The View from in Here

I have always been very interested in psychology, probably due to the fact that I have a lot of it. I am bi-polar type 1, I have OCD, and I have crippling social anxiety. I’m sure there is even more going on in my head, but these are the ones I have been diagnosed with.

Because of my interest in the study of how the human mind works, and because I am currently writing a fictional book about a psychiatrist, I have done a lot of research. I mean a lot of research. Since I am writing it in the first person, I want to make extra sure that her methods and thought processes are believable.

Anyway, as I have been doing all this researching and studying, I have learned a great deal about my disorders, and about the ways that I think. I have also noticed that some of the best, most inspiring things that I’ve found online are first hand accounts from people with psychological disorders, and professionals in the field of psychology.

So as a thank you to those of you out there who have blogged, posted, or done an AMA on Reddit, I have decided to share my own personal account from Inside of Jen’s Head.

Not Giving Up

Well, I missed a week. I promised to write once a week, and I’ve already failed. Normally I would write this off as a failure and just give up, maybe because I have low self esteem, maybe it’s the depression, or maybe it’s my OCD. Regardless, my therapist told me I need to work on my resilience, and I feel like this is a good way to do that. I am not going to roll over and give in to my doubts and fears. I’m going to pick myself up, and try again.

Speaking of trying again, I’ve already started applying for a new job. I’ve decided to try my hand working in retail, or fast food again, for a number of reasons. First and foremost being that my husband is sick of carting me around to and from work. It’s been a great stressor for him that he’s my only mode of transportation, and gas isn’t cheap, so working nearby would save us a pretty penny, but the only things close enough to walk to are fast food and retail.

Another reason I’m going this route is because I’m not sure I can handle a full time schedule. I didn’t start having my anxiety attacks until after I started working overtime, and that makes me think that the hours were a part of the problem. I always felt run down, and like I only had time to get ready for work, sleep, and work. So, maybe I will do better on a schedule that gives me more time outside of work.

Lastly, I want to work in an environment where if I have to deal with customers, I deal with them face to face. It’s a lot harder to be nasty to a person if you can see their face, so hopefully I won’t get yelled at as much. Plus, I know from past experiences that if I have a uniform I feel less uncomfortable about my appearance, so being out in the open where people can see me doesn’t bother me as much. Maybe it’s because uniforms make you blend into the background, and nobody notices you unless they need to.

Anyway, thank you all for bearing with me while I stumble through all this. I hope you all have a fantastic week, and hopefully I’ll keep on track this time!

A New Start for a New Year

Happy 2018, everybody! From breaking bad habits, to starting good ones, from making new goals, to recommitting to goals that you have let yourself lapse on, a new year means a chance for change, and I intend to take full advantage of the opportunity. There is a lot of fat in my life (literally and figuratively) that I am cutting out, and a lot of good that I intend to bring in. The road is sure to be bumpy, but I am excited to take the wheel and get started!

Before I go into the changes I intend to make, I’d like to recognize my husband for successfully completing a goal that he made last January first, which is (drum roll please) he went for an entire year without eating red meat! Congratulations! It wasn’t always easy, but he took it all in stride and came out the other side feeling accomplished and stronger willed than ever before. I am so proud of you, love!

In the past I’ve made it a rule that I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, primarily because it is super depressing when I fall short, and I mostly lack the confidence to believe I can make it happen. However, bolstered by my husband’s success, I’ve decided to give it another go, starting with resuming my blog here. I know I’ve been away for more than two months (more on that in another post, I promise,) but it’s time I come back, and recommit to keeping up this blog. From here on I solemnly swear that I will write at least once a week, and post it here.

In that same vein, I am making a promise to myself that every day I will do something creative. If that means scribbling nonsense on my iPad, that’s what I’ll do. If I’m feeling particularly uninspired and All I can muster is taking high resolution pictures of the inside of my shoe, I’ll do that, but everyday I will do something that stretches my imagination, and hopefully makes me happy.

I’m also joining my husband in one of his goals, no fast food for the year. We cheated a little so that he could have a hamburger at midnight, but that’s it. We are not going to eat anything that you can get through a drive through window for a whole year.

