I’ve met a decent guy who shows me and tells me that what Jerk did to me was wrong and that I can stop being insecure about it.

I’ve been off my meds for at least a month now.  It’s not as terrifying as I initially thought it would be.  I remember when I initially started taking them.  There was one weekend when I completely forgot to pop my pills every morning and by the end of it, my head felt really weird–the only way I can describe it is that electric jolts would go through my brain when I moved too much–and I started getting those ugly thoughts of despair again.  My doctor started me out in April of last year saying that he wanted to keep me on it for a year and then we would see what to do after that.  If all was well, he would wean me off the meds and my brain would go back to being non-drugged.  Well, funny things have happened since then, namely not so funny things like losing my health insurance.  I haven’t been to the doctor since the last time I needed to get my prescription refilled, and once I lost my insurance, my dad started sending me my meds.  I don’t know how he got them.  I never asked.  Long story short, when the year was up, I started weaning myself off my meds.  I don’t really know if this was the wise thing to do, but it’s not as though I had a choice since I couldn’t go see my doctor without paying a bajillion dollars.  They probably wouldn’t have even taken me since I didn’t have health insurance.  Boo to that.  Anyway, the way I weaned myself off was by starting to take my meds every other day, then every third day, etc.  The time would lengthen, until I was going two weeks without having electric brain storms.  There was this really bad time at work, though, where I could barely function without my brain feeling like it was going to explode.  That was bad.  And every once in a while I get headaches at the top of my head, although I can’t say that they’re related.  But I’m completely off Lexapro now, and I don’t get the electric brain storms anymore, and I don’t have ugly dark thoughts anymore.

I can say, though, that I am much healthier emotionally than I was a year ago.  I’ve come a long way since that night writing my paper and then having a breakdown and crawling into bed.  I can remember what my day-to-day life was like before being medicated and getting couseling.  That was the year I walked everywhere, which was bad because it made me disappear into my head.  I would walk over the train tracks and wonder what would happen if I just stood there and let one run me over.  I would listen to really depressing music and have really awful thoughts about how my life wasn’t really worth anything, and I would dwell on all the ways that I had failed.  It didn’t take much to set me off into hysterics when anything went wrong.  I was a complete mess.  The semester during which I realized that I needed to do something about myself was the one that tanked my GPA and the one when I wrote a long letter to the jerk.  I can remember sitting in my apartment all alone during Spring Break for days without going anywhere waiting for him to call me and then losing it when I found out that he wasn’t coming to visit me like he said he would because he “lost my number.”  Any normal person would kick his ass to the curb and move on.  But not me.  Instead I told him that I loved him, which was one of the stupidest moves of my life.  I know that would never happen now because I’ve become the kind of person who doesn’t accept that shit.  There are times when I get so angry about all that that I wish I could do something vindictive like tell his (now) wife about various things.  In the end, though, I’m not that kind of person and I don’t care enough.  The point of all this, though, is that I’m not that person anymore.  I went through a lot during my sophomore and junior years of college, and they really affected me, but I worked through them and I’m moving on with my life.  I’m more balanced now, and I don’t let things get to me as much as I used to.  I’m also more capable of not letting bullshit get through to me.  I don’t blame myself anymore for the way that other people treat me, and if they treat me like crap, then I tell them so instead of letting them continue to hurt me.  I’m not responsible for the way other people act.

Anyway, I’ve barely even noticed that I haven’t been on my meds anymore.  Every once in a while, when something potentially damaging happens, I handle it much more calmly than I used to.  These are moments when I step back and allow myself to be impressed with my progress.  I can also concentrate now on all the good things that are going on instead of weighing myself down in the morass of the shitty stuff.  It’s actually really great.

There are some regrets, though, such as my GPA, which could’ve been better had I not been depressed.  Also, I would’ve never written that damn letter.  Motherfucker I wish I could take that letter back.  But what is done is done, and I’ve dealt with it, and I’m a stronger person for it.  So, goodbye lexapro, and hopefully, goodbye depression.

