I'm Tired

Now that we’ve got “My thin skin” post out of the way, and I’ve mostly digested the crap-ass comment from Mr./Miss. Anonymous regarding my love letter to California, how about we see how thin my skin really is?

It’s thin. The truth is, the comment by Mr./Miss. Anonymous kinda sent me over the edge. I began questioning why I am even striving to be a writer. I started wondering and asking myself, “What if my writing is the worst kind of suck and I don’t even know it?” And thinking,”Shoot, I know I’ve been lax in my blog, and getting things out there without trying to be perfect, but what if I’m just delusional and my writing is crap beyond my non-edited mistakes?”

Then, it hit me. The fact that someone I don’t even know could have that kind of affect on me, it really showed me how raw I’ve been lately. But, because there have been so many straws weighing on my camel’s back, and so much emotion that has been piling up only to get pent up, I think that comment by Mr./Miss. Anonymous gave me a target for my anger and the release for my emotion that I’ve needed.

I can’t lie. I’ve had some weeps which have worked their way out in little spurts when something tips me, but until I read that comment from the ASSnonymous person, I’d not had a good cry yet. I know myself well enough to understand why I’ve been shutting my emotions down.

I’ve been trying to turn my feelings off the same way I tried to turn off the physical pain I experienced the day I broke my wrist over four years ago. After slipping on a declining slope in the snow, I fell back onto my wrist and I snapped my radius in half. The sharp, vibrating, burning sensation inside my wrist from the immediate break was so excruciating that I was afraid to cry. I thought if I let the tears out that my brain would get the signal of how much pain I was in and that a confirmation of that pain would then make the pain even worse. (I simply could not take any more pain.)

I guess what I am trying to say is that I’ve been feeling so emotionally overtaxed, so tender and exposed from the weight of my emotions wearing me out, that I’m afraid if I acknowledge how beat up and fragile I feel that I might actually break in half. Seriously, if I didn’t already question whether or not I have an anxiety disorder, I am now at least certain that my crazy is showing and that stress is not my best color.

What’s got me constantly on the verge of tears? Fuck. It’s all of it. I’m tired, man. Just plain fucking tired.

I don’t want my dad to have any more heart attacks. To catch you up, a few weeks after my dad’s quadruple bypass, while I was still in Colorado, my dad had two more heart attacks. Two of his graphs didn’t hold from the bypass surgery.

I don’t want my dad to have cancer, either. The whole reason my dad ended up in the bypass surgery in the first place is because he had a growth on his salivary gland and they wanted to do a stress test to find out if he could withstand the surgery to remove that growth. Obviously, my dad failed the stress test. This is what ended him up in the quadruple bypass surgery. He also failed the benign growth test.

By the way, Anonymous, how do you like me now? Am I still too happy for you? Is my dad’s cancer bullshit? Do you still think its nonsense that I needed to write about something positive, such as being happy to be back in California, before I admitted, and then reminded what few readers I have, that the last couple of years have put enough of a strain on me that I feel like I’ve aged more in this time than I’ve aged in the past 10 years?

I’ve heard other people say how a series of events or even a single circumstance can take its toll, but if I didn’t get it before, I get it now. All the things that have collected, first with me feeling forced out of my home of 14 years by the butthead neighbors, then with the bad job, the bully bosses, my dad’s health, feeling displaced and feeling figuratively homeless since I left my old home, and with me learning to be more adaptable and flexible then I actually bend, has turned me into a different person. (Frankly, I don’t even want to be around me right now and I am wondering how my friends are putting up with me.)

It really is incredible how much stress can screw with you. I’ve gotten my first gray hairs and my jowls have now come in. Shit! That sucks! While dating is the last thing on my mind (and the thought of dating makes me want to puke), when I’m ready, how am I supposed to get another young lover if my sagging jaw skin is threatening to make acquaintance with my doubling chin?

(Yeah, I may write things about how a gay man is telling me that I am stunning, but maybe you can see now how that’s not me bragging. That’s me realizing that I’m living on borrowed time. I have to take any compliment I can get right now because I fear I’ve heard the last of the compliments.)

I’ve got another question for you, Anonymous. Do you think that my sisters and I are assholes because we haven’t been able to keep our dad’s cancer diagnosis straight since we’re getting all our information from our dad, a man who is stressed out of his mind and who is afraid of dying, and from my mom, a woman who is afraid to loose her husband of more than 45 years, rather than getting the information straight from our father’s doctors.

