I Have Become Faust - 4-7-09

This won’t be a long entry. All of it is gone so this is just paper and ink and has become a job. I have put off journaling even though there is much that needs to be recorded because it’s just so much work. So I will leave off meticulous detail and poignant words – if I could even find them in the first place, which is doubtful.

.

Zoloft is quite effective. I didn’t notice much that first week of half-doses but by the time I was on full doses, it became exponentially easier to do my job with a quiet voice, a smile, and gentle eyes. The only thing is it took all the rest of me away. In order to do my job, my life drained away into those little blue pills. I didn’t feel drugged, exactly; I wasn’t a zombie. To all eyes, I seemed to return to the old Nicole and on several levels that was precisely true. But to keep me from feeling the bad things too much, the medicine kept me from feeling anything too much. And it kept me from really minding. It was with a distant concern I noticed this and kept my mouth shut except when I was taking these pills. Because it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter than I no longer missed the runs, neglected my journal, and had to real desire to write. None of that mattered in the face of what I gained – I could do my job and whether I was no longer miserable or couldn’t feel the misery in any case, I couldn’t really care. I had to face the reality that I would need to be on this medication for as long as I had this job, as long as I was in this profession. I would have no soul indefinitely.

.

Because that is what it really boils down to. All those things that made me me, everything that made my heart flutter with anticipation and my muscles flex with satisfaction was gone from me. Price for sanity? One soul. Well, isn’t that perfect. That’s exactly what I have to offer. What a Faustian bargain.

.

Days passed and my writing languished. This journal was never opened. The one or two times I went running, I was going on fumes of remembered glory and anticipation only to be gutted when I saw yet again all the garish orange lights at my marina. They took my sanctuary, my destination from me. The loss crippled me, squeezed the breath right out of my chest. But I didn’t cry. The pills take that from me, too. I don’t remember the last time I cried, let alone wept. Incomplete tears and half-gasped sobs were all my body could manage for the terrible loss of my marina.

.

How high is too high a cost to do your duty? To survive this job, everything of meaning has been carved away from me, a pound of flesh. They took my meaning away in my writing and my purpose away in my running, for what is the point of running if you have nowhere to run to?

.

But I begin to suspect that it is not just the medication. Now that it is Spring Break, I cannot afford to let this precious freedom pass without writing. I cannot just sit by and lose myself in movies and computers when I could be creating. So I whittled my doses back to half a pill a day last week and then stopped taking it altogether as the week came to a close. True, I didn’t notice the Zoloft take effect till after about a week so maybe it’s too early to tell the effect of cessation. But I suspect with each passing unchanging day that maybe the medication only brought to the fore the truth – maybe this job, this year, truly has changed me. Maybe I am not unscathed and I really have paid the toll instead of inching by with my hand on my wallet. Maybe pieces of me really are missing and can’t be recovered. Maybe I will never have my running or my writing again. Maybe I will always bear these scars that no one seems to notice because people only see what they want to see. Maybe I am a broken toy and have lost those pieces of me that make me work, all in order to make a living. But there’s a big difference in being alive and making a life.

"Suicidal Patient"?! - 2-27-09

I went to Dr. Palting today. I’ve never been a “suicidal patient” before. It’s an honor I’ve managed to skirt. Not sure I like it much now it’s caught up with me. That’s how the nurse put it when she was on the phone making an appointment for me with counseling services. I overheard words I knew I would never forget, that dropped into my chest cavity one by one like lead musket balls: “I have a suicidal patient. She’s actually attempted suicide.”

.

They are wrong, but I suppose that is just semantics. The cutting I specified turns into suicide implied. It’s all the same to them. I understand.

.

But what a weight on me at those words, seeing the wary alarm in their eyes that I had wanted to avoid – this choice colors all lenses, tints all glasses that people will squint through trying to see me.

.

I did not attempt suicide, nor have I ever, but it was close enough not to matter. Who would understand that my parents have chained me here with their blinding love to ever leave such an option open to me? Who can know that a couple of cuts and the soft thought of permanent escape is all I can ever have when it gets this bad? There are some times when thoughts don’t lead to actions.

.

