I should be in bed.
If I made a list of the terrible events, disappointments, and general bullshit of the last two months and published this list it would probably make your average sane person cry. But I wouldn't do that to you, dear reader, or anyone else. I keep waiting, as patiently as a person can be, for the good stuff. Truthfully, I think I may have the patience of a saint. I am by all rights the classic INFP personality. I am 100% "Introverted Feeling with Extroverted Intuition". It doesn't matter what I try to do to be different, it will always be who I am.
With that said, this is basically how I work:
Imagine a well. This well is me. It's capacity represents my own emotional capacity before 'meltdown'. When the well gets about three quarters of the way full my mind kicks into overdrive and I start to get neurotic. For those of you who have spent anytime with me lately, you know that this is where I've been hovering. To compensate for that, I do my best to, at least outwardly, put on a happy face and move along. I call it "fake it til you feel it". If something good , or validating in some way doesn't happen to me and the well continues to fill I start to lose touch with the things in my life that need to be taken care of. I stop paying bills, I forget to clean anything in the house, laundry doesn't get done, I'm unproductive at work, etc. I start to spend all my time running around trying to make myself feel better.
If the well fills up, emotionally, I shut down. I forget about simple things like eating. I am not capable of taking in any more. On some level I feel guilty about it. I know that the world doesn't stop spinning or anything. Nothing has changed. People still want things from me. I'm still expected to perform this life thing. And yet all I can do is stare off into space. Obviously, this isn't productive. This doesn't fit into any master plan.
For the record, I do know that I cannot solve everyone's problems. I have no illusions about saving the world and I'm not a babysitter for junkies and the little punkrock kids that fuck up their lives and end up at my doorstep. The most I can offer is an ear and a shoulder to cry on. I don't have a problem with this. I really don't. But where the fuck is a shoulder when I need it? The weight of 'everything' lately has become too much to bear. I'm holding it all together and the ship hasn't sank yet but I highly recommend life jackets.
So tonight the well is FULL. I did my best to take care of some things but wasn't able to pull off a single errand without help from other people. The 'closet pole' or whatever it is that you hang clothes on collapsed a few days ago and all of my clothes fell to the ground. I left it there. I just didn't have the energy in me to even pick anything up. Yesterday I went and bought stuff to fix it all with. I tried to fix it all myself. In the end I just laid in the big pile of clothes. I broke a few hangers in the process but this was minimal damage compared to the way I felt. Eventually, Josh found me in there (which somehow irked me -- I was quite peaceful there...) and spent the next hour figuring out a way to correct the damage I had done. I think that normally I should have been embarressed to be found in such a state but I didn't care. Why can't someone fix me once in a while?
Less than an hour later he comes to me: "Stephanie, I'm really fucking scared".
Rightly he should be. His luck is almost as good a mine. And I felt really bad because there was not a single thing I could think to say. Normally I would at least say...dunno...something. All I could do was just look at him and say sorry. Now I feel like shit. I'm sure there is something else I could have said. I wouldn't lie to him and say "everything will be ok" which is exactly what he wants to hear. Things won't be ok. His life, and while it may be selfish to say it, but my life as well, will be drastically different forever.
I'm actually considering therapy as a viable option. Maybe I can pay someone to dump all this on them. My life is like a car accident -- it's terrible but you just can't stop watching.
With that said, this is basically how I work:
Imagine a well. This well is me. It's capacity represents my own emotional capacity before 'meltdown'. When the well gets about three quarters of the way full my mind kicks into overdrive and I start to get neurotic. For those of you who have spent anytime with me lately, you know that this is where I've been hovering. To compensate for that, I do my best to, at least outwardly, put on a happy face and move along. I call it "fake it til you feel it". If something good , or validating in some way doesn't happen to me and the well continues to fill I start to lose touch with the things in my life that need to be taken care of. I stop paying bills, I forget to clean anything in the house, laundry doesn't get done, I'm unproductive at work, etc. I start to spend all my time running around trying to make myself feel better.
If the well fills up, emotionally, I shut down. I forget about simple things like eating. I am not capable of taking in any more. On some level I feel guilty about it. I know that the world doesn't stop spinning or anything. Nothing has changed. People still want things from me. I'm still expected to perform this life thing. And yet all I can do is stare off into space. Obviously, this isn't productive. This doesn't fit into any master plan.
For the record, I do know that I cannot solve everyone's problems. I have no illusions about saving the world and I'm not a babysitter for junkies and the little punkrock kids that fuck up their lives and end up at my doorstep. The most I can offer is an ear and a shoulder to cry on. I don't have a problem with this. I really don't. But where the fuck is a shoulder when I need it? The weight of 'everything' lately has become too much to bear. I'm holding it all together and the ship hasn't sank yet but I highly recommend life jackets.
So tonight the well is FULL. I did my best to take care of some things but wasn't able to pull off a single errand without help from other people. The 'closet pole' or whatever it is that you hang clothes on collapsed a few days ago and all of my clothes fell to the ground. I left it there. I just didn't have the energy in me to even pick anything up. Yesterday I went and bought stuff to fix it all with. I tried to fix it all myself. In the end I just laid in the big pile of clothes. I broke a few hangers in the process but this was minimal damage compared to the way I felt. Eventually, Josh found me in there (which somehow irked me -- I was quite peaceful there...) and spent the next hour figuring out a way to correct the damage I had done. I think that normally I should have been embarressed to be found in such a state but I didn't care. Why can't someone fix me once in a while?
Less than an hour later he comes to me: "Stephanie, I'm really fucking scared".
Rightly he should be. His luck is almost as good a mine. And I felt really bad because there was not a single thing I could think to say. Normally I would at least say...dunno...something. All I could do was just look at him and say sorry. Now I feel like shit. I'm sure there is something else I could have said. I wouldn't lie to him and say "everything will be ok" which is exactly what he wants to hear. Things won't be ok. His life, and while it may be selfish to say it, but my life as well, will be drastically different forever.
I'm actually considering therapy as a viable option. Maybe I can pay someone to dump all this on them. My life is like a car accident -- it's terrible but you just can't stop watching.
posted by Stephanie at
10:44 PM
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