BACK FROM THE DEEP END--or, WHY AM I STILL DOING THIS?
Thanks to Shamus & Liz for your comments. Even though my origial purpose in starting this blog was to reach out to others with GAD, it still amazes me that anyone would give a shit about what I write.

The reason I haven't posted sooner is because I spent some time being royally fucked up, then spent most of the past week being royally knocked up--on new meds, that is. Here's the breakdown:

Monday: Interviewed for awesome new position with the person who would be my supervisor. It went well. (Or so I thought...)

Wednesday: I was summoned to my boss' office for a meeting with him and my potential new supervisor. (Reminder: my boss is the director of HR). PNS told me that I had wonderful skills, I'd be an asset to her team, blah blah blah. Then she told me she wasn't going to hire me. I'm not going to go into detail about what her reasons were, but I knew in the instant she gave her reasons that she didn't have a fucking clue what I was about.

To make a long story short, PNS eventually left the room. As soon as she closed the door I started sobbing. I spilled my guts to my boss & told him how miserable I was in my current position. About how nasty certain people were, about all the stuff I kept overhearing, about the blabbermouth who can't shut up about other people's medical information, the whole nine yards. Again, to make a long story short, Boss said he'd try to get me out of my position ASAP.

Later that night: There was a function that evening that all employees were "invited" to attend. I say "invited" because it was made pretty clear that if we didn't show up it had to be for a damn good reason. I had one glass of wine mixed with diet soda to make it palatable. (Yes, I know that sounds gross, but this is how I have to drink if I'm going to drink. Most alcoholic beverages taste yukky to me.) I'm not a hard drinker or a regular drinker. Usually when I drink I have ONE drink. And it usually makes me calm & relaxed, but not tipsy. Not this time. I ended up getting drunk. From one lousy glass of wine. (And in case you're wondering, my meds had nothing to do with it. My last drug use prior to drinking the wine was 0.25 mgs of Xanax around 12:30 in the afternoon. I had the wine at 6:30pm.) I wasn't out-of-control shitfaced or anything, but I was definitely tipsy.

Now, I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I've been drunk. (Shows you how much & how often I drink.) Usually when this happens I just fall asleep. I'm not an angry drunk or a weepy drunk or a silly drunk or even a horny drunk, I'm just a sleepy drunk. I wasn't really sleepy this time, just highly uncoordinated. Getting drunk at a company function--nice move on my part, eh?

Thursday: Instead of being chained to a desk, I was asked to report to another department to help out because they were swamped. I spent the entire day paper-clipping piles of paper together. I didn't have to think too hard, and nobody was nasty. It was bliss.

I went home that day feeling really good. I couldn't remember the last time I had left work feeling that good. But a few hours later I started feeling shitty again & lapsed into a crying fit. For no particular reason. The good feeling just wore off.

Friday: I spent another day helping the swamped department. I should have felt good, but I felt weepy & stressed all day. My day culminated with a conversation with the Awesome VP. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say he wasn't too impressed with me getting drunk at the function. I was crushed. (Geez, it's not like I went there with the intention of getting hammered! I had one glass of wine--ONE! If I'd known it was going to knock me out that hard I wouldn't have had it! And it's not like I was dancing naked on a table with a lampshade on my head. I was just a little uncoordinated.)

I left work that day sobbing uncontrollably. I sobbed from midtown all the way down to Greenwich Village. The Cute Guy & his brother were performing & I had a ticket to the show. (And yes, I walked the entire way. It's about the only exercise I get.) But I knew there was no way I could sit through one of their performances. The only reason I went down there was because I had a newspaper article I wanted to give to the brother. I walked all the way down there, handed the stuff to a stagehand (a total stranger who gave me a hug when she saw how wrecked I was--I must have been wrecked, total strangers in NYC just don't hug each other...ever), and walked all the way back to midtown again. As soon as I got home I took some remeron & went straight to bed.

Saturday: Got up, felt ok for about an hour, then started feeling weepy again. I went grocery shopping, and for the umpteenth time I was confronted by guerilla high school urchins begging for money for some stupid cause. This is one of my pet peeves. I usually just walk right past them, but this time when they stuck out their bucket & said, "Would you like to..." I wasn't in the mood. "NO! What I'd really like is to be able to walk in & out of here without someone shoving a can in my face & begging for money!" Yes, I actually said that. Which means I'd probably better not walk to the grocery store at night ever again because I'll probably be bashed by a bunch of high school hooligans.

