I've been reading some interesting blogs about writing, including this one, which mentions that if you want to be a writer (not someone who likes to write), then you have to write every day, even when you don't feel like it. Well, over the past few days, every time I think of something to say, some part of my brain goes "I don't feel like it. Maybe later." So, I'm writing.
I keep getting random bits of insight, which I wanted to stretch out into a full blog, but I let them wait too long, so now I'm not sure of what to write about. So, it'll be a kind of helter-skelter post, and I'll work backwards from today.
Number one: I am not depressed. I've been depressed before, and it's not like this. But I keep dropping really low, and I'm trying to get my way out of it. I feel good sometimes, I feel excited sometimes, so I know I don't have depression. But then I get so worried, and so tired of being worried, and trying to cover up the fact that I'm worried from everybody else, and it's been just too much lately.
The first reason I stopped writing a couple of days ago, happened the day of my last post. I had a lot of phone calls that day: I needed to make a new appointment with my therapist, I needed to schedule an appointment to get my wisdom teeth removed (I broke one of them a few weeks ago), and I needed to figure out how to sign up for training on my new job. I had interviewed the previous Thursday for a life guard position, and they had accepted me right away. But I had to go through a whole bunch of training for the job, and it's July now, more than halfway through the season, so I had to hurry and sign up. Of course, since making phone calls is one of my bigger fears, I was super tense, and just trying to get things rolling before I had time to stress out about it, so I started off with the therapist, but the office wouldn't answer. Next was the life guard training, which, after maybe a half an hour or so, I finally signed up for the first of the training, for one hundred dollars. Then I started looking through the rest of the training, and I realized that most of the training sessions were over. I did the math. It was possible that I wouldn't be able to get all the training this season, therefore, I wouldn't get paid until next summer, when the season started over again. I broke down and went to talk to my mom, explaining the situation, and she agreed with me, that I shouldn't go through with the training. Problem was, I already paid, and it was possible I wouldn't get my money back. That wasn't even the worst of it. My mom mentioned that I should go back to school, because I need to stay on the family insurance, and I won't be able to by my next birthday. Now, I can't explain it, but I have this huge, huge mental block against going back to school this fall. Long story short, I wasn't going to be able to go, and now, I can. I told everyone I knew I was taking a year off, and what I was going to be doing, and now I'm not doing it now, and I'm so... ashamed. I know it's not my fault, and people will understand, but I can't stand having to explain to people, one at a time, how the only thing I've been absolutely certain of for the past several years, was actually wrong, and that my plans, and my life, have been completely flipped upside-down. Obviously, when I tell people about it, I say it in as short, and light-mannered way as possible, so that hopefully they won't see how messed up I am about it. I mean, I'm working through it, but it would be nice not to have people asking too many questions while I'm trying to deal.
But back to the conversation with my mother. I've been trying to get a job all summer long, and it's helped me get in the door being able to say that I won't be going back to school, so I'm available to work through the fall. Unfortunately, even that doesn't seem to be helping me much, because the only "bite" I had all summer, the life guard gig, I ended up having to drop, because it would cost more to be trained than I could possibly make at this point. When she said I would need to go to school, I just broke down and started crying. I don't know if I can have a job and go to school at the same time. I've done it before, but it was hard, and to be honest, on more than one occasion, I found myself wishing I could become really sick, or get hit by a car or something, just so I could get a break. So when my mother said that, I didn't hear "you should go back to school," I heard, "you cannot get a job, even though you currently have just over one hundred dollars left in your bank account, and you need to go back to everyone you know, and tell them about your deep shame and failure, Oh, and you need to continue living at home, having your parents pay for your food and health care like the loser you are." I just started crying. I told her it was too much, I just couldn't handle it. I've never admitted that out loud before. I'm not sure if she guessed half of what was going through my head, but she got that she just unloaded something huge onto my shoulders, and tried to help me, but there really wasn't much she could do.
The next reason why I haven't been writing all week is far less whiny and depressing. My sister and I had a dance to go to on Friday, and it was 1920s themed. Before I continue with this story, I must say: my sister and I love costumes. LOVE them. I learned how to sew when I was eleven or twelve, and every year we made new, elaborate costumes, more and more accurate, with more and more skill. My sister ended up majoring in costume design, and worked as a costumer for several theater productions there. I even helped her with one of them, and it was a blast. So, back to my story. I haven't gotten to sew anything for at least five years, and I was excited to finally get a project to work on. We couldn't find the right fabric for her costume, so we found an old dress in my closet, which she altered to be more period. Anyway, we spent three or four days obsessing over our costumes. I haven't gotten to wrap myself up in something like that in a long, long time. We barely ate or slept, completely enveloped in our costumes. The night before the dance, I had finished my sewing, and put on the dress, and looked in the mirror. It didn't fit. It looked horrible. I hated it. I had spent the last three days, doing nothing else but working on that stupid costume, and I looked so stupid. I wanted to burn it. My mom and sister got caught up with something else, so I went in my room, took it all off, and curled in a ball. This is bad. I'm starting to sulk worse and more often than I have been for years.
A few years ago, I wrote a story about a girl with a unique kind of schizophrenia. I'll probably never try to get it published, so I don't mind telling you guys about it. You see, she had a band following her around. She was the only one who could see and hear them, and they were always there, watching, whispering, sometimes ignoring her completely as they argued among themselves. There was the lead singer, who was "the face", who's always pretty bright and cheerful, the brave one. There was the pianist/lead guitar player. She was very quiet. She rarely ever said anything, but when she did, it was usually profound, everyone listened to what she said. There was the drummer, who, unusually, was the whiny, wimpy little chick. I didn't realize until today, but she was the character's fear. The final band member, and the one I'm getting to, was the bass player. I named her Joan. She was nasty. She hated herself just as much as everybody else, but you wouldn't notice. She was the voice that tells you you're a failure, says you can't do anything right and everybody hates you.
