- I might have to have brain surgery. I'm being tested for Cushing syndrome, which is an excess of cortisol in the body (think "stress hormones", and corticosteroids).I have a LOT of the symptoms, so I'm expecting the tests to come back positive. Unfortunately I've been waiting for test results for nearly a month now, because the lab messed up the first time and I had to repeat the test. Anyway, if it comes back positive, the next step is to look for a benign hormone-secreting tumor, most likely in my pituitary gland, which is at the base of the brain, right behind the eyes. The surgery is usually done "up the nose" (remember how they used to make mummies?), which is less horrible than a craniotomy, but... it's still brain surgery. Believe it or not, I'm actually hoping I *do* have Cushing's, because the alternative is that I have diabetes and familial high cholesterol and fibromyalgia or MS or some other incurable chronic pain condition and treatment-resistent depression and God knows what else. So... one disease, with a cure, sounds a lot better than all that.
- I might have to go to court. I'm not in any legal trouble. But I've been trying to get SSI (social security for disabled people in the US) for about a year now, and I'm at the stage where you bring your case before a judge. I haven't been assigned a hearing date yet, but I'm sure this will happen this year.
- I'm getting married. A wedding and brain surgery in the same year? Why not just shoot myself in the foot right now and get it over with? But see, we got engaged in November and found out about the possible Cushing's in December. We're planning to get married in the early fall, which already leaves us with less than a year to plan (which, according to every wedding website in the entire universe, every engagement apparently lasts exactly 12 months...). If we push it back any later than early fall, we'll hit New England winter, which just isn't gonna happen. So then we'd be pushed all the way back to like, April 2015. I don't wanna wait that long to get married, so... onward and upward! (Of course, if I have serious medical complications we'll have to push it back, but right now I don't even have a confirmed diagnosis yet, so early fall it is.)
- We're probably going to be moving. Ah yes, the curse of the twenty-something: moving every fucking year. I'm really, really tired of moving, but our current landlord never repairs anything, we're on the second floor which is not ideal when you have chronic pain, and more intuitively, this place really just doesn't feel like home to us. I doubt we'd really be moving very far, but it's still a huge ordeal even just to find a new apartment, let alone physically move all your stuff across town.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
2014 might be the most confusing year of my life
I don't feel like thinking of a bullshit intro so I'll just jump right into a bulleted list:
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Hello!! Am Blog! Pleased to meet your acquaintance very!
Hi. You haven't met me yet. Or maybe you have, because probably no one is looking at this blog yet unless I aggressively shoved it at them on Facebook or whatever. But let's just say we haven't met, you know nothing about me, we have no common ground to start from, except we both kinda liked Breakfast at Tiffany's, that's the one thing we got. So this seems like an excellent time to tell you about my mental health. Or lack thereof.
I used to try really hard to seem normal and fit in, until I realized a couple things:
1) I am astonishingly bad at appearing normal and everyone was laughing at me;
2) The few people who actually did like me, did so because I am crazy;
3) If someone doesn't like being around crazy, it's probably better for us both if I get my crazy out in the open early on, so there are no unpleasant surprises around the bend.
When I say that I've "realized" these things, what I actually mean is that I keep realizing them, over and over again, and then I keep forgetting. The first time I actually remember realizing that my real friends appreciate my crazy was in fourth grade, when I was stupid enough to throw a slumber party and invite every girl in my class, and my parents (perhaps because they were also crazy?) agreed to let me do this.
I think I was kinda hoping that by inviting every girl in my class, I could get away with inviting the "cool" girls who I had no established friendship with whatsoever. But at my school, the "cool" girls tended to be the ones with sane parents who didn't let them attend a 15-person slumber party at the home of a family they didn't know. Or maybe the cool girls just didn't wanna go. So what I got was a mixture of my best friend, a couple girls I'd known since we were little, and about half a dozen girls I barely knew anything about.
