouth while watching every available episode of LA Ink on Netflix. This is not good, ya’ll…

But last year was extreme. I thought maybe I had late on-set post-partum. My daughter was almost a year old but I had just stopped breastfeeding so anything was possible, right? My other friends who had battled with PPD assured me that it was and I should see a doctor. But I am my parents’ child through and through. “See a doctor? For just a problem with my brain? That’s ridiculous! I can handle this…” *more cookies*   ….And this is how I end up sitting in a church parking lot, curled up in a ball in my driver’s seat, sobbing so hard I feel like my heart will explode, listening to David Crowder’s rendition of “How He Loves” over and over and attempting to fight against the desire to leave my family.

Yeah.

That’s where I go when things get dark. I want to run away. I have these elaborate day dream/’mares of just driving away a few states, ditching my car, hitchhiking a few more states away, setting up shop in some hole in the wall town and waitress’ing at some slop diner. Every night I would come home to my 100 square foot apartment and rest my tired feet in an old bucket of warm water and just listen to the silence of living completely and utterly alone with no commitments or ties to other humans. (What’s that, you say? This is insulting and demeaning to people who work in diners/people who live alone/people forced to live in 100 squarefoot apartments? Well, duh. It’s also completely impractical. All other climates besides the Pacific Northwest make me break out in hives of some sort and after a day of dropping plates I would be quickly ax’ed from being anyone’s waitress. This delusion alone should tell you something is wrong with my brain in these moments.)

I finally scheduled my regular lady parts check up, hoping that would at least give me a gateway to talk about what was going on with me. I had other physical problems/symptoms too. But I left the doctor’s office after being prodded, told that I probably just needed to man up and exercise and if I wanted that pain in my tailbone-ish area checked out I should probably get ahold of another department and schedule an x-ray. I like my doctor. I respect her. This felt like a death sentence. This “eat healthy and get exercise, spend time with your friends and read a good book” solution is helpful for many of the world’s ills. I understand that. But this was something different. Something hard to fight.

They called me a few weeks later to tell me I had an abnormal pap – “pre-cancer” is what they call it. But a lot of it. And the ‘almost cancer’ kind. On my biopsy appointment when I asked whether this could explain my out of control emotions and inability make my brain function, this new doctor looked sad and acknowledged yes, this could put all of me out of whack. Maybe this was my body and brain’s attempt to communicate and instead I had interpreted it as MY failure….

How often do we do this to ourselves? Something goes haywire and we think “Well, I can handle this if I just work harder/get this to do list accomplished/parent harder…” Cut yourself some slack. Sometimes things are just WRONG. In my case, the ‘routine’ procedure of removing precancerous cells from my nether region ended up in a trip to emergency surgery and being put completely under. How often does this happen? Hmm. I’ld guess, not often. Since the room that houses the ‘zap your privates’ machine is down a hallway that they discovered (courtesy of mwah…) could not be navigated by a rolling hospital bed. But it happened to me. Because – that pain I kept feeling in my tailbone area? – that was a cluster of blood vessels that had enlarged themselves in that area to attempt to fight that pre-cancer that was taking root.

Yet, all along – no one had connected anything to one another. Not a single medical professional had bothered to look over my list of reported symptoms or complaints so they knew what they were getting themselves into. No one recognized that this might be something other than ‘routine’. And so they weren’t at all prepared.

And that’s me, most days. I miss the big picture. I miss the patterns. I get the “OOOOHHHhhh!” moments on the backside, but that doesn’t really help me when I’m staring a stack of files in the face at work, dishes in the sink at home or list of people that I feel crushing guilt for losing touch with… I’m hoping that if I just start documenting ME for ME, that this blog will actually become something I enjoy again. I don’t know. We’re a long ways from the days were I daily wrote a paragraph in my livejournal and barely ever thought about loading photos or impressing anyone.