Down

Watch "blink-182 - I Miss You" on YouTube

I'm posting from my new phone app, so I hope my imaginary audience will forgive randomly odd auto corrects.  Like it just tried to change audience to silence... So ironic. I guess we all hope to toil under the delusion that our lives have meaning and significance enough that others, even strangers, would care to learn about them.

The song came to me from a dark time in my past. A good friend had just been tragically killed,  after I had lost a large number of family members, and I was coming to the realization I could no longer progress in med school. Despite the fact I cried every time it came on the radio, it helped me persist.  It helped me find significance and meaning in my life. I thought maybe it would help again.

I'm so overwhelmed by everything. I can't get caught up at work to save my life... I keep falling behind in my graduate course work... I feel like I'm neglecting an important new relationship in my life, and I worry about failing my husband. Then there is the complete uncertainty of when the surgery will be, our if it will be,  because I went for a second opinion,  and now I wish I hadn't because it will probably just cost us more money and time for a different doctor to say the same thing. Then money is always an issue. With Wayne still out of work, keeping my job becomes a serious worry, plus we have had to rely on my parents to help financially... And they offered to help make IVF with a surrogate happen, but the first fee we told them about related to the potentially 90,000 dollar process and I get grief from my mom. Awful thoughts fill my head.

I'm sure I need to talk to a therapist, but the process of finding one promises to be so fucking difficult I don't have the energy on top of all the other bullshit I'll have to find out - like how I'll be able to take off 6 weeks of work and still get paid...And still teach the students to pass the stupid test so I score well as a teacher on this new evaluation system, which I can't fully comment on, for fear of being scored poorly and losing my job. Then if by some miracle we have a baby by surrogate, I have to figure out if I can get maternity leave... And I have to alter my expectations and realize we'll be lucky to have one kid, forget two... But see, that's me being positive... At least it sounds like I expect to have a kid...

Then I avoid my best friend, whose going through a tough time, just because I selfishly don't want to be around a pregnant woman, and also feel guilty about the fact I'll survive my cancer, and her mom probably won't.

I guess I feel my main purpose is becoming my job again, which is something I had thought I moved past. So now it kills me I can't talk about my job, just because no one ever wants to hear about it. I'm back to where I was 6 years ago, when I would start to talk about my job, and quickly realized from the glazed looks no one really cared, they had just asked to be polite and I was one if the few people with a real job and no longer in grad school.

It's hard to be alone among people, and I think that makes the loneliness worse... Feeding the depression and the darker things. Then my usual methods for dealing with such emotions are cut off to me. Can't have sex, because of my issue... Can't eat because I really want to lose the weight again and be able to wear my rings... Can't cut or burn because that's not really healthy, and I'm sure my husband would frown on that. My only recourse is to go numb, just like I was for so many years when everything was in black and white and meant to be forgotten. Of course, then I was supposed to somehow die young... I had figured I wouldn't make it to 25.