Rejection

I am feeling very rejected today. Not dejected, rejected. A website that I visit daily and in whose forums I regularly participate, posted a request for articles to be published on its site. They said that they were “desperate” and that they would accept “anything”. Wanting to be helpful, and also wanting to get something that I'd written published on a “real” website. I edited and revised a couple of things that I'd posted on another blog that I had just started which dealt with issues relevant to their site, and sent them in.

I felt happy and confident, because for most of my life, I've been told that I'm a good writer. I'm not a very entertaining writer, but I can write clearly and efficiently. And the articles they wanted weren't just for entertainment, they wanted informative articles. Explaining things in written form is something that I thought I was good at. In my past, I've actually worked professionally as a technical writer and editor.  I thought that they would like my articles. I was looking forward to seeing them published.

And then I got the rejection notice.

Despite all their pleas about how they were “desperate” and would accept “anything”. They rejected me.

That really hurt.

They did give a very brief explanation of why they couldn't use my articles. But that didn't make it any easier. I know that I am overly sensitive to rejection. But it doesn't matter if I know that I shouldn't take it personally, it still hurts.

I hate feeling this way.

Damn you for rejecting me and making me feel worthless.

Midnight Panic Attack

I woke in the middle of the night last night having a panic attack so bad that I was literally shaking. I crawled out of bed and downed a valium as quickly as I could, then crawled back into bed and lay there hoping the valium would kick in soon.

I don't know why my anxiety attacks are so much worse lately. My mother-in-law was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, but it didn't seem to affect me that much. At least not consciously. I was more worried about providing emotional support for my husband than I was about my mother-in-law's illness. It sounds heartless to not be worried about someone with cancer. But I grew up knowing that both of my parents and my brother had terminal diseases. (Turns out my brother's wasn't terminal after all, he's still alive and kicking, but one of my cousins did die from the same thing.) I think my parents' long term illnesses and eventual deaths wore out all the circuits in my brain that are programmed to worry about parental illness. Or maybe somewhere deep deep inside I am worried, but it's just not making it to the surface of my thoughts. Who knows.

Or maybe the anxiety is simply about my husband. He is emotionally torn up about his mother's illness. He is also stressed about being emotionally torn up. I've tried to tell him that it's normal to be upset, but he keeps beating himself up about over-reacting. Personally, I think that he's handling it extremely well, but it's what he thinks that matters. I just try to be there for him. Which means I'm back to hiding how badly I feel so as not to put any more stress on him.

Someday I'd like to run around screaming at everybody, telling them in graphic detail exactly how miserable I am. I suppose this blog is my more subtle way of doing that. I may not be telling the people in my life, but I am telling someone. Even if they are complete strangers.

Bad UMPA's, Broken Sleep and Suicidal Thoughts

My Usual Morning Panic Attacks have been worse than usual lately.  Instead of waking up with a somewhat elevated heart rate and a vague sense of dread.  I've been waking up with a pounding heart, shortness of breath and the absolute conviction that I would be much better off if I could just go back to sleep, preferably for the entire rest of the day.  I don't know what's caused my UMPA's to become worse.  There is nothing particularly stressful going on in my life right now.  I was under a lot of stress during the jousting tournament, but it's been almost a month since that event.  It's more likely that the bad UMPA's are related to me not sleeping well for the past several weeks.

I've always had sleep issues because of my non-24.  But ever since I gave up trying to keep to a regular 24 hour sleep schedule a couple of years ago, I've actually been sleeping pretty well.  I'm completely out of sync with the rest of the world, but I've been falling asleep when I go to bed and sleeping through the "night".  Lately however, even though I've still been falling asleep pretty quickly, I haven't been staying asleep.  I'll wake up after three or four hours and have problems getting back to sleep.  And even when I do manage to get back to sleep, I only sleep for another  three hours or so.  Even combining the two sleep sections doesn't get me up to my usual nine hours of sleep.  This has been going on for several weeks, and I'm getting really, really tired.

I just want to sleep.  A nice, solid, restful, nine or ten hours of deep peaceful sleep.

But lately, even when I get  eight or nine hours of broken sleep, I still don't feel rested.  I wake up tired as well as terrified.  It's exhausting.


And, of course, my depression is acting up as well.  It's not the worst it's ever been, but I have been having fairly regular thoughts of suicide.  I've been calmly trying to figure out what method of suicide would be the least traumatic to those left behind.  Debating who I should write letters to and what I should say in them.  Even thinking about what kind of memorial service would be nice.  That last one's new.  I've never really thought much about what would go on at my memorial service.  I've always made it clear that I would prefer to be cremated, but that I didn't really care what happened after that.  I'd be dead.  The memorial service is for the survivors, not for me.

