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I am on vacay in Florida at the moment. Got here yesterday afternoon after an overnight flight, a layover, and an early am flight.
Lots to think about, much to write…but for the moment I have to wrangle the six-year-old into a swimsuit and go see my sisters.
For now let me leave you with this thought…a lot of the stability I have in my recovery is based around habits and routines that I’ve developed in my life at home. As soon as I got taken out of that environment…hell, even when I was just thinking about being out of my home environment, my brain started scheming, thinking bad thoughts about other people’s medicine cabinets and how I was sure to be in a lot of pain after such a long flight and and and…
I caught myself and put a stop to that runaway train, but still – I was kinda suprised that I went in that direction at all. I’ve had it so good with the Suboxone treatment, and I hardly ever have cravings anymore, so I guess my defenses were down. Taking me out of my safe little life and then heaping on the stress of traveling (on my own with the kid no less), not to mention the whole visiting-my-family thing (They put the FUN in DisFunktionaL! har-dee-har-har) – well, let’s just say I probably could have seen that coming.
Lucky for me, I’m really starting to enjoy my new life and I don’t want to mess it up. Not for a feeling, a fleeting feeling that never really was as good as the joy I get to feel nowadays. I’ll prolly go to the library or the bookstore and get some kind of inspirational reading to do while I’m here (Hat Tip to the fabulous Erin who gave me that idea!) and I’ll do my best to make time to chronicle the wackiness that is my family over the next two weeks. Sure, they’re on their best behavior now, but the vacay has only just begun.
We’ll see how things are in a few days.
Love to you all, I’ll be thinking of you as I lounge by the pool eating lobster and trying to avoid skin cancer. Kisses!
That’s right, I think I’m starting to become almost like a “normal” person. Ha ha!
I know, I know, there’s no such thing as normal, and even if there was, it isn’t something one should aspire to be anyway.
What I’m getting at, I think, is that I’m starting to cross over into a place where I, and my life, am not totally defined by what is fucking wrong with me all the time. Does that make sense?
My depression seems to be in remission and I’m not even taking any antidepressants anymore (unless you count Suboxone as an anti-d, and it is a very effective one.) My anxiety is largely controlled by exercise and meditation, and I rarely have to take anti-anxiety medication anymore. My fibromyalgia flares are getting shorter and less intense and I have longer stretches of well-being between them. Migraine headaches are largely a thing of the past.
I’ve been going to the gym. I’ve made some new friends and reconnected with some old, good friends who I lost touch with when I was so sick and using too many drugs. My house, while not perfect, is way cleaner and more organized that it was a few months ago and I don’t feel so overwhelmed by it. Sleep is no longer the best part of my day, or the only thing I have to look forward to.
I still have a lot of work to do, and I know it. I’ve got issues with self-esteem and procrastination, my relationship needs a major overhaul, and then there’s the whole pandora’s box of food/eating/body image issues. I’d like a more developed spiritual life, and I need a haircut…
But still. I feel good. Dare I even say that I feel happy? That doesn’t even adequately describe it. I feel accomplished, and today I feel like I might even make it for the long haul. I know that feelings are fleeting, but I’m going to enjoy this one. I’ve earned it. I think that I’m only on the verge of realizing how much energy I was using up by living in a state of emergency 24/7/365. I’m kind of excited to see if I can keep going forward now. Ahhhhh….
You, all of my blog friends, thank you. Do you know how many times I’ve wanted to quit, but I didn’t because I felt some sense of accountability to y’all? Thank you for reading this mess, and leaving your comments and baring your own souls on your own blogs. I wish I could have you all over for a BBQ. Thank you from the very bottom of my almost normal heart.
WordPress has this Tag Surfer feature that I use a lot when I’m bored. It finds blog posts that are tagged with tags that I write about and other stuff that I like to read about.
For whatever reason, lots of posts written by Christian bloggers come across my tag surfer. I guess because I have tags like spirituality, women, and feminism on my list and these are issues that are on their radar as well.
This has gotten me thinking and reading outside of my comfort zone lately. One blog I found, White Washed Feminists has really interesting writing by Christian women who are thinking about women in Christianity. I really wish I had had access to women like the ones writing on this blog 15 years ago, even 20…back before I broke up with Christianity.
