8:24am Aargh

Could not go to bed last night. Tried. Honestly, I did. Sort of. Jb crashed around midnight, and I was still wide awake. Read some of Nora Roberts' Blood Brothers. Still convinced that she is a deceptively good writer. Stupid me, I held out for years thinking such a prolific writer must be a hack. Way to go, jackass. Granted, her novels--the ones I've been reading, the more supernatural ones--have the same structure: 3 women and 3 men brought together to battle some sort of evil, and in the process of the three-book series, they all hook up. But she does a wonderful job of characterization and creating a sense of a non-nuclear family, but a family all the same.

Anyway, off track. Could not sleep last night. Woke up several times. Up at 8:24am. Groggy per usual, but I don't know, my sleep pattern is definitely shifting. I'm finding it harder and harder to not stay up half the night like I used to. The fact that I resist sitting there watching Adult Swim all night helps, I'm sure. But reading with the light on probably doesn't. Still, I can't just lie there and think, and think, and think. Because I start thinking of blogs to write, or scenes to write, and what's happening in the book, or what I'd do or say if X, Y, or Z happened. Feh. Useless, stupid things.

Still Here

I am . . . here. Which is to say that I have nothing to say, despite feeling somewhat better than I have, mentally speaking, since the hospital. My body, however, not so fine. First period in fourth months, non-stop IBS during the day . . . it's really more than I can be buggered to say that I actually swept up some and have a load of laundry going down in the basement. The dishes and dinner are waiting, but I can't quite bring myself to that yet.

Overall, I'd say I'm very . . . meh. With a bit of restlessness and random anxiety thrown in. Maintenance was supposed to be by to fix the tub and oven. No show, of course. And I've been sitting here waiting for them all day. Thus, no doubt, the anxiety. I still don't like the idea of having to deal with strangers or having people in my "space." I actually was resistant enough to the idea of leaving the new apartment that I rescheduled last week's psych appointment for this week. And I still don't want to go.

I don't care to write anymore either. That's be supplanted by reading. I'm reading again. And with that, the writing's dried up. There is nothing intelligent in my brain to say, no spark of personality to put forth. These are clunky words put together by a clunky mind and typed by clunky fingers. We're broke. I have no job. I have no idea what I'm doing with myself. Epic fail.

By the by, when I went down to do the laundry, I really took a good look at the basement, and promptly wished I hadn't. There are, I'm certain, the largest cockroaches I've ever seen down there. They're all dead, which is a good sign, I guess, but dear god. As long as they stay down there. The spiders are welcome to them.

Back to moving around the apartment and random futzing with this or that to pretend I'm being productive. If I were working, this would be one of those days when I couldn't be buggered to do my work because I'm too distracted and unable to focus. My body feels leaden, and I'm utterly unmotivated, except that I owe it to Jb to do something. Feh.

9:59 a.m. How Do I Feel Today?

It's one of those "activities" they make you do in therapy and at the hospital. In the hospital, you rated yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. In therapy, I had a sheet of faces with the names of different emotions beneath them. Often, there wasn't an emotion that ever fit how I felt, or I couldn't quite name how I felt. On a 1 to 10 scale? About a 3 today. I'm feeling numb. I don't care about much. There will be no shower today. I will put my hair up in a makeshift bun with a hairband. I will not unpack--something I haven't really done since we moved in. I will not play on the computer. I will not read a book. If I do either, it will be for 10 minutes, maybe less. I may turn on the tv, but I will not watch it. If Jb comes home and asks anything of me, I will be upset and put out. I'm supposed to make a grocery list today. I will wait until the last minute to do it. When we go to the store, I will shuffle around from aisle to aisle without really seeing anything. I will not want to be there. I do not care about eating, though I will when I'm hungry later. I ate half of one of Jb's Nutty Bars because I couldn't be bothered to make anything more complicated. Jb will probably be upset that I did. I don't much care. He will take that as me not caring about him, or his feelings, but it's simply apathy. He can be mad at me if he wants to--he often is these days--and I don't care. I do not want to write. That is how I feel today.

10:48 a.m. Nada

Didn't feel like writing yesterday, which is... meh. First time in two weeks I haven't felt like writing, and I don't know if that's the first sign of a change in mood, or no. I know it's the one thing Marya Hornbacher notes in her book as a telltale sign, and I can verify that one of the ways I knew I was sick was that I couldn't read or write.

Before the hospitalization, I was a voracious reader, going through the used books my mother sent me like they were M&Ms. I could finish one in two days reading only on the train during my commute and at lunch. I'm a Writing Intensive English major with a Master's in Writing and a concentration in Teaching & Pedagogy, as well as Creative Nonfiction. I've worked in a library on and off for over five years. I've taught college level English Composition I, II, and III. I have a certificate in teaching Adult Literacy. I've been a tech writer and a non-profit public relations writer.

I am not the kind of person who does not read.

Writer's block, however, happens. But it's the depression that takes all desire to write away from me, and I've been too depressed for years to take up that task. My writing comes out strong when I'm hypomanic, riding the edge of energy and anger. But now, words come slow and dumb, and even this blog reads clunky to me. In the hospital, I thought, "What a good opportunity to write about something important, to do a bit of creative nonfiction," and maybe one day I will, but at the time, I couldn't even bother to ask for pencil and paper. We weren't allowed pens. And there was a sort of respected silence, as if we were all in jail, and you didn't dare ask why someone was in there, or if it was voluntary of involuntary.

This lack of desire to write, to have anything to say, nor to read... it worries me most. I've a box of books my mother sent me, and I haven't even cracked it open. I tell myself I don't have time for them with the move in the next week. But part of that is justification for not reading. My greatest secret pleasure has always been women's magazines, but even in the hospital, and even now, I can't flip through them and retain anything. The glossy pictures hold no interest for me, and the spicy headlines no longer make me flip, almost compulsively, to page 112.

Dorothy Parker has always been a poet I've been able to relate to in my moods, though, and often I find myself repeating bits of poetry, like a magpie who collects shiny strings of lyrics, poems, sayings. If it weren't for the last line of the poem, Ms. Parker might have been spot on in her "Symptom Recital:"

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the simplest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick. I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore:
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men.
I'm due to fall in love again.

There's no falling in love again, but the symptoms, those came from a women who knew what it meant to fantasize about suicide, to try it herself, someone who knew depression, and it shines clear as day in that poem. These days, like Parker herself, I can't help but feel that that my "world," as well as my words, "is but a bunch of tripe."