Are both my parents jerks because they, in their distress, seem to hear and process the diagnoses and the information about my dad’s cancer different than each other? Then, they seem to give that information to us differently, too. Was it wrong for me to be freaked out and fear the worst because I’d not heard back from my parents for three days after my dad had his first chemo treatment?

One more question, Anonymous. Does my whole family suck because we’re glad that the second opinion my dad got from a doctor at the Mayo clinic told him he had a better chance at life, that he actually had the aggressive kind of cancer which can be treated aggressively, that is rather than the slow growing non-treatable kind of cancer he was told he had in the first opinion which, incidentally, gave him 2-16 years to live?

How’s that for a diagnosis. You could die really soon, or not so soon, but you are going to die from cancer, not old age.

You know what, Anonymous? Now, I am actually feeling bad for you. The fact that you spend your time posting belittling comments on people’s blogs means that you wouldn’t even get how important it was that my sisters and I all got to go visit my dad before he started chemo, and we got to play pool with him, and see all of his new wood carvings, and then take with us a memory of him still healthy (visually, at least) and smiling ear to ear because he got to have all of his daughters together before he gets sick from his chemo treatments.

My sister, Christine, reminded me of how important that would be for all of us to take that visual home and to keep that memory in our hearts rather than to have seen our father when he was already sicker than shit from his chemo.

I never told anyone this, friends or family, but I had a feeling my dad had cancer back before his bypass and back when he and my mother informed us that he had a growth on his face. I also didn’t ask my sisters if it was just as hard for them as it was for me to see most of our father’s left earlobe gone and to see the ½ inch dent, or hole (call it what you will) in the side of his face where his earlobe used to be and from where they removed the cancerous growth, hoping they got all of it, understanding later that the cancer has spread through his body.

Something that made me feel good is that after talking to Christine one night, she admitted that the only word she could also come up with for how it feels to emotionally deal with our father’s health is an overwhelming sense of being tired. Just plain fucking tired.

What I didn’t tell Christine is how exhausting our visit to see our father was for me in a different way than it was for her and for my sister Lyn. Yes, my dad’s health is especially trying for me and both my sister’s, however what added to my tired was the fact that I couldn’t help but take in how much duress my mother has been under. While Christine and Lyn were focused on spending time with my dad, as was I, I was also trying to do double time.

See, my mother is my and Lyn’s mother, not Christine’s. Christine is my father’s daughter from his first marriage. Also, I’ve had the added advantage of getting to see Christine, who lives on the East Coast, way more than Lyn has gotten to see Christine.

What does all of that mean? While Christine and Lyn were catching up with each other, and catching up with my dad, singing songs with our father in the basement, trying on his leather Harley vest, and taking turns taking pictures with his cowboy hat on, I was upstairs in the kitchen with my mom making dinner and giving my mom the shoulder she needed to express the fear she’s going through with everything going on with my dad.

“What am I going to do if I lose your father?” That’s what my mom was asking me during some of the dinners we made. What did I do every time my mom confided in me? I assured her that everything would be okay. What did I do every time my family looked at me for my strong face? I assured them that everything would be okay. Then, I’d sneak away to the bathroom and have me a short little spurt cry that I’d shut down after 20 seconds so that my face wouldn’t get red and so that my mother, my father, and my sisters wouldn’t detect that I was just as scared as the rest of them. (How the baby of the family, me, turned out to be the high-strung freak in her life but the rock with her family, I don’t know.)

Did I tell Lyn and Christine how much my mom is going through? Hell no. Every time something goes the hard way in my family and the tears are about to come out, my family looks at me, literally. They all turn their heads towards me to see if I am going to cry. So, I keep my face straight. I don’t cry. I know what they’re looking for; a face without fear which says things will work out. They want to find in my expression the strength we’re all hoping for.

They don’t know they do this, look at me the way they do. They’ve been doing it so long and I’ve been playing the part for just as long, that it’s how our family works.

But, I thank goodness that I have the friends that I do, because when I feel like I am going to go crazy, because I need to cry, too, and when I need somewhere to lean, where I don’t have to be strong, my friends are there. (For how long, shit… if I don’t stop being a pill…who knows.)

