Goodbye

Madeleine L'Engle is gone.

Tight, tight circles

Why can't I get into a situation and be at peace? Job, class, club, group, friendship, whatever, I will torment myself and twist myself up in it until I would rather die than face it. Rules I don't enforce, standards I don't uphold, something always that makes me feel INVALID. Powerless. I fuck around, being weak, until I am completely powerless. Sometimes its real, sometimes its imagined, but I always decide that I have done wrong and have no say. WHY? And how do I fix it? More therapy? Move? Quit? Die?

New Post

Anything to make that stupid Dayquil letter go further down the page.

So ... how are you? ... great, great. Ya, I'm good. Doing much better than before, further and further from the Zoloft withdrawals. No, still not taking anything. Road rage? Oh yeah, that was bad, wasn't it.....well, I still get pretty unreasonable about tailgaters and those who Refuse To Use Directionals, but I talk to myself a little more productively these days and can usually get calm, find room to think. I remembered recently that there are signals to tell someone they are following too closely. They sort of work.
In fact, I came up against all my driving fears the other day. Planning a daytrip for last Saturday I put myself into a spiral of craziness and anxiety that I couldn't pull out of until I was yelling and throwing things and realized I was about to crash. Visions of terrible things that can happen while driving far from home gallop through my brain and they are so fast and familiar I'm barely conscious of them. Like a dream, I can't remember much either, except vignettes of fatal crashes, car trouble I can't afford, scary men offering to help, poverty, homelessness. That's it right there. I'm worried we won't make it back home. Turns out, I do this every time I have to drive long distances without Curtis. I went on Zoloft when 20 minutes became too far, too long to drive without such severe anxiety that I couldn't bear to watch. Yeah. I couldn't bear to watch WHILE DRIVING. That is a personal definition of crazy for me.
Luckily, I'm not having that particular difficulty right now. I can watch the road, find my way, listen to music or audio books, talk with my kids, share snacks... in fact, we did pretty damn good on Saturday. It was the drive itself that gave me time to figure out why the idea that was so appealing at first became a panicked frenzy for me as we loaded up the final necessities and I had to get behind the wheel and go. Curtis was stoic, as I screamed at him about stupid shit, giving me room to see myself and what I was doing... and I figured out what I need to be able to go places, with or without Curtis and not get crazy. These are the things that made this most recent attempt work:

1. No children under 3
2. Money in the bank*
3. Driving the route of my choosing, even if it seemed impractical and I can hear my dad lecturing me about it all the way. I hate I-80 and I-5 and that is a reasonable way to feel.

#2 is flexible. I don't always have money, but I do have family and friends who would help me if I needed it. It sure feels good though, knowing I can pay for repairs, get a room if I can't go any further, and feed myself and the kids as often as necessary. I seem to spend less when I feel safe, too.

Where shall we go next?

Dear Dayquil,

What happened? Where is the love? Once, when we first began, I knew it could never be serious. We could never be together more than a few days at a time, you had your life, I had mine, but those days! Talk about hot! And, I knew you cared. We were a team! When the bad times hit, I only needed 1 of your lovely orange gel thingees to feel human again. Only 1, and I could work, breathe, stay awake--you know, like you promised? You seemed to really care then. I thought you'd always be there. What did I do wrong? I did what you wanted... recommended you to my friends, introduced you to my family, I even used you to keep people coming to work when, really? they needed to stay home. Sharing you has never been easy, but we looked out for each other and you were always there for me, every time. Until today.

Was it a perceived lack of faith? Was it that I eschewed my usual single capsule and went straight for the double, the recommended two gel caps? Do you not see how miserable I am? That it wasn't lack of faith, but an undeniable need to drown myself in your squishy, orange relief? What made you turn your back and leave me like this? With a stuffed head, packed sinuses and no chance of getting any sleep? I've had to turn to your scary older brother and let him take care of me. Yes, it's that bad. I've gone over to the green guy and I belong to him now and I'll never be able to get away... and I'm not even sorry! I have kids now, babe. I gotta get some sleep. This is the big time.