I will also be quitting my job and looking for something that actually makes me happy. I’ll go into the reasons I’ve been unhappy at my job in another post, but for now I’ll just say that it wasn’t the company that I worked for, it wasn’t the people I worked with, and it wasn’t even the job itself. The reason I’m leaving is all me, and although it’s taken me some time to come to this conclusion, I am certain that it is the right one for me, and I will not be looking for another job in the field of telecommunication.

Finally I am committing to take better care of myself. From exercise to hygiene, I plan to always be at the top of my game. To succeed at this I have created/borrowed two mantras: I am worth taking care of, and less time now means more time later. Let’s face it, if I am worthless to myself, how can anyone else find me worthy, and if I don’t take the time to take care of myself I’ll burn out, and I won’t be able to do the things that I love.

My husband has dubbed this year “Project Happy,” so by the end of the year, if all goes well, we will be!

Keeping on

Work has been pretty good. It has some ups and downs, and I definitely need to talk to my doctor about adjusting my medication because I have the hardest time getting out of bed in the morning, and I’m still having minor panic attacks before work once or twice a week. Maybe I’m still adjusting.

Other than that it’s been pretty nice having a job that gets me out of the house and forces me to talk to people. I feel like I’m actually getting over my social anxiety, instead of just dealing with it. I’ve even made some new friends. I’ve been getting more confident every day, and I even feel good about my appearance lately. I think this job could be really good for me.

I’m starting to think about my future with the company. I was already committed to spending the next five years working here, but I’m really thinking I might make a real bonafide career out of it. I even applied for a promotion already, which I probably won’t get because I’m still super new, but I’m excited about getting my name out there.

I asked a supervisor a few weeks ago what advice he could give me about moving up in the company and he told me to be annoying. He obviously didn’t mean that I should do irritating things that would make my presence intolerable. What he meant was that I should just keep applying for promotions, talking to supervisors about taking on other responsibilities, and just generally getting my face out there.

That is definitely sound advice. You can’t get noticed sitting by yourself in the shadows and avoiding everyone. That’s part of the reason I started this blog in the first place, to be honest, because I wanted to get my name out there on the internet so that if I ever do publish a book maybe some of you will buy it.

Anyway, other than that I have nothing new to report. Thank you for reading, and I hope you all have a wonderful week!

Autumn Days

Ah, fall. It’s finally here in earnest, and I say this because we have Halloween decorations up, and it’s been cooling down again. Finally. Autumn is my favorite season, probably in part because of my birthday, but also because it is home to my favorite holiday: Halloween. From trick-or-treating, to caramel apples, and dressing up in costumes, I love it all. My favorite part is all the scary stuff that happens this time of year (I’m looking at you, Stranger Things: Season 2. I can hardly wait!) Horror movies, scary stories, and of course startling/scaring others are some of my favorite things.

I don’t know why I love the dark side of life, but I have always been fascinated by the grisly and macabre. In elementary school I borrowed all the books I could get my hands on at the library about medieval torture, murder and mayhem. My first R rated movie was Scream, which I saw at my friends house when I was thirteen or fourteen, and since then I’ve watched every horror movie I could get my hands on.

I also liked to gross people out with worms and spiders, or really any creepy or crawly thing. It had it’s advantages. I rarely had to have anyone else squish a spider and I was possibly the only person (at least the only girl…) in my science class that really got the full educational experience from dissecting frogs. That is certainly a skill that I wish I still had, but alas it has faded over time, and now I am squeamish about a great many things.

Perhaps my fascination came from all the darkness in my own life. I’ve shared some of my childhood traumas with you all here, though there is much more to say, and you’ve probably read more than you ever wanted to about my suicidal thoughts earlier this year. Maybe it’s something dark in me that revels in the evils portrayed in film and literature, or maybe it just makes me feel a little better, knowing that things could most definitely be worse.

In any case, I’m sure at least a few of you are probably wondering about the job. Am I still in training? Have I started taking calls yet? Well, the answer is yes to both. I just had my first day of taking calls. It’s still training, in that there are a ton of people there to help if you get stuck, and pretty much everyone stinks at it at first. I am no exception. I went in today thinking that my years of experience at other call centers would catapult me to the top of my class, and all of my calls would be amazing, but no. I won’t go into details, but there was one call where I thought for sure I could pull the call from the brink of disaster, but I ended up wasting forty-five minutes of the gentleman’s time and making him mad enough to want to speak to my supervisor.

