 |
2005-07-01 @ 9:41 p.m. |
When I'm manic, which frequently happens in the summer, its kind of like a TIVO unit that has gone awry. Instead of recording several programs over a several hour period, it has recorded every single thing being broadcast in the entire universe at hyperspeed. Before I knew what bipolar or manic depressive meant, I thought because it contained the word "Manic" it meant "Happy!" or "Fa-la-la, lets go pick some daisies!!"....WRONG. It probably just meant you were about to say to someone lets paint-the-house-pass-a-law-in-Congress-find-a-husband-cook-4000-meatballs-for-a-picnic -give-the-cat-a-bath- write-a-novel-pave-all-the-streets-in-my-entire-town- hike-up-Mt.-Fuji-learn-Swedish- master-calligraphy- give-birth-to-triplets- drive-the-entire-length-and width-of the-United-States-on-a- 3-wheeled-tricycle-while-raising-funds-to-cure-cancer-while-playing-the-saxophone-and-blinking-the-morse-code-with-your-eyes-for-the-film-crew-of-the-documentary-you-are-directing-about-the-effects-of-wind-velocity-on-women-who-are-menstruating. But you have to have all this done by Tuesday or you lose your funding stream from PBS. Easy? Of course it is. You're bipolar! Of course, when you're on top of things, its great! You feel like Wonder Woman. You can do anything! You can create art for the Louvre (did I mention, you get a little grandiose too?). You can write entire novels in one sitting. You can WISH yourself a better life (heh, heh, My Favorite, but the one that works the least, unfortunately, but it doesn't keep me from not trying it night after night). I also psyche myself up day after day, that when I put my dollar in the lottery ticket machine that suddenly I�ll be saying to a news crew filming my big lottery win... "I knew TODAY WAS GOING TO BE THE DAY!! I knew it! I Definitely Knew I Was Going to win $29 Million Dollars!! And I Knew that my life was going to improve Tenfold, just, well, because!!" Oh, you kidder, witty. I can't even begin to tell you how being bipolar affects my personal life though. On some days I think I'm Paris Hilton and every man is fainting dead away behind me, as I walk by. Its really funny, since I'm a middle aged woman with a few extra pounds and a few extra chin hairs. But I'll be walking down the aisle in the yuppie grocery store, and I'll think about some scene from a movie, where some beautiful girl is walking in slow motion, and than that'll be me. And I will totally see it. And it'll be beautifully filmed with special filters and lighting. And my hair will be bouncing and curling sensuously as I sensuously walk down the broccoli aisle. And maybe a strand of hair will momentarily get caught between my lips and I will slowly lift my hand up and sensuously pull it out of my sensuous mouth, and then they'll cut to some hunky guy looking up just when I do that, and then he'll drop his cell phone, and then they�ll cut to his cell phone smashing on the ground and then back to me stepping over his cell phone, in slo-mo, with the camera just catching my perfectly formed calf flashing by.  "Yeah....Baby!" (Sorry, I just watched "The Spy Who Shagged Me" yesterday). But I only get like that when I'm manic. I mean, I don't totally believe everything I think about when I'm thinking it, but its definitely a case of "ALL ABOARD...Next Stop Delusional Island." On the other hand, and this is a rather large hand, my manic behavior, is also a rather evil entity. Evil in a debilitating way. Why? Because I have a rather significant problem with anxiety. My 30 years in therapy hasn't exactly been all fun and laughs. And its only been in the last 8-10 years with "A" that my anxiety has been such a big issue. I don't think I realized I suffered from anxiety before. I just pretty much hid in my house and disguised it as depression. But now that I'm out and about, it does come up pretty often. Ok. Every damn day. And when I'm manic, it manifests itself in some of the strangest ways. How? Well, lets just say that right at the tail end of my full time working career, I was having panic attacks left and right. I would get stressed. Panic Attack. I'd come back from lunch. Panic Attack. I'd come into work in the morning. Panic Attack. I even started having them on the weekends. Also, at the time I lived over some people who fought and screamed and had the police coming to their house all the time. That brought on panic attacks too. Anything that even slightly upended my serenity, would set off panic attacks and I wouldn't be able to breathe and my heart would start racing and I would get paranoid and think people were following me. It's not quite as dramatic as it sounds. I was a quiet crazy person. Only "A" knew about all this stuff. I finally went on disability about 4 years ago. By the way....Medications helped. HEAR