I wish ya’ll could live in my head for an hour.

... if you could even last an hour, that is.

It’s hard to describe to people what’s going on in there on a good day. On a bad day/week/month/year, it’s beyond impossible.

I dip into deep, deep, dark, scary dark, depressions a lot lately and they’re tinged with anger. Rage, even. The voices in my head are incredibly mean lately, too.

We’re working on fixing this, but it’s not like any other illness, where success is easier to measure. Therapy and pills are the weapons of choice, but they’re sticks and stones. I need higher power weaponry. Ninja level shit.

My body, however, wants to make this even harder to fight. Bad reactions to the slightest change in ingredients that makes a drug a generic, problems with my heart defects (yes, TWO! Two heart defects. Ha ha ha.), problems with insurance (because the pills that work aren’t always covered. yup.), and problems with side effects. (Remind me to tell you the story of how upping one of my meds two months ago made me go blind. Really.)

The wrong combination of pills fucks with my heart. The right combination of pills makes me top 200 pounds. A tolerable, almost perfect, combination of pills has me experiencing extremes lately: extreme stability and extreme bipolar. After all the trial and error, we’re not quite ready to give up on this combination. It’s worked so well for years. YEARS!

We tack on an extra milligram here and there, we change the times the meds are taken, we cross our fingers.

And we hope.

A lot.

——-

I stopped hanging around with other mentally ill people online a while ago. Some of them were faking. Some of them had learned how to work the system and get disability even though they’re not entitled to it. Some are seriously fucked in the head, and probably misdiagnosed. It’s not a world where I can find people I have things in common with anymore. The landscape has changed.

As I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten worse. I’m on my fourth go-round of trying to decide what we would need to cut to be able to live on J’s salary. I am getting to the point where I can, unquestionably, undeniably, qualify for SSDI. I’ve been subtle about it, but I’m exercising my rights under the ADA* that my employer make reasonable accommodations for me. And yet, I refuse to give up. Even though the writing is on the wall.

I grab my helmet, and my gun, and I head into the battle.

I refuse to give up this fight until I’ve won.

Or I die.

——-

*Thank you, Teddy Kennedy. I will always love you forever for that.

It’s a location joke.

“So do you ever go out with your other girlfriend?”

“No. She’s clumsy.”

——-

I’d almost apologize to the good Doctor, but we’re writing our own dirty version of “Green Eggs and Ham” over here and it’s all kinds of awesome.

——-

Possibly related: HOLY FUCK. We are loving The Big Bang Theory. Why did it take us so long to find it and why isn’t it on Netflix?!?!?!

And it goes a little something like this…

I can’t decide how I feel about the news I received tonight…

My uncle’s brother left a voice mail telling me Uncle John had died. He was young-ish.

My first reaction was that I didn’t care.

Seriously.

He wasn’t a part of my life, and he hadn’t been for such a long time, that it’s hard to feel anything. It’s sad, but it’s like when a stranger dies. “Oh, yeah. John. I heard he was a nice guy.”

Upon further reflection, I started to feel a little bad.

I mean, I’m not COMPLETELY cold hearted… he left two daughters, a wife, and a granddaughter, in addition to his mother, brother, and sister. (We’ll have to revisit the topic of Makayla Rose later. Seriously, Melanie, WTF?!?)

My relationship with him was really good. Honestly, my aunt was the one that fucked things up between us but I never held anything against him or the girls. I have these great memories of him dressing up as Santa at my grandparents’ house… and some others that I’m not sharing with the interwebs.

I got the call today… a little earlier and I would have been able to make the trip to CT for the funeral. I wouldn’t have been welcome there, but that was a risk I would have taken. For him. NOT for them.

I did suck it up and messaged my aunt on Facebook. It’s as close to her as I want to get. I didn’t message either of the girls. I’m not quite sure what to say to them—“Hey, guys, sorry your dad croaked. LOL Remember when your mom told me she was glad MY father was dead? Yeah. Good times. Skype me, bby. <3”—I know what they’re going through, but I can’t be there for them. I don’t want to be there for them. Not any more. (See imaginary conversation.)

So, I thought by writing this, I’d figure out how I felt about all this… I’m still kind of eh about the whole thing.

It’s sad he died, but in these last 10-ish years, he’d been a stranger to me. It’s hard to feel anything…

And that’s all there is to it.

Too close to home

Nothing like pulling up CNN first thing in the morning and choking on your coffee. Like coffee everywhere… including my lungs.

Gah.

I (naively) never expected to see the headline 1 dead, 4 hurt in high school shooting and have it affect me so… violently.

I know I’m not the most pro-family, huggy, kissy, love-my-relatives type person, but my brother-in-law teaches in a suburb of Cleveland.

Thankfully, he’s on the other side of Cleveland and safe and sound.

But I definitely didn’t need the reminder that this could happen anywhere, anytime, and sadly, sometimes, too close to home.

Just another night around these parts

In the past twenty minutes, we’ve talked about:

• porn stashes
• robot sex
• whether or not dead werewolves can turn into ghosts
• If those dead werewolves change during full moons
• how do vampires deal with women’s periods

Yeah. After fourteen years, we’re still having fun together.

Can’t ask for anything more!