As much as I try to pretend like I don’t care, the loss of my childhood religion left an emptiness that I’ve seldom been able to fill. My sense of this absence grew more acute when little C was born. Since then it waxes and wanes: some months I barely think of it, others I long for the rituals of church and the support of a spiritual family.
So I read these posts written by various bloggers, thinking about their faith and the word of their God, and what it means to try to live by that word in this time. I get drawn into their lives for a little while, fascinated and disturbed.
I wish I could believe in something. I read a lot of Buddhist teachings about meditation, westernized Buddhism, because it doesn’t require belief and it makes sense. Meditation fills something, helps me cultivate compassion and insight, but it doesn’t replace what I lost when the feeling of belonging to Christianity, of knowing God and Jesus, died in me.
That’s not an uncommon story, at least among my friends and acquaintances. I was raised in the Lutheran church, and I remember loving it, really feeling it. I wasn’t but 13 years old, though, when the hypocracy started showing through, when the pat answers stopped being enough for my questioning mind, when my Pastor told me the boy raping me was “the devil working in my life”.
So much has passed in my life since then. I’ve studied and thought and worked to shore up my unbelief, make a good foundation for it but still from time to time I get this strange longing and I feel almost, almost like I could go back to church, fall into the arms of God and just let it all go.
Almost.
I just published a new post at The Second Road. Here’s a teaser…
Now that I’ve been off the drugs for almost nine months and I’m feeling more stable in my recovery from drug addiction, I’m starting to pay more attention to the myriad other ways that I’m dysfunctional. The main one that I am very tentatively starting to work on is my relationship with food (and eating, and body image.) Which is appropriate, I think, because my food/eating issues are very much connected to my drug-abuse issues.
Ah, food. This is the one area where abstinence just isn’t going to work. Too bad.
Read the rest of the post here.
It’s hot today, hot outside and hot inside the store where I work. We are in a hundred year old building with no AC, the only fan in the store is a ceiling fan 20 feet above my head.
I’m PMSing and my feet are swelling up. This annoying phenomenon first occurred while I was pregnant, but it didn’t cease when my pregnancy was over. Now my feet puff up at all manner of inconvenient times. This whole combo is irritating as hell. My bra is too tight, my joints ache…even the weight of my hair up in a bun is oppressing me today. Fuckin A.
It sucks getting old.
The only good thing I can find in this situation is that it’s not making me wish for drugs. Instead, I’m just fantasising about a refreshing swim in the cold-ass lake at the end of the street. That’s where Little C is today, and I have to say I’m jealous.
Guess I should try to get some work done. Later, y’all.
My dentist is a sadistic fuck. Seriously. I have never feared the dentist, and I’ve always taken good care of my teeth. Well, I should credit my mom for the majority of that, she had us in for our yearly cleanings and flouride treatments like clockwork. And I have the genetic good-fortune of freaky-strong tooth enamel too.
But as most good things must come to an end, so did my 35-year cavity-free streak. It actually ended a year ago, so I guess it was a 34 year streak, but whatever. When I had my dental check-up the x-ray showed my first cavity, which I promptly blew off for the next 12 (or 18) months. Time sure does fly when you’re avoiding the dentist! Not to mention that I was deep into my active drug abuse during a lot of that time. I probably only scheduled the original dentist visit because I was looking for some way to score…
Fast forward to this week, when I’m trying to move forward with doing all that life-maintenance stuff that I neglected while I was strung out. I called the dentist, sheepishly admitting that I’d been in a while before but never came back to have my cavity filled. Imagine my suprise when they welcomed me back with open arms! Little did I know I was walking straight into the embrace of a man who was holding a drill in one hand, a sharpened hook in the other.
Like I said, I’m not scared of “the dentist” in a general way, but I’m definitely afraid of my dentist. You see, I, being a broke-college-student-recovering-addict, am on medicaid. In my state, the dental care one gets with medicaid leaves something to be desired. Most dentists don’t take medicaid, and the ones that do are a little scary. My last dentist was competent and not entirely ungentle, but the x-ray machine at her clinic was so old and rickety that the dental assistant had me holding it steady for her while she escaped from the room to push the button. Otherwise it would have drifted off to the side and taken a picture of my inner ear, I suppose. But that gem of a place went under, and so I was driven into the lair of Dr. Yea.
