Nocturning

My psychiatrist may be brilliant.
I've been in my standard winter useless-lump-slump. Every year I forget that it happens every year and I fight it tooth and nail, or at least "fight it" as much as I can without leaving the house or accomplishing anything and really just fight my own sense of self-worth. But every year I try new drugs and new therapies and new resolutions to not be generally miserable and this year has been no exception. So far it's been a sun lamp and that horrible, horrible Ritalin experiment and lots of yelling at myself to be fucking positive and get off my fucking ass and accept my health and my family and get on with it already.

It's not working. At all. Which is much of why I'm not writing. I don't feel like doing anything, writing included, but I also am trying so fucking hard to be positive and I don't feel positive so I can't write positive so I can't write. Hell, most of the time I can't feel because it's feel crappy or feel nothing. We're messing with my medications again or still or more or however you want to look at it. The migraines have been so much better, I don't know why The Sads have been so much worse.

But in the past 9 hours I've gotten more done than I've been getting done in week-long stretches, and without stressing or straining; just quietly working and accomplishing like I do when I'm not in depression mode. Like I said at the beginning, my psychiatrist may be brilliant.
I was trying to explain to him my listlessness and days of foggy nothingness, migraine or no migraine.
Is it cognitive? Motivational?
I don't fucking know, probably because I'm having too much in the middle of it to have a clear understanding of what it is.
So is it a medication? Does it get better or worse at different points of the day? When I've taken things?
I'm clearest at night. Always have been. I wake up at 9 or 10 and can only start to think then...which is right around or after I've taken my night dose of the same crap I take in the morning and feel like a fuzz-bucket.
So maybe not the medication...

BUT!

If I'm naturally nocturnal and am clear at night, what if I actually allow myself to be nocturnal? Get shit done at night when I can get shit done and sleep during the day when I'm a grog-monster? I can still see my friends in the evenings, when I see them  anyway, and spend some portion of business hours awake so I can make  phone calls and go to stores and things.

It took me about 24 hours to get over the idea that staying awake all night and sleeping during the day made  me an automatic freak of nature and quite possibly bad person who just couldn't make it in society. But why? Other cultures have different sleep patterns than ours, anyway. It's just when the sun shows up that tends to dictate the most popular times for productivity, and even that's BS as proven by the existence of Cleveland where the sun never shines yet at least three companies still operate (though I hear one is in talks with Miami).
I'm still adjusting and figuring out what works with my biological, medication, dog-walking, hypothetical social, and errand-running schedules, but today started to feel right. I slept hard from 5-10 PM and it's now 7:15 AM and I've done all kinds of Etsy stuff, written this, worked on a BS time-wasting project I enjoy (in which case maybe I should be nicer to it and stop calling it a BS waste of time), did all the dishes, researched prices on printers and contact lenses, talked to my brother and Aural Girl on Facebook, and walked the dog twice. Maybe the return of the bitter self-hate is an indicator that it's bed time again. Also I'm itchy, another good sign. I'd wanted to write a bit about The Boy, but I'll give the extremely condensed version instead:

Boy. Talked hours and hours of IM pre-Christmas. Then didn't hear from him between Christmas and New Years. Heard from him New Years Eve, ended up talking to him on the phone for a long time, now no sign he's alive for a week. He's on vacation and working on his own stuff (and getting a shitton done, it sounds like). And I had a fear it'd be like Love in the Time of Cholera or something...passionate love letters curdling when faced with actual proximity...but he comes back in a week and I'm trying to play it cool when we all know very well I'm a giant dweeb whose unsure about everything in the entire universe, worst of all myself and second-worst-of-all Boys.

7:30 AM. Sounds like a good bed time to me.

Belated

Why write now when I haven't blogged in almost two months? A Boy, of course. I'll get there in a moment...

I never wrote about Thanksgiving, how much we had to be thankful this year. My cousin adopted a child. My other cousins are pregnant. Amber stopped by and she's all kinds of pregnant, too. I've created an actual business that's started to make actual money that I enjoy and works extremely well with the chronic migraines and depression that I need to accept as part of myself that's not going anywhere any time soon. And my mom had the fastest, easiest experience with breast cancer humanly possible. I don't think we've ever cried so much as we went around the table and did our "I'm thankful for..."s.
My babycousin (the adoptee) is almost one and friggin adorable. My parents still have this plastic horse on wheels that was my favorite 1st birthday present. I found it in their basement, Lysoled the hell out of it, and brought it up to see if Babycousin wanted to try it out. She loved it and I love that she loved it. Maternal instincts creeping in, biology and all that...raising the next generation with my own experience...someone please start singing "Circle of Life."

