Tag Archives: mood tracking

Coming full circle

It’s a lot

In lieu of proper emails to the people who have expressed concern, here’s a blog entry.

I’m not doing so hot. It’s a whole bunch of things. This PMDD cycle is ridiculously brutal. I’m on day fucking 35 and I wish I would just god damn bleed already. I think I would be doing poorly even if everything else was going well. But everything else is not going well.

The pandemic is not hitting my area hard at all–there haven’t been new cases in a while and we’ve gone a few days without a death in the whole country. There will be a few more deaths as this trickles to an end, but Scotland as a whole has managed this pretty darn well. I am terrified of when tourism opens up again. That’s going to fuck us. But I also recognize that an awful lot of the industry exists around supporting tourism so it’s a double edged sword.

All the stuff in the US. I feel ashamed for not being there to participate. I feel grateful that I am not part of it. I feel fear for all of the people on the ground doing the work. I feel scared for the future. I am watching the revolution on tv because I was a coward and I got out.

Things in my house. Stuff with Noah is at a weird/hard point. We are having some troubles. I don’t know how to fix them and I don’t know what the way forward looks like and I’m really scared. I am really really scared. I feel so hurt. I feel wounded. I feel sad.

My oldest child is truly into puberty now. Woo! In the process of trying to celebrate her having a big milestone (in a way we have been discussing for three god damn years) she told me that I am the most embarrassing thing ever and there was a whole lot of “you are gross” face and body language. I’m totally butt hurt. I know it is normal. I know it is to be expected. I know I shouldn’t let it get to me. But I’ve already been crying for a few days so that was just not something I could shrug off in that moment.

Middle child is… she’s having a hard time with everyone taking care of their own needs right now. She is angry and being difficult because she still wants to be catered to like a little kid and no one has that to give her right now. We are all tired and doing stuff to deal with our own shit. I’m trying to talk her through how to meet her own needs a bit more and it’s just hard. So she’s getting in trouble a lot because bad attention is better than no attention.

Youngest child is an adorable little shit head. She has taken to yelling at us all because she wants to be top dog. YOU. WILL. NOT. SAY. THAT. TO. ME. (When we say something like, please don’t kick me.) She’s starting to get more consequences and she’s learning that when mama says something it fucking stays true. If you get into the fridge and steal multiple pieces of fruit and take one bite and leave them to rot, no you don’t get a slice of cake when the rest of us do. We don’t do that with food in this house. If you take the fruit you eat it before you move on. Sorrynotsorry.

Well, I’m writing behind this password because Jenny promised me that I could write what I needed to write and I didn’t need to password protect it–she would choose not to read it. Then she read it and yelled at me. So awesome. Jenny is trying to rewrite history. “I’ve said one wrong thing.” Oh fuck that. You started out our relationship 26 years ago calling me a stupid slut. There have been incidents like this for over two decades. You don’t get to say that calling my kids retarded was saying one wrong thing. She also clarified that she didn’t spank her daughter for a panic attack she spanked her because she was being defiant and screaming in Jenny’s face. Hello? You have rewarded her for bad behavior and defiance all her life and now all of a sudden it is not ok to the level you have to hit her for it? Yeah I don’t find that more excusable.

I don’t want to end the relationship. But I don’t know how close I want to be either.

I am not doing well at responding to anyone’s emails. I feel trapped inside my head. I feel unable to reach out because I feel wrong and bad and stupid and unwanted all over the place.

There was drama in some online forums. A couple pieces in a couple of places. In one of the womens-support groups there was this one woman who was really fucking antagonistic and when I got sick of being bullied I left. The one person from the group who has remained my friend then wanted me to spend weeks helping her process her feelings about being bullied by the one problematic woman. I’m like, this is not good for me. So she left the group too. Some of the other members came to her and asked about forming a new group without the problematic woman and I feel rejected, unworthy of defense, and really unimportant. I feel fucking bad. I provided a lot of emotional support to those people for over a year and me being chased off was fine but once it is this other gal all of a sudden the bully is a problem. I feel like shit.

