I can't believe how long it's been
You know how the longer you're away from something the harder it is to come back?
I haven't posted anything here since last fall and so much has happened and changed since then that as much as I think about coming back here and posting, it's hard to make myself do it.
But I miss LiveJournal so much. I'm head deep into One Direction, like paying stupid amounts of money to see them live and obsessing and just so into them and it's cool hanging out on Tumblr but it's not the same as fandom on LiveJournal, not for me.
And I get that everyone's moving on and migrating and I'm trying to keep up. I tried to do Twitter for a bit but it was too much to keep up with and there's just not enough personal interaction on Tumblr for me, I feel like I'm having an isolated fandom experience, and that is not what I want.
I read my flist every day but just like I've always been, I'm shit at commenting and when I think to do it I talk myself out of it because how odd would it be to just see my name pop up in your comments? Is it weird?
I don't know, I'm just feeling very nostalgic for LiveJournal and I get that it's never going to be the way it was, but I've been using this platform since I was eighteen years old and a freshman in college and to just give it up entirely feels so strange.
I've tried the blogging thing, and I do that to keep my family and rl friends in the loop but blogging is not the same either.
So I'm thinking of trying to get back into the whole LiveJournal thing, keeping in mind that not many people hang out over here anymore, and learning to be cool with that. LJ started for me just as a way to get my thoughts out when it felt awkward to do so, and it's always been that for me.
So, feeling like I'm a million years behind, here's what's happened since I last posted anything of substance.
Last October, work got really tough and I let myself slide on things like taking my antidepressant and showering and being a productive member of society. I stayed up too late, didn't eat right, pretty much just blobbed through life. As a result, I fell asleep one afternoon during rest time when we were putting the kids to sleep. We lie down beside a child and rub their backs or foreheads until they're asleep and move to the next and one afternoon I fell asleep for a few minutes. It was terrible. I got written up for it and did my very best to change how I was living and being. I started running again, I started seeing a therapist again, I started just trying to be present in my life instead of floating through it. And things were going really well. And then on May 17th, I was coming in from the playground with a group of kids for lunch and we walked into the classroom and I shut the door behind me. A few minutes later a teacher came in with one of my kids who I'd left behind in the hallway. There is not a day goes by that I don't replay that in my head and think of all the things I did wrong and all the things I could have done differently. It cost me my job. The director, Jeff, sent me home on administrative leave with pay while he and HR came to a decision about what would happen to me and the following Wednesday I was let go.
It has been a real struggle because I loved that job. I woke up every morning excited to see my kids. I made some good friends, I had a community of families I babysat for regularly, and I was just generally very happy to say I worked for the Dartmouth Childcare Center.
Ironically, the day before the incident, I decided to join Weight Watchers. If you've been around here for any length of time then you've seen my struggles with my weight. Up and down and up and down until I realized that I'm 31 and the one dream I've ever had is passing me by. The only thing I have ever wanted is a family. I want to be a mother more than anything and I had pretty much given up on it because I'm just used to giving up on things I want, giving up on myself, giving up because I'm not good enough. It's such toxic crap and I wish I knew where it came from.
So I joined Weight Watchers and then I lost my job. The triumphant thing is, I'm doing it. I've been without work since then, battling shame and self loathing for letting myself get to the place I was last fall that I fell asleep and an accident that wouldn't normally have cost me my job ended up doing so. I'm so used to just eating my feelings away. I learned it when I was eleven and my dad died and then it's how I coped through everything as a teenager, through college, through my mom being sick and then a mess and then when she died and I didn't leave my apartment for six months. It's just been my story. And I'm tired of that being my story. I'm just tired of giving up on myself and what I want.
Since May 16th, I've lost thirty-one pounds. You know, there's a lot of embarrassment and guilt and shame when I talk about my weight. Because how many times have I done this and what makes this time any different? I guess that's part of the reason I want to write here again, because getting the toxic, dangerous stuff out of my head means maybe it won't fester until I'm just putting food in my face to escape myself. My current weight is 272. I haven't set a goal for myself because I'm just trying to think of it in small, manageable steps.
For Christmas, my brother signed himself, Sarah, Ben and me up for the New Haven Road Race over Labor Day, which is 20k with the hope that I would train for it and be able to run it. At this point, running anything more than four miles is painful for me, I'm still carrying around a lot of weight and the strain on my hips and knees is a lot. But that's part of what I've been doing, trying to walk or run every day so that when Labor Day comes (four days before my thirty-second birthday), I'll be able to complete it, even if I can only run four of those twelve miles.