I never wrote about my business taking off over the holiday season, money coming in for the first time in a substantial way, paying down the credit card I pretend doesn't exist from a few years back, seeing 800 shop views in an hour, front page, treasury after treasury, hard work paying off.

I never wrote about The Ritalin Experiment. As happens every year, fall showed up and so did a general feeling of gloom and constant exhaustion. My psychiatrist thought I'd do well on a "stimulant" meaning Ritalin. It was a good thought. Unfortunately, I had a paradoxical reaction and it took me two weeks to realize my total lack of desire to do anything and deep dark depression were a result of the drugs and not just a part of me I deserved (isn't depression fun?)

I never wrote about my mom's surgery. Breast cancer reconstruction stuff. The last of it. She was getting back to her negative fussy ways, but then about 24 hours before going under, she saw her therapist and POOF! back to positive thinking. Amazing.

I never wrote about the ovarian cyst I got the day before my mom's surgery. I ended up driving myself to the ER in agony, getting probed by nice people with creepy machines and dumb people with nice drugs and then missing the entire  time my mom was in the hospital. Not ok. Ok with my mom (who was wonderful about it) but not with me. I felt guilty, like somehow I'd made myself sick so this would be about me instead of her. They got a nice clear view of the cyst in the sonogram, so if I did somehow give myself the damn thing, I've gotten good at materializing my psychosomatic symptoms.

But I never wrote about the boy, either.
At first I thought he was gay. I misinterpreted something as him flirting with another guy, and I must have thought he said something else early on, too, because I filed him away as "gay" very quickly in a way I don't normally do. So he was my fun new friend I didn't see that much. He was there for Halloween, we hung out for a good chunk of the night as I got consistently more and more wasted. He was gone by the time I was almost ready to follow home the snarky stranger.
I think Halloween was when I first thought, "Wait, why exactly did I think he was gay?" Went from "Too bad he's gay" to "I don't think he's gay..."

Apparently I'm extremely dense. Aural Girl is amazed at my obliviousness, and Possible Boy knew exactly who I was talking about because "it's just that obvious that he likes you."
Still, I wasn't sure until he was talking about Neighbor Guy basically trying to rape him no matter how many times he said "I'm. Not. Gay." (Glad to hear Neighbor Guy is sticking to his M.O., falling for straight boys and  then not taking "no" for an answer.)

I had to reevaluate The Boy. Because now he could actually be a Boy. What? Further investigation was in order, but I saw him at most once a week at the bar. We didn't actually hang out until right before he left for the east coast for a month-long winter break vacation.
But.
The day we hung out, we were together from 11 AM to 11 PM and had a really fantastic time. Driving around in freezing rain and an estate sale and making music and cooking and more music and being awkward and then just a little bit of smooch on my way out the door. He followed me out to my car in his t-shirt, oblivious to the cold in our mutual dazed bewilderment. The freezing rain slush had turned to snow. After our final bits of giddy and apprehensive, I managed a cool "See you in a month," and drove home.

And then he flew away. To a Carolina. For a month. He won't be back until mid-January.

I wished for an excuse to write love letters, but at this point it would be for the storyline and the love of myself.
But it turns out, he tends to be awake at stupid hours of the night creating things. Whether it's a bad habit or just my natural clock, I've been  indulging my nocturnal tendencies and spending hours and hours (like, a good 5 hours a night) "talking" to him on Facebook chat.

I'm not quite sure he's real. I suppose there's enough about him that is just completely his that he can't be purely a narcissistic projection of myself, and there's so much I still don't know. But so much of what I'm finding out seems to fit very well. I'm not getting completely lost and stupid because, via instant messages, he seems more like a concept than a real  person. We'll see when he gets back. As long as he keeps making me feel better about myself instead of worse, he's an improvement on most of my past emotionally-involved Boys and I"ll gladly live in fluttery-but-cautiously-optimistic limbo for a few more weeks.

[No code name yet because I haven't decided on one.]

Inpatience

It's amazing that last post reads so coherent. I felt like I was in pieces, like I shouldn't have been able to type the words.