I’m not letting it get to me though. This is where my past experience has come in handy. I have been yelled at, berated, called names, and been sworn at. In several languages. I know better than to take it personally. For one thing I’m new. I’m bound to make mistakes now and then. For another, y0u have to just remind yourself that most people that call in yelling and screaming are mad before they even get to you. You can’t let it get to you. They don’t hate you, they don’t even know you, as my trainer was fond of reminding us. For my part, I’m feeling pretty zen about the whole thing so far.

Anyway, I’m up half an hour past my bedtime, so I will leave off here. Thank you all for reading. I promise to catch up on everything you’ve been up to once I finally feel settled in, and I have time again for things other than worrying unnecessarily about everything under the sun.

Update… Sort of

Sorry it took me so long to post this week. I haven’t really had much to report. The training for my job has been fun and interesting, but it’s not exactly something I would want to write about on here. Well, I did get to teach the class for about five minutes, and although I was anxious about it, I think I did alright. I’ve mostly switched back to vaping rather than smoking, and that’s been pretty fun because a lot of my fellow trainees vape.

As far as things at home go, I haven’t had any more incidents with my hair brush or other inanimate objects. So that’s good. The meds must be working. I’m now on my full dose of each of them, 100 mg of Lamictal, and 200 mg of Seroquel. I’m sleeping a lot. Oh, but I have had an interesting thing happen. I’ve been dreaming again.

Let me clarify what I mean by again. Up until this week it had been more than two years since I last remember dreaming. I’m sure I was having dreams, but never ones that I could remember. This week so far I have had three, two of which I can’t recall right now, but the third was a dream where my teeth were all falling out. I’ve heard that this is a fairly common dream, so I got curious and looked up what that means according to dream theory. Apparently it means that I am afraid of growing older, or at least that I am afraid of becoming less proficient at something or other.

This made sense to me on several levels, the first of which was my birthday. I’ve never been coy about my age, every year that goes by and finds me still alive is a year to be proud of. Still, I do worry that I am getting to old to do all the things I want to with my life. On the other hand I have a test coming up at work, and I am having some anxiety about that. Then again it might be because I decided to participate in ink-tober with one of my younger siblings, and I’m feeling pretty inferior in my drawing abilities. Admittedly, ink has never been my medium, but still, I find myself criticizing and over analyzing each picture over and over. Maybe it’s even a combination of all three, but what ever the reason it was a pretty weird dream.

So that’s been my life lately. Next week I’ll actually start taking some phone calls at work, so I will probably have more to say then. In the meantime I hope you all enjoy the rest of your week, and thanks for reading!

Another Week

Well, I tried to get this out on time, I really did. Of course by tried, I mean procrastinated until the very last moment. As such, I don’t have a lot of time to write this, but I don’t really have any earth shattering news to relay.

I do want to up date you all on the job. It is going as smoothly as can be expected. I’ll be in training for at least two more weeks before I’ll actually start taking phone calls, so nothing terribly stress full there for the time being. The Seroquel seems to be doing its job. Not only am I sleeping more than twelve hours a night (if I let myself), but I am also much less suicidal. I’m not positive, but I don’t think I even thought once about killing myself this last week.

Otherwise, there’s nothing new to report. Oh, I did turn 33 on the twentieth, so my OCD is very pleased, lol. Anyway, thanks for reading, and hopefully I’ll post more during the week!

I Made It!

I meant to post this on Sunday, sorry you guys. I just got caught up in other things, and lost track of time. I will try to mostly make my posts on Sunday in the early afternoon. Anyway, enough about my failures, let’s talk about my success! I made it through my whole first week of working! Yay! It’s not too hard yet, I’m still in training, but as all of you know, I suck at being in social environments, so it was a bear of a week for me.

Monday went well, because I was prepared and I took my 25mg of Seroquel to calm my nerves. Mostly it was playing getting to know you games, and learning about the policies and procedures regarding dress code, security, and talking about other typical first day stuff. I won’t delve too much into any of that stuff for fear of leaking any proprietary information, but I will mention that getting wanded by security upon entering the building is a lot less awkward than I thought it would be.