But oh, what anxiety is in me now at this label. And it is so ironic that life had begun to turn for me. The irony of my life will be the death of me one day. After Rachel called me and my dad spent the day with me the next day for Valentine’s Day, I began to feel normal for the first time in a long time. The numbness had cracked and splintered like a spring thaw. And in a whoosh, the writing I had been hunching over with all this pain informing it exploded to take the place of my burdensome reality, and all of a sudden it became my reality, my true reality. My writing was my bliss and I was good at it. It was my true vocation, my real job, and without warning, those loathed hours at school seemed to take on the look and feel of a thin, watery film I could poke my finger through. I had joy again, good feelings, certainty in my future. I was going to write and write and write, every night, at work, on the weekends. I was going to write because I had to. And wonder of wonders, I was able to go into work on Monday morning and all that week with a perfect peace. This was not my life. My writing – that was my life. I was going to get published. It was miraculous! All the storm clouds had split apart and the sweet moon was spilling through. I was happy. God, it stunned me. I even began to wonder if I needed to go to the doctor. Would I waste my time and money on medication I didn’t need?

.

Then as if in answer to my query, last Sunday night, I had a startling drop into the old dread at the thought of going in the next day and deal with all the behaviors and all the work and all the crap. It took my breath away because it was so unexpected. I gasped with the sudden tears because I had been so certain that I had had more than a week in me. And where before I hadn’t journaled to chronicle this miracle because I was too busy writing stories, now I walked past my journal because I didn’t want to have to write of that glorious change in the past tense.

.

I calmed down and my chest unclenched but it answered my question. I couldn’t trust any unaided good feelings in the maelstrom I was navigating through.

.

So I kept on with my writing, having to take a couple of days away from it to just watch a movie and cross-stitch, because as lovely as my second job was, I was still working two jobs. And I put in leave for today’s doctor’s appointment. Good thing I didn’t take a half-day. I’m between appointments now, scribbling away with a heavy heart before my emergency counseling appointment. At least it’s a woman I’m seeing. I just don’t want to have to unearth my whole dating history and mindset and motivations like I did with Dr. Rabinowitz. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Not that I mind the subject matter – it’s just so complicated, I’d have to untangle it for someone outside my own head. But it’s a big part of it. While I think it might be a relieving thing to tell someone everything, I sigh inwardly and gird my loins. I am a suicidal patient after all. I wonder if I should have just lied about the cutting to the nurse and Dr. Palting. I hate to lie; it itches, sits wrong on my skin. But honestly is sticky – I’ve been burned before by it. I truly think if I just got the medication I’d be fine. I don’t think I need counseling. But it’s out of my hands now, isn’t it?

.

I had just been starting to feel normal again, not so broken anymore. I have been emailing with this guy on Match.com, with dad giddy over my shoulder. He makes me laugh in his emails and he doesn’t make me nervous. And when I feel broken, I just don’t see how I get started with him. When I feel normal and just ready to feel good and all my defenses are gone, I don’t feel any anxiety about him. He may be the One, he may not. I’m not thinking ahead. I just want someone to make me feel good, feel safe. You make me feel good, I’m yours. Simple as that. But now, this thing is hanging over me, this label, this diagnosis or whatever it is. And again I wonder if any man would want someone with these scars?

Visualization Entry - Hey, You - 2-27-09

Hey, you. I’m so glad to see you, to feel things I feel when I’m close to you. You’re here with me, and it’s all all right. My bones are loose and my muscles slack. My walls are rubble around me and it feels so nice. I’m here, with you, and it’s all all right. You make me feel good. I’m not broken with you. You see me, more of me each day, and make me feel so safe with your eyes on me. I’m floating free, no longer holding my limbs close to my body, no more defenses. You see everything and you’re still there. You don’t see anything wrong with me, no broken toy soldier but a lovely china doll. I’m lovely and seamless and whole, and I’m here with you.

.

My eyes rest on you, on your sweet face, your jaw and hand, the shadows in your eyes that hide me. You’re all around me and it’s all all right.

Reaching Out - 2-13-09

Rachel called tonight, wanting to apologize for being “such a bad friend” and getting caught up in her own life and not checking on me. She said I just seemed so sad and that she didn’t want me to pull away from my friends as it seemed I was doing. Maybe because I had a better day, having perhaps some vindication on the horizon after talking with Sherry, or maybe because I was just so tired, or maybe because I simply needed to tell someone how bad it’s gotten – a relief only somewhat attained by keeping a journal – but for whatever reason I held little back with her. And some of the things I said, I could tell drove her to tears twice. I’ve never seen Rachel cry. She said she’s been in that kind of depression before and I needed to get on medication. I promised I would call on Monday. I didn’t tell her that my reluctance to make an appointment now was due to more than just wanting to plan my day off better than sticking it in an already shortened week when the month of March is chock-full of 5-day weeks. The other part of it is that some unreasoning part of me doesn’t want to take medication to force my emotional hand. I don’t want to suddenly be on cloud 9 and relieve everyone’s worries and justify the hell I’m in. I don’t want the pills to make everything I’ve been through, everything this place has done to me, suddenly okay. On some level – or maybe on every level inside my mind – it’s not okay. But if I’m stuck here with no expiration date, I admit I do need help. Lots of it. Strong dosages of help.

