I apologize for my lack of activity

I haven’t updated hardly at all this month. I’m sorry. I just get really discouraged sometimes, which makes me disinclined to work…which of course feeds into the feelings of general uselessness and depression. I’ll get back on track soon enough. I just need to force myself to get to work, and feel that spark again, all the words clicking together, the stories spinning themselves out under my fingers, that feeling that has kept me working at this as long as I have.

So for all the people whose emails I haven’t replied to…I’m not ignoring you, I’m not ungrateful for what you are doing for me. I’m just kind of stuck right now.

I saw Dr. Easley on Monday for my follow-up appointment re: my recent stomach problems. The doctor who treated me at the hospital, once they could find no cause for my problem, suggested it was stress. Everyone knows me, including Dr. Easley, agrees. I didn’t notice this until after it was all over, but both of my week-long episodes of nausea and vomiting began shortly after something extremely upsetting happened. As in “stay up all night crying and raging and calling your friends in California cause they’re the only ones who’d be awake at that hour” upsetting. In fact, the first time I threw up I thought it was nerves.

Dr. Easley says I should talk to my psychiatrist about getting on some anti-anxiety medication. I would just as soon not go that route; I take four different crazymeds as it is. Yoga might be a better idea.

I definitely don’t deal with stress well and I have regular meltdowns over the tiniest things. I view it was kind of like an overfull suitcase: you’re trying to get it to shut, but there’s too many things in it, so you sit on it while you work on the zipper to force it to close. But, even if you can get the suitcase closed this way, eventually the sides split, or the zipper breaks, and the suitcase comes flying open because the underlying problem is still there: there’s too many things in there. Some of it has got to come out.

It would seem that my current methods of chilling out are just like sitting on the suitcase, a temporary fix that winds up failing in the long term. So either I have these mini-explosions where I, for example, scream out loud while washing the dishes just because two plates got stuck together, or my back freezes up or I start puking.

So I totally have to do something about it all. I cannot keep getting sick like this. So, yoga, or some exercise program, or meditation, or, god forbid, Xanax or whatever nostrum my psychiatrist thinks up next.

I’ll keep you posted.