Lately there’s been some political bashing going on facebook that I’m pretty tired of hearing.  It’s probably well-known that I’m “liberal” or whatever the hell that means.  I’m really not that liberal, but since I support Obama, I’m freaking public enemy #1 of most of the people who go to Evangelical Institution and claim to be my “friend.”  I’m not just talking facebook friend here, I’m talking people that I have gotten to know over the past few years and who are more than just acquaintances.  I’ve had discussions with these people, I’ve invited these people to events, I’ve gone through really harrowing times with some of these people.  What bothers me the most is that each and every one of these people claim to be Christians.  They can keep reifying those stereotypes if they want to.

I want to make it clear that I’m not calling myself the “victim” here, because there really is no victim, just some political differences.  I’m not suffering because of what they’re doing, but I am highly annoyed, and honestly, a little surprised.  Maybe this speaks to my naivete about human nature (I always seem to think that people are much better than they are, and I expect people to act with a certain dignity, even if I don’t always fit the bill.)  I guess I just expect these people to be civil.  I would hope that in the past, if I have had problems with people that are as shallow as political differences that I have at least been civil to them.  I may have been unable to understand them, and I may have been privately (sometimes publicly) pissed, but I hope that I haven’t taken it out on them in a vitriolic way.  I recently failed at this goal for myself.  I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I started putting angry comments on a facebook wall.  It began when someone was mocking my facebook political views and it ended when they accused me of having my “panties in a twist.”  I just wanted them to “leave me the hell alone.”

There is one thing that I understand about things like facebook, and this blog (which is why I choose to remain anonymous): it’s a public forum, and I can only expect my views, or, for that matter, anything I put up, to be criticized.  I don’t mind criticism.  I like it most of the time, because it helps me to develop what I believe more fully and it helps me to better communicate what I believe.  But this recent criticism differs from the ideal for public discourse about beliefs:  it is not civil and it is not constructive.

It’s really just harassment,  unwarranted harassment at that.  It happens when someone looks at my facebook wall and sees that I support Obama or really dislike McCain, or am a vegetarian, or even put up a facebook note about a button which was, admittedly, an overreaction which I corrected.  When people see these things, their first reaction is to pounce.  I’ve gotten quite a few comments that were just plain mean and didn’t do anything to challenge me or to start productive conversation.  The only goal seemed to be to piss me off and bully me.  My question is: why do these people think it is necessary to do this?  I don’t really know.  And the only reason I can think of is that they a) have nothing better to do than find people with different viewpoints and harass them; b) are just ugly people lacking compassion or at least civility; c) think that harassment is an effective tool at beating people down who hold different viewpoints; d) genuinely lack understanding of what constitutes civil public debate.  The funny thing is that the majority of these people were former debaters with me, and we lived by the understanding that debate rounds included nothing personal and that ad-hom arguments or ones lacking nuances didn’t get as much mileage as the ones that were reasonable, measured, and evidenced.  Perhaps they forgot.  If this isn’t true, let me know.  I’d like to understand why.

Really, what this harassment achieves is intimidation.  The end of it is that the person on the receiving end doesn’t feel free to voice viewpoints because he/she knows that in the future, nothing productive will come out of it, and no debate will happen.  This is what leads me to believe that the people who engage in this type of public discourse want the other person to be silenced because the harasser doesn’t agree with them.  In the end, civil public debate dies, and the definition of public discourse becomes one of intimidation and domination.  Nobody wins, except maybe the harasser.  He/she gets to feel in control and self-righteous and gets to have a little power trip.  His/her viewpoint, though, doesn’t become anymore valid or right.

I went through my phase of berating and disparaging other people.  This seemed to be the vogue when I was on the debate team.  We didn’t seem to get the core concept of the activity we were participating in.  Then I grew up.