.

Amidst her platitudes for which I didn’t resent her because she genuinely believed them, she managed to well and truly crack the ice that has rimmed my heart for so long. I truly cried, just sobbed silently in the phone, which inspired her tears. I broke down and confided some of it to her – not all, though. The worst of the symptoms of this breakdown (as this must be according to all the research I’ve done this week) I kept to myself. I didn’t want her to go suicide-watch on me, but when I whispered that I couldn’t see any future, any end to this, that I’ve become deaf and blind and dumb and don’t know how to see any hope, she did ask if I was planning on hurting myself. I didn’t let her sense my hesitation as I hedged, “I hope not. I’ll call the doctor on Monday.” She didn’t need to know my eye glanced down at my concealed left forearm or that I could feel the muscles in my face go from tired to wary.

.

When we hung up, for the first time I felt anxious about the marks on my arm. Last night I had visualized going to Mom and Dad, defeated in my efforts to keep away from them, and showing them the lengths I’d been driven to and ask them one last time if they can help me, if there was any way out from this job so I could begin to heal. This morning on my way to work, before I got a grip on my weakly wild daydreams, I thought of them being so alarmed that they would tell me they would support me so I could write, because my hands have not been able to keep still for want of typing and my brain keeps writing in the dead air it’s breathing. It’s been this week I haven’t been able to bring myself to write in more than this journal, so stressed I couldn’t even channel it into my fiction as I had been doing.

.

But after talking with Rachel, I felt the first stirrings of – if not shame – then anxiety that my parents should indeed be kept from all I’ve done. I was a little sad that I felt I really couldn’t go to them, even “eventually.” I would have if I felt the way I did last night – I would have gone to them when the lines across my wrists has just been tracked with my fingernails and not a blade yet.

.

So then will anyone know? Will anyone see the depths to which I’ve sunk and pity? Or will I find only alarm and judgment? Will I only be found to be an even greater disappointment than previously thought, or will anyone be moved to grab that wounded arm and pull me out?

Where Is This to End? - 2-12-09

I asked my creative writing instructor, Cecilia Petretto, about how one becomes a professor at TCC. It seems that even though I have some good qualifications, the most I could expect is one class as an adjunct in the summer and possibly a couple more in the fall if I do well in the summer, and that only as an adjunct because of the hiring freeze (it’s everywhere) and that means no benefits. And the pay for one credit is $500. So a 3-credit course would be $1500. Even if I got three classes in the fall, that would only be $4500 for the whole semester. So I’d have to do it in addition to my job, although apparently they are hiring because, as Petretto believed, with so many people unemployed anyway, many are going back to school, though how they would afford it, I don’t know.

.

So I don’t see much in the way of that escape. I need my salary as a minimum (and it will be a minimum as next year we don’t even get our step, let alone a raise) and I need benefits.

.

And the atmosphere at work is toxic. I have worked really hard to respond well to the kids, but I am betrayed by coworkers and then made out to be the unprofessional one by the administrators. As Analiese aptly put it, I am “getting it” from all sides.

.

There is no way out and I started hyperventilating in the shower as I contemplated March, where there is not one day off, and next year going through this. I really don’t think I’ll survive that.

.

Tonight I added another thin red line to the inside of my left forearm, the smooth, perfectly white skin marred by my pain. But this one didn’t track inward. It was, I think, a practice line for the real thing. I drew a line across my wrist and thought back to when I did that once before, at the end of my first year, but that one had been drawn out of self-loathing over what a bad person I’d felt I’d become. I feel that now, too, even worse than that time from more mistakes, but the driving force was that if I had no outlet, no escape, I would at least create the illusion of one.

.