THAT TOM CRUISE?? Yeah, I tried vitamins and exercise Tom, but I still felt like biting the fucking heads off brain-dead movie stars, so they gave me some clonopin and topamax. And I�m actually way undermedicated compared to a lot of people I deal with at work. But I�m not too bad. I do still have some issues with anxiety though. And they become way exaggerated when I�m manic. Because lets just say, that a matter that is teensy eensy to a �normal� person, is like a triple story tsunami to a person like me. Like right now I am thinking of moving at the end of the summer. I am tired of living in a shoe box. My apartment is very tiny, as in one small closet, no storage and my vacuum cleaner sits in the living room because I have no place to put it. Also since I have started doing art, my space has grown exponentially smaller with the monthly additions of new sketch pads, canvases and art supplies. I also have framed artwork stacked all over the living room floors. I have sketch pads strapped together going into my bedroom and by the piano. I have two large baskets of art supplies on my living room chair. My bookcase is overflowing with artbooks. My easle is still in the car trunk. And even though I am poor, every extra penny I have goes to art stuff. And then theres the other things I don�t like about my apartment, like the fact that my bedroom is 8 feet away from an Volkswagen sized air conditioning unit for a medical building and it sounds like a 747 jet taking off everytime it goes on and off (like every 2.5 minutes) and the fact that I live across the street from a fire station with a huge fire alarm that goes off 3-10 times a day and that damn thing is so loud that it makes my fillings vibrate. And I also have to listen to my grumpy Eye-talian landlord scream and humiliate his grandkids out in the backyard all summer. He�s such a stupid bastard. He just sits on the back porch and yells at his grandkids, calling them �stupid� or saying �What an idiot!� and I just want to go over and whack him long side the head with a marble rolling pin. So it�s not exactly a relaxing environment for someone who is so easily fritzed out. So, where was I going with this? Oh! So I saw a �For Rent� sign in an apartment window over in the nearby yuppie village and amazingly it was right next door to where I used to live. I always really liked living in the yuppie Village. It�s kind of a nice New Englandy kind of place. Very historic. Nicely preserved older homes from the 1800's. Nice yards. Lots of Democrats. My kind of town. Plus its closer to where I like to hike. It�s closer to the YMCA. Its closer to �A�s office and I just like that side of town. Its pretty! So I took down the phone number. Yup. I�m going to call it. Yup. Absolutely. Yup. There�s that phone number in my purse....to that apartment....in that cute yuppie village. I should call it. Yup. Well, that was two weeks ago. And everytime I was over on that side of town, I'd drive by to see if the sign was still in the window and it has been. The problem? I have phone anxiety. Major phone anxiety. I can�t even call �A�. Pretty funny for someone who used to be an executive phone sales rep for Gannett Newspaper. Ha, ha!!! So what did I do? What I always do...had my mommy call the phone number. Man, I am such a fucking loser sometimes. No wonder I can�t get a date...even with that slow motion walking thingie. She called the guy yesterday and they talked for quite a while. She�s quite the schmoozer, my mom. She forgot, however, to pass the Schmoozer DNA onto me. She told him about me, including the fact that I was bipolar (she had to. She said I was disabled and he asked how I was going to walk up the stairs. Ha! Caught-cha!). Today I saw my case mgr. and told her about the apartment. She asked me whether I wanted to move because I was manic. I said yes BUT....and then I gave her all the other reasons. She thought the reasons were legitimate, and I�ve almost made it to the two year mark in an apartment, and that�s like a world�s record. (I move alot, you see. Its a bipolar thing.) So we�re going to be going to Section 8 on Tuesday to check on some paperwork, and she said, if I want to do this, to go look at the apartment and then we�ll make what they call a Mover�s Appt. at Section 8, so that my funding for a new place can be set into motion. Remember what I said about eensy weensy things becoming three story high tsunamis? Well, that�s pretty much what happened after I left the office. I want to move, but the whole moving thing seems so incredibly daunting. I no longer have the help I used to get from Married Guy and his kids and his SUV. I now have to deal with the bureaucracy of Section 8 (and having seen how inane and slow they�ve been in the last two months, I cringe at the thought of having to go