By the time I got home I was sobbing again. Uncontrollably. I couldn't take it anymore, so I called my p-doc's office & begged her to let me start taking doxepin. (She had written me a Rx for it a year ago and to make yet another long story short I ended up not taking it.) She told me to take 25 mgs of doxepin with 0.5 mgs of klonopin (that's double my normal dosage). Then she said she'd call me in an hour to see how I was doing.

6 hours later she finally got around to calling me. I was mildly annoyed, the main reason I wasn't majorly annoyed was because I'd spent the better part of that 6 hours sleeping.

I had a comp ticket to an off-Broadway show that night (worth $75), & I didn't go because I was too wiped out. So that makes two shows in two nights I missed because of my stupid mental illness.

So now I'm on doxepin, or doxedope as I like to call it. Because that's what it does. It puts me out like a light.

This past week I've behaved very strangely. Work was fairly normal, except that it was the first week of classes and I spent the better part of each day telling little lost freshmen where to go. (In more ways than one--ba DUM bump! :) ) Then I'd leave work and on my way home I'd pig out on whatever I'd pass along the way. This week alone I've consumed 4 pints of ice cream. That's excessive even for me. And I ate dinner out 3 times this week. I never do that unless I'm staying late in the city to see something. Then I would come home, take my doxedope, & zonk out. I think I went for like, 3 days without showering because I was simply too sleepy to do it. I'd get home around 7:30 or so, take my meds, fall asleep, & not get up till the alarm went off the next morning.

So that's my life now...go to work, come home, take my meds, go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat. I have no life at all now. None.

Which leads me to the second part of my subject header. One thing I've never mentioned in this blog is that I am a music freak. And no, I'm not going to tell you who my favorite artists are because the stuff I like is so obscure that to identify it could compromise my anonymity.

Anyway, I went to a gig tonight. Like I've done probably hundreds of times since I moved to this area nearly eight years ago. At that time, I'd been excommunicated from the people who share my DNA (note that I do not refer to these people as my "family") for only a few months. Once I discovered the city & the wealth of musical opportunities, I honestly thought that I could form a communnity for myself among the people who shared my love of these artists whom I follow.

Wrong. Dead fucking wrong. While I've met some interesting people in the past eight years of going to gigs & had some good times, I don't have any solid relationships among these people. There was a guy I was really close friends with for about a year, then he met & married a psychobitch who considered anything and anyone who wasn't her to be a threat to their relationship. So he stopped talking to me & cut me out of his life completely. He's divorced now--big surprise. He was at this gig I went to tonight. Didn't even say anything to me.

There was another guy there who's actually in one of the groups that I followed closely for a long time. He said hello, but then ignored me for the rest of the evening. Not that I tried too hard to capture his attention. He's got a reputation for being a jerk with fans, so I don't push him too hard.

Anyway, in the time that I've been going to gigs, I've formed a network of a staggering number of musicians, all of whom know me and are glad to see me when I come to their gigs. But I can't really call them my friends. I honestly don't think any of them would come to see me if I ended up in the hospital. I've never done anything social with them. And maybe I can't expect that from them. Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So why am I still going to gigs and hoping to find someone to bond with?

Honestly, if it weren't for work and grocery shopping, I would never leave my apartment. My life isn't worth anything. I don't HAVE a life. If you want proof that I'm not suicidal, consider this: one of my biggest fears is of dying in my apartment. If I slipped in the shower & cracked my head open or something, it could be WEEKS before anyone noticed that I was missing.

I've now been typing for over an hour & my doxedope is starting to kick in, so I'm going to stop now without a neat & tidy ending. But one note of epilogue: My boss did come through on his promise. Starting a week from now, I'll be in the swamped department I worked at last week. It's in a completely different building, so I won't be around any of the toxic elements I've currently been dealing with.
- posted by Pat @ 11:42 PM | 1 comments

 
THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART
I submitted my resume & cover letter for the cool new position at my school on Saturday (one week ago today). Got a voice mail from my boss on Friday telling me I'd be having an interview with my prospective new boss on Monday at 1pm. I've been shitting bricks ever since.

Even though there's been talk of me having this job from day one, I still feel like something could happen to screw it up. Chalk it up to GAD, I guess. Another part of it is that the person I'd be reporting to isn't the Awesome VP, it's another person. And while she's been ok to work with for the most part, a couple of weeks ago she showed me her ugly side. And this week something happened that may have also put me on her bad side. Basically, she made a disciplinary decision about a student that was overruled. How I was involved is a long story that I won't go into here. I obviously wasn't the one who overruled her, though. I don't have that authority.