Honestly, I’m glad to be done with this school.  I met very few people who had the mental capacity to understand how civil debate works.  The rest just engaged in name calling and an ignorant level of argument.  The impression I got was that they were afraid of what was different and that they were too lazy to think about it more than the shallow level of their debate showed.  Life after Evangelical Institution probably won’t be much different, but I hope that as people mature, they can understand how to argue and at least attempt to understand, perhaps even sympathize with, viewpoints that are different than their own.

All I’m saying is that I welcome challenges to my beliefs.  I did post them publicly, after all, and so I can’t expect everyone to agree with me and to co-exist in a bucolic world because I ask them to.  I do expect, though, that challenges be reasonable and productive, and that people engage me in a way that is constructive.  I would hope that there could be a mutual respect between two people who have reached their own conclusions about the world around them.

Maybe I hope for too much.

He’s married now.  I can’t help but think this is exceedingly strange.

And if I see one more wedding photo album on facebook I’m going to puke.

This is what I saw when I was filling up my gas tank today:

$3.33
0.8 gallons
Your approved limit has been reached.

Four miles later, my “low gas” light turned on again.

All I can say to last night’s dream is: What the hell?

I had a dream about the apocalypse.  It started at my house where I grew up, and someone was bombing various areas, but only the ones with purses laying on the ground.  I was inside my house, and then I noticed that tons of people were purposefully putting purses on the lawn.  I was trying to get rid of them so we wouldn’t get bombed, but there were too many.  While I was outside trying to clear them off the lawn, the house got bombed and I ran away, unscathed, although everyone in the house died.  Then I went to the library and was working.  Even though the whole world was ending, I was still working and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  Someone was asking me to return books, but I told them that my house got bombed, so all the books in it were gone.

Then who shows up but the ex, along with his current fiance.  This is troubling.  Every once in a while he’ll show up in my dreams, and I always give in.  What I would really like for my unconscious to do is to kick his ass.  But alas, my brain’s synapses aren’t quite that sophisticated.  So while he’s trying to woo me behind the back of his current victim, giant clouds of poisonous gases are appearing outside.  Then we started to seal the doors so we wouldn’t get poisoned.  That’s really all I remember.

That’s the second apocalyptic dream that I’ve had over the past few nights, and it’s both puzzling and annoying.  I think the fact that ex-jerk ended up in the dream is more annoying than anything else.  I wish he would just go away.

But could the apocalypse have anything to do with looming financial doom?

Probably.  The clouds were green.

I talked to my mom on the phone last night.  It was the talk after the Really Bad, Fighting Talk we had the other night about car insurance.  The fight basically went like this:

Mom: “I told you to do this a long time ago.  You’re irresponsible and now I have to pay for your mistakes.” [I had mistakenly asked her if she would call her mechanic to see if I could get my car inspected when I came home.  Apparently this is a hardship not to be borne.]
Me: “I understand that I screwed up.  Can we concentrate on what to do now instead of digging up the faults of my past?  I’m tired of hearing about everything that I did wrong two months ago.”
Mom: “Stop condemning me.  I’m right, you’re wrong, and I’m tired of dealing with your screw ups.”
Me: “Well I don’t like being reminded about everything that I do wrong all the time.” [She loves to slip in little jab-pokes at me like "we need to do x, like responsible adults should have done" or, "like you should have done a long time ago" or, "now I have to deal with something that you messed up," etc, etc.]
Mom: “Well, it’s true, and I don’t care how you feel because I’m right.”

By the end of the conversation, I needed to be reminded of reasons why I am not Inherently Bad Person and everything that my counselor and I had worked through last fall.  Sheesh.  It was stressful.  I had to turn out all the lights and smoke and stare at the ceiling from my prone position on the floor.

So, yesterday, I went to AAA to work out all this stuff and find out what I needed to do, like a responsible adult would do.  It was so much easier than my mom made it sound.  My mother is the queen of blowing things out of proportion, and then crying “woe is me!  My life is so HARD!”