I’ve been chatting with some of the bay area kinky folk. Some dude was making “jokes” that weren’t funny about covid at at ime when one of the members had a mom who was doing quite poorly and she was terrified. A few of us called him out for not being funny and told him he should apologize. He then proceeded to go on this extensive tirade about how pointless it is to apologize to mentally ill fuck ups. He said that the request for an apology was tantamount to him being falsely accused of rape. WTF? Now one of my friends is his new submissive. I’m like, “well. That’s fucking awesome.” I’m trying to just set boundaries with her about how I don’t want to hear about him and it’s only so successful. I may end up having to stop talking to her and that will be sad.

I don’t know why emails feel harder.

House stuff continues……..s…..l…..o…..w…..l….y….. which means I can’t just be done. I am in this constant state of waiting for the next step and it feels awful. This house will be great when everything works. And I just want to cry.

Sleep is not going well. I do get a fair bit sometimes but mostly I don’t get enough sleep and I feel poorly. I’ve had more than a few days lately where I got almost nothing done because I feel so awful. I’m depressed and I’m definitely getting the full-body malaise.

That said, I have been completing my miles. If I feed the kids, get my miles in… that’s enough to count for a day right now. I’m only up to 16 miles/week right now. I’m adding 1 or 2 miles every other week (mostly 1 but there are a couple of jumps) until September of 2021. My birthday week next year will be my peak week: 54 miles in a week. Then I start ramping down again (hopefully for a marathon the first weekend of October, we’ll see) the week of the marathon I only do 35 miles. It’s more in a day than I did during training, but the hope is that my body will be so accustomed to just going and going that it will be fine. Knock on wood for no injuries. I am a little worried about how often I will need to use the treadmill over the winter because it just isn’t the same as running outside, but it’s a lot better than injuring myself on ice or not running.

I am 10lbs below the peak weight I hit a bit ago. I have done pretty well about cutting sugar from my tea (only had one teaspoon one time) and I’ve not 100% eliminated alcohol (it’s not a great coping method and I get that but I don’t *have* a great one) but I’ve gone from drinking 5-6 days a week to having some 3 times in the past two weeks. I am also running out of stuff and I think I will be good about not buying more for a while. I mean, I have a whole bottle of whiskey sitting there I haven’t touched yet so I won’t be out out for a while.

We have some tenants and they are super sweet. I found them through the mosque. A bit ago my heart was moved to reach out to the mosque and tell them that if one of their members ends up in a tough spot because of job-loss in the pandemic and they need emergency housing, I have an empty apartment. The kind doctor who talked to me at first said he didn’t know of anyone at the moment but he’d keep me in mind. Almost a month later I got a call. They are a really sweet couple, she’s pregnant and her cooking is mind bendingly good. They are not paying rent yet (that’s the whole out of work + being an immigrant means you can’t get government support thing) but they are giving us stuff they make and offering help around the yard and being super gracious. The long-term goal is they will pay rent once jobs happen again. I am willing to extend some faith here. These are rough times all over the place. We are having really fun conversations and they love playing with youngest child when she’s outside. The young lady moved here just over three months ago and basically doesn’t know anyone. We are talking as best we can with her emerging English and my bad Hindi which is close enough to Urdu that we can communicate some.

Seriously, just having those smells wafting through my house from her cooking is worth the price of admission. Oh golly. It smells like home.

The yard has come along quite a bit and I feel like I am ready for the growing season. I still have a long way to go before I figure out all of what I need to do and what I need to prune and when. It’s a process. The yard is feeling overgrown and more jungle-like and I love it.

I mean, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy. But instead of feeling suicidal I have self mutilation ideation. It’s still not great (and I’m not doing it) but after so many years of “I should die” being my first impulse it is in fact an improvement. I’m sad. I feel bad about myself. But I have work to do and I need to wait for this wave of sadness to pass so I can get back to it.

Why am I not over it.

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I don’t like how long it takes me to deal with my feelings. I want to be done already. I want to know how I will feel in the long run. I am impatient.

But today I am managing three children. I made smoothies to use up the fruit before more arrives in the box today. I made lemon bars (part of using up stuff from the fruit drawer). I have done a bunch of cleaning. I’ve done a load of laundry (with some assistance from kids). I’ve done a bunch of cleaning dishes. I’ve had to have several conversations about the next stages of fixing house stuff.