Now, I'm in a hospital bed with an IV aching on my left hand.
I've been  so ambivalent  about this whole inpatient thing because this is somehow the big huge next step overhaul in migraine treatment options and it feels like more of the same: more throwing curious chemicals at a problem we don't understand. The drugs they're giving me to break up my current headache cycle aren't even anything new; they're the exact same thing dripped  into me five years ago in Cleveland with limited success.
I feel so down and negative right now. It's a universe of infinite possibility and potential. I'm trying to concentrate on the shiny happy things, but it  feels like all my shiny happy places are currently imaginary. Still way better than feeling like shiny happy places will never exist, but at the moment I can't see them in a touchable way.
I see the beautiful moon and amazing view from my hospital window. I see tubes and informational bracelets and "mid-century furnishings."
I had one friend (Possible Boy) drive me to the doctor's office, the bank, and the hospital, and stay with me through all the waiting and my frazzled uncertainty, until hours later I had a room and internet and gratitude I'm never sure how to show.
I have another friend  (HDS) who is not only walking and feeding my dog but also sent me a picture of him adorably accepting her surrogate love.
These are my shiny happy and these are real. I feel like I'm covered in muck and can't be a part of them. They are a part of me, I know, but I am a part of them, too.
I want this dark cloud off of me and the only way out is to realize it's not actually there.

My parents came by to visit tonight. They showed up just after visiting hours ended. I was still glad to see them.

Disbelief

Dear Annabell,

Being human and being alive is hard. Some times and some things are harder for some people. You are doing a good job dealing with now. You are working really hard. Dark clouds may say otherwise. You may say otherwise. But I can see the progress, I can see all the things you do and try and think and push every second of every day. I know how hard you are fighting, and even if you're going nowhere or fighting in the wrong direction, you deserve a lot of credit for your effort and your experience. You are a deeply wonderful human and I am proud of your humanity.

Love,
Annabell who needs to believe what she writes

You probably think this song is about you

Love is longing? Is the unobtainable? The feeling that your emotional muscles are being stretched to their limit, that is love?
No.
That is familiar. That is the semi-silent suffering that makes for great novels and television dramas and plenty of mediocre works of truth and fiction, too.
It's what we late bloomers, wallflowers, writers, and dreamers  have been carving into trees our entire lives.
Now here we are, blossoming in a maniac's paradise, the world delivered on a plate via room service, and all we know is longing and books and promises we carved into trees.
I still blossom in wallpaper and words, but there is too much world overflowing with true love and fullness to get caught in webs of longing for its own sad sake.
I know you can see how much world is out there--love is there, too. The searing fades away when you can see the love, the intentions, and the humanity.
Now, I'm lapping up every last drop I can get, but I'm also looking for a partner. My heart does a lot of crazy things, but I trust my intuition lately, and whatever happens happens. I want to feed this to you in pill form. I want to take your sadness and flush it into the ether so it's merely another frosty breath passing through winter.
Mine, too.
And then you will see friends as love and longing as pain and love as possibility.

Esteem

I want to love myself.
I hurt myself.
So much comes so easily to me, I don't know what to do when something is hard. Things either work or I figure out another way to make it easy for them to work.
My heart hurts. Loss and loneliness and jealousy are the hardest for me to bear. When a Boy likes me, I try to make it very clear from the start if he has any chance in hell so he never gets emotionally sucked in only to be let down. Maybe that's a bit too pre-emptive. I'm fussy and not feeling particularly good about myself this past week, and I know many girls in my position would go out and flirt and get as many of their Male Suitors as possible to tell them that they are pretty and wonderful and all that. I half-assed tried to contact the Boys Who Like Me yesterday and today, dolled myself up for karaoke, and still felt like crap. I couldn't really bring myself to tease forth accolades. Because it's evil or because I don't think I deserve their shiny words? Possible Boy has a new possible Girl, and of course that chokes me with extra jealous and lonely. How can I ever measure up to anyone else with a pulse?
I hate these feelings. Why do I feed them tequila? Why do I have them in the first place?

Worm

Very long day with too much driving in Friday traffic and getting mad at myself for things and not eating for many hours at a stretch. Tequila and Aural Girl heal all wounds. My psychiatrist official prescribed a sun lamp for seasonal depression. Why can't it just be ok to hybernate? Juggling my four main doctors and eight regular prescriptions makes me want to hybernate, too. Where's that One Magical Thing or Person that can make everything improve in a constant and noticable way?

