I did six loads of laundry today.

Six loads!!

I’m lucky I’ve got like 200 pairs of underwear. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, ’tis not the season to go commando.

Here, have a rocket.

Well!

After hearing the full details of a huge new project, too much to handle in my current state (what is up with management dumping more work on you when you’re already doing the job of two people?), I just gave up and before I knew what I was saying, it was all, “I quit. I mean, I’d like to resign. I mean, uh, I respectfully… uh… pants… err… with all due… I just quit, OK?” They stared at me for a second, the fat files faltering in their hands. I burst into tears. It was kind of awesome.

So now we get to find out what was going on really:
- Did insomnia cause job stress?
- Did job stress cause insomnia?
- Did depression cause insomnia?
- Did depression cause job stress?
- Did job stress cause depression or insomnia?
- Are any of the above things causing me to hear things all the time?
- Are any of the above things causing me to draw rockets all the time?
- Or robots?
- How about a hot bath with that fabulous clove-scented bomb from Lush? And no razorblades? And maybe sleeping in tomorrow?
- Am I going to get better now (thanks to no work stress) or worse (thanks to being unemployed)?
- Is it good that I don’t have a job (because the job was killing me) or bad that I don’t have a job (because there goes my employee support program)?

Anyway, I don’t really like quiz-type memes (”7 Things You Didn’t Know About Me”) but I do like graphic memes, and I would love if everybody tried this one. True, it takes a couple of minutes, but it’s so fun, and it definitely says more about the interweb than it does about me, I think.

What you do is: go to Google image search, and type in the answers to the following queries, and put up a result picture from the first page you get back. See? Easy!

1. Age at next birthday

2. A place you’d like to travel

3. Your favourite place

4. Your favourite objects

5. Your favourite food

6. Your favourite animal

7. Your favourite colour

8. City where you were born

9. City where you live

10. Name of a past pet

11. Name of a past love

12. Best friend’s nickname

13. Your screen name

14. Your first name

15. Your middle name

16. Your last name

17. Bad habit of yours

18. First job

19. Grandmother’s name

20. College major

#15 is the funniest because I wasn’t expecting it. Ha-haaa! Kim Basinger. Oh, and #7. Didn’t see that one coming.

Update: saw the guy, got hooked up with the drugs. But I refuse to fill the prescription because it’s only for fourteen days of Rem… something (can’t read it after that, a friend suggested it might be a prescription for REM albums? That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spot, light, losing my religion). After the fourteen days are up he wants to see me again and odds are I’m going to end up in some kind of inpatient program. I’m reasonably anxious to avoid this fate, as you can imagine. If there’s anywhere more guaranteed to fuck you up than a psych ward, I can’t think of where it might be. I present a lightly-bowdlerized e-mail excerpt of the meeting here:

“Jesus!
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any scarier.

I woke bright and early for yesterday’s appointment at the special clinic and was standing erectly at the receptionist’s desk at half past ten on the dot, quivering with suppressed tears. And what do I get? Miscommunications, billing errors, doctor swaps, lunch breaks, doubleplus incompetence. I actually ended up seeing the damn doctor at 2:30, by which point I had finished the book I brought and had had two panic attacks, due to the ‘company’ in the waiting area - whose dubious quality I’m sure you can imagine.

Dr. C turned out to be sixty, monstrously obese, and completely bored with his job. After a cursory glance at my file, he scribbled out a prescription for what looks like… well, I’ve no idea. It starts with ‘Rem’ and I can’t read it after that. The scrip is lurking in my purse like a poisonous toad and I have no intention of filling it, for the very simple reason that it’s only fourteen days worth of drugs.

“I thought people were supposed to be on antidepressants for longer than fourteen days.”
“Fourteen days is the minimum you have to be on the drugs to let me get you into the inpatient program at Rockyview.”
“I beg your pardon?”

After the nuclear burst in my head had faded and I could speak again, I asked him about the program, which sounds like an absolute bloody nightmare - and the minimum detention time is THREE MONTHS. He kept looking at his watch, half-buried in his marshmallow wrist, as if to remind me that I wasn’t the only loony about the place and he had other patients to see. I said, “I think technically I can’t be forced to go.” He said, “Come back and see me after the fourteen days and I’ll decide whether you’ll go or not.”

I asked about the outpatient program. He claimed ignorance. I kept staring at his belly - his stained green dress-shirt was partly unbuttoned and an eighteen-inch wedge of hairy, tallow-white fat was clearly visible. He had rested my file on the bulge. I thought: “My God, and these are the people I’m supposed to trust with my sanity and my life? These are our efficient, ethereal, robotic heroes? They’re human after all - disgustingly, unabashedly human. They’re no better than me. That does it.”

I’m weighing my options now, and wearying of the whole idiotic parade of health-care ‘professionals.’ I’m sick of the runaround I’m getting - of the contempt, the far-flung geography.”

Etc etc, whine whine. Up to 11 suicide plans now. I had to discard the one where I jumped into that Indonesian volcano, as I understand the rumblings have subsided. But don’t forget, it’s when you can’t laugh that you’re crazy, not while you still can. No Joker references please.

Take a good look: this is the last of the real me.

This is a post I did not want to write.

But I can hear my six or so regular readers huffing in their living rooms: “Premee, seriously. What the hell. You were writing every couple of days. What gives?”