Anyway, day two was even better because I knew what to expect, and there are a decent amount of smokers in my training class, so it was somewhat easier to get to know people. I really started having fun talking to people and although I was still very nervous about it all I pushed myself to talk to as many different people as I could. Since I’m going to hopefully stay with this company for the next five years, I even asked my trainer about tips and tricks to move up in the company.

Wednesday was another story. I had a total melt down. My shirt was riding up and showing my fat belly, and I didn’t feel like I had anything else to wear. I couldn’t get my hair to behave, and to top it all off there was an incident involving an electric razor, a fly and my eye brows. I tore my shirt off (literally) and threw it in the garbage, and tried to make my eye brows match, but by the time I came out of the bathroom I was seething with white hot rage. I looked in my bedroom mirror and tried to get my hair to cooperate with me, then I went in the bathroom again ad wet it down. It still was not doing what I wanted and my frustration exploded out of me in the form of smashing my self repeatedly in the head with the brush until it broke in to pieces and I threw it on the floor.

My husband grabbed me at this point and held me while I screamed and sobbed until there was nothing left inside me and I felt like an empty shell of a person, hollow and dead inside. He was patient with me, although I know I scared him, and he bent over backward to help me finish getting ready. I went about the rest of my pre work time like a robot, or a zombie. My arms felt weak, and my scalp throbbed where the bristles had punctured it. I was worried as we pulled up to the building that I wouldn’t be able to muster a smile, but the phrase fake it till you make it rang true, and although my smile was tinged with self loathing and snark at the start of the day, by the end it was genuine.

Thursday was a breeze. For the life of me I can’t pin point what was so different. I still had some panic over what to wear, and how to tame my stubborn hair, but honestly it just didn’t bother me. I waltzed into work like I owned the place, happy to be there, ready to learn and socialize.

Friday was crappy, but I tried to practice my EMDR safe word thingy, (I should probably figure out what the technical term is, huh?) and although the visualization was not as vivid as it was in my therapists office, it did help a little.

Finally the weekend came. My wonderful hubby, who had spent the whole week cleaning the house, and taking care of our pets, and chauffeuring me to and from work (sometimes with an additional passenger if someone from my class needed a ride), brought me breakfast in bed. I honestly don’t know how I would have muddled through with out him, he has just been so wonderfully supportive, and understanding, even when I’m in a crappy mood.

He made me breakfast on Sunday too. It was coffee and cold cereal, but I still think he deserves props for it. He has just been so on the ball with the dishes, and he even makes my bed for me. He is definitely a candidate for best husband in the world. After that my brother and his wife came over to do their laundry and play board games like they do every week, which has been so much fun, and is definitely something I look forward to.

Anyway, long story… well, long, I survived, and despite the ups and downs, I think it was over all a pretty good week. Here’s to another, and I hope you all have a wonderful week as well!

Tonight’s the Night

And it will happen again, and again. I know, it’s a little melodramatic of me to apply the opening lines of Dexter to my life, but what can I say? I’m a melodramatic kind of girl. Anyway, it is the night before my first day of work, and I’m trying to stay up until 3 AM, which is harder now that I am medicated/on my depressed cycle, but since work doesn’t start until 3 PM I figure I should try to make sure that I have time to in wind after work, and still have enough time in the morning to get ready at a leisurely pace. Anyway, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, since I’m sure some of you are wondering what happened with the ID’s, and how the medications are affecting me.

I had to wait until Tuesday to go to the social security office, and the DLD (drivers license division), since Monday was Labor Day, and both of them were closed. Because of this I spent most of Monday in a tizzy, worrying that Tuesday would be too late for my new job to accept the ID’s and I’d be out of work again before I even started this one. I also worried that the social security office wouldn’t give me my social security card because my birth certificate was slightly damaged, and that the DLD would refuse my W2’s as proof of my social security number. Needless to say, it was not a pleasant night.

The next day my worst fears were realized as the social security office turned me away because I didn’t have a valid ID card, or medical records that proved I am who I say I am. My husband almost lost his cool as we were talking to the guy, because he’s very protective of my rights, and he felt that the system was unjustly jerking me around, but we left quickly, to try our luck at the DLD. They were much more accommodating, I not only got through the door, but they accepted my documents without complaint and printed me off a temporary ID.

