update from home

April 27, 2009 9:15pm
I just wrote a letter by hand to my mom. Here is the transcription:
“First, I wanted to say thank you for helping me out again. It’s really frustrating to be waiting like this. The school told me it was done in March but only Summer funds not Spring funds and I got 2 emails last week contradicting each other, one saying it was done, one saying they just did it, so I don’t know who to trust. Hopefully it’s done correctly now.

I know it must be hard to be away from me and not know what’s going on, but I want you to know I am trying really, really hard to take care of myself physically, emotionally and financially.

I want to try to explain this to you so you can try to better understand me and my life. I have severe mental illness. Agitated Major Depressive Disorder and General Anxiety Disorder mixed with Insomnia and ADHD. I never dealt with it and it began manifesting itself in physical problems, headaches, neck and back aches, tightness is my chest feeling like a heart attack for weeks on end, vomiting several times a day for years. I finally started therapy about 3 years ago and continue every week to this day. After a few months of being coaxed by Kara, my therapist, I finally saw a psychiatrist and started medication. Things have been continually improving since then and I actually feel good.

I know having mental illness does not just give me a free pass, but it did affect me and my decisions. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t car how my actions would affect me. In fact, satisfying needs in the moment was all I cared about. I didn’t realize how my actions were affecting other people.

I know I have made a lot of poor choices and bad decisions and they are affecting me and will continue to affect me until I have resolved all of my past problems and can function stably. I also realize that they not only affect me, but you and everyone around me. When I think about my life I remember pain and suffering and it was internal all along. Of course external stressors affected me even more and it seems like I was always angry and fighting with myself and everyone else.

Now is the first time I’ve actually felt good and I want so bad to have long term employment and work towards my Master’s degree which is basically necessary as a teacher who wants to make more than $10/hr. I also don’t want to be alone, I crave genuine social interactions and have been working towards that as well.

I just want you to understand and it’s hard for me to grasp and I’m living it. I love you more than words can say and you’ve literally kept me alive more than once. I LOVE YOU. *n”
I hope this doesn’t upset or worry her, I just want her to understand. I think I layed it out pretty clearly and hope it maintains or enhances our relationship.

April 27, 2009 10:30pm
Ok, I am seriously becoming paranoid. A lot of people experience this when they smoke, I experience it when I don’t and I haven’t in over 3days. I just walked to the corner store and on the way there I saw a delivery type van, but with weird writing on the back that I was trying to decipher, music bumping and when I walked by the front, there were at least 2 people standing up, I looked in and then thought, shit, don’t get yourself in trouble. Then when I left with my bottle of wine and pack of clove cigarettes (I’ve been fighting with myself for several days about buying one or the other or both and I finally decided that both will last a long time) I was holding the wine by the top of the bottle as if to be used as a club if needed. In my left hand I put my keys through my fingers. I think I need to get some pepper spray. I also have been watching marathons of The Sopranos, Law & Order, CSI and daytime talk shows with crappy situations on them, so, uh, maybe I should watch some comedy or read or something. Problem with reading is that the 2 books I am reading right now, one is the vocation one from my old advisor which keeps annoying me and Clockwork Orange which is quite violent and also partly in Russian. I started reading it and thought it was some weird slang language or “future talk” bc I know that back in the 60s it was kind of a supposed prediction of the future, but then I was like, WTF?, and I went to the back and there was a glossary of Russian words as well as a few slang terms. What’s weird though is that I understood it from the context clues and now I kind of wish I didn’t know it was there bc I keep looking at it, yet some words come up that are new, I just don’t want to keep looking up the same word and be like, ‘oh, I was right.’ Um. I could do soduku. Or listen to music. Or play solitaire. Or clean. Or do laundry in my bathtub. Exciting life.