I think I'm starting to get addicted to the benzos again. Sometime this week I was lying down at home & felt some slight chest pain. The only times I've felt chest pain like that was when my body needed klonopin & I wasn't taking it. I try to avoid meds on the weekends in order to prevent building up a tolerance and also to conserve. I skipped my Friday morning dose of klonopin because I didn't feel like I needed it. By the evening I was climbing the walls with restlessness & anxiety. I had to take some just to be able to get to sleep.

Like I said, my interview is on Monday. Cross everything you have two of...
- posted by Pat @ 8:55 PM | 2 comments

 
A FURTHER BULLETIN
OK, ok. I didn't get fired. But the night after I posted I came home from work, ate dinner, crashed on the couch & didn't wake up till after midnight. Then last night I went to a concert & after I got home late I had other computer stuff to do. More on that in a minute...

So here's what happened. Nothing happened on Thursday, the day I was sure i was going to get fired. (Hey, I've been right before! This is EXACTLY what happened to me at Prestigious Institution.) Then on Friday...shortly after I started working at this place there was talk of creating a position that would basically be a right hand to the Awesome VP. But when the budgets were banged out in March the funding for that position was cut. So I assumed it wasn't going to happen at least until 2007-08. And then when I thought about being chained to the stupid front desk for another 6 months it just made me sick.

But on Friday, some new internal job postings were announced. And I guess the powers-that-be changed their minds, because the Awesome VP Assistant job was among them. That's what I was busy doing last night--working on my cover letter and resume.

Yes, you bet your sweet bippie I'm applying for this position. It's not only made for me (or should I say I for it?), but it will get me out of Front Desk Hell.

Suddenly my depression seems to have dissipated. Could be the neurontin, could be that I see a way out of a place that I thought I had no way out of. Could be a combination of the 2. The mind is a funny thing. All I can say is that if I DON'T get this job I'm going to be despondent.
- posted by Pat @ 2:30 PM | 0 comments

 
MY STOMACH HURTS...
...That's what Charlie Brown always used to say when he was in a stressful situation. Actually, Charlie Brown is a pretty good model for GAD. Wishy washy, lies awake at night worrying about stupid inconsequential shit, down on himself because nobody likes him, loves someone (the little red-haired girl) with all his heart but can't bring himself to even talk to her. But I digress...

I went into work today & sat down at my desk. The 3 head honchos were behind closed doors having a conversation with the director of HR (my boss). They were discussing positions they were about to advertise.

At some point my name came up. I obviously couldn't hear everything, but I don't think it was good. I'm not going to spell out specific details here, but I think I'm going to be fired. And I think it's going to be tomorrow.

Again, I'm not going to spell out specific details. But to be fair...what I heard wasn't irrefutable proof that they're going to can me, but it didn't sound good.

It never fails. Every time I believe that things are going to be better, they inevitably become worse. Is it any wonder I'm a pessimist? It's because I always end up being punished for being an optimist. I felt so happy and useful at Famous Hospital, & they let me go. I felt I had a good rapport with the CPA, and he let me go for failing to flip off a light switch. I thought Prestigious Institution was going to turn my life around, I busted my ass to get a grip on that job despite being thrown to the wolves, and I got fired for lack of initiative.

It's not even the thought of leaving School of Style that upsets me. After all the temping and firing I've been through, I've learned not to be too attached to one workplace. It's that I'm going to have to jump on the same goddamned gerbil wheel again. Re-doing my resume (again!). Scanning craigslist & all the other websites every fucking day. Having my Sunday revolve around the NY Times. Filing for unemployment and all the stress associated with that.

The really shitty thing is that I honestly believed I could make a difference there. There are departments at the school that desperately need my assistance, but I'm not allowed to help them because I have to stay chained to a fucking desk. They say there's no money in the budget to create a new position for me. I'm currently being paid a salary. That money has to come from somewhere. Why can't they just take that money out of whatever pot it's currently in and stick it in the pot of a place that needs me?

Well, tomorrow's probably going to be my last day of work. I'll try to get through it without throwing my dignity out the window. At least it's hot enough outside for me to pretend that my tears are actually sweat.

I spent my lunch hour talking with one of the folks in the counseling center. As a result I forgot to take my neurontin. I came home, fixed dinner, & promptly fell asleep on the couch. I just took some remeron about 20 minutes ago. So hopefully that will put me to sleep too.
- posted by Pat @ 9:41 PM | 0 comments