Weekend tales

It’s been kind of a tough weekend for me. Our finances are just in complete disarray for a variety of reasons, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to navigate those. It’s been hard because I have a lot of my self-worth caught up in how well I can provide for my family. My wife tells me that it’s not all on me, but it sure feels like it. I keep thinking that I need to get a second job so I can work evenings and weekends but, for reasons that will become clear, I don’t think that’s possible.

Whenever I’m off work, like this weekend for instance, or in the middle of last week, I basically never get out of my pajamas. I don’t shower, I don’t clean up at all.  I just sit around all day and can barely even get up to do anything. This is a marked change from a month ago, when we would spend all weekend Konmaring. I don’t want to do anything that I usually like to do, I’ve stopped reading the books I was reading, barely play records anymore. I mindlessly scroll through Twitter looking for that fix of whatever I’m looking for. I don’t even know what I’m looking for when I’m doing it. Interaction? Affirmation? It’s really hard to say. Anyway, to say things have deteriorated as far as my mental health goes.

I think I’m going to have to go back on Abilify which I don’t really want to do, but I really see no choice. I’m definitely worse off of it than I am on it. I’m just going to have to cope with the fact that it’s making me fat and prediabetic. So tonight I’m going to taper back up on that. I hate being dependent on chemicals to function, but I guess that’s just how my brain works.

The thing that sucks the most is I just can’t turn off the tape of negative self-talk, the one that tells me I’m stupid and a terrible worker, father, and husband. Intellectually, I know that it’s not true, but I think that when I am feeling lousy, I am much more susceptible to its effects, which just serves to make me feel worse. Today I woke up feeling like I was ready to take on the day and I’ve been up for 2 hours and have done next to nothing. I think I need to start making lists of things that I need to do – setting little goals for each day so that I have a direction in which to point myself. Right now, I feel like my only goal is to survive life and make it to my next day off, when I can not shower and just sit around all day.

I mean, I know that it was my own fault that I ruined the weekend for myself. I hate being in my 40s and feeling like I am a prisoner of my own life and brain chemistry. I really thought that by now, I would have worked it out.

My wife, who I feel is not as supportive as she could be, basically told me this weekend that she will not be drawn into the negative feelings pit with me, and who can blame her? I know I wouldn’t want to do that either. I told her that I don’t talk to her because she makes me feel like she doesn’t want to hear anything – something I perceive to be true – but perhaps it’s the way that I express myself that is causing the problem.

As it turns out, it really is my fault, not hers.

Still, this morning I can’t shake off the tired and lonely and depressed, but I know that things will get better. I’ve taken steps to improve things and I’m going to start reading the books I was reading again today in an attempt to normalize things a little bit. We do choose our own happiness – I truly believe that – but right now, I barely have the energy to get out of bed, let alone choose anything.

A Facebook break and task paralysis

So last Friday when I was off work and recovering from working the overnight shift, I posted a filtered post to Facebook saying I was dropping off the grid for a while. It had a lot to do with my anxiety and depression, but I was mostly just sick of Facebook. I needed to step away from it for a while, as one occasionally does, to regain some sense of perspective. That, and everything I was seeing was pissing me off something fierce. Be it the political posts or the screen captured tweets or just people posting every dull fact about their lives, I was over it. I couldn’t take it anymore so I had to turn my back on it.

What I found while doing this is not what I expected.

I’ve still perused Facebook a little bit – my high school music teacher died at the ripe old age of 91 so I’m glad I saw that and wasn’t out of the loop – but what I’ve really enjoyed is not sharing every dull fact about my own life.  I didn’t expect to feel that way. I think social media has trained us to share every little detail and you know, sometimes we just don’t need to know those details. I wonder if anyone that wasn’t on that filtered post even notices I’m gone. My hunch is probably not, what with the algorithms and promoted posts. Hell, I hardly ever see any friend activity, just stuff from news sites (which honestly, I should unfollow) and Buzzfeed quizzes.

I’m still posting on Twitter – well, my alternate Twitter where I can be my whole self. I sometimes feel a little bad that I had to resort to that, but I just couldn’t be me in front of the entire population of my life. It’s wide and varied and well, most people just won’t get it. It’s weird how I started that alternate Twitter and now, it’s really the one that is more accurately me vs. the Twitter account I’ve had for 10 years.

