love life

As the housing crisis heightens in our household, I am doing not so well. The stress is literally killing me. I can't eat or sleep, and I have been pooping mud for days.
I went to see Dr Liz on Weds. I went in, smiling through clenched teeth. By the end, I was sobbing and angry.

Why People Don't Like Me

Bold the ones you’ve read

Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.


1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)- maybe
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible I have read parts but definitely not all of it
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) I never finished this one
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)


I am a loser - I don't really even know where this list came from. But I done read a lot!

'tevs

originally I was hoping that the next time I blogged i would have photos of our new house. But I should have known to dump that optimism into the trash.

no house, still doing very well (mood wise)

I can see how some people have warned me about this 18 mo phase. He is so fucking fun! we are having a blast and laughing all the time. I am starting to feel the fever. Thankfully there are several new babies in the area and so I have been able to hold them and that quiets the beast for a while. Especially if they barf on me!

Sorry for the lame post. I have a couple of decent stories stored up that I want to post, we shall see.

peace out y'all.

housing schmousing

I have been feeling fantastic.
I just want to shout it from the rooftops. I really hit a major turn about, and I am feeling fine.

I am handling shit. TCOB like it is going out of style.
I mean nothing major, just being able to make decisions and handle minor setbacks as they come.

We are in the process of trying to buy a house. I was really hoping that I would be able to write bought a house by this time but no such luck. The three offers we have made have been outbid by 25K, 80K, and 45K respectively. Want to visit a real mad house? Go to one of these crazy open houses where the yuppies are swarming like flies to shit, and just as possessive. What an emotional roller coaster. Yes I love the house and want to go into huge debt so that I can have it. Yes, commit commit commit. Then no no it wasn't that great since we lost it, something better will come along, yeah right.
The San Francisco housing market, at our level, is really silly. Everything goes over the asking price. and basically if a house has been on the market for more than 2 weeks without any offers you have to figure out what is wrong with it, because there is something wrong with it.
example, we go and look at this place well within our budget, it is one of the most beautiful places ever. Knockout fireplaces, dark original wood throughout, pretty big. Perfect except it is over a bar and they obviously smoke in the bar because it was seeping up through the floor.
example 2, wonderful quirky property in a nice neighborhood, good size, distinct possibility, oh except there is a 60k estimate for termites that may or may not be undermining the foundation.

So it is like that.

My parents were just here they left yesterday. May I reiterate how much a hate Fisherman's Wharf and Ghirardelli fucking Square (my poison against Ghirardelli was tempered with arguable the best hot chocolate I have ever consumed).

oh and I got a label maker. OCD here i come...

Things are going fine. I can't believe this is how people walk around feeling, like all the time.

Nirvana

I have been listening to a lot of Nirvana lately. It has been making me sad. Poor Kurt, he was so fricken fucked up. He is the poster boy for depression. Lithium is like the depression anthem. God, Smells Like Teen Spirit, I cannot help but be sent right to where I was when I first heard that song. We were at Jaime Whitney's house, up in her room and we just listened to it over and over and over and over again. We were dancing like freaks. It makes me feel happy and sad for young kristen. I had no idea the song would still move me so deeply 15 years later. That the song would still be so important.

I have been having a pretty good week.
I almost went a full week without crying. Then I cried in yoga on Friday cause it was too hard :(
But a whole week without tears? Shit - the meds are finally starting to do their job.
I sent this weird group email a few minutes ago ( i kinda want to undo):

Please excuse the group email:

I wanted to write this note, to some of the important people in my life, as a little explanation.
I have been battling severe PP depression for the last year. It started 4 months after Elias was born. I feel like I really hit rock bottom around his 1st birthday and the first few months of this year have been incredibly difficult.
I have not been responding to emails, or phone calls, or anything for that matter. I hope you can understand why. It has been hard for me to function.

I have been feeling much better for the last week. A combination of therapy and medication seems to have finally brought some relief.
I have been embarrassed of this affliction. But I am trying hard to overcome that. It sucks so hard and I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I am not ashamed. I have done the very best I could under the crumby circumstances. But with me being so far away it is easy to hide, but I wouldn't hide if I had a broken leg, right? I just happen to have a broken brain right now.

that's it.

It feels good to have written it and to believe that everything I wrote is true.

Markers and Milestones

Tomorrow is my last day at the hospital. This last month has seemed so long and simultaneously so short.
I don't feel like I am the same hopelessly morose girl that checked in, but it seems like it was just a few days ago that I was hourly, if not minutely, trying to talk myself out of the Bell Jar.

Also middle March will mark a full year of the depression. It was really shitty from end of November until I went in to the hospital. I really didn't think I was going to make it. It sounds so dramatic, but suicide really seemed like the only option for many of those black days. I was in so much pain. Since then I have had probably 10 days of "good days" in the last month. 1o whole days of just passive suicidal ideations and not full on planning and sending out goodbye letters to friends. They keep telling me this is the road to recovery. Of course I will still have bad days (Friday to Monday were very ugly) but they will be less and less and permeated by good days.

The hospital was miraculous for being able to push my meds to a therapeutic level in a much shorter time than Dr. Liz ever felt comfortable to do with me alone. It would have taken her weeks to triage me up to the same levels that I was able to do in a couple of days at the PHP.

We hired a wonderful babysitter. Kelly has been a god sent. She is working about 30 hours a week. Now that my stint in the hospital is coming to a close, I am going to have to find something else with which to structure my time - a part-time job, a class, who knows?!

I have lifted my self-imposed "do not allow kristen to be alone with the baby" rule. I feel so much safer for everyone else involved.
I am trying to limit my self-judgement and self prophesying catastrophic thinking.
I am hoping I learned enough over this last month and year to avoid every letting myself get that bad again.
Also drugs are not bad. I am currently still taking 4 different meds. So they are helping a lot.

tools

So in theory, I am in the hospital (PHP), to learn coping skills. To learn how to deal with emotional chaos and the like.
my mantra:
"I am doing the best I can right this second"
And I cannot underestimate the power of breathing.

However, right now I am locked in my bedroom while jon and his mom interview a potential nanny. I feel like someone took the car keys away. Actually it is more like, I gave the car keys away. So the best I can do at this second is run away, actually just hide in my room.

These are some things that I have to try to keep in my head:
-Eventually I am not going to be depressed.
-The fact that I feel like it was a huge mistake for me to have a baby is part of the depression.
-Eventually I may even begin to enjoy this.
-This is not my fault.
-Negative thoughts are only going to encourage more negativity. Instead of saying "I hate my self I am so fucking stupid I would be doing the world a favor if I just donated my body to science."
I should say
"I deserve to love myself, I am doing the very best that I can, I will get better."

If you have read this blog, you know I am not a positive paula. It is really hard to try to flip the script on thirty years of thinking. But that shit wasn't working for me so maybe this will...