Now I assumed that we were heading back to the S.S.O., but you know what they say about assuming, and my husband drove over to my work building instead. I’ll spare you the gory details of my freak out, but I will say that it wasn’t very pretty and I’m ashamed of my behavior. As it turns out, I was worried over nothing, as they took my ID’s, did a drug test, and had me fill out three or four documents that said I was ok with them preforming a background check on me. Then they handed me a packet, told me to come fifteen minutes early to my first shift, and sent me on my way.

After that, we headed over to our local pharmacy to see how much my prescriptions were going to cost. My husband had applied for Medicaid and food stamps a week or two ago, which we were approved for (and will probably go away now that I have a job…) and so I presented my card for the pharmacist to run. He did, but there was a mix up with one of the two meds. It seems that Medicaid has a very specific procedure for billing the Seroquel, one that my psychologist didn’t follow, and he put in for the brand name, so that one medication alone rang up at $1000.

We went home without either of my meds that night, feeling discouraged and a little perturbed by the huge amount of money that we might have to pay to get me on the medications that I was supposed to be on, and knowing that no matter how much I needed them there was no way we could afford it. We talked to my dad about loaning us some extra money, which he was able to do, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to cover the Seroquel.

Fortunately my husband doesn’t have the same issues with calling people on the phone that I have, and he was able to get everything sorted out the next day. When we went to pick up the pills this time they were both generics, and each only cost $3. Yay! And that meant I had enough of the loaned money to go to therapy. Double yay!

The first night I took the Seroquel, it made me feel drunk and sleepy. I can definitely see why they recommend that you don’t drink alcohol while your taking it. It knocked me out in a little over half an hour, and I slept like a rock for ten hours. I have to say, it doesn’t scare me like I worried it might. I’ve had sleep aids take me down hard before, and once when I took melatonin I thought I was dying.

I haven’t really noticed a difference in my mood since I started it, or in my anxiety, which I was told it would help with. I’m still depressed. I still feel like tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my miserable life. I still wish I didn’t have to go, even though the negative balance in our bank account is eating at me. I even still think about ending it all, although it has gotten less frequent and I’ve been able to convince myself that I don’t really want to die, I just want to stop feeling my feelings.

Speaking of feelings, in therapy this week we got the EMDR therapy to work, which is super awesome, and combined with my emergency dose of medication (an extra 25 mg of Seroquel if I start freaking out) it should hopefully help keep me sane. I won’t go into it here, but if I have time this week I may write a “Let’s Talk About” post about my experience and how the therapy works, etc.

Anyway, apart from a dry run or two to gauge when I should be going to bed/getting up, that’s all the exciting stuff that happened this week. Hopefully I’ll have time to write more often, but I will keep writing at least one post per week, and if you comment or email me I will of course respond asap. Thank you all so much for reading, and I hope you all have a wonderful week! And for those of you in Texas and Florida, and anyone else who may be affected by the hurricanes, my thoughts are with you. Stay safe out there, ok?

Hair Dye and a Bottle of Pills

So as those of you who subscribe, and read this blog regularly already know, I have been looking for work. Well, I found it. Maybe. This has been a hell of a busy week, suicidal on Tuesday, therapy on Wednesday, interview Thursday, and a med evaluation on Friday. But before I get into all that I thought I’d just take a minute to apologize for leaving you all hanging so often over the past month. I know I went rather quickly from posting almost every day, to maybe squeezing one out per week. If the job does go through, it will probably stay that way, although I fully intend to start cramming as much into these posts as possible, starting with this one.

Anyway, let’s go back to what happened this week, shall we? I’ve been trying my best to apply for as many jobs as possible in the telecommunications field, which is where I have the most experience. By telecommunications I mean, of course, telemarketing and customer service hotlines. You might be wondering how I can possibly work in a field where ninety percent of the job is talking to strangers, and you’d be right to wonder. I certainly don’t have an answer for you, except to say that most of the jobs I’m qualified for are in the customer service industry, and at least on the phone they can’t see me.

On Tuesday morning I got a phone call inviting me to set up an interview for a job. I agreed, answered a few questions, and promised to bring my two forms of ID with me so that if they wanted to hire me after the interview, they could get started a.s.a.p. As soon as I got off the phone I enlisted my husbands help to find my stuff. I knew my ID card was expired, so that wouldn’t work, but I was pretty sure that I had my birth certificate and social security card in an easily accessible file. We pulled out the file and sure enough there they were, only they weren’t mine. As the day went on we went through every last place I could think that they’d be, but to no avail.