In February, I moved out of my sister's house. I'd been with her and her husband for a year and a half and was really needing my own space. I found a little apartment in Windsor, Vermont, about thirty minutes from Dartmouth. I like living here a lot. In May, my brother Will graduated from the two year rehabilitation program he'd been in down in North Carolina, with two years completely clean and sober. In June he came to live with me. So far, it's going very well. We don't spend much time together but I like having him around, knowing he's here. It's brought up a lot of old anger and resentment on my end, and maybe some for him too, but we're working through it and we've had some really nice conversations. He's a really good guy, a little narcissistic maybe, but a good kid, and trying his absolute best to prove to himself and the family that he's not the kid he was two and a half years ago when he went to jail.
Last week, most of my family met up in Madison, Connecticut at the beach house my grandmother has rented every July since my mom was little. I was lucky to go for the whole week. Every one of my siblings, except for Charlie, was there. Charlie, Will's twin, lives in St Louis with his girlfriend and my niece, who turned a year old in June. I got to see him and meet his beautiful daughter Skylar in March when they made the trip to New Haven to see Granny.
Also in May, my brother Andy graduated from Syracuse Law School. He's since moved to DC and last week he took the Virginia Bar Exam.
I came back from vacation to find out I was being denied unemployment because I'd been fired due to "misconduct" which was really demoralizing. And then yesterday, I got a call from Sarah and the most amazing offer. She works for the box office for the Hopkins Center, which is Dartmouth's Performing Arts Center. They wanted to offer me a full time temp job in the office. Sarah mentioned my name and told them she thought I'd be great at it so I went in this morning to meet the manager and have found out that this is a really excellent chance to get my foot back in the door at Dartmouth in a different capacity. If this goes well, I could find administrative work with the college. It's not working with children, but I've been thinking I need a change of pace for a while. The pay is far better than anything I could make working in Early Childhood Education.
I just sprinted through almost a year of my life and I know this is so disjointed and jumbled, but I wanted to get it all out so that the next time I want to write here it doesn't feel so scary.
If you're still around, thanks for being here.
I haven't posted anything here since last fall and so much has happened and changed since then that as much as I think about coming back here and posting, it's hard to make myself do it.
But I miss LiveJournal so much. I'm head deep into One Direction, like paying stupid amounts of money to see them live and obsessing and just so into them and it's cool hanging out on Tumblr but it's not the same as fandom on LiveJournal, not for me.
And I get that everyone's moving on and migrating and I'm trying to keep up. I tried to do Twitter for a bit but it was too much to keep up with and there's just not enough personal interaction on Tumblr for me, I feel like I'm having an isolated fandom experience, and that is not what I want.
I read my flist every day but just like I've always been, I'm shit at commenting and when I think to do it I talk myself out of it because how odd would it be to just see my name pop up in your comments? Is it weird?
I don't know, I'm just feeling very nostalgic for LiveJournal and I get that it's never going to be the way it was, but I've been using this platform since I was eighteen years old and a freshman in college and to just give it up entirely feels so strange.
I've tried the blogging thing, and I do that to keep my family and rl friends in the loop but blogging is not the same either.
So I'm thinking of trying to get back into the whole LiveJournal thing, keeping in mind that not many people hang out over here anymore, and learning to be cool with that. LJ started for me just as a way to get my thoughts out when it felt awkward to do so, and it's always been that for me.
So, feeling like I'm a million years behind, here's what's happened since I last posted anything of substance.
Last October, work got really tough and I let myself slide on things like taking my antidepressant and showering and being a productive member of society. I stayed up too late, didn't eat right, pretty much just blobbed through life. As a result, I fell asleep one afternoon during rest time when we were putting the kids to sleep. We lie down beside a child and rub their backs or foreheads until they're asleep and move to the next and one afternoon I fell asleep for a few minutes. It was terrible. I got written up for it and did my very best to change how I was living and being. I started running again, I started seeing a therapist again, I started just trying to be present in my life instead of floating through it. And things were going really well. And then on May 17th, I was coming in from the playground with a group of kids for lunch and we walked into the classroom and I shut the door behind me. A few minutes later a teacher came in with one of my kids who I'd left behind in the hallway. There is not a day goes by that I don't replay that in my head and think of all the things I did wrong and all the things I could have done differently. It cost me my job. The director, Jeff, sent me home on administrative leave with pay while he and HR came to a decision about what would happen to me and the following Wednesday I was let go.