What gives is that (as I’ve already explained to one of my regular readers) in life, we have a thing we hold onto. Picture it as a pole, like the kind skinny Olympics people jump over - and we are all dangling from our poles, which you may call ’sanity’ or ‘normality’ or ‘happiness’ or ‘the top of the bell curve.’ So there I was, apparently hanging quite calmly and tightly onto my pole, when suddenly the insomnia pounced again and the pole grew to a foot across and began to rotate. I grabbed at it again and again and suddenly I found I had let go.

What do you fall into, if you fall off your pole? I found out in pretty short order. It felt like hitting a pool of icy water - I surfaced, spluttering, to find that everything had changed. I blew up at work, screamed at hapless consultants, cried, cursed, considered smashing things. Outside work - what outside work? - I could feel myself tilting, falling even further. It is a hard thing to do and see and feel and hear all your favourite things, recognize them as such, and be completely unaffected. It is a very hard thing. One by one, functions dropped away - I couldn’t smile, blog, cook, clean, shower, read, write, anything. All that was left was a) work, b) trying to sleep, and c) putting on a really excellent show for the few times I was invited to social events. The people I love turned into ghosts and began to disappear from my memory and my attention.

It gets so if you can’t enjoy anything, or indeed hate anything much, for a little while there’s relief - numbness comes as a relief, like having a screamingly-infected tooth pulled and leaving a void. I embraced the void for about two weeks. Reflex is amazing, really - inertia is amazing, momentum is amazing. In the mornings I’d roll out of bed crimson-eyed and hysterical after two hours of punctured sleep and something in my body would go: There’s a routine here. Standard routine. You get up, and now you walk to the kitchen - walk, remember walking? That’s it, left foot, right foot, into the kitchen. Fill the kettle. Press the switch. My brain had gone somewhere else. At work it was all I could do to focus on something for ten seconds at a stretch. Phone calls became exercises in futility for my poor consultants, who needed money and paperwork and places to put boreholes and I’d listen intently without speaking, because I couldn’t make any decisions. My manager’s manager, the department head, called me into his office and as nicely and gently as possible asked me if I were all right. I said I was fine.

But when the numbness had ended, something had moved into my head, not something new. I knew it. Some of you know it too. It is large and persistent and speaks in a curious, siren voice that is impossible to ignore for long stretches, the way it is said no woman on earth can ignore the sheer neediness of a crying baby. This new resident came with boxes and bags and suitcases full of nasty logic that I couldn’t argue against, since I couldn’t think. It sweetly said: “What do people live for? What makes them strive? It is hope for the future - and fear of the unknown. You are living by default, and default is a terrible way to live, isn’t it? Isn’t it terrible? Why not just check out early? See, you have left marks for yourself, for the next time that you knew would come when you felt like a zombie again. Just cut along the lines. And this time do it in a fucking warm bath, kid.”

The resident and I spent a few weeks writing up a memorandum for a will I never ended up formalizing. We came up with seven suicide plans and discarded the ones that didn’t fit the decision matrix for cost, convenience, pain, or likelihood of success. I wrote everything out and put them in order of preference and said, “Let’s pick a date.” This is true. Am I weeping as I write this? Would you?

I had spoken briefly to a couple of counsellors without mentioning any of these new developments; we discussed insomnia and self-nurturing and stress reduction techniques. I was threatened with involuntary commitment a couple of times, and was frightened into a semblance of normality… or a new therapist. Part of me thought: You blind, brainwashed fools - when has a potential suicide ever been persuaded to live by yoga and lavender oil? Part of me thought: Live for something. They won’t tell you what to live for, so think of something. A sizable part of me thought: But there’s nothing. Nothing! Why should I? Where do I fit in this meritocracy? When have I fully succeeded at anything without lying, cheating, or stealing the glory from someone else? I can be replaced at work and replaced in people’s hearts. Hearts aren’t so small. Hearts aren’t so hard. They’ll let anyone else in. I’ve seen that for myself. Suicide’s OK, in the grand scheme of things. Plan Number Two, actually, sounds like the winner - let’s move that up a notch, replace Plan One. We do want it to work, after all.

It’s not me, they say; it’s that some chemical in my brain decided to go on vacation without telling me. For so long I’ve been so proud of my unbalanced chemicals that I barely noticed my quality of life dropping. I thought my ruined brain was so great that it didn’t strike me as odd that all I could do was come home from work, unplug the phone, and lie face-down unsleeping on the futon for five hours, sweating in fear. My ruined brain, we’ve had some good times together. I shall miss it.

On Sunday I’m supposed to go see some guy and get hooked up with some drugs; I am paralyzed with shame and fear that it has come to this. And if it’s so shameful (you inquire), why am I even writing this post? Why am I telling everyone everything, after spending so many years denying that anything was wrong with me and it was all the world’s fault for being so crappy? Uh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m worried that the drugs will, you know, dope me into a shade of my former self and I will sit around vacantly at parties with a diet Sprite, quietly drooling into my cup with nothing to say; and this will therefore be the last shout-out from the true me. (Which is a little messed-up, let’s not forget, having fallen.) Maybe I’m worried that the drugs will steal every last thing I liked about my personality and turn me into someone else. Maybe it’s because ugly, shameful things should come out in the open once in a while so people can sigh and say “Thank God it’s not me.” Maybe it’s because I haven’t really written anything for weeks and the loss of the language has been galling me. Regardless: I throw myself open to ridicule and condescension with this post. Perhaps something good will come of it.