You think about what I've said and we'll talk again in the morning. I just want to say, I don't know if you can ever make it up to me.


[Sniff. Cough],

Jamie

The local lingo

Just in case you drop by and my children try to communicate with you...

Fortilla = tortilla

Pustard = mustard

Pop-sea-ul = popsicle

Empty-three-player = MP3 player

Neckflix = Netflix

and our new favorite:

Hot Bear Balloon =

Crack that whip

There's this thing that I do, but kind of try to ignore and never mention in print. I don't want it to be part of my identity, don't want to be identified with it. Friends and family are in the know, of course, but we keep it in the, "you're only doing this right now, because you have to," category. We do not allow it to be me, something I own. It's an ugly little thing....

I work.

Confused? There are many reasons this is a problem. #1, I never really wanted to. Not that I am lazy or interested in free-loading, but I have a low tolerance for any kind of daily schedule or routine. Truly, I can really suck at the basics of employment. I'm late, unorganized, tired, depressed, obsessive about how much I suck.... really I'm just not cut out for most jobs.
#2. Most of my peer group does not work. Wait. Are we peers if we don't match on something as major as being employed? Okay, save that one for later, but, I mean, my best friends don't have jobs outside the home. They are homeschooling mothers at varying levels of granola-hood. I want to be them and have that life, so I homeschool my kids, but I failed to make sure I wouldn't have to work during this adventure. Now I work, badly, and I homeschool, also badly. Homeschooling could be really cool, and I feel my kids are still better off, but wow, it could be so much better.
#3. The work I do...is what plenty of smart yet under-alphabetized (as in, degree-less) folks do. I manage. I used to manage a video store, these days I'm managing a mobile home park. My family lives here, gratis, and we earn a small monthly salary. I live where I work. I live in a mobile home in a funky, all-age mobile home park. None of these things makes me feel very good most of the time. Like the way I deal with my body , I don't like how my life looks, so I spend a great deal of time not really seeing it, making sure I pass by reflective surfaces, or moments, quickly and from the best angle. Also, I look far too long at things I wish I had or did and sometimes I take that stuff on as if I had the where-with-all, the funds, the whatever. I forget who I am and what my current status in my life is. Or, maybe I used to do that and we're still living with the consequences. Hmm.

This is sad though, because when I'm in the moment, taking care of a great resident, confounding a bad one, having 5 minute conversations with the owner that take 2 hours because we only email and never call... I can be pretty happy. I have a sea of neighbors, most of whom I love and care about. My god, the stories from our four years here.... how can I pretend this isn't real? Or important? How can I keep telling myself how bad I am at this if I'm still here?

More later. This is a big thing. For now, gratuitous cute:

This is your brain...

Off meds update:

Things are mostly better, and then they suddenly turn very, very much worse. It's RAGE. It was worst the first week, occurs less frequently now, but still comes up and it is terrifying, for me and for the kids. Mostly it's road rage. I've never used my horn like I have in the past two weeks. And I scream at people, as if they could hear me over the continuous horn blaring.... Sunday afternoon I tried to get out of my vehicle at a stop light so the driver (who was just as out of control as I was) could benefit from my screaming at him up close and personal. And when he drove off, I followed him to yell some more. My kids were in the car. When it was over I considered driving to the hospital and admitting myself.

I had asked my friend early on, when this uncontrollable anger first surfaced, "So, tell me the truth... How mentally ill am I? Have I always been like this?" This was not the me I remember from before the meds. I was depressed, anxious, tired. I was not violent, not like this. I told my husband about the incident with the driver of the Lexus and how I behaved, with our kids on board, and asked him, too, "How mentally ill am I?" He didn't get to answer because we have those kids and kids, they do not like for folks to have private or productive time. EVER.

