December in retrospect
I always try to see December as a time, maybe not specifically for celebration, but to be happy at the very least. I tend to tell people that Christmas is just another day for me, and largely that is true. It has appeal, though, as the one day out of the year that my family doesn't fight about something and the exchanging of gifts is always a pleasant tradition. I made a lot of people happy this year with gifts given, and that in turn makes me happy. I still engaged in all the familiar traditions, the ones that still had that kind of magic to them that makes this time of year so special. We did a tree, put up lights. Lights are always a favorite of mine, always have been. I spent many a long night, in the dark, with just the Christmas lights flickering and casting multi-colored light in the gloom. Music, too, from Thanksgiving to New Years I always have Christmas music playing. I didn't do that as much this year, though, but I still did it. One of them that never seems to get old are watching those three favorite Christmas specials that I always look forward to this time of year. The Boy Who Dreamed Christmas is always first, though I admit it's deteriorated for me over the years. The songs remain a the thing that made that special great, which is the same reason for A Claymation Christmas that I never really watch so much as listen to. The last I feel is a woefully under appreciated classic of the Rankin and Bass family: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I'm not a fan of many of the Rankin Bass Christmas productions, especially their stop motion department, but I have always had a dear fondness for that particular special. I find it appeals to the fantasy lover in me, featuring a cast of everything from elves to nymphs, demons and immortal personifications of roles such as The Woodsman. I felt it was always less of a holiday special and more like a favorite fantasy story that I only get to indulge in once a year. Maybe that's what keeps it a favorite.
This December for me was pretty typical in all the best ways, yet seemingly in spite of the holiday positivity it was the worst and biggest month this year for shit falling on my head. It started and remains mostly concentrated around work. There's so much stress about with the constant threat hanging over our heads of being fired to save the boss a few bucks on the new minimum wage laws, coupled with the presence of an unruly, anal retentive “I'm not here to be your friend” new manager with a temper and an over inflated sense of how important her position makes her. Everyone is so tense and stressed out because of her. We used to do fine when people left us to do our jobs and let us do what we would with our down time as long as it didn't hurt our ability to do the job, but I swear that productivity has actually gone down now that everyone has this crazy bitch with insane expectations looking over their shoulder, searching for any excuse to write someone up and make an example of them. Seriously, this nutty broad LOVES write ups. I sat down the other day for two minutes in the midst of the DEAD hour because my knee was acting up and she writes me up for taking an unauthorized break. And she gets everyone else for similarly stupid, inconsequential bullshit. It's maddening. It's sickening, the levels of perfection this nutter expects from people not even being paid a living wage to do what they do. In just the span of a few weeks, this shitty job that I could at least tolerate has become the source of roughly 70% of my stress levels for the entire year, all because of one woman who takes a shitty theme restaurant way too goddamn seriously. What the worst part is has to be how utterly fake this bitch is, too. She has this mask of cheerful friendliness that only seems more disgusting when you realize what a mean, angry Queen of the Bad Dye Job there is hiding just beneath the surface. I could respect her at least if she owned up to what she is and doesn't try to be my friend when she's not cursing at me about things the last shift staff did that she's decided to take out on me. Just, fuck, man.
Then there's the discouraging result of my first attempt to socialize out in the real world. Now, I adore my friend Theresa. She's very dear to me and I've missed her ever since we stopped working together. I thought, hey, I'll see if I can stay after I drop off the gifts for her and the kids and catch up. Great idea. She was so happy to see me, and I was overjoyed to see her again, too. They loved the gifts, too. Woo, go me! It really was looking great until her husband came home from work. Now, I'd never formally met Kevin until then, but I knew him to be a pretty stand up guy from everything Theresa would say about him when we had our (sometimes hours long) talks about nothing in particular. I actually stayed as long as I did in the hopes that I might meet him, because it seemed like I should with me having been friends with his wife for so long. He was nice enough, polite to the extent he needed to be. It wasn't lost on me that he seemed in a smidge of a hurry to get me out of the house, though he politely apologized for it. Gotta respect a man who's gracious under stress. Oh, I thought nothing of it. He seemed to want nothing more than to take a bath and relax. Sure, I understand, he looked like he'd had a long day and was tired. Totally understand, so I couldn't begrudge him for his behavior. I said my goodbyes, after being gently encouraged to wrap it up by the man a couple more times, and was on my way thinking nothing of it. What a surprise it was for me to find an email in my inbox on Christmas day, sent a few days after my visit, explaining that the reason he was being so less than his usual sociable self was in fact because he was significantly upset by his wife having had a man over while he was at work and that, long story short and after some bit of arguing on their end, I'm not allowed to visit my friend at her home anymore. Well, damn.
