The Perfect Storm

Still feeling pretty low, but I see a faint glimmer at the end of the very long dark tunnel of this depression.

It always helps to have a good friend who "hears" what you are saying and can give you validation. That helped more than anything else I have tried in the last week. I dumped everything that was bothering me on him and he wrote back with complete understanding. We've got to have the exact same personality, which is what made us great friends and awful romantic partners. I guess opposites really do attract, but sometimes you need to know just how much you are heard by someone who works the same way you do.

Hubby continues to recover from his brain surgeries and that is hard on both of us. The loss of hearing in his left ear has made it difficult for him to process the mass of information that is coming in to his right ear. He has short term memory problems. The problem is that I am a talker and he is not. And my constant talking makes him very tired and confused right now. It hurts that I have to curtail how much I need to talk to him, because having bipolar can make me extremely chatty.

My friend mentioned that I am a "talk to think" person, which means I talk to work things out in my head. My hubby is a "think to talk" person. He works things out in his head and then he only says the bare minimum of what needs to be said. I don't know how our marriage has worked for thirty years, but it still works. i guess when you've been through so much and survived. And thirty years means a LOT of shit you either go through together or you get divorced.

I had the perfect storm on Wednesday. I had to drive 45 minutes in the rain on the interstate with the the 18 wheelers, who use that as their main method of travel north to south in our area. I am petrified of driving after my accident in 2015, when I broke my back. I have slowly managed to be more comfortable behind the wheel, but my ADD makes me a distracted driver and that scares me more than I can say. The energy I need to put into a drive like Wednesday inevitably brings on a panic attack.

The clinic where my shrink works is also an addiction recovery center. It's usually full of people and it's noisy. I spent a year coming off of a strong narcotic last year and the struggle is truly real. I am incredibly lucky that I have come through the other side and don't need any further treatment. After almost overdosing last April when I ran out of one med and went into suicidal withdrawal and a desperate attempt to get myself to sleep with another prescription almost killed me, i decided the number of meds I was on was unacceptable and dangerous. So I weaned off several medications with the help of my doctor and my therapist. It appears that I'm not the classic addict, since I haven't had the desire to go back to the drug I went off of and I no longer abuse my other pain medications, which I admit to doing on many occasions in the past. It's under my control now. I'm so very lucky.

But...being around other addicts who are discussing everything about their addiction is very much a trigger for me. And a path to an immediate panic attack. I usually take my earbuds with me so I can tune people out while I wait, but I forgot this time. And I had to wait for about 15 minutes after my 45 minute drive in the rain with the killer trucks.

It was horrible.

I've been posting in a facebook support group for about a year and they have been amazingly supportive. But there are several recovering addicts. I had posted a quick post about not having my earbuds and how the clients in the office were upsetting me. If I had thought that one through, I would never have posted it the way I did. It was a quick post that I was having a rough time with the situation and apparently it came across as judgey. Totally NOT meant to judge. But it upset people in a group that has saved my life and the fact that I upset people I really like had me so depressed I didn't know what to do.

Then I drove home 45 minutes with the trucks to get home. (Anti-anxiety meds, anyone?)

When I got home and check FB, I realized that my group was exploding over my post. So, I deleted it and apologized profusely. Because that's who I am. I apologize for my very existence constantly, so the fact that I offended anyone cuts me to the core.

I'm stepping back from Facebook. Just for a bit.

Between that and the five year anniversary of my mom's death on March 12th, my best friend's birthday was on the 13th (she died six years ago of breast cancer at the age of 36), I've been functioning at a low level for a couple of months.

I've been grief stricken for weeks and trying to hold it in because my mom would hate for me to sit around crying over her being gone, but it is what it is. Maybe someday, the grief will become bearable. I don't think so, but I know time has a way of blunting horribly sharp edges.

All I want it to not let go of the grief because I don't want to let go of my mom. I feel that if the grief stops, so do my memories of her. And she will no longer be here if I let it go. So I can't let it go. Maybe someday.

I have been busting my ass trying to get my autistic son ready to move to an assisted living situation two hours away to get complete and total support with his daily living skills in an independent apartment and an autism support program to help him with community college, I feel like I've been hit by a truck. It's a full time job right now that I will soon be handing over to the support people where he will be living on July 1st. But right now, it's almost all I do.

I talked to my mom every day before she died. Between losing her and my best friend, living has been just hard. They were the two most important women in my world. And finding other women I can relate to has been hard. I'm finally making some progress, but my agoraphobia and social anxiety make it tough.

I think I'm going to the cemetery today. It's finally sunny and somewhat (?) warm.

Spring, where are you/