Unwell

I was feeling drained and poorly after training with my new trainer, who emphasizes intensity and metabolic burn. One day I could barely stand in the shower after our session and was worried I might faint and they'd find me there, with a bump on my head.

I've been weepy. Last weekend I went to see a really slight and sort of dumb movie, "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist", and it was raining while I was driving home down College Ave, and tears just streamed uncontrollably out of my eyes, the same effect that the movies on the plane used to have when I used to take international flights for work.

I lost my temper at work. There's a difficult situation - restructure, plus new planning process, we all know we're getting new jobs but don't know what they'll be, the power structure is getting challenged and rearranged, there's paranoia and insecurity in all directions. But after saying "Yeah, yeah, whatever" to angsty colleagues all week, then an agency stepped on my own professional toes by presenting a web plan, and I just lost it. All over someone who is on my list of performance reviewers and could very well end up my new boss. Haven't had the chance to talk to her again to apologize and explain a bit more articulately what made me angry.

Friday I was late to work and while in a meeting noticed that when I turned my head to the side the room was spinning. I went down to the health service, she looked in my ears and exclaimed at how red they were inside. She said allergies. But my ears were blocked, and lymph nodes in neck working really hard.

I talked to my sister yesterday about the ear thing. She has this wonderful and hilarious book called "You Can Heal Your Life" that has a table of all the body parts that might be ailing and what that means, spiritually, plus some mantras to say to get better. The whole ear thing is so unusual, and has come on so suddenly, that I wondered what the book my say about it. Guess what it is? "Don't want to hear your parents arguing." That fits scarily well. All the senior managers at work are at war about 2009 plans. Plus, the election is hotting up and the candidates and all their advisors and the media, and then also all my Facebook friends, are yelling at each other and starting to get very emotional and scathing. Plus, my new trainer told me all his problems with the management at my gym and how he might leave. But it's all a secret so I'm not allowed to go to the manager to tell him. Everyone who's an authority figure in my Appleton life right now is fighting - emotions are high and it's getting a bit nasty. No wonder my ears hurt. My mantra is supposed to be "I listen to pleasant sounds with love." Okay, will do my best.

So, I've had another completely blank, disappointing and frustrating weekend. Haven't been out of the house, or even gotten dressed, since Friday evening. Trying to get house stuff done, the long list of ridiculous torment that never gets dented - weekend after weekend gets set aside and I just can't do any of it. Boxes, sure, but also recycling cardboard and plastic bags, taking old clothes to Goodwill, updating my iPod with new stuff, vacuuming (might help my allergies), cleaning the bathtub. Long list, tormenting me, but I keep lying down on the couch and watching renovation shows, or my parents argue with each other on CNN.

Had a plan to go on a lovely recreational drive to see the leaves, shop, have a nice lunch, take photos. Woke up too late to make it there by lunchtime. Feel too sick and dizzy to get ready and drive a long way. Plus, the house stuff. Plus the work stuff, didn't even mention that - the stuff that gets pushed off to do on the weekend, which I never do on the weekend.

My life is no fun. I don't have anyone to do anything with on weekends. I really need to put some effort into fixing that situation, but I'm ground down farther and farther by the stress of not having it - vicious downward spiral. And I'm unwell. If it's allergies, that really sucks, because that means this is more or less a permanent unwell feeling - until it snows, anyway. If it's the cold that's been going around at work, I wish it would just be the cold, so I could call in sick and be done with it.

I need about a week off work, maybe two weeks. Don't have enough vacation days. Wonder if I could get stress leave? Wonder what you have to do to get it. And then a whole week's worth of stuff would be undone when I got back, so I'd be that many more days behind.

This is a bad situation. All the books say you have to have hope to live, you have to have something to look forward to. You also need human contact and companionship, and you have to have some time off when you can just enjoy leisure activities, not on the clock, not doing a "to do" list or a pile of "shoulds". It's amazing I'm surviving at all. But how am I going to dig myself out of this hole?

