The downpour of my mind

 December 18,2020

2:00am

No music

The sound of the downpour outside is filling the living room. A repetitive clanging is coming from the vent pipe for our gas fireplace as the water tries to find a route into the room and were it an undamaging thing to do, I would try to find a way to help it. I love the sound of the rain falling and that’s a little strange so far as I’m concerned. I find it calming but the sound is a cacophony of randomness and chaos which is how my brain normally is. It’s coming in waves now, heavy then light, just like the waves of uncontrolled emotions which rule my life. 

It is two o'clock in the morning and I should be asleep but my brain won’t slow down long enough for that to happen. I’ve spent many nights like this throughout my years going back to before I was a teen. Some of my earliest memories were from before I was seven or eight years old, laying in my bed with a small transistor radio beneath my pillow as I listened to the hockey games until four or five hours after I was supposed to be asleep. Then I would lie and look at the ceiling, my brain creating swirling patterns akin to paisley or fractals which I could actually see in my bedroom. I’d fall asleep sometime after midnight and then be up for school at seven: not nearly enough sleep on a daily basis for a child of that age but my parents never knew and I never told.

It was at this age that my anxiety first began to rear its ugly head, making me nauseous just looking at my morning oatmeal or my eggs, which I was supposed to dip my toast in and sop up the disgusting runny yolk.

A little older now at ten, my bedroom was moved downstairs and was close to the rec room my parents had set up. We had a large, thick piece of sponge which would go in the opening between the two rooms in place of a bedroom door. The foam had a vertical seam in it and I had torn through it just enough so that I could stand and watch the TV in the other room while my brother and sister were up later each night than I was supposed to be. It was around this time that I remember the nuclear holocaust film THREADS played on TV for the first time and I watched through the hole in the sponge. The uncensored and gruesome images of nuclear war I saw as a child still haunt me to this day. 

Now I had my first full blown panic attack at the UBC museum of Anthropology. My teacher recognized it as something strange but it was passed off as a one time thing, never to happen again. Not true, I learned to hide it better, often excusing myself to the washroom when my heart began beating through my chest and I was unable to catch my breath.

Still, I was awake late into each night. Now I was twelve and had a ghetto blaster with a pair of headphones so I could listen without the possibility of being caught for having the radio too loud.. On top of listening to hockey games  I would often stay up until two am listening to the local radio station playing radio science fiction and other classic radio plays from the early days of broadcasting in the late nineteen thirties. I knew who the characters The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Digby O’Dell all were. I would lay there listening to whatever they would play, secretly hoping for a science fiction play from X Minus One or Dimension X, some of which I can remember all these 35 years later. One of the most popular radio shows was called Lights Out and ominously ended each episode with the phrase, “It...is...later...than...you...think.” Still, I would crawl out of bed at seven am to get ready for school, my parents none the wiser.

Soon we moved into a larger house and the radio wasn’t enough to keep my mind occupied while I lay in bed at night. I began reading the encyclopedia, from beginning to end including the year end additions my parents paid for. It was a World Book edition so the writing was at my already advanced reading level. I wonder what I would have done had my parents sprung for the higher level Britannica encyclopedia, but I digress. In months, I had burned through all the volumes and needed something else to occupy my mind. I was awake until three or four most nights now. I began borrowing/stealing my sister’s collection of young adult romance novels. Sweet Valley High and others were not exactly what most 13 year olds were reading but I was devouring the written word but had access to very little so what was there was what I read. I was down to three or four hours of sleep most school nights but soon, two new wrinkles would change everything.

My father had been spending the summers in Toronto for the past couple of years. He was in construction and work in BC was slim so he’d drive to Ontario and work the long days there while saving up everything he could and coming back in the fall when the snow came to Toronto and the construction scene would slow down there as well. He would then go on unemployment for six months until he’d head back East the following spring. This went on for a couple of years and no doubt contributed to me being able to stay awake into the late hours each night without getting caught.

It was also this time that I began playing rep hockey, a higher competitive level of the game where, rather than only playing teams from my small town, we played teams from around the Vancouver area. But ice time was at a premium so rather than practices being at reasonable times in the evening once or twice a week, they were at four or five in the morning leaving the evening ice times for games with the other towns. My sleep went from minimal to non-existent once or twice per week as I would be awake until my alarm would go off telling me that it was time to get up for practice at four fifteen in the morning. Still, I got good grades, was a year ahead in math and was ready for high school to come along and knock me down.