So, I went to my computer and googled, "off Zoloft." What I found let me know just how much of my intelligence I checked at the door of my adult life. How could I not have figured this out? I finally have a name for these changes from the last few weeks and it is WITHDRAWAL. [slaps forehead] Why did I do no research on this drug? Turns out that Zoloft is one of the top four toughest antidepressants to stop taking and that many, many people try repeatedly and fail to get off it. Most of the gross crap I've been going through is not from removing the antidepressant effects and revealing a worse depression, but from moderate withdrawal effects. I say moderate because while I do have fatigue, irritability (rage, I know), crying jags, dizziness and an odd sensation in my head sometimes, I do not have migraines, electric shock sensations, flu symptoms or panic attacks and the symptoms are lessening significantly with each day, after only two weeks. Taking the supplements I do helps enormously, as I found out over the weekend when I forgot. Exercise though, is the BEST. It makes all the difference.

Even if I have to get treated for depression again in the future, which is possible, I will never take Zoloft again. And when I thought about it, it wasn't really working for the last several months anyway. I was still depressed, still having anxiety attacks, and that blessed (and much needed at the beginning) emotional distance or buffer the drug provides just gets thicker and thicker as time goes by until... well, a friend said she never saw an emotional deficit in me, and I didn't really either, but now I feel so much more connected to my life and my kids and all, I can see that I was quite close to comatose before I stopped taking it. It made me bored. Bored with my kids. Can you imagine that? Suddenly they are precious, priceless and interesting again, not just irritating, contrary and committed to my unhappiness. How much of their childhoods have I missed while in that cocoon?

What this all nighter is missing...

is chocolate.

Which . . .

I left at my office.




Crap.

Paper? Plastic? Spastic?

That was a rough first 10 days off the meds. Also, it was PMS time. Nice timing there, spaz. Not that I believe it's over or that the peace I'm feeling today will even last. I'm still touchy, still get mad quickly, cry even more quickly, but when I'm not mad or crying in that overstressed, getting over the hump way, I feel so much more. . . real. It's as if that skin the meds give me becomes wool batting after a while. Everything is muffled and it's hard to take in how things really are. Hard to empathize, hard to take action, hard to just feel things as deeply as I do unmedicated. I'm not the first person to say all this, (indeed, it's not the first time I've learned it) so I won't take time to reiterate a common complaint. After all, I have things to make.
Here's a fun project: I have started purchasing reusable store bags. Trader Joe's has these handy insulated grocery bags, for frozen and refrigerated items and Safeway has the best cloth bags I've seen so far. They are made from recycled materials, are lighter than the canvas bags I could never get used to, and they carry twice as much.

Also, I actually remember to use them, which is a first. But, I don't like advertising for these, or any, stores. The bags are little billboards and I won't be suckered into carrying them around that way. Last Sunday, as a my sister and a friend sat in my kitchen and we BS'ed, I dug out some fabric paints and covered up the Safeway logo with black, to match the rest of the bag, then decorated with wonky flowers and vines until the girls noticed and wanted to paint, too. Sigh.


The first experimental one was fun, and I did hand over half the bags to the girls to do themselves, but now I want to do something better and have been looking through all my motif books.



Aren't Dover Books the best? I never appreciated them until I started wanting to make things beautiful and had given up on waiting until I was an artist. I think I'll google a few things I don't have, too, like oak leaf and acorn motifs, and see what says, "Pick me!" the loudest.
Anyway, I'm trying to tell that voice in my head which mocks the admittedly odd ways and places my need to create manifests to shut the fuck up. So what if I'm spending time, effort and materials on grocery bags. If it were up to that asshole, all I'd ever do is bitch on this blog. ; )

A catalog of certainties

that occur when coming off anti-depression/anxiety meds:

1. You will have no skin. No way to deflect the slightest hint of negativity. Every exasperated sigh, even from people you know love you, will cut you to the quick.

2. You will be paranoid. In absence of any or very little evidence, you will believe that strangers hate you and think you are crap at everything. You will hate them back and lash out without being able to stop yourself. The words and actions you visualize come forth, despite all efforts.

3. You will feel exposed. Walking through a store or other public area you will feel certain that you stand out, and not for any good reason. Your inability to cope/function/fit in is being broadcast in your smile, eye contact, clothing choices and hair color.