Anyway, it was Lyta that had me laughing a couple of weeks ago. She really talked me off the emotional ledge when ASSnonymous sent me into my scooped out cry. Lyta gave me the proverbial reminder, “Hey, honey. Get off the ledge. Come on inside where the wine is.”

Now if I could only figure out which side of the stress eating/stress not-eating pendulum I’m going to swing towards this time. Since I’ve been so tired, so emotionally spent from completely over feeling, I’ve been doing what many of us do to avoid feeling. Eat.

It’s a known fact that everyone comfort eats. It’s a lesser known fact that there is a reason for this. The energy it takes to process emotion and the energy it takes to digest a fattening/big meal is so great that the two processes cannot take place at once. One will take precedent over the other. This would explain why people can vacillate between loosing their appetite during great times of stress to over-eating in order to shut emotion down for awhile.

Over the last year, I’ve experienced both. While dealing with the stress of my last job, it was so constant and on-going I couldn’t eat. Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between not having an appetite to wanting to eat everything in front of me in order to shut down.

The funny part is, if any of this is funny, is that I wonder what my dad, who introduces me as his vegetarian daughter, would think about the fact that I recently horked down an In N Out cheese burger and some fries so fast that I got a knot in my belly. Man, I haven’t eaten meat in I don’t know how long, but I am here to tell you that the lightening speed in which I ate that meal is what accounts for the stomach ache. I barely made it to the second traffic light away from the drive through before half the burger was gone. Well, at least Chad, my old neighbor, who calls me a cut-back-atarian for eating a mostly meat & dairy free diet, would be proud.

What’s worse? After that burger and fries I wanted a cigarette. What the hell? I quit smoking over four years ago. Six weeks after I broke my wrist and had to face my own mortality, I put the ciggies down. Then, after getting through the first six months of habit withdrawal and learning new ways to deal with stress (which obviously haven’t been that successful) I haven’t wanted or craved a cigarette. So why now? Hmm. Something tells me I’m not coping with my life well.

Anyway, I’m too pooped to get out another peep. I’m going to bed early tonight and as I lay my head down I am going to be thankful that my dad is in good spirits, that his first chemo treatment went well, that his labored and breathy speech is probably from recovering from his last surgery, and not the effects of the chemo yet. I am also going to be grateful for the fact that there is wine.

My Thin Skin

Turns out, I’m not as tough as I’d like to be. I went to work on one of my blong posts (as my friend Rod calls my long blog posts), in order to catch things up where I left off, and I came upon an anonymous comment, which needed to be moderated, that upset me. The comment, in reference to the post “My love letter to California…” was something to the effect of “ Trololo-lololo-lolololo!!!”

I didn’t know what Trololo… meant, so I looked up possible meanings. It looks like “Trololo” is any speech or B.S. which, while it may have a positive connotation, is not only clueless in it’s delivery but the person delivering the speech doesn’t realize they are full of shit and are too happy.

In my small moment of power, I deleted the comment. But, I couldn’t let it go.

So, this is to you Mr./Miss. Anonymous. I guess I am a Trololo-er, someone committed the ultimate sin of buying into their own bullshit. I like to write. My blog is from my experiences. So, if you do not like what I have to say, don’t read my blog. Go fly a kite. Move on and take your bad energy elsewhere. I don’t have the desire to deal with the cycle that comes when faced with a negative person making derogatory comments anonymously.

And, if you wanted to make me feel bad, if you wanted to hurt my feelings, and wanted to make me question my ability to write, to communicate, to do what makes me happy, and if you wanted to knock me down some punches, then good job; You win. You did it. I hope that’s what you were looking to do, so at least one of us got something out or your comment. Purveyors of bad energy usually do want others to feel bad, so you can now sleep better tonight knowing it worked.

It’s not what I wanted, though, to give you, an asshole, six paragraphs. But, now that I think about it, I am actually happy to do it. These paragraphs are my effort to cycle through the negativity you left me in order to go on to the posts that I have been putting off, sharing about my father’s health, my job search, and about how out of balance I’ve felt for the last year and a half of my life.

Turns out, your negativity has actually served to remind me of why I write. There will be those who don’t like what I write. So be it and be them on their way. (No one is forced to engage.) Then, there will be others who will read something that I have written and they will connect with it. They will know someone else understands what they’ve been through or are going through. So be them with me on our way to knowing we are not alone in this journey as we try to figure out life.

XO – My few readers.
Kiss off – Anonymous