What I do is just crawl in bed and take a long nap. And when the alarm goes off at 5 on Monday morning, get up and sleepwalk through it all again. One day a crisis will come, or else I will put things in place to gradually get better. But right now, this Sunday afternoon, this weekend, I am stuck.

ladybug, ladybug (ladybug, ladybug, ladybug, ladybug)

Right now there are six ladybugs hanging on the screen outside my window.

Stationery happiness

I love the sight of stacks of new calendars and day-planners at the bookstore. We're coming up on a new year, and the sight of all those lovely, uncracked books full of black pages of possibility is a lovely sight.

I remember many times having the experience, first, of going through a new calendar and filling in the important dates - birthdays, Rugby League season kick-off and Grand Final, that kind of thing, and then later, having that long-anticpated date actually roll around and realizing it's finally here, right now.

When I lived in Sydney we sometimes subscribed to whole seasons of theatre, either at the Belvoir Street (especially when we lived on Belvoir Street, right across the road), or at the Sydney Theatre Company downtown. You'd get the tickets in like October or November, and there was always one for not the next January but two Januaries hence. Putting those dates in the calendar (usually on the back page where you could sketch out whole year plans) always really felt like an act of faith. And when those finally rolled around, and were this weekend, and then were today, that really did feel like a milestone.

Definitely reverse seasonal affective disorder

It's October, the leaves are turning, it's dark when I get up in the morning and dark when I get home at night. It's cold and damp and I noticed about a week ago that suddenly I can concentrate, I'm in an optimistic mood, I can get things done.

Tonight when I left work it was raining and misty, and although driving was kind of a pain, when I looked at the coloured leaves through the soft mist and the drops pattering on the windshield, my main thought was, "This is really romantic."

Conversely, on Saturday I was inside, on the computer, in the spare room with blinds drawn, and my cousin IM'd me and asked, "Why aren't you outside in the sun?" I had a look outside at the sun, but the very thought of going out there made me tired.

I definitely do better in the cold, dark and wet. I wonder how many others out there have my rare and misunderstood condition?

Why I haven't been doorknocking

This evening Terri Gross on Fresh Air (NPR radio show) was talking to the current Presiding Bishop of the Epsicopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. I haven't transcribed the quote exactly, but when asked about the Pastors who recently spoke from the pulpit and told their parishioners how to vote and in doing so risked losing their church's tax-exempt status, she said something like,

"My job is not to tell my parishioners how to vote. My job is to help them explore their own values, so they are more clear about their own decisions."

Sunday night reset

I had planned to spend the whole weekend working hard, per the predictions in my horoscope. Day 1, house stuff - deep cleaning, including the scary bathtub in my ensuite bathroom; and then Day 2, work stuff - actually do some of the time-consuming tasks that I have too many meetings on work days to get done, and process a few things that are waiting on me for approvals or routing.

I did hardly anything. I feel like I spent all the time, but more or less everything is still exactly where it was on Friday.

I did the dishes, which needed doing, and even did another lot of dishes, but now there are dishes in the sink again, a new lot of dishes. I did laundry, but forgot the last load which was towels, and they're just finishing spinning now and still need to go in the dryer.

I took my new amplifier out of the box, and plugged both my guitar and the headphones into it, and it's really fun, I tell you. The very first preset is a very rock and rolly one, with lots of distortion, and when you finish a chord it echoes like you're in a very large concert hall. I practiced the open chords and a few power chords again, and am anxious to learn a whole song soon. So that's something.

I took my work computer to a coffee shop downtown, because they have wireless, and I thought I could do work stuff there. I could not. I could see my work calendar, but couldn't get to anything through a browser. I'm sure there are some instructions saved on my machine somewhere, and I did it wrong, but in the end I did nothing, just turned it on and off again, had a coffee and muffin, and moved on.

