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