4. You will feel intensely. All emotions will be heightened and result in crying, even the good ones. Sentimental tears held back will make the muscles around your eyes ache. Your breathing will always feel like the post-crying kind. Frustrations will be epic and you will feel certain you are actually oppressed by even the most minor obstacle.

5. You will be certain that everyone in your vicinity does everything they do to either hurt you or help you. You are the center of it all.

6. You will make bad decisions. You will find your instinct/judgment to be off often enough to be frightening.

7. You will get worse when you end each episode with the litany of self-hatred. You know you have one. That's what got you here in the first place.

Knowing this does not always help, but Don't. Give. Up.

What the meds do can be accomplished at home, folks, the old fashioned way. It's what you say inside your muddled, probably dizzy head. Forgive yourself. Forgive everyone else. Give the world the benefit of the doubt. Assume your husband loves you and does not consciously take advantage of opportunities to subvert your authority or happiness. Assume your kids don't know they are ruining your life with their fighting and slovenliness. Remember they don't know you even have a life to ruin. Don't expect appealing to their (inappropriate/non-existent) concern for your happiness to work.

That is all, for now.

Back to the new hobby...

I've spent the last 4 days making recycled paper. It's been coming on for weeks...ever since I first read No Impact Man. There's a link in his early posts to instructions for making paper from junk mail. I tried to talk myself out of it, for fear of having another obsession. If I allowed myself to know how much money I spent when I finally fell for beads, holy shit...But, suddenly I had to make paper. Turns out it is slow, backbreaking, and really, really cool. There is such satisfaction in the work of it. The shredding, the soaking, the processing... I love making up the paper pulp. The racket of the food processor (just slightly younger than yours truly), the quiet when moving my hands through the water stirring up the slurry... its just fantastic. Waiting for the individual sheets to dry is hard, but what beauty when it's finally ready! My friend scoffs, says it's hard to write on recycled paper with a dip pen (we don't discuss my habitual use of ball points. It's beneath us), but why write on this? Just making it, looking at it's texture and the feathery edges, it's almost enough even if I never use it. And yet, I've seen wonderful art work matted with paper like this. The paper itself can be art! If I manage to get a flower press and learn to use it before summer is over this could turn out to be something really lovely. Pressed Sonoma County bounty in handmade paper? It's all been done before, but turning so much wasted paper into such tactile and visual wonder? Where's the downside? I know she's imagining getting a stack of dark grey, chunky "homemade stationary" as a gift, but another thing I learned this cycle (!!!) is not to combine learning a new craft with gifting. I wait to see how it turns out and what I feel like doing with it. No more learning how to make something so I can, at the same time, start a temporary Christmas sweatshop and make a ton of them. What a way to strip something of any fun or creativity. The pressure, fer Chrissakes!
See? It's like this year I finally grew some sense. And I'm terrified of losing it. Or worse, of finding out I've lost it many times before.

So, about papermaking. I've taken many pictures, as if to do a tutorial, but going along with a resolution not to teach things I've only started to learn myself, recommend books I'm only half way through and movies not yet seen, but sitting in my Netflix queue, I will refrain from actually posting that way.
.

However, I would like to point out 3 things I have to add to the excellent tutorials already out there, there and there (and now here!) on the web, that I came up with as I went along:


#1. I did not make my own frames with wood, saw, nails/staples. I dug out some old frames with broken glass and used a hot glue gun to attach window screen fabric to the inside of the frames. This only worked with wood frames, not metal, but it worked beautifully. Being submerged in water does not seem to affect the adhesion at all.







#2. We (Lucie helped for a while) added pencil shavings, from an electric or hand sharpener, especially colored pencils to our white pulp. You get the specks of paint from the outside of the pencils and the small wood fibers that look lovely in the finished sheets of paper. I do recommend rinsing the shavings in a fine strainer to remove most of the graphite. Lucie and I find the smell unpleasant.

