It's not all crap all the time.

I realized my last several posts have all been pretty... down. 

And yeah, that's because I'm a few weeks into a pretty significant mental Down, but if there's any misconception about Depression that bugs the shit out of me more than any of them, it's " How can you be Depressed? You're laughing and having fun!" 

That kind of shit makes me want to claw my eyes out.
...or you know... the eyes of whatever asshat said it. 

Also found $5 in the pocket. W00t!

For the record, Depression doesn't necessarily mean that I have to be crying all day every day. It is possible to laugh at things and have fun, even when you're in the middle of a big ol' pile of crap.

So, even though I'm in the middle of a great big crap pile, it hasn't all been mental anguish and bullshit. Some good things have happened lately too.

1. The weight loss thing is still happening. Like, holy crap, things are still working. Slow as hell, but still happening.

As you can see in Exhibit A, these 22's, which were a little bit too big for a while are now WAY too big. Like, take a step and they start falling off too big. In fact, right now, I'm wearing a pair of 18's from the same brand. So I think I've reached the point where my 22's are officially retired and the 20's get to move up to the "Reserve Fat Pants" status.

2. The school year has started again (for public schools, not for me yet) which means I have a job again. 2 weeks straight of not working between summer camp and the start of the school year actually kind of sucked. Mostly because money. But also because bored. Sure it was great for the first day or two of "LOL I'd be at work right now, but instead I'm sitting on my butt blogging and marathoning Drop Dead Diva" but then it was more like "Ugh. I'm tired of just sitting here not writing anything and watching Netflix all day." So, yay job! I'm going to try to remember that I actually really like my job - most of the time - I'm gonna need to remind myself of that from time to time. Working with kids can be... challenging, to say the least.

3. I went shopping yesterday with some of The Family. We were on a mission to find some clothes for the boys. Ellie and I talked the older one  into two pairs of nice jeans and three shirts that weren't black and/or band t-shirts. (Today he wore the purple one that I fought valiantly for!)  We even talked him into a vneck after he swore up and down about much he hates vnecks. Didn't have as much luck with the younger boy, because he's got some weird sizing going on right now. Mom has decided we have to go along every time the boys need clothes now. Challenge accepted yo.

Ellie and #puggacrowley

4. After shopping,  Ellie, Raif and I went over to the Crowley Compound where the Chef made THE BEST PORK LOIN AND GLAZE EVER OH MY SWEET BABY JESUS.

Many shenanigans were had and among them was my inability to stop taking instagram photos of #puggacrowley. That's right people, we made this bitch a hashtag.

5. Slowly (okay very slowly) but surely, I'm working on the whole de-cluttering my life thing. For clothes and shoes, if it doesn't fit, it goes. Goodwill, Salvation Army, whatever, it doesn't matter, it just has to get out of the house. If it's a book or movie that I don't want anymore, it goes to 2nd & Charles (and then I use the store credit to buy vynil that I really want). Unless it's a textbook; those go on Amazon.  And then there's all the other... stuff. That's probably the hardest part of the whole effort is all the other, assorted clutter. The 'well, it's still a usable thing' stuff and the 'kinda-sorta-sentimental in a I've had this forever kind of way' stuff, and the 'I don't know if I still want this or not so I'll hold on to it until I decide,' stuff. Just... stuff. And things.


6. I've actually compiled a list of 5 things that I'm happy about, and didn't have to go back several weeks to do it.

A glass of wine and an epiphany.

So I've had a headache all day, am possibly a bit dehydrated, and have generally felt like crap, most likely due to a minor case of altitude sickness, yet I still let my cousin talk me into a glass of wine. Which I don't regret because it was the first red wine I've ever enjoyed and it was delicious. But as I was sipping that glass, I was looking through my facebook feed, and then I had an epiphany. The hit-you-in-the-face holy fuck kind of epiphany.

When you've spent more than a decade actively fighting the effects of your Broken Brain, epiphanies are something that actually happen pretty often. Some stick a little better than others, others disappear almost as quickly as they appeared.

And then sometimes you're pretty sure you've just fixed your life.

The most amazing part is that the ones that you're pretty sure just fixed your life are usually the simplest ones.

And this one is simple. Just a quote a friend posted in his status.

"Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” 
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

And holy shit, that's it, isn't it?  In my head there will always be the terrible shit - the capital-D Depression, the self loathing, the Anxiety - and there will always be the hilarious shit too. I will always have the grief and the high delight... but I don't have to run back and forth between them.

But wait, Mk, isn't that how the cycling works?

Yes, Imaginary Blog Reader, technically that is how the cycling works, but let me explain. I will always feel the highs and the lows, but I don't have to let myself get lost in them. That's what I tend to do, let myself become totally consumed by the feelings. There's having Depression, and then there's letting Depression have you. There's having Mania, and then there's letting Mania have you.