Every time we came up empty my temper got a little hotter and my fear welled up a little bigger inside me. How could I be so stupid as to misplace such important documents? After exhausting every reasonable location they could be I let it all get the better of me, stomping up the stairs to my room, and slamming the door. I let out a hideous screams the top of my lungs, but only for a second. The last thing I wanted was to cause a scene, and get the cops called on me. As I sat on my bed I thought about getting a knife from the kitchen, sharpening it, and using it to slit my wrists.

Then I thought about how that wouldn’t solve anything, and it would wreck my husband’s chances to live his dreams, and how it would end rather than just postpone my own and I switched gears to thinking about just cutting a little. Just a few deep cuts on my upper thigh, where no one could see them… I let myself dwell on that for a little while longer than I probably should have, but then I let them go, too. I realized this was exactly what my therapist was talking about when he told me I needed to work on being more resilient. The missing papers were not that big of a deal, I would probably be given a little more time to get them together, and although it would be hard and require a lot of uncomfortable socialization, I could do it.

I didn’t want to, and I had a bad attitude about it the whole day, flopping back and forth between, “I can do this,” and “This is impossible,” but I didn’t think about killing myself after that, and although I still thought about it, I didn’t hurt myself either.

Wednesday saw me feeling a bit better about the whole thing, and I was looking forward to seeing my therapist. We talked a lot about the importance of self-care again, and how important it is to maintain a good sleep cycle. We talked some about the state of my marriage, and how much having a good relationship with your spouse can affect your mental health.

Then we talked about the future, specifically the fact that I spend way too much time living there mentally. I don’t really allow myself to feel good in the moment, because I’m too busy focusing on what’s going to be, instead of what is. He asked me how I felt about that, because I think he could sense that I was more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of living for the now, and I told him bluntly that I felt like that was a little short sighted. He explained that he wasn’t advising me to stop planning for the future, or setting goals, and it’s important to consider the future consequences of our actions. What he was saying was that I need to stop spending every waking minute of my life there. I need to take the time to stop and smell the roses, as it were.

He was right, of course. I do need to be happier in the now, and learn to recognize when it’s productive to worry, and when it’s not. For example, right now as I write this I am feeling extremely anxious about a couple of phone calls that I blew off yesterday to spend time with my cousin. I feel bad, because I know that one of the people who called is feeling extremely isolated lately, and the other is a dear friend from high school, who means the world to me and I would do anything for. I feel like the decision I made to ignore these calls was the right one, because my cousin is also very important to me, but at the same time I feel like I’ve wronged the people I ignored and consequently damaged our relationships. I know I’m probably over thinking, and more to the point, there is nothing I can do about it right now, so shouldn’t I try and let it go for now and deal with the fallout when it gets here, instead of trying to do damage control before I’ve even assessed if there is damage to begin with? Probably, though it kept me up for a few extra hours last night.

At the end of the session we got to try something fun: EMDR therapy. EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It seems really cool, although it didn’t work for me this time. Anyway, you start by picturing a safe and peaceful place, either real or imagined, in as much detail as possible, including how it feels to be there. Then your supposed to follow the therapist’s fingers with your eyes as they move back and forth in front of you. Then the therapist asks you what you feel.

Now the visualization I get, I do that all the time when I’m writing stories. I imagine every blade of grass, the temperature of the breeze that rustles though it the way it smells of earth, with a hint of something flowering close by. I see with my mind the lady bug that crawls up the tallest blade and sits at the top, fanning and refolding it’s wings. I hear the hum of the electrical substation somewhere nearby. What I can’t do, is keep any of it in my head once his fingers started moving.

My brain went instantly from thinking about my peaceful place to hyper focusing on making sure my eyes did exactly what they were supposed to. Then when he’d ask me what I felt, I was at a loss. How did I feel? Did it work? Did I do something wrong? How was I supposed to feel? He told me repeatedly that there was no right or wrong, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was screwing it up.