It has been a real struggle because I loved that job. I woke up every morning excited to see my kids. I made some good friends, I had a community of families I babysat for regularly, and I was just generally very happy to say I worked for the Dartmouth Childcare Center.
Ironically, the day before the incident, I decided to join Weight Watchers. If you've been around here for any length of time then you've seen my struggles with my weight. Up and down and up and down until I realized that I'm 31 and the one dream I've ever had is passing me by. The only thing I have ever wanted is a family. I want to be a mother more than anything and I had pretty much given up on it because I'm just used to giving up on things I want, giving up on myself, giving up because I'm not good enough. It's such toxic crap and I wish I knew where it came from.
So I joined Weight Watchers and then I lost my job. The triumphant thing is, I'm doing it. I've been without work since then, battling shame and self loathing for letting myself get to the place I was last fall that I fell asleep and an accident that wouldn't normally have cost me my job ended up doing so. I'm so used to just eating my feelings away. I learned it when I was eleven and my dad died and then it's how I coped through everything as a teenager, through college, through my mom being sick and then a mess and then when she died and I didn't leave my apartment for six months. It's just been my story. And I'm tired of that being my story. I'm just tired of giving up on myself and what I want.
Since May 16th, I've lost thirty-one pounds. You know, there's a lot of embarrassment and guilt and shame when I talk about my weight. Because how many times have I done this and what makes this time any different? I guess that's part of the reason I want to write here again, because getting the toxic, dangerous stuff out of my head means maybe it won't fester until I'm just putting food in my face to escape myself. My current weight is 272. I haven't set a goal for myself because I'm just trying to think of it in small, manageable steps.
For Christmas, my brother signed himself, Sarah, Ben and me up for the New Haven Road Race over Labor Day, which is 20k with the hope that I would train for it and be able to run it. At this point, running anything more than four miles is painful for me, I'm still carrying around a lot of weight and the strain on my hips and knees is a lot. But that's part of what I've been doing, trying to walk or run every day so that when Labor Day comes (four days before my thirty-second birthday), I'll be able to complete it, even if I can only run four of those twelve miles.
In February, I moved out of my sister's house. I'd been with her and her husband for a year and a half and was really needing my own space. I found a little apartment in Windsor, Vermont, about thirty minutes from Dartmouth. I like living here a lot. In May, my brother Will graduated from the two year rehabilitation program he'd been in down in North Carolina, with two years completely clean and sober. In June he came to live with me. So far, it's going very well. We don't spend much time together but I like having him around, knowing he's here. It's brought up a lot of old anger and resentment on my end, and maybe some for him too, but we're working through it and we've had some really nice conversations. He's a really good guy, a little narcissistic maybe, but a good kid, and trying his absolute best to prove to himself and the family that he's not the kid he was two and a half years ago when he went to jail.
Last week, most of my family met up in Madison, Connecticut at the beach house my grandmother has rented every July since my mom was little. I was lucky to go for the whole week. Every one of my siblings, except for Charlie, was there. Charlie, Will's twin, lives in St Louis with his girlfriend and my niece, who turned a year old in June. I got to see him and meet his beautiful daughter Skylar in March when they made the trip to New Haven to see Granny.
Also in May, my brother Andy graduated from Syracuse Law School. He's since moved to DC and last week he took the Virginia Bar Exam.
I came back from vacation to find out I was being denied unemployment because I'd been fired due to "misconduct" which was really demoralizing. And then yesterday, I got a call from Sarah and the most amazing offer. She works for the box office for the Hopkins Center, which is Dartmouth's Performing Arts Center. They wanted to offer me a full time temp job in the office. Sarah mentioned my name and told them she thought I'd be great at it so I went in this morning to meet the manager and have found out that this is a really excellent chance to get my foot back in the door at Dartmouth in a different capacity. If this goes well, I could find administrative work with the college. It's not working with children, but I've been thinking I need a change of pace for a while. The pay is far better than anything I could make working in Early Childhood Education.
I just sprinted through almost a year of my life and I know this is so disjointed and jumbled, but I wanted to get it all out so that the next time I want to write here it doesn't feel so scary.
If you're still around, thanks for being here.