#3. After the first batch of pulp and finished paper I decided to sort my raw materials a little. I started to separate newsprint from computer paper and first class junk mail. Newsprint turns a dark grey I don't love, although it has it's purposes (later idea to pursue), and I found that white computer paper that has been printed on makes nearly white recycled paper. The best discovery though was the few pieces of colored computer paper. We made a gorgeous batch of pulp with purple and pink , a vibrant blue, and, finally, a tiny batch of yellow. As we used the scant amounts of these colored pulps the slurry got pretty thin and I would add our white pulp, making the colors softer and lighter with each sheet.

All about the kni... oooooh! Beads! Whoa! I can make paper? Kids? What kids?

It occurs to me that everything occurs to me repeatedly. I have this one loop of ideas and realizations that I go through over the course of each year. One of those is that I keep no memories, really. I don't journal, I lose pictures, I fail to even take pictures, I forget everything. I have a cycle of good times, followed by stress, followed by no sleep, followed by lost days or even weeks in which all I do is survive and keep the kids alive, finalized by a reboot, i.e. getting some sleep and starting over. I don't mean starting over from where I left off after a nice rest. I don't mean 'it's never too late to start the day over,' a la ye olde 12 steps, I mean starting over as in forgetting much that went before and starting. the fuck. OVER. Starting over discovering how to do my job, and why. How to parent, and why. How to homeschool. How to relate to my family and friends. My poor kids, how will I ever see to their education when only about 20% of my days are actually functional? At this stage, inevitably, I start a new hobby. And when I start a new hobby I do little else. There's no cleaning, no cooking, or just one without the other. Much impatience with pesky family members... I learn it all. I get all the tools and all the skills and make a few nifty things and then... I start that hideous cycle again. Eventually, I rediscover knitting, but only by starting new projects, the UFO's receding into a basket or bag I may not re-visit for a year or more. When I rediscover those projects they take me back to where I was when I started them and I get the awful insight that I've learned all this before, grown through all this before and I just keep doing it over and over with no wisdom. It's a pathetic, real life Memento. Luckily, and thank the Universe for this, there's my best friend with whom I speak almost every day. She keeps my memory, my mind really, and tries to give it back to me in bites I can chew after one of those devastating set backs. It must get so boring for her...
There is some foundation forming, I guess. I think it's been a few years since I last complained that, growing up, she actually had culture and an education, and I had... an awful fucking lot of television. Each time I told her that it felt like a really original thought. Or, at least, that it was the first time I had the guts to say it aloud. The last time though, she asked me, "Are we doing the culture thing again?" And then I remembered. We first had this conversation when we were fifteen. Jesus!
So, no surprise, here I am again, in a big start over that includes ceasing to take meds for depression and realizing that if I kept a journal, or actually posted to this as yet private blog, I may save myself some remedial living and get outside the spiral I'm making through life. Maybe I'll get to move up a level, get into some three dimensional existing.
Something is a little different this time already and I'm writing it down before its too late. Right before this latest reboot I learned to cook. And to clean. And to think. I mean, all the disassociated skills of my 37 years finally started to gel and I could come up with original ideas on how to organize, put things together, vague shit like that. Essentially, I could work with what I had. I could see beyond the tiny little detail right in front of me and draw on everything in my life, my experience and my home and put something together. For a few weeks there, I was good & happy. I managed my household. I had time for my kids and a little for myself and even Tarzan (read: spouse). I had a clean home and I learned that I need it to be clean. I understood that squalor is a huge part of my lifelong, abusive marriage to depression. I learned that stress doesn't come from not having time to clean, it comes from not taking time to clean and I was stuck in that trap because I didn't know how much time a clean house gives me. How much peace. Remember that silly poster from the 70's with the supine kitten that was captioned, "Whenever I feel like doing homework I lie down until the feeling goes away."? Am I the only one who remembers that? That is exactly what I did with homework and housework or any thing I needed to do. The stress I was feeling came not from the crap on the floor in the hallway but from not letting myself pick up the crap on the floor in the hallway! From not letting myself work on my paper until the night before it was due! When I wanted to! I wanted to do what I needed to do. Now I know what that feeling is. What did I think it was before? Cultural oppression? Gas? I don't fucking know... And yet, learning this, I still don't do my job the way I should. Maybe that will come with time. Please! Let it be so.

