Overtired

I try and avoid gender stereotypes, but I think it is pretty common for women to put up with a lot. We have things that bother us that we carry around, and responsibilities that weigh us down, but we keep going and put a cheerful face on it most of the time. Sometimes something will shift though, and then we get weepy, and the man who blames it on PMS deserves a good punch in the face. Yes, the hormones may be the straw the broke the camel’s back, but the ton that was already there was you.

To be fair, maybe not every woman does it, and a man is not always the trigger. I drive my family nuts when I go over the edge. Maybe they have less baggage.

I guess I am trying to explain these low periods that I go through. There are two sides to them. One is the falling out of balance, but then there is the fact that the balance was so precarious all along.

The last one that was really bad happened about a year and a half ago. I have written a little about that time period, but I don’t know that I really captured how awful it became. After being fairly well-depleted from a year of unemployment followed by a year of underemployment, including one really stressful job that made me physically ill for not nearly enough money, things were looking better. I had a new job, and if it was at a lower rate of pay that what I was used to, it was still an improvement, and I was working on a writing project that really had a chance of going somewhere.

Well, adjusting to a new job was hard, and it wasn’t even that the writing project did not end up going anywhere that was a problem, it was the way in which it took over my life, in that the phone kept ringing and requiring an hour on the phone before I could get to anything I needed to do, and the project kept becoming stupider and uglier based on the person who knew what he was doing (not enough to actually get it sold, but okay). That kind of squeezed the joy in writing out of me for a while, and then I started trying to get the house refinanced, which in retrospect I should have put off until after the new year, based on the nightmare that it was. And of course there was Mom’s surgery, and Aaron ending up back in jail, and so there was a lot going on. Really, I don’t think any of that would have broken me, except for one other thing: the dog kept waking me up.

Jack is pretty old, and his bladder can’t make it through the entire night any more. That’s okay. We love him, and we can deal with this. Normally, if we make sure he goes before bed time and we limit his water intake in the later evening, he may need to be let out once or twice. During that time period, he was waking me up four or five times.

I think it was somewhat emotional. In many ways he took the surgery better than we thought. Jack is just devoted to Mom, and follows her around the house, and we were really worried that he would be whining and anxious non-stop while she was in the hospital. He was okay. However, afterwards, when she was back, but feeling weak and depressed and recovering slowly, suddenly he became much more restless at night. I have to feel like it was related, because he got back to normal. Regardless, right then I was getting disturbed a lot.

You might think this would make me really nervous and tired, but what it did was make me depressed. Everything that I always carry around but am not really thinking about, I could not stop thinking about. I mean, it would make sense to think about how tired I was, or how awful the people at the credit union were compared to when I took out the mortgage in the first place, and that sounds logical, but it was really just about not feeling loved or like I would ever be loved. I mean, there may have been some element of the lack of writing success, which would have been perfectly logical, but no, the big wound that never goes away is the loneliness, whether it’s fair or not. So, that’s what the next few posts will be about.

I need to say though, that no matter how frustrated my family gets with me when I melt down over a life that is exactly the same as it was the previous week, and for whatever differences there are between us in our ideas of what constitutes a satisfying relationship, one of the kindest things that anyone has done for me is that one night when this was going on, Julie slept with her door open, and I blocked my door, so that the dog had to go to her.

There are two parts to it. I’m working on taking better care of myself so that I don’t get pushed over the edge, but also, if I can change the position of the edge, or the depth of the ravine, that would probably be a good thing too.