Turns out the plumber we hired to fix the leak in MC’s bathroom didn’t bother to use any silicone sealant around the shower. So effectively he charged us a bunch of money to set a new shower frame inside the existing shower frame (he didn’t feel like tearing out the old one) then he just kind of left it like that. It leaked like a sieve. Our options are to A) rip out the new shower, old shower, and build an entirely new one from scratch B) be like the old owners of this house and just use it as a closet or C) rip the entire thing out and give up on having a shower in that bedroom.

That shower also was added well after the original house and the plumbing for it all goes waaaaaaaay around the house to come up the outside wall so it is basically impossible to keep it warm for any length of time. If we want it to be an effective warm shower we would have to add an electric boost and the shower is already so tight that I don’t think I could take a shower in there and wash my hair without knocking the door open with my elbow. That would cost a bunch of extra money. It would take up a bunch of space in the shower.

Fuck it, rip the bitch out and all three kids can share the one main upstairs bathroom.

Bonus: Middle Child will no longer have a bedroom that is effectively much smaller than her siblings.

One of the dudes is going to do all of the sanding of the bookshelves today. I am going to start the oil process myself because they are showing up intermittently and paying their hourly wage is adding up pretty fast. We are starting to have anxiety about how much fixing this house is costing. I think it will take me somewhere under 24 hours of labor (not including the time it takes to let the oil dry in between coats) to do all of the shelves I can reasonably reach for myself. That’s a fair bit of cash to save.

I am indefinitely putting off the idea of painting the house in fun ways because I can’t justify spending the money if it means Noah might have to get a job this year. I need to give him a full and complete runway to launch his products and that means I can’t be selfish.

Talking to people through forums is resulting in me feeling overwhelming rage a lot of the time. Almost every piece of major social progress in human history has been deemed impossible right up until the minute that it happens. We have the ability to make peoples lives easier. We choose not to. As a species we prefer to have a majority of people suffer so a few people can be fantastically wealthy. It’s immoral. I need to not be part of any online discussions for a while because I am rapidly growing to despise people I have loved for years.

I am once again in that mode where I feel like I have to move everything I own back and forth and back and forth and back and forth because every fucking area of the house is broken and I can’t put anything in a permanent home.

Did I mention that the kitchen tap broke for a second time? And the bathroom tap?

Fuck everything.

I am so overwhelmed. I don’t know how to process my feelings about people and how I need to be treated in order to be in a healthy relationship.

I don’t think I know what a healthy relationship even means right now.

And I have three minutes until the next stage of work begins.

I have a lot to get done today. How in the hell do I find time to break down all of my feelings so that I can turn around and be support to other fucking people. Because that’s what it feels like is expected. How dare I have distanced myself such that I’m not providing support.

Dad sent me a video. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.” Dude, I think this is the second, maybe third time you have initiated contact in our more than two decade long relationship. I don’t have the spoons to reach out and console you right now. Even though that is our norm.

I feel so much rage.

Hanging sadness

I should probably take a break.

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I have moved my center of social media activity to different places and I think it is stupid. I’m getting really frustrated with a few people and situations. That means I should stop going there because I want to go off on people.

I am in a very mixed place with people at the moment in general. I’m talking to a few neighbors through texts or emails and long distance folks are emailing. I’m trying to be chipper and upbeat. In my head I am failing. I am cranky and irritable and frustrated and I want to scream.

I was pretty sick last week so we were in isolation before the lock down. Everything is on hold indefinitely. I feel like I need to hurry but I’m not sure towards what.

Over 17,000 dead. Almost 400,000 confirmed cases. Some folks are focusing on the country by country numbers. I can’t. This is global. It’s in 192 countries. The death rate is 4.39%. It’s slowly climbing. If we are very lucky we will see a turn in the tide in a month or so, but who knows.

Who knows. I should stop talking to people so much. I’m feeling so much frustration with people.

Lots of people walking past my house. That’s bothering me. I know people are allowed to go exercise but it’s… it feels weird.

This is going to be a very rough spring.

You just keep going

Do the best you can