In case you don't remember fourth grade, or you come from a country with a different grading system, or you didn't go to school (hey, I know a lot of unschoolers, so I'm not even kidding on that one), basically the thing you need to know is that in any given fourth grade class, there's a pretty even mix of girls who are already going through puberty and girls who might not go through it for another four years. I happened to be in the first group, but I was still emotionally much more similar to younger kids. I was the kid who made it very clear that I absolutely did not under any circumstances watch Nick Jr., except that I totally did, because hey, it wasn't my fault Gullah Gullah Island didn't happen to exist when I was four.
(I may or may not have made the same excuse as recently as college, except replace Gullah Gullah Island with LazyTown and Wonder Pets.)
I'm totally spending way more time talking about this stupid sleepover than I intended to, but to set the scene, I will recap a few things that happened:
For those of you who really didn't go to fourth grade, this is a recorder.
In the middle of all this, there was the Fashion Show Incident.
My best friend, who I'd known since second grade and who hung out at my house basically all the time, decided to host a "fashion show". I thought this was a completely stupid idea, but I agreed to participate. This didn't really involve dressing up so much as parading across the living room, trying to do the best catwalk. Most of the other girls tried to act all sexy, which is pretty amusing in retrospect, but at the time it sort of made me feel like a baby for not knowing how to do that. So I decided to make my "catwalk" as silly as possible, wiggling across the "stage" and probably also making a bizarre noise. A couple of other girls did the same thing, and we all thought it was pretty good fun.
Then, my friend rated everyone's performance. She gave almost every girl, including the other ones who'd done silly catwalks, a 10. The only people who didn't receive tens were my friend Sheli, who received an 8, and me. I got a 9. Admittedly, this really was especially unfair to Sheli, but I was mad at her about hot cocoa and Mall Madness, and the girl doing the fashion show wasn't supposed to be Sheli's best friend. But she was supposed to be my best friend.
She wasn't my best friend after that, though. I started hanging out with the other kids who'd done silly catwalks, and they came back to my house more times and we did more silly things. And, as if this were an episode of a family-oriented sitcom, I learned my lesson: your true friends are the people who like you exactly the way you are.
Except, also as if the incident were an episode of a sitcom, I pretty much forgot the lesson immediately. I relearned it a few more times, sometimes remembering it for a few years at a time.
I think I was going to say something profound there, but I realized it is 1am and I really, really want to go to bed, so I will just say the thing I was going to say about my mental health: I have pretty severe depression and abysmally poor self-esteem. And I have spent many a therapy session in an endless loop of "but you don't understand! I really AM terrible and everyone really DOES hate me!" And of course every therapist says the same thing: "It doesn't sound like you've done anything wrong, and I don't think you're a bad person." And then I launch right back into "but you don't UNDERSTAND!"
Today, after such a session, I decided to try to pretend I am awesome and see what happens. When I got home, I asked myself "What would I do if I were awesome?" The answer was: I'd take a nap, because I wouldn't need to do anything to convince myself that I'm awesome. So I did.
And then the second thing I decided to do was make a blog where I just write whatever the hell I want and don't worry about what that makes anybody think of me. Now that I am about to hit post, it has suddenly occurred to me that there are a number of ways this could backfire. But I'm doing it anyway, because I feel like it. So there.
Don't you remember the '90s? What the FUCK is wrong with you?
I used to try really hard to seem normal and fit in, until I realized a couple things:
1) I am astonishingly bad at appearing normal and everyone was laughing at me;
2) The few people who actually did like me, did so because I am crazy;
3) If someone doesn't like being around crazy, it's probably better for us both if I get my crazy out in the open early on, so there are no unpleasant surprises around the bend.
When I say that I've "realized" these things, what I actually mean is that I keep realizing them, over and over again, and then I keep forgetting. The first time I actually remember realizing that my real friends appreciate my crazy was in fourth grade, when I was stupid enough to throw a slumber party and invite every girl in my class, and my parents (perhaps because they were also crazy?) agreed to let me do this.
I think I was kinda hoping that by inviting every girl in my class, I could get away with inviting the "cool" girls who I had no established friendship with whatsoever. But at my school, the "cool" girls tended to be the ones with sane parents who didn't let them attend a 15-person slumber party at the home of a family they didn't know. Or maybe the cool girls just didn't wanna go. So what I got was a mixture of my best friend, a couple girls I'd known since we were little, and about half a dozen girls I barely knew anything about.