For Those Considering Suicide

There is the will to live. There is a lack of will to live. There is a will to die. Where and why does one slip into another? While I'm standing on the sunny side of the shore, how can I bottle my reasons to go on and pass them out to people who don't feel the same stability?

I'm lucky; I knew my fundamental reason for living by high school. I have something more tenable than faith or goals or people: experience. I live to experience things. The senses themselves blow my fucking mind on a regular basis; all the colors of the world, the nature of color, light, the nature of light, how these visual cues tickle and stimulate and set off things inside the hugeness of life and feeling. And that's just a teeny tiny slice of one sense. Don't get me started on touch. If I feel more pain than the average person because I'm more aware of tactile sensations, I think I'm willing to take my migraines as a sacrifice. Mind you, I'm not in the midst of a migraine right now, but I did have one the last few days and it messed with my Great Life Plans, and I will gladly give up Great Life Plans for a will to live that life. Because that's the fundamental piece of being alive that death, suicide or otherwise, will most likely end: tasting the world, tingling fingers under a hot faucet, smelling memories in damp wood staircases.

One friend faced with the sudden death of a colleague, jarred again by her own mortality. The rug can get yanked out from under us at any time, but we fool ourselves whenever possible, we forget and concentrate on the long-term blur, the big picture, the daily minutia.

Another friend says the biggest thing between himself and suicide is the means.

Today, while I remember my love for existence, death terrifies me. It seems such an easy mistake to make, it's everywhere. I'm not done yet.

Now how do I give every person who ever has and ever will contemplate suicide a drink of my reason to live? Can I go back to younger me and understand it better? Harness its power and pour it over the universe? Would it seep into all the cracks in all the hearts and souls everywhere? Do I have to go around with a caulk gun and give spot treatments to those in arms length (plus booster shots to myself, of course)? Or is this all an exercise in futility, like my other desperations, trying to eke some meaning out of another night of words words words words words...

I was too frustrated/befuddled/tired last night to write. Neighbor Guy is being all depressed and dumb about it. He's so emotionally stunted I want to shake him and slap him a lot, but I can't do the work for him or say magic words to fix him and that frustrates me. Possible Boy and I went over to see what was going on with Neighbor Guy and I realized I couldn't just say whatever I thought Neighbor Guy needed to hear but I also had to tailor it so it was Possible Boy acceptable, too. Neighbor Guy wouldn't cry with Possible Boy there, and I wouldn't do nearly as much bitchy tough love. But it was good, too, because I was more aware of how narcissistic and monologuey I get when trying to help.

I'm fuzzy this morning. I was feeling good when I went to walk my dog, but computer makes me fuzzy. I cleaned out my hall closet. Something smells like poop and I can't figure out what. It may be one of my estate sale items.

Still like Possible Boy. He's still spending lots of time with Other Girl, but I know from comments he's made they're not getting it on. She's not thrilled at my existence. She reminds me a lot of myself.

Did I mention I'm fuzzy? Writing is hard today. Can't focus. Stopping now.

Sads

I've got The Sads and I don't know why. Is it the medication? Is it whatever was before all the fun with the medication just catching up with me again? I don't know. But I'm crying and deep-down sad and I've been hiding out at NBF's since Saturday and just went home tonight even though I really didn't want to. I just want to hide there forever. Curl up into a little ball and not deal with anything. Not be alone. I'm having trouble writing and I can't concentrate on anything still and I don't feel like doing much of anything, so staying there and watching movies and reading and eating and playing with dogs was perfect. Sometimes when I'm in depression mode I want to be alone. Right now, I want to be not alone, but not in public either. This is when I used to show up in Birdie and Sunny's room/house in college. My parents are the last people on earth I want to see. I want my super-close friends and to cry a lot and for the hurt to stop being hurty. Why am I all hurty?

Countess

I went to a psychiatrist for the first time in a few years. No more Effexor! Yay! Switched back to Prozac (which worked well for me back in 2000ish) as of today, plus he's going to talk to my neurologist about just how high and terrible my stroke risks are to see if I can get on birth control after all. I still think birth control would help all kinds of non-pregnancy-related things in my body, like the friggin' ovarian cyst that I had and my evil evil periods and my migraines in general and my cyclical swinginess.

He asked me about the last time I was happy. I have happy moments and hours and days all the time. Then he asked me the last time I was happy for a whole week. Um, summer of 1999? And even that's questionable. I also think I sound like the whiny over-privileged child of a doctor and a social worker with no valid reason for a lifetime of negativity. Then again, that's a very negative thought and doesn't help matters.

