zeptember

Diet stuff:
I’ve been suffering hypoglycemic attacks, dermatitis and anal bleeding again, so I’ve decided to eliminate soy (as much as I can - since it’s like corn - it’s in everything). I am also eliminating corn again, too. These things will be eliminated for ten days, at which point I will reintroduce one at a time over a period of seven days apart.

I found out that the dermatitis is exacerbated by cleaning products - namely those bleach-added cleaning wipes that I’m so fond of. So now I use rubber gloves when using the wipes, and I’m nursing broken skin.

Job stuff:
My boss informed me on Friday at the end of my shift that a prospective hire would be coming in on Saturday to check the place out, and that I should check the new hire out and see if she will be a good match for the other two who run the office.
This in turn led me to panic once I got home, because I’ve not been looking for work, and I could very well be out of a job again Real Soon Now.

So I went to work on Saturday, stressing over how to greet the prospect when she showed up, while outside the street was closed off for a street fair (beer tent in the street a straight line from the office door), and my coworkers went on with their usual personality conflict dynamic, taking it out on me and the patients as usual, even though we just had a talk about it the day before.

The prospect never showed up on Saturday, either, the cooze.

I tried looking for a job for a few hours today. Let me tell you, looking for work equals instant severe depression with me.

I’ve decided that I have a block. The block is this:
How can I look for work when I promised my masseuse I’d help her friend and her friend’s employee until a qualified replacement can be found?

My co-worker is at her burnout point and needs a vacation BADLY. If I quit now, leaving her to take care of the entire office on her own again, after she had to do this for three months before I came along, that will be a very mean thing on my part.

But how do I cover my ass and still help someone else?

If only I could be told definitively that I would be retained full time til the end of the year. If only the woman who runs the business could make up her mind as to whether she wants to close up shop by the end of the year, instead of waffling on hiring a new person who knows optometry and billing inside out.

So, not knowing what to do, I sit here, pausing the job hunt, and panicking about how to make rent again this month.

I’ll be lucky if my paycheck breaks $450 net pay for two weeks of work. Last paycheck was $370, but was combined with my last check from the scanning job, as well as the refund deposit money from our last apartment.
And of course I spent most of it on food and rent.

From a money minded point of view, I need to do what’s best for me, and others will just have to figure it out for themselves.

From a Karmic point of view, I need to do what’s best for all involved so that balance nears harmony and my sanity doesn’t take any further damage.

Job and money stress are NOT helping with the dietary restrictions.

I had a mocha and a scone for lunch (although aren’t you excited for me that I didn’t have a reaction to the scone?).

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing billboards and online photo advertisements for the new “World Trade Center” movie. And each time my eyes glimpse the image, my heart drops and my stomach knots and I feel a lump in my throat.

I’m not ready for this.

And then, there was today’s news of the Brits exposing a terror threat that was due to unfold in a matter of days. They’ve conducted overnight raids and arrested over 20 individuals who were involved in a plot to bomb transatlantic flights.

The major corporate networks have been near hysterics in their repeated coverage of this news. Their voices are pitched and anxious. National Public Radio on the other hand sounds as calm and rational as ever, but still reports from the same sources.

And there’s the corporate online media outlets, also at fever pitch. To quote my friend Jace, “You know CNN is near hysterics when their font is larger than 36 point.”

Waking up to this news this morning, combined with the ads for the movie coming out, I was near tears all day.
Well, that was probably also combined with my current depression, but I was very rattled all day today regardless, and the trigger today was the goddamned news.

So this evening, I ranted with friends online, and sought out further dialogue from sources such as americablog and billmon.

Now I feel a little bit better, and still a little bit like looking up warily at the sky, wondering if it is going to fall.

I fell off the wagon. Stress won out and I went back to eating sugar and drinking pop (high fructose corn syrup carbonated beverage, such as coca-cola) again.

The stressors that led me to crave forbidden foods:
Food allergies popping up after diet elimination experiments. A conflict with a friend. Long resolution process with friend. Getting a job. Preparing to move. Moving. Getting another job. Knowing I’d be fired from one of the jobs lest I quit first. Quitting a job. Adjusting to full time at the other job. No good food choices or advice. No refrigerator at work to house my special diet foods.