So I called her and told her that I didn’t really need to come home to take care of all the car stuff; she could just mail me the title and be done with it.  That way, I could save gas money because I really can’t afford to drive home at this time.  Her response:  “Well, I’ll have to call AAA to make sure that is actually true.  And you never cared about how much gas was going to cost before [you ungrateful idiot].”  Her tone said it all.

While I was at work, she called me back and left a message on my phone: “I called AAA and found out that what you said is [astonishingly] true.  Let me know if you’re actually going to come home because that will change my plans for the whole weekend [once again you are screwing up my life with your procrastination].”

So I called her back and told her that I would really like to come home [at this point, I don't know why] but I really can’t afford the gas to get home, what with all the taxes I will be paying soon to get the car transferred to my name, not to mention, paying for car insurance.  If she would be willing to help me with gas, I would like to come home.  She said she couldn’t spare the money.  She would mail the title to me shortly.  She, of course, didn’t forget to put some blame on me for the whole situation.  When I would tell her what I had learned at AAA, she would parrot it back to me “Well, of course, x and x are true,” with a tone that said I knew that all along, you stupid girl.  Well, then why didn’t she tell me before?

I even went so far as to apologize for upsetting her the night before.  She replied in an icy-cold tone, “I forgive you.”  And then she said nothing more.  Maybe I had hurt her pride and her precious schedule, but she had hurt ME.  But all that doesn’t matter because it is my fault.  She was merely reminding me of that, so she is not culpable if I feel hurt.

We went through a similar situation about a year ago, and I refused to talk to her for several months the last time.  She finally called me one night and begged me to talk to her.  I told her she better shape up and stop the venom, or I just won’t come home or talk to her.  I asked her to be kind.  She agreed.  But the same thing is happening again, and once again, she is making it to be all my fault.  I am responsible for her anger because I cause it.  That is her mantra.  I have been trying to get through to her since I was in the seventh grade, the night we fought and I called someone to talk to because my own mother refused to talk to me, and she unplugged the phone cord in the middle of my tearful catharsis of talking to someone with a human exterior.  I knew then that she would cleave me to her side, but I had to be clean and a good daughter in order for her to accept me.  Since then, I have used tears, silence, shouting, swear words, and once I even grabbed her arm as she was leaving me in order to make her listen to me.  I have tried.  But we can only be nice to each other when I am shiny and clean.  I know this is true because she reminds me of my halcyon year of five when I was a cute, agreeable kindergartener.  I think she would keep me that age if she could.  I went to the crapper when I turned 16 according to her–she also reminds me of this from time to time.  And she doesn’t understand why that would be hurtful.  No wonder I have a hard time standing up for myself.  My own mother rejects me when I do.  I had to go through months of counseling in order to realize that I was actually doing something right when I stood up for myself.

I would like to contrast this with my best friend’s mother, who is so willing to help me when I mess up or don’t know what to do that I can’t understand it.  I feel guilty every time I ask her.  In my world, mothers are supposed to make everyone very aware of how much they are suffering.  Yesterday morning I called her to ask her a few questions about state law and cars and such.  She gladly answered them and even offered some advice I didn’t ask for.  I understand that I am not her daughter, and therefore, she might be nicer to me, but knowing this woman and her huge heart, I doubt that she treats my best friend any differently.

I honestly don’t know who my mother is.  Even in our times of congeniality, it still feels like a big sham and that something is waiting to rear its ugly head when I screw up.  Oh, but my mother does everything in her power to make my life easier and to help me, right?  So shouldn’t I just be grateful and keep my mouth shut?

Meanwhile, when I think about everything that I have to pay for and all the difficulties with my mother.  Quite frankly, I feel like Moses at the Red Sea with the Egyptians closing in.  Either I part the waters, or I get killed.