These may look like successful projects...

But don't be fooled. They hate them. Please kill me before I knit for these devil children again.

Not so lame cross stitch

I dislike cross stitch. I mean, what a lame ass, fake brand of textile art. There are exceptions, as always. Really tiny cross stitch done on a large scale scenic textile can be beautiful. But the ordinary, every day variety is, to me, one step above plastic canvas. And, wow, do I loathe that shit. I keep and cherish the cross stitch birth samplers and blankets-you -must-never-use from my grandmothers for my kids, and I use the tea towels from my step-dad's old battle ax of a mother and am glad to have them. But don't tell me it's an art or even much of a craft.
However. Subversive Cross Stitch is something I can get behind. Bring it on.

Cursed knitting

It's a wonder I ever complete any damn project at all. Almost everything I start goes unfinished because of some fatal error in planning, swatching, yarn choice, whatever. Usually, I'm philosophical about it. Each experience, I tell myself, means I'll be wiser the next time. And I guess it's true. I now understand fully that doing a real swatch saves ripping out hours of good knitting. I swatch, I wash, I measure, I measure again, I count and double count. Stitch and row gauge. I have learned the hard way that flat stockinette and knitting in the round give me completely different stitch counts despite using the same yarn and needle size. I knitted an entire sock only to find it was too small for the intended wearer and she's the smallest person in the house, so no carrying on and making the next sock for someone else. I have several single socks, not because I never get round to the next, but because the first one was so fucked up there was no point. They sit on my desk and mock me. I've started using them as gift bags, just so I don't have to look at them.
So, trust me when I tell you that when I planned my own first sweater I was careful. It's a big deal that I've given up on waiting until I'm a smaller size. It's a big deal that I've learned no one appreciates what I make as much as I do (and other knitters, of course). I bought patterns, I cruised the web for free ones, I kept looking for the perfect pattern for me. I made false starts with patterns that I finally had to admit were not going to suit me. Recently, I realized I had to design my own pattern and make all that effort to do the math and risk having to restart a few times, maybe at every step. I mean, just getting the width to cover my ass is only the beginning. What about when I get to the armholes? I have very little experience with those... but I decided to go for it anyway and I swatched, washed, measured, multiplied and divided. I changed the ribbing on the bottom to a rolled edge followed by some reverse stockinette. I added side slits, which I double knit for stability and a hemmed look. I cast on 113 stitches and counted them twice. I got used to purling across that wide expanse every other row (oh how I love the no-purling of circular knitting). I enjoyed the mindless stockinette and thought I might make this thing up in time for next winter, past history not-withstanding. I couldn't find my measuring tape and kept thinking I really should, so I don't knit past the 7.5 inch mark, when I'm supposed to start decreasing for the waist. This morning I finally remembered we have that big-ass tape measure in my office (yeah, I knit when I should work. Don't you?) and I found I was only at 6 inches, not a problem, so I sat down to do a couple more rows before, you know, finding some work to do, and then I thought, "Oh yeah, I wanted to measure the width. "

32 fucking inches. WHAT?? But I checked my gauge! I am a master of gauge! I am all about GAUGE! So, I checked my damn gauge, I redid the math. My gauge is right on, so WTF? Finally, I counted my stitches. 123. 10 more than I was supposed to cast on. No, 9, because I remember in a fit of superstition I went for 114, rather than 113. Or, at least I thought I had. Apparently I had a seizure that lasted while I cast on and the two times I counted to be sure.

Motherfucker.

Needle Gauge Necklace

Found at Schoolhouse Press:

" Handmade, by artist Erica Schlueter, from Sterling Silver and textured with varying knit fabrics, these necklaces are both functional (for measuring needles size 0-11) and decorative."
No more digging around and searching for the migrating needle gauges. This one stays right where you need it.