I know I’m leaving stuff out. Just can’t think of it at the moment.

So I started craving caffeine, sugar, coffee, cookies, Cheetos™, Chinese food, biscuits and gravy, and other stuff. And I acted on those cravings. And I paid the price with some of it immediately. Some of the other stuff took a few days or weeks to finally pound me in the face.

So as of yesterday, I’ve been near tears all day and all night. Severe depression has set in once more.
Before caving to cravings, I’d been SO excited to realise that my depressions had nearly perished. I attributed the depressions to being part of the allergic reaction my body has to certain foods.
I know sugar is a HUGE factor in my depressions.

But yet, stress won and I caved and I went back to eating the very foods that would cause me to become this unbelievably depressed.

I got home and drank some brandy and ate some Cheetos and sulked. Then I took a nap. Then I vented to my friends. Then I got off my ass and made some brown rice pasta with some pre-made spaghetti sauce in a jar. We’ll see how my body likes that.

I’ve started a document of foods that my body approves of. That will become my pantry, and I will expand upon that. And I will become vigilant again. And I will take up a friend’s offer to get cooking lessons from her. She has allergies much worse than mine. Her allergies and sensitivities include all of mine plus another long list. We jokingly name her diet the beef jerky and baby food diet, for example. But it’s not a very funny joke.

I also need to make the long put off Steph’s Recipes document, so I’m not stuck wondering what to eat for my next meal anymore.
And I need to learn the sacred art of Southern-minded cooking, which means “cooking for an army”. I need to channel Grandma, who had nine kids to cook for every day. I need to freeze up the extra and have a stockpile to choose from for meals to take to work.

So the fact that I’m off my ass and making plans means that I sunk to my lowest point in my depression this evening, and bounced. Yay bounce. Can’t wait til the depressive funk is OVER.

Now, what to do for tomorrow’s lunch. I think I may have to suffer for two more work days (Friday and Saturday), before I have the time and energy to go food shopping again. Oh, and there’s also that pesky little detail of getting PAID.

I started cramping on the right side today. George isn’t due until the 21st, which is two weeks away.

Is it simply ovulation? Is the cyst back again? Did I grow another one? I never got the other one treated, because it was 11mm and I was told my body would reabsorb it. I thought my body did just that.

The gynecologist called me back today, too. She let me know that it’s okay for me to reschedule surgery. Last week, the billing department at the GYN’s office called me to tell me that B’s insurance was giving them a hard time over processing my impending surgery. They said I have a six month waiting period, which expires in November. They said they were investigating to see if I had pre-existing conditions. So I cancelled surgery til January. The doctor told me that’s the best I can do right now, cuz if I were to go ahead and do surgery in September and the insurance decided not to cover it, it would be $20K out of pocket.

Ouch.

So, surgery waits. And I’m on 600mg Ibuprofen, waiting for the mid-cycle pain to go away.
I can do this. I’ve done this for twenty years already.

Ever since starting the scanning job and the optometrist’s assistant job, then losing the scanning job, I have been in a depressive funk.

I’ve been feeling like I’ve not accomplished anything. I’ll be 35 this year. I haven’t risen to management in a Fortune 500 corporation. I haven’t squeezed out any children. I haven’t even gotten married (though I am in an unbelievably healthy and robust six-year relationship).

But these are things that women in this society are trained for these days. My mom was trained to be a hardworking secretary until she could find someone to marry her so she could quit in order to get married in her early twenties, then shit out a litter of kids and be a homemaker.
My mom was too wild a child for homemaking, and shacked up with a biker dude, but still eventually succumbed and squeezed out a couple of kids, before divorcing and living the single parent life.

I was too wild a child to cower to the corporate mentality. I tried it for years, but had to walk away in near-mental-breakdown, lest I be forcibly carried out in a strait-jacket. But I didn’t get married and have kids. So I’m still the rebel. I’ve persisted where my mother caved.