My first fall and winter of high school were horrible. I was bullied nearly every day and beaten once every couple of weeks. I was awkward, overweight, in choir and a nerd, a deadly combination as far as high school survival goes. To this day, I believe the only reason I didn’t have it even worse was because I was still playing hockey, as well as volleyball, which gave me a little bit of credibility. As bad as it was for me, there were others who had it far worse.

Near Christmas of my grade eight year I had an accident at home, falling down while jumping off the couch and landing on the dog. I fell forward and landed on the empty juice glass which had been sitting beside me on the carpet. When I got my balance and looked at my hand, a gash was in my palm, blood was pouring out at a terrifying rate and my brother who was staring at me was in utter shock. He picked me up and dragged me into the kitchen where he wrapped a tea towel around my hand in an attempt for pressure to stop the bleeding. It was soon apparent that this wouldn’t work so he grabbed me and took me to his car where he sped us both to the local hospital. In the ten minutes it took to get there, not only were the tea towel and my sweatpants soaked in blood, but a puddle had formed on the floor of his car. I was taken into the emergency department and quickly rushed in for life and hand saving surgery. As I type this at forty six years old, it has only now occurred to me that this trauma may have affected me in ways I never realized and was clearly the first time I faced death for had things not happened as quickly as they did, I would surely have died.

That spring would be the last time my father would head east. Given an opportunity he said was too good to pass up, he chose to stay in Toronto that year and seek his financial windfall, being written into a woman’s will as her sole heir of her $750,000 estate. He never called my mother and told her about this. Rather, he wrote her a letter and told her of the choice he had made. He never explained any of this to me, once stating that I was handling it all like a child because I had nothing to say to him.

So there I was, going into my grade nine year, sleeping three or four hours and night, being bullied and beaten, suffering from anxiety and panic attacks and ostracised by nearly all of my peers each day. I guess you could say that when the depression set in it was inevitable. The small amount of homework I had needed to do to keep up with my courses over the years now dropped off to nothing. I coasted on what I learned from the lectures and lessons each day. This sufficed in classes like math and science where the marks were almost entirely based upon test scores but I quickly fell behind in English and Social Studies, where homework played a key role in my grades. In a normal home, when an intelligent student begins to fall behind the parents step in and crack down on him, at least making them do their homework if not trying to find out what was going on, but i was no longer in a normal home. 

Unbeknownst to me, my mother was barely hanging on. Working full time, she was forced to sell the home and move us into a townhome across town, a home small enough where she could afford the mortgage payments. She was barely mentally and financially skating by and was in no place to come down on her son whose grades were slipping but was still passing. It was all she could do to stuff all of the problems she had down inside and just get through each day. The fact that she coped in this way was not lost on me, and I learned to stuff my emotions and problems deep inside where they could not bother me anymore.

I was 15 when we moved into the townhome, having now taken on a job to have a little spending money and the freedom to buy some new clothes from time to time. I also quit playing hockey. My weight had begun to bloom due to my emotional eating as I tried to cope with what was going on around me and even my teammates had begun to bully me about my size. The last thing I wanted to do was take my clothes off around a bunch of other boys teasing me three or four days a week. I actually wasn’t that big but stopping hockey and working in a restaurant was going to change all that and what little self esteem I had crashed as the number on the scale went up. Still, if my mother recognized any problem I was having I didn’t hear about it from her. By this time I had failed courses for the first time. I was now a year behind my peers in Social Studies and, far worse, English. Falling behind in that course meant that I was now repeating the tenth grade and unless I figured out a way around it, I wouldn’t be graduating with my friends.

Still, the bullying and occasional beatings at school continued. Now I was a target for being the kid who was too stupid to pass his courses, despite my straight A’s in the sciences and math ad because I was getting good grades in those courses my mother never came down on me about my grades. Instead, she stuffed her frustration inside and so did I. I no longer had a father and now I barely had a mother. She was distant and difficult to talk to. An example of this is that I never received the sex talk from her, so I grew up not even understanding that girls, and eventually women, were interested in sex as well. I thought, based on what the media around me had taught me, that they did it as a favour to men they cared about. My self esteem was so low that I never thought a girl should have to do a “favour” for me like that so when girls would make overtures towards me I would rebuff them. I was like this until after I lost my virginity at twenty three years old. I was emotionally and relationship stunted because my view on everything had been filtered through those damn Sweet Valley High books which preached romance and niceness and sacrifice for the woman you cared for. Never did I learn that relationships were about honesty about oneself as much as they were about honesty to the other person.

