What was supposed to have been a time of concentrated focus on a particular manuscript has instead become my harrowing confrontation with how much I would suck as a single parent, as a consequence of my husband having to be gone for longer than we expected to assist his uncle who recently had surgery.
I’m barely holding the everyday shit together, much less doing anything at all beyond that, as a consequence of which I have been fairly toppled by an acute consciousness of my profound inadequacies as a human being (in any and all capacities: parent, writer, etc.)
It has become clear that the more energy I put into planning a particular thing, the more prone I am to psychic disintegration if events beyond my control disrupt that plan. The “setback” I experience is such that I would have been better off having never made any kind of plan.
Yesterday, in the midst of my extended fog, I called my shrink’s office to see when my appointment was again, and the receptionist said it had been the day before. I said something to the effect of “I’m hopeless, never mind” and hung up. Not wishing to cause their office alarm (of course, that was my concern; not “I am in distress” but “I don’t want anyone to worry about me being in distress”), I wrote out a partial explanation of things, and sent it via fax, rather than attempt to deal with the phone again.
The end result of all that is that I have a new appointment for Monday, and it’s possible they’ll waive or at least defer the missed appointment fee, and in any case there will be some opportunity to adjust my meds. (At my last appointment, I’d mentioned the depression appeared to be creeping back, although it was unclear whether that was a consequence of frankly demoralizing physical health issues I was dealing with at the time. Since then, the physical health issues have, if not ‘resolved,’ have at least ‘receded,’ while the depression has continued to take hold in its sneaky, slow, vice-grip fashion.) Right now I’m not on any anti-depressant - only lithium for bipolar, which, while it may be preventing me from going all self-destructively apeshit manic again (this is good), isn’t doing anything at all beyond that, other than giving me a few annoying side effects.
Of course, no matter what plans one makes for any reason, there will always be disruptions, and one needs to develop some flexibility. Part of why I’m so easily derailed is that “flexibility” was all I knew for huge, formative parts of my life; basic survival required that. From when I was very young, and had to move constantly (not a military brat, and not the “fought over” child in a custody dispute, unless you count arguments between divorced parents concerning which one would have to take the inconvenient child in question at any given time), people would praise me for how incredibly “flexible” and “adaptable” I was, as if I’d ever had another option.
In my more recent years, recoiling from certain of the still mostly unspoken horrors of that time, I’ve developed a vastly inconvenient, apparently compensatory inflexibility which I wouldn’t mind shedding oh, like, now. I should not be so easily derailed by such simple things. (Or things which, while they may be individually not all that devastating, tend to bury me when experienced cumulatively. Little defeats here and there, like last week’s election. I still have the signs up for Democrats in Virginia’s race for Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General in our front yard, when all three candidates decidedly lost those contests on Tuesday; it is now, of course, Saturday. And though I really don’t care whether that annoys my neighbors, it is, in itself, rather emblematic of my difficulty accepting when something goes wrong, and moving on like people do - like I once did, with the deceptive appearance of ease.)
So that’s where things are right now. I feel like I’m drowning, although there are, ostensibly, life rafts and the like within view. Sputter, sputter.