And yes, this is absolutely something that is easier said than done, but I can talk myself into all kinds of shit.

Tapetenwechsel: Aurora, CO

I learned this word a few years ago to mean "a change of scenery." I hope it's right, because it's a good sounding word, and I like having a singular word to describe things. (Probably my favorite thing about German, really. They have a single noun for everything. Even if it is 18 letters long.)

Needless to say, Tapetenwechsel is something I have needed desperately for a really long time now.

While technically, I got it back in May when my theatre troupe performed in Santa Barbara, we were only there for a few days and it was a school-related trip, so while I was in a new place, it felt less like a vacation and more like the same old same old. Santa Barbara was lovely though. 

It was during  a late-night chat with 63 that I decided I really wanted to go out to Nebraska to see some family that I haven't seen since my dad's funeral, almost three years ago. And some that I haven't seen since before that, even.

Originally,  the plan was to road trip it, with 63, but that plan fell through for a lot of reasons. Most of them to do with Bad Timing in every possible fucking direction, like accidentally making confessions that weren't ever supposed to be confessed... 

But I wanted to make the drive, to see road behind me, watch the odometer show me how many miles I'd gone, but Nano didn't want to do it that way, and I've been trying to extend olive branch after olive branch because I don't like that my sister and I can never get along for more than a few hours at a time, so I compromised, and we flew out. To make our schedules match, I ended up cutting my originally planned time frame nearly in half, so Nano's insistence that, in the middle of our trip, we drive to Colorado to see our cousin kind of irked me. Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to see this cousin and her family, because they are some of the family that I'm much closer to, but the point was to see people I don't get to see very often, and this group is one that flies out to West Virginia fairly regularly, so it's time that we could have spent with other people.

So yesterday we drove the 5ish hours from Lexington, Nebraska to Aurora, Colorado, and now I'm sitting on the floor of my cousin's living room waiting for my sister to be done with the bathroom so I can finally shower. 

On top of sister-struggles, this hasn't felt much like a vacation yet because until last night, I was finishing up some papers for a class I had this summer. I hope now that I've gotten the last of it turned in that I can relax a little bit. It's also been kind of rough on the Broken Brain front, what with randomly crying from time to time for no good reason. 

Here's to hoping the other half of the trip is better.

Quarterlife Crisis Mode, Engaged!

I... don't know what I'm doing anymore.

And I don't just mean here on my blog, though I have definitely lost sight of that. I call myself a blogger and vlogger, but I haven't made a video in literally years, and I don't do much blogging these days. ...Except on tumblr. But that's a whole other animal.

No, I'm talking the big picture. I don't know what I'm doing anywhere. I don't don't know what I'm doing with my life, because I don't seem to be doing much of anything. I'm trying really hard not to be as hard on myself about this as I really want to be because I know a significant factor in this is the whole Broken Brain thing, but it's really difficult not to blame yourself for fucking up your own life - if it's no one else's fault, it has to be my own, right?

This is the sixth or seventh 'I'm Back!' post I've drafted in at least as many weeks; a few of them happy and excited, a few of them... not so much. I also spent a really long time writing a long, detailed explanation of the recent Great Big Heartbreak that so many different people heard bits and pieces of but rarely the whole story, but by the time I got around to finding the point of the whole thing, I just got tired of talking about it. I'm sure the subject will come up again at some point, anyway, but for now all you need to know about that is: it's a foreign situation for me for a few reasons, but I'm slowly navigating my way through.

Also, for the record: we don't have to hate this one, okay? Not yet, anyway. If he fails to learn from this mistake, then that's another story.

At this moment, I'm alone on the second floor of my college's library, trying to finish revising an essay to turn in, but I have so much other crap bangin' around my brain pan that I can't concentrate on this silly 4 page little paper that ordinarily should take me less than an hour to pound out. (Not that I'm entirely sure how to articulate any of it anyway.)

In two hours, I have an appointment with a counselor I've been seeing. We're exploring the possibility of meds, and to be perfectly honest that scares the shit out of me. It was realizing this that made me realize how much I have let the Broken Brain define me; I don't know who I am without this. I hear so many horror stories about medications changing a person, and not for the better. I keep hearing people talk about how the meds stole their personality. My personality is volatile, unpredictable, and even I'll admit, sometimes down right insufferable. But at least I have one, right?

...or do I? Do I actually have a personality, or am I just a product of my own chemical imbalances?

I don't know. I feel like I don't know much about anything anymore, but I know talking about it and writing about it has always been the only way I know how to deal with anything. I'm not saying I'm back. I'm not going to start another grand project to keep me blogging or whatever. But here's this one. Maybe I have more in me; maybe I won't touch this again for another year or so.

I don't know.