I don't know where to even begin with this. I was so crushed by this news that I initially stopped reading the email at the point of learning that my presence in a friend's home had incited anger in that friend's spouse. It was hours later before I could even go back and read the rest, which was largely a long stream of “Don't take it personally, he's just old fashioned like that” statements that I still don't know what to do with. I think I feel defeated more than anything. This seemed like a great chance for me to have a social life, and with someone I respect and get along with. And it ends like that? That's what I get for trying to do something positive for myself. That'll teach me! But I also have to say that insulted is the other thing I feel. But I have to keep reminding myself that he doesn't know me. He doesn't know that I'm safe, that I'm not that guy. Maybe I should try to tell him, but I feel like that would just make things more awkward.
The last part isn't so much a bad thing, but it's big, I think. It's on my mind a lot and I don't know how I really feel about it.
My depression's getting worse all the time, and all the stress I've been under has only exacerbated it. My down periods are coming with greater frequency, lasting longer, harder to break out of and harder to recover from. Sometimes they seem triggered by nothing at all. Sometimes I almost feel like being in a good mood triggers them. Like my brain is getting burned out on being happy and this is how it responds. It's becoming a real, noticeable problem that I'm having ever greater difficulty coping with. Trish and Silvi are worried.
Silvi's pretty tight with her 'no treating family' policy, but there are exceptions. I know she's been resisting the urge for a while, but I'm still kind of glad she sat me down to talk. It's weird, I'm so used to bitching to other people about her psychoanalytical bullshit pissing on the things that make me feel good about my life. The way she has to break things down all “Oh, no, you're nothing special, this is just how your brain works” makes it really hard to enjoy some of the little things. She's one of the reasons I hate psychology majors. This time felt different, though. She was so detached, in full-on Doctor Mode to the point that she didn't seem like herself. It came to where it wasn't even a conversation anymore, it was a session, which made me feel like she wanted to help. Like really help and not just flex her brain at me.
We talked a lot about things like how I feel when I have these moods and the different symptoms I get; weepiness, fatigue with inexplicable bursts of energy, that sorta stuff. She had me talk about how I grew up, mostly nothing she wouldn't already know, but she said it was important for me to say it out loud.
It's fantastic the things we miss when we're not thinking about it. She made me realize that I put myself down a lot just in normal speech. I don't notice it at all, and it took a while of going over stuff I said to make me realize I was doing it. She feels like I'm internalizing a lot of undeserved guilt and feelings of undeserving or unworthiness. It would be easy to say “psh” and shrug it off, tell her she's wrong, but she's not. I never really told myself that I have a guilt complex, but I did realize a long time ago that I do hate myself. I've said that I resent things like my gender more than a few times, and the list of things I hate about me is preeeeetty long while the list of reasons why is longer still. Only in recent years have I really started trying to reverse all of that and make lists about things that rock about me. But I spent my teens and early 20s just reviling everything about me. So, yeah, it didn't seem like a stretch.
So we talked, and we talked, then we talked a little more. The long and short of it is that she feels like I'm exhibiting symptoms of Bipolar Depression and really wants to get me referred to a psychiatrist that specializes in complexes like the one she believes I have. Someone who can treat me better than she can, because there's just no way for her to detach the way she needs to in order to treat me. She has that policy for a reason, exceptions notwithstanding.
The way I feel about this is the subject of much internal debate. There's a bit of fear mixed in there with the utter uncertainty that there's any helping me. I'm a pessimist to the end. But this is something I've been struggling with for something in the vicinity of 13 years, and my resolution to “just deal with it” has gotten me this far, but at the cost of the condition only worsening with time. I'm at a point where I think I feel like I deserve the help. I think the use of the word 'deserve' is apt here. I always told myself that I didn't have it as bad as some people, that this was just a fact of life. But if I'm just really honest with myself, I think I didn't feel like I deserved help, didn't deserve happiness. I hadn't done anything to earn it, what right did I have? Well, I think maybe I've punished myself long enough.
I'm a little scared of talking about a lot of stuff related to this with a total stranger. But I think I'm even more scared that my resolve is going to waver before I even make it to the doctor's office for the first session. Here's hoping.
So my year ended really weird, and I'm still entirely too stressed out by a lot of that shit following me into January. Writing about it like this has been therapeutic enough, because I think I genuinely needed to do it. Bottling up how I feel about shit is one of the things that make my low points so very very bad. I can't keep a lid on this shit until it boils over. That's only hurting me, right?
Well, here's to 2014. May she be a damn sight better than the last one.