In case you don't remember fourth grade, or you come from a country with a different grading system, or you didn't go to school (hey, I know a lot of unschoolers, so I'm not even kidding on that one), basically the thing you need to know is that in any given fourth grade class, there's a pretty even mix of girls who are already going through puberty and girls who might not go through it for another four years. I happened to be in the first group, but I was still emotionally much more similar to younger kids. I was the kid who made it very clear that I absolutely did not under any circumstances watch Nick Jr., except that I totally did, because hey, it wasn't my fault Gullah Gullah Island didn't happen to exist when I was four.
(I may or may not have made the same excuse as recently as college, except replace Gullah Gullah Island with LazyTown and Wonder Pets.)
Remember when this and Chris Crocker were the only things on the internet?
I'm totally spending way more time talking about this stupid sleepover than I intended to, but to set the scene, I will recap a few things that happened:
- One of my friends had a meltdown because I didn't feel like playing Mall Madness
- The same friend accidentally spilled hot cocoa all over my copy of the Baby-Sitters Club Super Special Snowbound, and I had a meltdown
- My mother became irrationally upset over some kid's use of the word "friggin"
- Because I was extremely hip, at some point I decided we should watch a Shirley Temple movie, and was surprised and angry when none of my friends watched it with me
- My recorder somehow got shoved deep into the bowels of the couch and we couldn't find it and my parents had to buy me another one
- I got up in the middle of the night to pee and found three girls in the bathroom pretending to smoke pretzel sticks like they were blunts
In the middle of all this, there was the Fashion Show Incident.
My best friend, who I'd known since second grade and who hung out at my house basically all the time, decided to host a "fashion show". I thought this was a completely stupid idea, but I agreed to participate. This didn't really involve dressing up so much as parading across the living room, trying to do the best catwalk. Most of the other girls tried to act all sexy, which is pretty amusing in retrospect, but at the time it sort of made me feel like a baby for not knowing how to do that. So I decided to make my "catwalk" as silly as possible, wiggling across the "stage" and probably also making a bizarre noise. A couple of other girls did the same thing, and we all thought it was pretty good fun.
Then, my friend rated everyone's performance. She gave almost every girl, including the other ones who'd done silly catwalks, a 10. The only people who didn't receive tens were my friend Sheli, who received an 8, and me. I got a 9. Admittedly, this really was especially unfair to Sheli, but I was mad at her about hot cocoa and Mall Madness, and the girl doing the fashion show wasn't supposed to be Sheli's best friend. But she was supposed to be my best friend.
I don't have an image to insert here, so here is Jimmy Carter being attacked by a swimming rabbit. I promise this is a real thing that has happened.
She wasn't my best friend after that, though. I started hanging out with the other kids who'd done silly catwalks, and they came back to my house more times and we did more silly things. And, as if this were an episode of a family-oriented sitcom, I learned my lesson: your true friends are the people who like you exactly the way you are.
Except, also as if the incident were an episode of a sitcom, I pretty much forgot the lesson immediately. I relearned it a few more times, sometimes remembering it for a few years at a time.
I think I was going to say something profound there, but I realized it is 1am and I really, really want to go to bed, so I will just say the thing I was going to say about my mental health: I have pretty severe depression and abysmally poor self-esteem. And I have spent many a therapy session in an endless loop of "but you don't understand! I really AM terrible and everyone really DOES hate me!" And of course every therapist says the same thing: "It doesn't sound like you've done anything wrong, and I don't think you're a bad person." And then I launch right back into "but you don't UNDERSTAND!"
Today, after such a session, I decided to try to pretend I am awesome and see what happens. When I got home, I asked myself "What would I do if I were awesome?" The answer was: I'd take a nap, because I wouldn't need to do anything to convince myself that I'm awesome. So I did.
And then the second thing I decided to do was make a blog where I just write whatever the hell I want and don't worry about what that makes anybody think of me. Now that I am about to hit post, it has suddenly occurred to me that there are a number of ways this could backfire. But I'm doing it anyway, because I feel like it. So there.
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