Rather than coming home I went to see a movie, that "Nick and Norah" one. I'd heard good reviews, but it was basically a teen film about courtship in that awkward time of life when you're still in high school. And I can't believe New York high schoolers get up to as much and stay out as late as these kids did. Especially with the drinking age being 21 and thus probably the entrance age for all the clubs. I was 45 minutes early for the next showing of the movie, and I didn't have anything to read or anything to write on with me, so I just sat and ate a whole thing of popcorn before the previews even started.

One other thing I did this evening instead of unpacking boxes or doing work work was to watch an hour-long show on TLC about people with hoarding disorders. Looked from the rooms on the screen, full to the ceiling with racks and storage boxes and piles of stuff, slightly to each side, to my big towering piles of boxes that I can't seem to do anything about. A psychological expert on the show said that the hoarders all seem to be intelligent, articulate people, but hide the state of their homes from people. Yep, that too. And that their hoarding is often some kind of grief reaction to an early trauma. Could that be what's wrong with me? Because the block is really quite severe. I tell myself, in my mother's helpful voice, "Just do one box per night". Break it down into small parts. I have a row of empty file cabinets - lovely file cabinets - just waiting to receive all the stuff that's left. I can't even start. I set whole weekends aside, week after week after week, I give myself deadlines like on my anniversary of moving here (Oct 26) I will have it all done and have a party, and then I just sit there.

I could almost have started at about 8pm tonight. Well, 9, because the vampire show was on HBO. And a thought occurred to me that has occurred to me in the past. It takes me until Sunday night to put my personality back together, and then it's Monday and I have to start all over again.

Pray for me. I know I'm just blocked. Surely a smart girl can make a plan and get out of this paralysed hell that I am in? Or am I making too big a deal of it all?

Reflections of gratitude

When things turn out to be less bad than you'd feared, you should stop and remember to be grateful.

1. When the last two fingers on my left hand hurt, for months, I was sure it was the start of rheumatoid arthritis. It runs in the family, it follows the same gene as Crohn's Disease which I already had in my 20's, I've thought for a long time that I'm bound to develop it sooner or later, and this made me think it was sooner. But I went to the doctor, got a pile of blood tests, and although I had a very slight elevation in my ANA factor (whatever that is), it turned out that a few days of lots of Advil fixed the fingers up, and although sometimes they're still a bit stiff in the morning when I get up, it's not the beginning of a lifetime of chronic pain and debilitation.

2. When I noticed that I had to hold vitamin bottles and soup cans a little further away to read the ingredients list, I thought, it's time, here it is. I'm over 40 and my close vision is going. I thought I would have to get glasses and wear them all the time, I thought I might even need bi-focals because I had trouble with distance vision in the past. Well, it turns out my distance vision actually got better - the eye doctor thought it was from lack of use and too much close work rather than a change in lens shape. So I don't need extra glasses for driving at night. Just some reading specs, and since the correction was symmetrical I could just get some off-the-rack glasses at the drug store (actually they were from a glasses chain at the mall, but same difference), and I don't even need them that frequently, only for meetings in which we have to read tiny numbers on spreadsheets.

3. I was having belly problems, on and off, and they were getting worse and worse until they got really severe. I couldn't eat anything without getting an upset stomach, and I spent one whole Saturday in pain a few weeks ago, so I knew it wasn't just work-stress-butterflies. Just about then I had a grocery crisis, though, and switched from cereal with soy milk to toast for breakfast, and the problem went right away. Who knew that soy caused digestive upsets? And I was having lots of it - after the soy milk at breakfast, then sometimes soy yogurt, and soy lattes at Starbucks, and tofu in stir-fry, and Tofutti ice cream bars in the evening. Cut it all out, and the problem went away immediately. Crohn's Disease often recurs in one's 40's, and I was braced for a few months of invasive tests and then possibly steroids and diet restrictions to treat it, but it was just the soy.

I am very grateful that none of these things turned out to be as serious as I thought they were going to be. I am incredibly thankful for the continuing good health of my aging body, touch wood. I am sure I will come up with new things to worry about, but today I stop and reflect that none of these things are it.