I tell you about this, because over the past couple of months, I've remembered Joan, and, in an effort to separate the parts of myself that I don't like, I've started pretending that voice is Joan, and not me. And that night, she was screaming in my ears. She wouldn't let up. She wasn't even all that creative: I've heard all of it before. You suck. You don't do anything right. You shouldn't have even tried. It doesn't matter if it was the best thing in the world, you're too ugly to make it work anyway. Blah, blah, blah. I know I'm not ugly. Once I got a few years past my dark and low teenage years, I realized that I love my body, and I'm plenty attractive. But Joan didn't care that I loved myself. Joan didn't care that I'm not fat, or pasty, or pimply, or greasy, or gross. She just hounded on me and hounded on me, and I curled tighter and tighter into myself, just waiting for her to give up and go away. My mom came to check on me at some point (she's got a pretty good radar for when I'm sulking), which made it worse, because I was just trying to ride out the storm. I didn't want to try and lie to my mom and say everything was all right, even though I knew, that when Joan gave up, I would be able to stop and figure my way out of the situation.
The next day, my mom spent the whole day shopping for accessories. I am still amazed at how much she sacrifices for us kids. She went shopping all over town, trying to find as many things she could to make our costumes work, while we were at home finishing up the last minute details. When she got home, and I put on the accessories, and my makeup, I looked in the mirror. I looked absolutely perfect, from my head to toe. I could have just stepped off of a time machine. My sister and I had a magical night. We had the best costumes at the dance, and we kept geeking out about how great the dresses were, how perfect the accessories were, how intense the makeup was (seriously, those twenties girls pioneered the "smokey eye" look. Don't believe me? Look it up.). We even stopped at the grocery store for some ice cream, sometime after midnight, and we seriously made some guys night, walking down the parking lot, looking like movie stars. It was a blast. I made sure to thank my mom multiple times. I know I hate admitting about my "episodes" with Joan, but she had to know what a big deal it was that she helped us out, and how I would have been completely miserable without her.
So... number two? Is that where we're at? Today, in church, every single message seemed to apply to me. (In case I haven't mentioned it before, I'm LDS, or Mormon. In church, the format goes like this: the whole congregation meets for an hour. We take the sacrament, sing hymns, and hear talks from two or three people. Then it's Sunday School for an hour, and we have a less formal instruction, with a teacher and discussions. After that, we have one more hour for Priesthood [for the men] and Relief Society [for the women], as well as classes for kids and teenagers. We will now return to our regularly scheduled program.) In sacrament meeting, the talks were on faith, and trusting in the Lord. Unfortunately, since I've been writing about all the negative things this week, I can't remember what stood out to me the most from those talks. But the first speaker kept quoting hymns, and if there's one sure-fire way to get me to pay attention, it's to talk about music. In Sunday School, we talked about "what can we take with us after we die". There's a couple things we mentioned, but the point of this lesson was that we took with us our minds, and what we learned. For a long time now, I've believed that knowledge is knowledge, and the more you know, even if it seems unrelated to what you're interested in, the easier it is to understand things as they are, and to learn more about it. The wonderful thing that we talked about, is that "truth is from God." Not "some" truth, but all truth. Doesn't matter if it's in religion, or science, entertainment, math, art, social interactions, whatever, any truth is from God, and the more truth we acquire, the better off we'll be. I just loved that. And then, I got a whoosh of inspiration. I thought: these struggles I'm going through now, these mental shackles (as I've started so fondly dubbing them), which are probably going to be with me until the day I die, they're a good thing. I mean, it's not awesome to have pain or fear holding you back, but imagine if you were an athlete, and you wanted to be the strongest, fastest person on the planet. What if, not just when you went to the gym, but all the time, you had weights attached to your wrists and ankles. Sure, you may have a harder time doing normal things than other people, like walking up the stairs, or going for a jog. But if you stuck with it, if you struggled, not only to catch up with everyone else, but to surpass them, then one day, when you took off the weights, suddenly everything that was so hard, would be easy. You would be stronger than you ever had been before, because nothing would be holding you back anymore. You would look and feel like Superman compared to before. I realized that life is like that. I believe that in the next life, we'll get our bodies back, but we won't be sick or broken anymore. When we move on, we'll have all our awesome "muscles" we got, from struggling and moving forward, even though we had our own "weights" that nobody else knew about. This is training season. This is the point. Life sucks. We all have pain, we all have our chances to be miserable, and we all have things holding us back. Fear is a huge one, for everyone, I think. But we have mental and physical disabilities. We have troubled childhoods and mistakes we have difficulty moving past. Everybody has weights. Some of them are easy to see, some aren't. But what we do with them, that's what matters. If we excel in spite of our burdens (heck, sometimes we excel because of them), then when they're all taken away, we'll be superheroes, man. Superheroes. I look forward to that day, my friends. In the mean time, I hope I can keep this little piece of information in mind, so that instead of saying "woe is me, I'm Penny and I have problems, boohoo," I'll be saying "I'm Penny, and I kick butt, even though I've got fifty pound weights on each of my limbs. Take that, you lily-livered, flap dragon." And I'll sound like Samuel L. Jackson while I do it.
(Super)Penny
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