But still, psychological conditioning is psychological conditioning, and so I find myself this year really being beat down emotionally by the feeling that I have somehow failed at womanhood.
It’s different from the biological clock. It’s acknowledging that there IS no biological clock, and feeling extraordinarily guilty for having no clock ticking yet.

Granted, my grandma didn’t pop out my dad until she was forty years old. But she would have bred earlier had she been allowed to leave the sight of her preacherman father, and had she not had to take care of her parents during the Great Depression. It wasn’t by choice that she delayed breeding. Her aunt on the other hand…she might have been a rebel. She was married and had a huge house, but they never had any kids. Though, given the day and age, perhaps she or her husband was barren or sterile, and they never told anybody about it. Perhaps even great aunt Dolly would have bred, too, given the chance.

But given the chance twice now in the past fifteen years, I didn’t wanna. Given the choice again, I wouldn’t wanna.

I’ve always been a late bloomer….I mean, REALLY late compared to my peers. We’re talking emotionally-stunted-late in how long it takes me to get to places my peers have been at for as much as a decade before me.

I found myself searching out old classmates to see how they’re doing in life. I realised today that what I’ve actually been doing is comparing their lives to mine, to see how far behind I am in growing up.

Hell, I didn’t even fully face the fact that I am aging until earlier this year, when some woman laughed at me in the fitting room when I answered her call to a “young lady” trying on a bra.
There had been signs, though. I’d seen an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, where Patsy and Edina, clearly well past their 20’s, went to a Marilyn Manson concert and tried to be all young, hip and cool. It was embarrassing to watch them all dressed up like twenty-somethings, trying to relate and be young, when the wrinkles on their faces and their awkward postures gave them blatantly away.

I identified with it, after seeing a photo of me from a music festival last year, whereby I looked really bad…old… grandma in goth gear. Instead of aging gracefully in gothic fashion, I was still trying to be the young and hip goth darling. And it showed. Badly.

Then an acquaintance of mine ranted in his journal, asking why thirty- and forty-somethings feel the need to continue dressing like teenaged skateboarders, because it looks really retarded.

Again, I saw myself, and took inventory of all the tee shirts and jeans I have. I noticed I had no dress clothes. Nothing flattering for someone in her thirties. I was going to work in a corporate setting at that time dressed like a fucking teenaged skater.

So.

It’s time for change. Change has come to me and tapped me on the shoulder. And when I did not listen, it smacked me around. Now I listen, and change, in many ways. I am sad to have to change, but I know it is for the best to avoid further embarrassment through bad financial decisions, bad hair days and horrible fashion.

Hm. Looking back through the years though, even in high school I couldn’t dress or style myself to save my life. Sure, I lived in poverty, but I could have learned to sew my own clothes like Andie did in the movie Pretty In Pink, for example. I chalk it up to having a sort of programmer mindset, whereby I am blissfully unaware of how disheveled and slovenly I look.

So it’s time. Some of the changes I have to make are as follows:

• Reread all my books on how to survive on a lean salary, or with no salary at all, and seek out more literature. Begin putting knowledge into practice while also figuring out how to make my genealogy research and writing my full time career, paying or not.
• Seek support from people like me who do not wish to breed, so I can stop feeling so guilty about not breeding.
• Learn how to clothe and style myself like a graceful thirty-something who adores the gothic subculture. This will require asking for shopping trips with a few girlies my age that I know, who are goth-fashion-smart. I’ve gotten their help before - keep at it until I learn on my own what to look for!

*sigh*
Do I feel better now?

Sorta. I mean, there are resources out there for me. I’m not alone and all that. And I must say, my sister has been SO good to me through all of this. She’s been showering me with praise and pride, and telling me that I’m just fine, and that I am a success just by the very fact that I uprooted myself and successfully forged a way for myself in a land over 2000 miles from everything I’d ever known.

So, I know I can be strong. I know I can get through this. I know it’s hard to see it when I’m in the thick of it. I need to read and reread my list of accomplishments, and begin adding to the list again.

And now I need to get off my ass and do something productive.