I have been feeling better emotionally this past week, for whatever reason. I camped out at NBF's for a number of days with ouchy brain, this time prepared with clean underwear and plenty of my medication. I've been to the gym five times since I joined January 31 and that's certainly helping emotional matters, since it's a place I can go and I only have to be a certain level of functional and I don't have to talk to anybody but I can if I want to and then I get to feel all pleased with myself for having gone to the gym and doing something productive and self-lovey. One of the boy people who works there (I've only actually seen him twice) is cute and sarcastic and makes me a little girl-stupid, but in a good way.

There's another maybe boy who clearly likes me a lot and/or really wants to get in my pants and I'd love to say more here about him but I don't actually know who reads this thing anymore and I don't want to hurt anyone or anything along the way, so email me if you are a reality friend and entitled to details.

Head is pressury distracting hurty.

The whole "tackle the big projects first" thing does not work for me. I have to start off doing something that's technically somewhat productive but I don't mind doing to get myself geared up for real work and the "big" projects. I never was one to jump into pools, but rather start with my toes and slowly lower myself in as I got comfortable until I was ready to duck my head under.
Yay ten billionth water metaphor.

Anyway, now I tackle. Or, more acurately, begin dipping until I am ready to tackle. But just writing is a start for me, and I made myself a headache journal template so it's easy and has exactly what I personally need to track. Two semi productive things! (cue thunder crack and Count Von Count cackle).

Neurology, Neurosis

An hour and a half on the train this morning with temperatures around -3°F not including windchill and I got my car back in time to drive to my neurologist appointment. I held January 11, 2009 as a special date in my heart for some time now, since that was when my "pre-existing condition exclusions" expired on my insurance. Translation: migraine- and depression-related medical shit now gets paid for. And while there's still no new incredible cure for my lame vessel of a head, I'm getting an MRI as soon as I schedule it so we can see pictures of my lame head. It's been about 10 years since my last MRI, but I'm not particularly hopeful that updated photos will say anything new. Maybe there's something that this much better neurologist can see or catch, but from everything he says, I'm an extremely typical severe migraine patient and the best we can do is pain manage with drugs drugs drugs and acupuncture and anything else I find that helps. Because my left eye droops when I'm migrainey, I'm supposed to look in the mirror the next time I'm mid-migraine and see if my left eye and nostril are also runny and if the left side of my face is red and splotchy. If so, I have a very specific type of migraine (definitely probable candidates...I know that's the sinus side that gets cranky) called Paroxysmal Hemicrania. If so, the one and only treatment is an NSAID called that indomethacin that I'd take daily, possibly instead of the gazillion pills I'm on now. Downside: indomethacin does terrible things long-term to your guts, particularly your stomach and kidneys. I'd have to get all of my everything else checked constantly, and if anything started going downhill, I'd have to stop the only medication that's been found do really help that type of headache. My migraines aren't going to kill me, but they can't really be fixed, either. And no birth control pills, like, ever, even with the ovarian cyst thing and the evil clotty crampy periods and my promiscuous unprotected sex. Ok, two out of three. But once again, I'm reminded of how much modern medicine still doesn't know. We think our bodies are supposed to work and when they don't we should be able to fix them or quit whining about it and overcome and Just Do It and No Fear and all those other slogans and mottos and things people say on ESPN and to 9-year-olds in football helmets. But fighting isn't working for me. I should go back to the meditation center, except that felt like a fight with myself, too. I have to stop fighting myself and my body all the time. I'm trying so hard to accept what I am. It's hard and it hurts because I still get mad at myself for not just being ok or at least accepting my not being ok. I've always been much quicker to understand things on an intellectual level than to feel them, and it frustrates the hell out of me that I can't just make myself feel what I think.
I just want to be happy.
I'm taking the steps that are supposed to help all of that (going to therapy, on happy drugs, trying to cultivate new friendships and keep stoking old ones, concentrating on the good things in my life...which I actually do but I use this blog to get my whining and bitching out since I'm spending so much energy the rest of the time trying to put a positive spin on everything).

I always have a hard time in winter. I need to declare a time to drive down to Nashville and romp around with HDS in the warmer and our dogs can try to eat eachother. I wish it was less than an 8 hour drive, but maybe that would help. I don't know. I keep looking for these things to help or cure or fix. That's part of who I am, too, and that needs to be ok, too. More time in the meditation center with the Buddhists, less time in the internal throes of Jewy guilt.