But lately, I've been creating song lists in my head, and wondering if it would be completely inappropriate for me to leave a letter telling my husband and friends that I would really prefer it if they danced and ate good food and told funny stories and tried not to be all mournful and depressed.  There was enough depression in my life.  I'd like to think that in my death, I could finally escape it.

If I had...

If I had but a single bright seed of hope, then this dreary drudgery would not feel so futile.

Put On Your Happy Face

When I was in junior high and high school, as soon as I got home from school or from whatever after school activity I was engaged in, my mother would ask me about my day. If I said anything negative, anything about the kids at school picking on me or not getting the part I wanted in a play or that I had a headache or whatever, she would proceed to lecture me on how good my life was and how much worse other children had it and how I should be grateful for all the wonderful things I had. My mother taught rhetoric and oration, she was a very persuasive speaker. And since I wanted to be a good daughter, I would listen to everything she said. And her telling me that feeling any negative emotions was a form of selfishness and that allowing myself to feel bad made me a bad person would literally tear me up inside. Because I did feel negative emotions. The other kids did pick on me, rather viciously at times, and it hurt. And I naturally felt disappointed when I didn't get something that I had tried really hard to achieve. And I did get headaches, rather severe headaches. (I found out much later that they were migraines.) I know now that her lectures were a form of emotional abuse though I didn't realize it at the time, and even if someone had told me my mother was abusing me, I wouldn't have believed it, because I LOVED my mother and I KNEW that she loved me.

And maybe she did love me. She probably did. But it was a very conditional kind of love. If I did what she wanted me to do, she would give me her approval and some limited affection. But if I ever “disappointed” her, she would withdraw all approval and affection and lecture me about how I was being lazy and selfish and a generally bad person. I dreaded those lectures more than I have dreaded anything else in my life before or since. In her defense, when I was in grad school, she told me that her father was physically abusive to her mother. He was possibly abusive to her and her brothers as well (though I don't know for sure). So she didn't exactly have the greatest role models for parenting. But for whatever reason, she was extremely emotionally abusive and it left some very deep scars.

But as a child, and even as a young adult, I really, REALLY didn't want to disappoint my mother and receive one of her lectures, so I developed what I called my “happy face”. Every day, when I got home, before I went inside, I would stand outside for a few minutes burying any negative emotions deep inside myself and creating a contented persona for her to interact with. This persona had to be more than a thin mask. My mother was a smart, perceptive women, and in order to fool her, I basically had to turn my whole body into a puppet that could convincingly portray the good daughter that she wanted me to be. It was a lot like acting in a play. But in some ways, it was also like intentionally developing a split personality. A “happy face” personality that I could use to protect my real self from my mother's attempts to create the perfect daughter through emotional manipulation.

Admittedly, everyone has to pretend to emotions that they don't feel occasionally. Some people find it easier than others. And some people are better at it than others. However, despite my years of experience at pretending to be someone other than I was for my mother, I never found it easy. I hated it. I just wanted to be myself and be loved and accepted for what I really was rather than for what I pretended to be. However, because of those years of experience, I am very, very good at pretending to be happy and social. At least for short periods of time. It is exhausting. Ask any experienced actor. Pretending to be something you are not, convincingly pretending, is hard work.

Anyway, just recently, I had to put on my “happy face” again. A very good friend of mine produced a very large jousting tournament and asked me to help out with certain things during the days leading up to the event and the three days of the event. Now, I was happy to help him out. He is a good friend and I wanted to support the event. However, some of the things he asked me to do were things that I find particularly stressful. But because I was a visible part of the staff of the event, I could not be seen looking stressed out and miserable, so I buried myself deep inside that “happy face” persona during the times I was at the event. Once I left the event, I allowed myself to escape the prison of that persona and let my real emotions out. I would usually start crying as I was driving home, and once home, I would cry for hours at a time. My sleep disorder was also causing major problems, so in addition to being exhausted from the stress of wearing my “happy face” for hours on end, I was also exhausted from lack of sleep. I was eating Valium like candy, but it wasn't really helping.

Fortunately, my husband, FuzzyPony and DA gave me a great deal of emotional support. And even SH, though he didn't really know what was going on with me (I didn't want to add to the stress he was already under from both producing and performing in the tournament), gave me some emotional support as well. And somehow, I made it through the event and managed to do everything that I had committed to do and more. But it was not a fun experience. (Though the jousting tournament itself was wonderful, and I really did enjoy watching my sweetie compete.) Therefore, in the future, I will be much more careful about what I commit to do, no matter how much I want to avoid disappointing my friends. Though it stood me in good stead this past week, I do not ever want to have to put on my “happy face” again.

Negative Thoughts – Daymares

As I was laying on the couch waiting for my husband to finally get home from work, I began having negative thoughts. What I refer to as “negative thoughts” can vary a great deal, but in this instance, they took the form of what I call a depressive daydream (or if I'm feeling frivolous, a daymare). These daymares are like little plays that I see inside my head.