And I thought about my motivation for cutting my own skin in such a way, repeatedly, and thought, I do it for the day after more than for the moment of. I look at it frequently throughout the day and don’t even have a feeling, a specific feeling in response to that. But my eyes are drawn to it nonetheless. If my insides are so cut up and bruised and battered, if my insides are so ugly and malformed by misery and my weak responses to it, then my outsides should not cry out, “hypocrite!” Maybe that’s the real reason I stopped wearing makeup and let the shadows under my eyes show. Maybe that’s why I don’t dress anymore, but merely clothe myself. And maybe that’s why I cut.

.

If this goes on, I’ll have to tell my parents on myself, per our agreement. I couldn’t take my own life without letting them know first. And I had thought often since I made that first mark with my fingernail of what I would say if one of them caught sight of my arm. “Cat,” I would say and shrug it off and hope they don’t think anything amiss with that brief explanation – and hope somewhere deep inside that they do. But I was thinking tonight, with just 3 marks on my arm, of driving to their house tonight and showing them everything and telling them about the cigarettes and alcohol, and ask them one more time if they can please help me. And I almost cried when I thought of them seeing me like this and finally being able to say, “yes.” To be the ones out of everyone in the world to tell me that short, lovely word: “yes.” I thought of them finally seeing for themselves that it doesn’t matter what happened to drive me to this – the important thing is that I’m driven to it.

.

And it really is so much more than “I don’t like my job.” I have come to lose so much respect for myself – maybe the effect of the kids never having had it in the first place and the administration losing it for me because I’m unhappy, regardless of how hard I may be trying to do my job well in spite of it. This is the worst job and job situation I can fathom. It is the very thing I had always dreaded about getting a job, but even I with my vivid imagination could not have concocted such a terrible situation. And there is no way out. If I had an expiration date, I probably could keep going. “This, too, shall pass” is probably true but it won’t pass for years and I will not make it that long. And as if work wasn’t enough, I have no faith that I will fall in love, that I will find someone I can actually love who will love me back. And without him, there is no family. I am alone and filled with horror all my days.

Dangerous Thoughts - 2-12-09

This is dangerous – dangerous to give free rein to my thoughts when they are so twisted with horror and dread and hopelessness. There is no way out. There is no one who can help me. I’ve been driven in my misery to do things I’ve never done before and some I thought I had put behind me: smoking, drinking in the evenings, cutting myself to create an outlet where there is none for the sheer weight of the pain, contemplating – dreaming, really – of suicide to escape since it seems all doors have slammed shut. Where will this go? I ask with trepidation.

The Third Race - 2-11-09

It seems to me that most people divide humanity into two groups: those who keep trying and as a result eventually succeed – the noble ones, the cream rising to the top on the basis of sheer hard work and faith – and those who are too lazy and self-indulgent to make anything of themselves and so they never do. It’s a neat list, one easily managed and corroborated by multitudes of human case studies out there in the world at large.

.

But what if there is a third category, one many people dismiss because it is so slippery and amorphous? What if there are some people out there who could make it, but who have lost their faith in themselves and this universe? What if these people, just given some help, would rise to the top like all those people who are so much stronger than they are, who never lost sight of their goal?

.

What if these people, this third race, are not so tough and strong as the first race but have so much to offer? What about them? What happens to them? One or two probably do receive some help, some lifeline, some buoy thrown out by some unusually kind, perceptive member of that first race who are made to more refined specifications than the rest of us. But what about the others?

.

I’ve been thinking that maybe God really doesn’t help those who don’t help themselves, making no distinction between those who won’t and those who can’t. Maybe the verse, “Draw nigh unto God and he will draw night unto you,” is more universally true, more uncompromisingly consistent, than we’d like to think. I’ve always noticed God comes to help, is faithful to save, far less often than we cry for him to do so. And when he does, it’s because you have kept striving for him, or at least still sending your weak call out to him. But what if you have stopped calling? Does he then look down disapprovingly from his throne and say in a disappointed voice that you can’t hear anyway, “You gave up. Sorry. Can’t do anything for you.”

.

Maybe our human frailty is our sin. And if you can’t see a way to be strong, to shoot your bones through with steel and push the corners of your mouth into a stretched smile, if you can’t even cry out or call out or whisper out to God for help that he probably won’t send anyway, then you’re damned. What a bleak thought. How can it be called rescue, salvation, if you’re strong enough still to keep yourself afloat? How can God save you from the raging waters if you’re not drowning, your lungs filling with salty water that cuts off your voice?