During the first visit I had relatively little interaction with Dr. Y, so I hadn’t really formed an opinion of him yet. I figured he was ok, and my husband, J, needed to see a dentist too so I made an appoinment for him earlier in the week. I should have known something was deeply wrong when J came home from his appointment with Dr. Y and wouldn’t speak to me. But I figured he was just upset about his impending root canal and blithely ignored the warning signs.
The morning of my appointment I brushed and flossed and headed out. The dental assistant took a few x-rays and put some topical numbing stuff on my gums so I wouldn’t feel the lidocaine shot that Dr. Y was to administer. Finally the man came over to assess my mouth. After the standard lecture about not drinking soda and brushing and flossing every day, he got down to business. Not only did I have the cavity that I’d learned about on my last visit, I had another, worse one that needed immediate attention. He also wanted to put some seals on the chewing surfaces of my molars.
He slapped a pair of safety glasses on my head, whipped out a big-ass needle and said something about a “little poke.” He then proceeded to jab that thing into my gums on the other side of my mouth from where his assistant had put the topical anesthetic. Ouch! But not too bad. The drilling and filling and sealing wasn’t all that bad, really. The worst thing about all of that was that my throat kept closing when I tried to breathe through my nose, and I couldn’t really breathe through my mouth because, well, dentist.
Whew, this isn’t so awful, I thought to myself as gritty bits of my tooth flew about the room like pixie dust. A little while later, Dr Y was telling me to bite down, the fillings were done, and…it was time to clean my teeth.
Suddenly the dentist seemed to be in an extrordinary hurry. It’s like we were in the olympic qualifying heat for timed tooth-scraping. I always hate the part where they scale your teeth with that damn hook, but this guy took the cake. He was gouging my gums left and right with that torture device, and then he had the nerve to lecture me because my gums were “sensitive and bleeding.” Yeah, buddy, I think most people’s gums will bleed if you stick a sharp, metal hook in em.
My god. I was gripping the arms of the chair so tight I broke a nail. My heart started pounding and all I could do was focus on trying not to choke to death on the water they were spraying in my mouth. When he was doing the last two teeth, the front lower two, I know I was wincing. He noticed, but instead of stopping or asking what was wrong, he grabbed my lower lip and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger really fucking hard – I guess that was to distract me from the meathook action he was perpetrating with his other hand.
Then he was done and my head was spinning. His assistant polished my teeth and told me to visit the restroom to “clean up” on my way out. I looked into the mirror and saw my mouth ringed with blood and spit, a blotch of greyish amalgam material on my lower lip. I smiled and noticed the dark spots of blood on my gums where he had stuck me with his hook. I washed my face, collected my free toothbrush and split.
Back at home I told J that I didn’t like our dentist. I said I couldn’t see why anyone who had real dental insurance would go to a doctor as rough as he was. J turned his sad, blue eyes to me and said: Yeah, that guy’s a butcher. I don’t like him. I felt so bad for having sent J to this guy, since he has total PTSD issues from bad dental experiences. But we had a bonding moment discussing the sadistic asshole, during which I waxed hyperbolic about the parallels between dental care and waterboarding, and then I went into the kitchen and loaded up on ibuprophen.
All day long my mouth throbbed. It’s fine now, and I know that there are dental procedures that are far, far worse than anything I went through. But still, this was a routine filling of a small cavity and a cleaning. There shouldn’t have been any pain or panic involved in this situation. This dentist, Dr. Yea, obviously makes his profit by hurrying patients through as quickly as possible – he examined my teeth, filled two cavities, put sealant on my molars, and did my cleaning in under 40 minutes – but he should keep in mind that the mouth is exquisitely sensitive and that patients feel intensely vulnerable when they’re in his chair.
I’m thinking about writing a letter to him and his assistant. What do you think, should I?
I just asked J not to yell at little C, and he told me to shut up.
The weird thing is that I don’t even really care enough to fight about it. I’m just so tired of it having to be so hard between us. So tired.
Otherwise, today was pretty decent. You can read more about my day at The Second Road blog where I’ve been guest-posting lately, if you feel so inclined.
I feel bad that I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, but there hasn’t been that much going on that I feel like writing about. I’m sure there’s a shitstorm a-brewin’, but right now it’s fairly calm with a slight smattering of anxiety.
In fact, I’m pretty damn sure that there’s something I’m supposed to be doing and that I’ve forgotten about completely. Fuck.
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