I listen to emotional music because I am dead inside

This is a friggin' long entry. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, and very little of it talks about anything I've actually done for the past month. If you only read one part, read the blue text. If you read any more than that, sorry in advance.

I don't know why The Sads are winning now as opposed to some other moment over the last few weeks, but they are. Probably hormone-related and all terribly logical, but I'm still feeling The Sad. I should listen to Emo and wear sweatbands around my wrists.

I called a therapist today and left a message. I've had the business card of said therapist for a month, but my parents decided to give me an ultimatum on Friday that I absolutely HAD to 1) start therapy 2) find a good psychopharmacologist and 3) hire a housekeeper on a weekly basis. They thought I'd be most upset about #3. Mostly I was upset that they were giving me Life Ultimatums, but as we all know, They know best and have not only a right but a duty to tell me what to do because They are right. At the moment it's particularly frustrating because, as I check off month number four of seriously compromised physical wellbeing, I do need some help and I do need to get my ass to the therapist but I've had such a hard time convincing them I'm a grown-up that relinquishing any of that is terrifying. And being my parents, their fucked up shit is ever so close to my fucked up shit, so it all gets more and more fucked up and shitty and I start regressing and now I'm back in my hole avoiding the universe. And I hate myself for getting like this, and it's not nearly as bad as it's gotten in the past, but knowing my cave-dwelling tendency, it freaks me out to watch myself bolting back in that direction. I have an appointment with a new neurologist on Monday, and I've done a lot of the crap to get myself on the state's health insurance thing, but I haven't followed up and I needed to do that today. I didn't. I called the therapist (and my regular doctor to restock my supply of Effexor samples, though my head was being too fussy to drive down there) and that was very good, but I didn't deal with the health insurance. I should have dealt with the health insurance a week ago. And instead of it just being the top priority on my To Do list tomorrow, it's a fucking albatross.

On the other hand, Etsy has been great. I'm actually selling things. Not nearly enough to consider it a job or even a real income, but at least my crafting hobby is paying for itself and it's given me something to do in my state of permanently-semi-dead. It's mostly a feel-good lovey-dovey community and the chatrooms provide a vague sense social interaction, and when I make something and someone likes it enough to pay me money for it, I feel deeply complimented and at least a little bit productive. I think the next step in Living-With-Migraines is to find some sort of work-from-home part-time data entry job.

It all comes back to trying to balance my current life formula. What percentage of my time should be spent doing each of the following to make the most out of my life:

• actively looking for medical and trying out answers and solutions to my migraines (neurologists, headache clinics, clinical trials, etc.)
• actively looking for and trying out "alternative" answers and solutions to my migraines (acupuncture, yoga, howling at the moon, etc.)
• learning to live with my migraines and seeking out new short- and long-term paths (find more lucrative work-from-home strategies, get degree online, join chronic pain support groups)
• nursing my wounds and just trying to do things that make me happy on a basic day-to-day level (sleeping, Etsy, dog snuggles, watching movies, etc.)

I want answers. And now I think my parents are convinced most of my migraines are self-perpetuating from my depression, and that's definitely on my list of possibilities, but my parents are back so deep in my skull I can't tell if that's really just me thinking it, if it's them thinking it and so I think it, or if both they think it and I think it but one is not necessarily dependent on the other. I'd say a lot of my opinions are going through this process right now. It's like back when I was 10 and I realized for the first time that everything I thought I knew was only because I accepted what I'd been told.

If I let myself, I could easily spend my entire life in an epistemological daze/fury.

It's hard when the voice of my own nagging and self-doubt is echoed by my parents, and then their voices echo in my head in an orgy of aphorisms and "shoulds."

A month or two back my whole immediate family was out to dinner at a very good restaurant. As we were all quite stuffed and contented and happy with our meals, we started ranking our favorites to least favorites from each course. I pointed out, half-joking, that we were such a judgmental family we couldn't even get through a meal without judging and ranking everything instead of just talking about how delicious things were and why. Everyone got really quiet. We'd switched to judging ourselves for being too judgmental.

This is why I'm crazy.

Tomorrow, I will deal with the health insurance. Head willing, I will go to the post office. I will also gather the plates and bowls and things that have overflown my garbage can by my desk and put them in the trash and take that trash outside. Baby steps.

"Baby steps" is so something my father would say.