My anxiety is not great at the moment. I’m having a hard time sleeping – mostly because my legs are very restless at night. I did some research into that and it can be a side effect of going off Abilify, which I did cold turkey in January. I should have known better than to go cold turkey but it was a low dose and I thought “what can go wrong?” That should have been my first clue.  I’ve also read that restless legs can be the result of anxiety and stress that are out of control. So who knows? The other night I was having such bad anxiety that I thought I was having a heart attack. I knew I wasn’t, but I had chest pain that would “roll” through my chest. I’m still alive two days later so I think I’ll be okay, but it really does suck that acute anxiety has so many symptoms in common with acute coronary syndromes.

The other thing I’ve been struggling with lately is just a general “task paralysis.” We’re going to meet with our accountant today, something I’ve known since the beginning of the week, but it wasn’t until this morning that I finally printed out all the tax documents that had been sitting in my email for weeks.  I also have to suspend my student loan payments for a few months because our cash flow is so bad right now. I feel like I’m selling off Madonna CDs just to put food on the table which is a terrible feeling to have.

I’m seeing my therapist today so hopefully that helps, although it’s just another thing to pay for which stresses me out. It sucks because when I was a kid, everyone said I had so much potential and would be so successful, but really, I feel pretty much like I have failed at life, being in my mid-40s and stressed about finances when I have a good job that pays well. Maybe it’s just the American way now.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this morning. I might write another post later today since I’m off work.

Blogging reboot

I’ve been meaning to start blogging again, and every night seems to be something and it doesn’t happen. Usually it’s me staring at my phone rather than reading or writing or doing anything that’s constructive, but hey, I’m certainly not alone in doing that.

Truth is, I blogged for a long time – starting in 2003 – but the last time I wrote a post was in October. I just haven’t been moved to write like I used to. Part of it is because it seems like blogging is very passé. Does anyone even read blogs anymore? In a world of Facebook updates and tweets, is a post like this even interesting any longer? It’s hard to tell. But in the end, I write for me and not for anyone else. If someone happens to read it, great. But it’s not my primary purpose in writing.

It just seems like now’s the time to start up again, and honestly, I’m ready to be done with my other blog. 15+ years is a long time to maintain a blog, and although my posts had dropped off in frequency a lot in the last several years, it still felt like home to me. But too many people from my real life know me there. Hell, my mom reads my posts there. And ultimately, I’m not really that person any longer.

A lot has happened in my life in the last year. I’ve admitted that I’m a gay man. I’ve said so to my wife (you read that right) and we remain committed to our marriage. A lot of people would say that I’m lying to myself or only hurting her but honestly I couldn’t care less what other people say about that part of me because only I know the real truth and it’s my relationship to navigate. Who is anyone else to say what makes a family, especially mine? I’m much further out of the closet than I ever expected I would be. Even writing this blog is an act of bravery for me. The simple act of saying it out loud is sometimes hard. I still have a difficult time saying the words “I’m gay.” It seems foreign to me and something I spent so much of my life running away from that to embrace it feels crazy.

It’s weird to be in your mid-40s and suddenly you decide that you have to be honest with yourself. Perhaps it’s the mid-40s themselves that create the environment for that kind of thing to flourish. It’s easy to call it a mid-life crisis, but I don’t think it’s that. I think that if you get to middle age and you’re NOT thinking about what you’ve done with your life and what you want to do with the time you have left, you aren’t paying attention.

I’m dealing with a metric fuckton of anxiety currently. It’s been so bad that it’s basically crippled me. I’m still managing to get out of bed and go to work every day, but there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about calling in sick. Much like I have always been gay, I have always been anxious. I look back to when I was a kid and I was one of those nervous kids that always feared the worst. Sadly, it was the 80s and I couldn’t get the therapy I so desperately needed so I turned into an anxious adult. My college years were mostly lost to undiagnosed anxiety and depression, a fact I still struggle with. I was anxious and depressed when my daughter was a baby and now she’s in her final years of high school and not much has changed. That kind of thing makes me feel bad about feeling bad and that just spirals in on itself, like a snake eating its tail.

My goal for this blog is to talk more openly about my sexuality, how it affects me day to day, and also to process the anxiety and depression that are as much a part of me as my eye color. If even one person reads these words and feels like they aren’t alone, I have accomplished something. But I don’t want this blog to be just about serious subject matter. I’ll have some fun too because, despite the anxiety I’m feeling these days over just about everything, I have a good life with a lot of things to live for.

So here we go. I’m not promising brilliance, because I’m not putting that kind of pressure on myself. We’ll see if I can keep this up.