In the end we decided to put that therapy on the shelf for now, though he told me he has a few others in mind to try. He also said that even though it didn’t work, it wasn’t a failure, and that he learned some new things about me because of how I responded. I’m very much looking forward to going back to see what else he has in store for me.

I was too anxious to sleep on Wednesday night, so I ended up dying my hair at 3 AM, since the place I’ll be working is business casual and doesn’t allow facial piercings or unnatural colors. Which I would like to mention is utterly ridiculous because it’s a call center, the only people who can see you are your co-workers. In my book asking someone to remove piercings, cover up tattoos, or dye their hair a “normal” color is like asking a black person to bleach their skin to a “less offensive color,” and should be every bit as illegal. But whatever, there’s nothing I can do about it, so I acquiesced and now my hair is black brown #20.

Thursday came and I went to my interview. I totally aced the primary interview, and got a decent score on the typing test. They had me stick around for a second interview, and I nailed it too. All kinds of nice things were said about me by my interviewers, like “You’re sweet as a peach,” and “That’s the best response I’ve gotten to that question all day.” I was supposed to get started on my new hire paperwork and do the drug test, but not having my ID yet kept me from moving forward. They can’t even start the background check without having proof that I’m legal to work in this country.

I told them I understood and promised to bring it in as early as possible next week. Needless to say, I was significantly less calm about the whole thing as the day progressed, but my husband learned that my mom had a copy of my birth certificate, so we were able to arrange to pick that up from my stepdad on Friday, though due to the holiday weekend I won’t be able to get either my ID or social security card until Tuesday.

My med evil on Friday was weird. It was an hour and a half visit, and I swear that by the end of that time the doctor knew my whole life story inside and out. I talked to him about everything from my paranoia, and aggression, to my childhood, and my relationships. We went through a list of all the medications I could take to treat my bipolar, which he confirmed was a correct diagnosis. We talked about Abilify, because he felt it would be one of the best to pull me out of my bipolar depression, where as the Lamictal that I was on previously would take longer to start working and is more preventative, and less effective at pulling you out once you’re in. I told him I was really worried about the suicidal thoughts and behaviors I’ve been exhibiting, and he said that the only med proven to reduce suicide risk is Lithium, but that it wouldn’t help with my anxiety. Then I told him exactly how bad the anxiety was and he said that he felt the best course of action would be to start me on Serroquil, and work on getting the Lamictal back into my system. So that’s what we did. I haven’t picked up my prescriptions yet, but that’s what I’ll be taking.

So aside from yesterday, which was pleasantly uneventful and nice, that brings us to today. Today I sat down with my husband and figured out more or less how much money we’re going to need to make it work until I get paid, provided I actually get the job, and the number is ridiculous. It’s going to cost us $2,500 to pay all of our bills over the next three weeks. That’s just three weeks, not even a full month. If you were to extrapolate from that figure it actually costs us $3,333.33 per month to live in a house that’s all paid off, drive a car that was paid for outright, and not have any television service apart from Netflix and Hulu. That is the amount for power, internet, phone, gas, and utilities, plus groceries, and including therapy for my husband and I.

Something is going to have to give, because my new job is only going to net me about $1,650 per month, and that’s barely going to cover therapy, let alone pay the bills. I’ve been seriously considering canceling my phone plan, but the biggest expense from that is that we are still paying off four different phones, and that wouldn’t go away just because we canceled the service. I know I can’t afford for either of us to stop therapy either, because we need to be in a good head space to make the next five years work and that’s not something either of us are capable of doing on our own. The power bill is probably going to drop drastically once the weather cools down, but for now it’s still hot as hell, so I can’t count on that happening very soon.

My husband applied for food stamps and Medicaid, and he got approved, although I’m sure that’s all going away once I start working, as is the possibility of getting on disability. I literally don’t know how we’re going to survive the next five years when I won’t even be making half of what we need, let alone the next month when I’m not making anything and our funds are completely depleted. But I’m trying to do what my therapist said and enjoy the now. Right in this minute I don’t need anything. Right this second I have food to make it through the day, and I have no bills due, and no other obligations. In this instant I am free, and that is going to have to be good enough.

I did my makeup and everything to show you all my new hair color, but I just couldn’t take a good picture that actually showed my face today…

Tragic Loss, Funeral, and GoFundMe Campaign