THE (ANTI-) CLIMAX
It's over.

I got through Hell Day, aka my yearly review.

The night before I took my regular dose of doxepin, followed 90 minutes later by 3.75 mgs of Remeron. I slept like a rock. Then I got up & did 0.5 mgs of Xanax XR before I left for work. It didn't help. By 9:30am I couldn't sit still & I felt like I was going to throw up. At 10:30am I took 0.5 mgs of klonopin & walked to my boss' office.

And now it's over. And yes, my boss faulted me for some major things that weren't really my fault. But I'm not going to complain. Why?

Because I finally got my goddamn raise. 9 fucking months after I originally asked for it, they finally gave it to me.

This will make it harder to leave, because it will be more challenging to find a similar position that pays as well. But what this raise also tells me is that all the negative bullshit that my boss put in my review doesn't really mean anything, because if I sucked that badly they wouldn't have given me the raise, now would they?

So fuck my boss. By this time next year, there's a good chance she won't be my boss. And the person who hopefully will be my boss has a hell of a lot more backbone than she does.

I should be happy. I should be dancing on the walls. After a long hard battle where I went through hell I finally got what I want. But I just feel empty inside. Empty & hollow.

I wanted to call the Guitar God and tell him. But of course I didn't.

I often imagine myself having conversations with him. And in one such imaginary conversation he asks me how I feel about being cut off from my family. And this is the insight I've gained from imagining what my answer would be. (See, an active imagination isn't such a bad thing! And it's cheaper than therapy.)

What's hard isn't leaving behind the people to whom I was born. When it first happened I thought that I would move to a new place, meet some new people, make some friends, & I would be able to form my own homemade community that I could call family, even if we didn't share any DNA. But ten years later, that hasn't happened. What's hard is not having ANYONE.

I honestly thought that by now I'd have people solidly in my life. But I still spend every fucking holiday alone. I gave a presentation at a conference last week and I kicked ass. I was so pumped. Then I came home and realized I had no one to share my good news with. I want to scream "I GOT A RAISE!" But there's no one to hear. Or care.

In a little more than a year I will be celebrating a significant birthday. And I am already making plans to fly to a foreign country for that birthday. I figure no matter what I do I'll be spending that birthday alone. But it would be better to be alone because I had the means and the courage to fly to a foreign country than to be alone in my apartment because I had no one in my life to mark the occasion.
- posted by Pat @ 11:15 PM