Alone and not understanding relationships at all, my depression blossomed in the well fertilized ground within me. I didn’t think I was deserving of love and never wanted to force anyone to care for me. The few times I opened up my heart I was rejected forcefully so I  learned to keep those feelings to myself. I became convinced that anyone who showed even a shred of feelings for me would break my heart eventually. Looking back now, this lesson being taught at such a young age, is obviously the roots of my borderline personality taking hold. Combined with the vitally growing anxiety and depression within, the BPD would colour the rest of my life.

So now the question is which came first, the BDP or the sleepless nights and the inability to form close, trusting relationships with those around me. I honestly don’t know. Due to my other complicating illnesses and how long they have been affecting me, the BPD line is disturbingly blurred. If my father had not left, or at least had not left in such a callus and unfeeling manner, would I still be dealing with BPD today? After all, the sleepless nights and the bullying were there before he left and the life threatening event of my hand injury may have been the trauma which triggered my BDP. I mean, what twelve year old is going to come that close to death without some sort of mental scarring. Maybe I was just genetically predisposed for all this to have happened the way it did or maybe I can lay all the blame squarely on my father. How much of this is my fault? How much of this is my mother’s fault for never teaching me the healthy coping skills I needed or for even making me do my fucking homework.

I look back thirty and forty years to the person I once was and I wish I could figure out where it all went so wrong. They say that depression is living in the past and anxiety is living in the future. For a normal person with those disorders the solution is simple if difficult: learn to live in the present. But, for a person with BPD added atop those problems the solution may be impossible and is, at the very least, improbable. Through medication and treatment, depression and anxiety can be controlled and even cured in many cases but there is no cure and no medication for borderline personality disorder. There are only coping mechanisms which require deep therapy with a committed counselling partner. This is not available to me because I am living on minimal funds and cannot afford the $150 per session, $450 a week, needed to implement the dialectical behavioral therapy which borderline patients need. I have a workbook on DBT which explains how it all is supposed to work but my cognitive abilities are limited to writing like this and trying to keep a check on my hygiene.

As much as there are millions of other BPD sufferers out there, I am alone in this and perhaps that’s the greatest little piece of irony about my life. I am terrified of being hurt by those I care about and maybe the person I’m most afraid of is myself because in the end, no matter how much work I do and how much I get past my other problems, I only have the barricade of myself to get passed and that’s the one brick wall I never learned to knock down, the one ball of suppressed thoughts and emotions I’ve never learned to cope with. I know I am not the one to blame about how I ended up here but am I the only one to blame because I can get out of this hole I am in?

The rain has stopped and the world is silent once again. My brain has begun to fill the silence with the questions which haunt my life and my hope of quieting them by writing them here has failed. I am again alone with the non-loneliness of my existence for I will never be by myself again.  constantly surrounded by the voices which haunt me, like a pounding rain which ebbs and flows in it’s power but never completely subsides. 

Rambling thoughts from a suicidal mind.

December 17, 2020
Written while listening to Evermore by Taylor Swift

So I made it out.

Such a small thing but on days like today, at least in my current mindset, this feels huge. I just needed to get out and away from my mother. I love her but 9 months of listening to her has pushed me to the edge some days and after almost biting her head off for nothing this morning told me that today was one of those days. Part of me wants to let loose on her and the other wants to let loose on myself.

In a direct way, it’s not her fault but if you look around the corner at where I come from, maybe it’s more her fault than I want to admit. I know that a huge part of who I became is the direct result of my father leaving the way he did but I’m wondering how much of me is built upon the foundation provided by my mother’s reaction to being left so coldly. I have no doubt that she did the best she could, coping without turning to alcohol or any other immediately self destructive behaviour. But she also turned inside herself,  never letting out the anger that built up, thinking that it was best that her kids not see her break down. 

Now, that’s how I live my life or at least that’s my go to coping mechanism; denial, painful yet simple. My father leaving without saying word one to any of us kids about it, never trying to keep a relationship of any kind with us. He ghosted us, never facing the people he must have known he was going to hurt, including my mother by having split with her via a letter rather than even a phone call. My mother pretending that everything was normal even after she knew he was never coming back. What else was I going to learn but to ignore what was happening to myself in my relationships, to never constructively ask for my needs to be fulfilled. By shoving everything down and ignoring others I guess I never learned to even recognize what those needs were.

And now I’m 46, pushing 47, unable to set boundaries or put my needs on par with those of others. I sacrifice parts of myself in an attempt to receive love from others. I ignore even the basic things like hygiene and eating, literally forgetting that they are important. It isn’t like bulimia or anorexia where the person is in a constant battle with food. I just don’t remember, to the point where I end up with a headache and wonder why. 