through it again so soon). The very thought of packing everything up by myself and making 50 trips across town in a car on its last legs...ugh. The financial aspect. I may or may not be able to get some financial help for a moving van for the piano and big pieces of furniture. The physical toll moving takes on my fibromylagia. Ow. The new place is more expensive. Its also two bedrooms. Section Eight won�t pay for a two bedroom place for one person, so my funding will probably fall short and I will shortly be paying payments to �A� for the first time in a long time and I may be broke again. And then what if my car breaks down during the summer and all the money I�m saving for the move has to be spent to repair my car? I use my car for work. I don�t have credit cards. I don�t have rich friends. I don�t have rich relatives. I don�t have my Dad to ask for a loan. What then? I also dread talking to my current landlord. I feel like they did me a favor by doing the Section 8 paperwork (I did it, they just signed it), and then to suddenly up and move. I feel guilty. I know Grumpy Corleone will probably be an asshole about the whole thing. And I know as of tomorrow, they�ll have two rent checks from Section 8 for one month�s rent. With this cumulative build up of money, I know they won�t give any of it back if I move. I don�t want to screw things up with Section 8. I don�t want to lose my deposit. I don�t want Grumpy Corleone to call me an idiot, because my inner-witty pretty much does that every day anyways. So today when my mom started taunting me for being afraid to call the guy about the apartment, I just couldn�t get through to her, how much anxiety I have stewing about. It wasn�t just a phone call. To me it was more about tipping over the first domino in a huge domino configuration, and once it was tipped over, 23,000 more were going to follow, whether I wanted them to or not. Plus I�m just afraid to use the phone anyways. Her question to me: �What are you going to do when I die and can�t make your phone calls?�. Me: �Hire a personal assistant?�. So she said she was going to hang up and she wanted me to call the guy and then call her back about when we could go see it. A slight squeak of air escaped my throat when I attempted to say ok. We hung up. I sat and looked at the phone. I did deep breathing exercises. My heart was beating really fast. I tried to imagine my new landlord naked. Ok. Not really. Ha! I then called his cell phone. It rang. And rang. And rang. Did I call the right number? Then I got his voice mail. I immediately hung up. Well, guess it wasn�t meant to be. Nope. I called him. Bygones. I�ll just call my mom and tell her, he wasn�t available. Almost as soon as I put my hand on the phone to call her, it rang. I figured it was my mom wanting to taunt me some more about being such a phone-o-phobic wuss. But no, it was Mike, my possibly naked, but I�m not sure, new landlord. Yup. Damn that caller ID. I immediately forgot how to speak English. I think I spoke in tongues or possibly in Swahili. He asked if this was *** (my mom�s name). No, this is witty, her I�m sure he was a little perplexed, because I certainly was, and my heart was beating so incredibly fast, that I thought this is how it must feel if Johnny Depp were to slowly and sensuously lick chocolate off my inner thighs while dressed as Willie Wonka. He sounded busy though. The landlord that is. Not Johnny Depp, although there�s no real way of knowing. Johnny could be busy doing some last minute dubbing on �Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory� or maybe bonking his skinny wife in Barbados, or eating chocolate or...What? Oh.. So I asked if we could come see the apartment tomorrow. He said, ok, but late in the evening. And I was like �Late in the evening?� Like 11:30 p.m.? No. I didn�t say that. We�re meeting tomorrow at 6 p.m. I called my mom back and told her about our conversation and how stupid I felt when I was blubbering incomprehensive things about hamsters. She said she thought I should try to dress nicely. Huh? Like my job interview outfit? Heh. I actually don�t have a job interview outfit. Last summer when I interviewed for my current P/T job, I wore a sundress. When I got home, and was taking it off, I realized, I had actually worn the dress backwards to my job interview. And I�m sure afterwards, all the interviewers gathered saying, �Oh that witty girl was so charming...with the backwards dress and all. Let�s hire her....Yeah, lets!!� So I did tell my mom, that I wouldn�t be dressing like a �Dollar Store Hillbilly�, so I guess I should start going through my closet tonight, because Lord knows, there is certainly a Dollar Store Hillbilly element running through it. Older Entries |
Lyrics by Lennon/McCartney. All angst copyright by awittykitty |
>