I love my mom.  I really do.  We’ve been getting along better than usual lately, and I like talking to her and getting advice on certain things from her.  But there are just some things that we don’t do well together.  Mainly, talk about what we believe.  My mom has serious issues with most of the things that I hold dear: the church I choose to go to, the things I choose to study, the food that I eat, and of course, the politicians that I vote for.  I don’t really care about the politics so much, but the other stuff makes everything a lot harder.  Most of the time, if she doesn’t get it, she’ll say she doesn’t comprehend my choices, she worries about tme, and sometimes she’ll even borderline-ridicule me.  It’s pretty annoying. 

Last night I was talking to my mom on the phone, and she mentioned that there’s a picnic we could go to when I’m home at the place where she works.  She said there was going to be barbeque chicken, and I asked her if they would have anything else. 
Mom: “Oh yeah, you don’t eat meat.  That’s just so RIDICULOUS.  I don’t understand.”
She basically threw a little hissy fit about me being a vegetarian.  Why does she care so much?  I’m not a hippie, I bathe daily, and I don’t wear birkenstocks.  I just choose not to eat meat.  Apparently this is a problem.  So I told her some reasons why and then she was just kind of quiet.  So then I wrote a big thing on facebook about why I’m a vegetarian, and this offended her. 
Mom: “I just can’t even talk to you about anything without you going into a tirade about it.”

All I have to say to that is, well, you do into tirades when I tell you what I believe, and you don’t understand, and so I feel like I need to make you understand.  How do you think it makes me feel when you attack my person for what I believe?  I don’t attack you for your beliefs.

Alas.  Sometimes I think the only way my mom and I can get along is if I conceal who I really am from her.  And it’s not even that bad.  I go to church for crying out loud, I don’t do drugs, I’m not pregnant, and the beliefs I have are a result of reflection and self-improvement.  What’s so bad about that?

Finally, finally, something good has happened.  I got a new job at the library of Evangelical Institution.  One of my friends who works there told me about a job opening and personally recommended me.  I went in this morning to fill out an application and to have an interview.  They asked me how much I knew about libraries and such, and I told them I was an English major, which lit up my interviewer’s face and pretty much guaranteed me the job, apparently.  Tonight, when I got home after 9 hours of truck at Corporate Crap, I had good news when I opened my email and found that I had been hired.  Although the job pays 20 cents less per hour than my current job at Corporate Crap, it has a fixed schedule, which means that I can keep the job at CC as a side job.  I’ll still be making more because I have a guaranteed 40 hours per week.  Plus I don’t have to work on Sundays and I get every other weekend off.  The other perfect thing is that the job is temporary, and it ends right before I move.  I can call the restaurant I was interviewing at and tell them that there’s no longer a need for the 2nd interview they had scheduled me for.  It was rather funny when I interviewed there, because the interviewer asked me what area of English I was interested in:

Me: “Modern British literature.”
Interviewer: “Oh, literature.  British?  Seems rather dull.”
Me: ”I find it to be really interesting.”

So having the job at the library is perfecto.  Plus, it seems that I’ll get to read most of the day anyway, since the library is pretty dead this time of year.

Finally, something good happens.

“But under this torpor there was a fierce battle of emotions, such as Maggie in all her life if struggle had never known or foreboded; it seemed to her as if all the worst evil in her had lain in ambush till now, and had suddenly started up full-armed, with hideous, overpowering strength!  There were moments in which a cruel selfishness seemed to be getting possession of her; why should not Lucy–why should not Philip suffer?  She had had to suffer through many years of her life; and who had renounced anything for her?  And when something like that fullness of existence–love, wealth, ease, refinement, all that her nature craved–was brought within her reach, why was she to forego it, that another might have it–another, who perhaps needed it less?  But amidst all this passionate tumult there were the old voices making themselves heard with rising power, till, from time to time, the tumult seemed quelled.  Was that existence which tempted her the full existence she dreamed?  Where, then, would be all the memories of early striving–all the deep pity for another’s pain, which had been nurtured in her through years of affection and hardship–all the divine presentiment of something higher than mere personal enjoyment, which had made the sacredness of life?”

From George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss