Mick + Meds, Day 1

Outside my psychiatric nurse practitioner's office yesterday, I cried listening to a Jewel song playing in the waiting room. I wasn't even listening to the words. I don't know what she was singing about. I know it was one of her hits and I could find it easily enough, but I don't care. I just cared enough to cry, but I cry at anything.

She gave me meds (my psychiatric nurse practitioner gave me meds, not Jewel). I finally have meds again. A kind I've never tried before. They might work in a week. In a week I'll be happy I started them when I did, today I'm just regretting the absence of a silver bullet. I took my first pill after breakfast and I told myself a hundred thousand times it wouldn't fix everything and I wouldn't feel anything right away and then I didn't feel anything right away and I thought, "this is bullshit."

I'm going to OA again. It's hard. It's hard to be present. It's hard to not be angry. It's hard to grieve my mother and be surrounded by all these my-mother-aged women. It's hard to keep hearing about God and God and God and God and God and God. Someone said they know God is there because when she can't find a parking space she asks God for a parking space and hey, alakazam, there's a parking space. I wanted to ask her where "Higher Power" was when I "put my intention to the universe" for help in the wake of my mother's death and the universe gave me a middle finger, because at the time I strongly felt like I could find my own fucking parking spaces. I wanted to ask her if she's considered traveling to places where people have seen their families chopped up by machetes so she can share with them the miracle of her available parking spaces. I wanted to ask her if she's ever considered she finds the parking spaces because roughly 73 fucking percent of America is fucking parking spaces. Saying any of these things would, I suspect, be frowned upon in a 12-step meeting, I think. So instead I just sat there and hated.

But the meetings help. They do. I don't know how but they do.

When I am writing, I am okay and then I have to go home to my neighbors who are just people but their slightest sound drives me to rage. And the rage only exacerbates the constant, doubtless, torturous sense that everything is wrong and everything is futile and everything is pain.

I just want to sleep. I want to sleep and I want to be warm and I want the world to go away.

I care about myself. This is a revelation. The other day, I mentioned to Jolene that I knew something was terribly wrong because as depressed as I am, I don't want to binge on food. The urge is not there. I don't want to go to the drug store and buy five different "party" or "family" size bags of candy and finish them all before it gets dark. It wouldn't help. It wouldn't even give me a temporary respite, and I know that, but that's never stopped me before. So, I told Jolene, that was a bad sign. Like, I care so little about anything that I don't even have the energy to engage in my usual method of self-destruction. And then I said I was worried I might start using alcohol. Because I'm not immune to that yet. It would give me a couple of hours of comfort. Maybe.

But then I thought about all that yesterday, and it occurred to me that, yes, the alcohol would give me a temporary comfort but I'm not drinking it. So maybe the urge to binge on food isn't there because I care about myself. Because I want to get better. That, in fact, maybe that was the only possibility.

Because things are harder than they have ever been. This is grief but this is also more. This is constant, unceasing despair. There's no break from it, it's always there - there are simply times when it takes me over and times when I'm distracted so it's waiting to take me over and there are times when I'm asleep. So if I didn't care about myself, if I wanted to destroy myself for the sake of temporary relief, I would.

So I give a shit about myself, yay. And that's good. That's great. That's as close to a miracle as I'll get. But I'm still in Hell.

Maybe it'll be better in a week. I think it might be. I feel like it will never be. I hope feelings are stupid.