I started imagining things that could go wrong at the upcoming jousting tournament. I've been worrying about Foxfire getting hurt, but for some reason, this time I imagined myself getting hurt.

In this depressive daydream, I imagine that I am asked to run an errand for the event. I have to be driven in a little golf cart up the narrow, steep and winding driveway that leads to the secondary parking area by main road above the event site, because I'm not important enough to rate a parking space down at the site itself. As I am being driven uphill, some asshole comes barreling downhill in a pickup and runs the little golf cart that I am in off the road. The driver rolls down the hill with the golf cart and dies, but I am thrown out of the cart. I am pierced by branches and my body slams against the trunks of trees as I roll downhill. I am severely hurt, but still conscious. I slowly drag myself back up to the driveway and lay there on the edge of the incline, watching blood bubble out of my mouth with every breath while waiting for someone to find me.

The Asshole who drove us off the road doesn't bother telling anyone what happened, so I lay there in pain for a very long time. Finally someone driving down the road notices me and calls an ambulance and I am taken to the hospital. (I hate hospitals.) Foxfire, my husband, and DA, my closest friend, are there at the hospital with me.

The doctors come in with the x-rays, and show all the damage that was done in the crash. Broken ribs, a punctured lung, all sorts of other less life threatening injuries. Then they ask about all the previously broken bones that are apparent in the x-rays. I tell them about falling off my horse a year ago, but they say that these bones would have been broken many years ago, probably when I was a child.

I respond, not too coherently because I'm recovering from a punctured lung and am juiced up on pain killers, “Prob'ly... from one of the times my brother beat me up.... He came at me once with a baseball bat.... Got a few good licks in 'fore I managed to re-direct the force of the bat... so he hit himself in the head. ...that point he dropped the bat ... started strangling me.... Fortunately ... stopped 'fore he killed me.”

DA, appalled, asks, “Your brother used to beat you up that badly?”

I reply, “...told you he used to beat me ... up all the time. Tried to avoid him ... much as possible.”

DA,”But if you had broken ribs...”

Me,”...didn't know they were broken.”

DA, “Wouldn't your parents have noticed you were hurt?”

Me,”Mother always accused me of ... exaggerating 'bout being hurt ... to get attention. ...would punish me if I complained ... learned to hide pain.”

And so on...

These daymare scenarios will repeat over and over in my mind. Sometimes exactly the same each time, frequently with slight variations, each more disturbing than the last. It is usually very hard to make them stop.

That's part of what makes up my depression. I don't daydream about happy stuff. My imagination is filled with disturbing thoughts about what awful things might happen, occasionally, but not always, combined with disturbing things that have happened in my past. And, yes, the story about my brother beating me with a baseball bat is absolutely true. (Although I don't know if he ever actually broke any bones. He did leave several scars on my skin.) And there were many other not so pleasant things that happened to me as a child. From being emotionally terrorized by my own mother to being molested by an older cousin who lived next door.

But my childhood is over. My brother stopped beating me up by the time he finished high school. The cousin who molested me committed suicide while I was in college. And my mother finally died when I was 25. Since then, my life really hasn't been that bad. (Well, okay, I got pregnant and gave my child up for adoption and I was beaten and raped by a friend of a friend, but compared to my earlier life...) And in the past eight years my life has been even better than not bad. It's actually been pretty damn good. I met Foxfire and married him. I no longer have to suffer the humiliation of losing job after job because of my emotional disabilities since Foxfire is willing to support me financially. And I have several good friends that like me despite my problems. Actually, the most traumatic thing that has happened to me in several years is getting thrown from my horse and badly injured. (Okay, for someone who has always been very physically active, suddenly being unable to do much of anything, and becoming weak and overweight is fairly traumatic. But compared to the stuff I had to deal with as a child...) So even though my life is, for the most part, going extremely well, why is my depression/anxiety not getting any better? It actually seems like it's getting worse.

And I keep having these damned daymares.

Dreams – Packing Up to Go Home

A recurring theme in my dreams is that I'm packing up to go home, and I'm worried that I'm going to forget something and leave it behind. In my dream, I've been somewhere other than home for a while. Maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a semester. Where I am varies a good bit, I may be vacationing alone or with others, it may be some sort of business trip, maybe I've been away to school. In the dream, I know exactly where I am, but that isn't really important, and I know I'm heading home, though “home” is never clearly defined. But it is very important that I not leave anything behind that I've taken with me or acquired on my trip. Sometimes in the dream, it's nearly time to go and I'm frantically searching for everything that belongs to me to get it packed. Other times, I just know that I need to leave soon and I'm worried about finding everything so that I don't leave anything important behind.

I have no idea what these dreams mean. I vaguely remember talking to my therapist about a "packing up" dream I had a while back, but I don't remember how she interpreted it. Anyone have any ideas?