This is why it’s so important and even surprising that I stay on my meds, twice a day every day. A handful in the morning and a handful in the evening. I’ve never felt what so many others in my shoes have battled, when their minds are telling them that they just don’t need their meds any more. I feel nothing but empathy for those who struggle to stay on their meds, especially those who are bipolar. It must be incredibly difficult to fight through the high that bipolar brings and remain medicated. I just take my meds like a good little boy, trusting that the doctor who prescribed them knows enough about me to  prescribe the correct pills. 

But I hate my meds all the same. I hate that they make me sleep. I hate that they keep me awake. I hate that they mess with my sex drive. I hate that they keep me from being who I truly am. I hate that they keep me from recognizing who I truly am. I hate the mental fog they create. I hate them almost as much as I hate my father and what my mother taught me.

I'm not ok.

Eight years ago, I was forced to move in with my mother after a nervous breakdown and near suicide. She has never understood just how bad off I was and still am most days. I know this because she has told me so and I have stopped sharing with her as a result.

I can deal with all that but what really bothers me right now is when someone asks how I am handling things she says he's doing fine, being polite and not wanting to worry anyone, convincing herself that if she doesn't ask me she can assume I'm ok.

But I'm not ok. I'm barely sleeping through the night, taking two or three naps throughout the day. I'm functioning for two hours tops out of every twenty four. I'm fighting back tears every day. Due to her age and immunocompromised state, I have to self isolate as if I've been exposed to COVID or the town is in complete lockdown. 

Yesterday, I wanted to go to my old work, a local restaurant, just to have coffee and get out for a while but I had to choose to stay home instead, protecting her health. See, I don't care if I die of COVID but I can't take her down with me so I remain locked inside my condo like a prisoner and zit is not good for my mental health. I look forward to having to take the garbage downstairs so I can have five minutes to myself. 

I don't know how much longer I can do this. When the vaccine becomes available I'm hoping she'll get it but I cannot, due to my own immunocompromising medication. If she doesn't get it, then I'll be trapped at home until herd immunity is reached, around another year from now. 

I get through life day by day, my mental health dragging me down. I'm about to have another cup of coffee, something I seldom do, because my brother and his family are coming to town. My mother has decided that she wants to break provincial health guidelines and meet up with them, to which I'm being dragged along. So, I have to stay awake rather than going back to bed. I won't be in great shape no matter what I do so, although it's only 6:30am I'm going to be spiking this coffee with whiskey in an attempt to keep awake and mellow at the same time. I'm beyond the occasional day drinking, moving on to morning drinking: self medication at its finest.

I hope you all have a better day than what I am about to endure.

Be well.

The Last Day

 (written on my last day in CRESST, 2016)

I’m not better.

I’ve been here for ten or eleven days, I’m not even sure anymore, and I still don’t see any reason for hope. I wanted this journal to be so much more than it is. Looking back over the last week and a half I feel as though I have wasted my time here and today they are making me leave, ending up in the same place I was when I began my stay. 

I’m titling this final chapter The Last Day in honour of the TV show Red Dwarf episode of that title. In it, the mechanoid finds out that it’s his last day to exist, his replacement about to arrive on the spaceship he lives upon. His crewmates throw him a goodbye party, during which he experiences his first emotions and realizes that he doesn’t want it all to be over. The mechanoid finds a reason to hope for more in the future.

This has not occurred for me and I feel like I’m in a worse place than I was in when I first arrived. All that being here has done is reinforce the only reason I have to stay alive: my mother and the damage that killing myself would do to her. I have made a couple friendships in here and I have a new diagnosis but neither of those things change the position I am in. The psychiatrist recommended a book for me to get, so I could learn about my possible borderline personality disorder, but I tried to tell him I can’t concentrate long enough to read anymore. Because I can’t read anymore I can’t realistically go back to school again. It would just be a waste of the government’s money. I am beyond hope, a waste of effort. I am only treading water until I eventually succumb to the waves around me. It’s like I can taste the salt water splashing in my mouth even now and I’m no longer afraid of what that first mouthful of seawater would mean.

I don’t write this for the person who eventually reads it. I’m only trying my damndest to understand it myself, how a person’s need for self preservation could be so low that they would think this way. I know it’s abnormal. I know it means my brain is broken but I need to know if it’s broken like a car, and can be fixed, or broken like an old cell phone, worthless as anything other than spare parts or recycling. I’m not contributing to society and am actively dragging down those around me, living off of charity from the government simply because my brain has decided that it doesn’t want to function anymore.

Wait, that’s wrong. There’s nothing simple about it. There’s no doubt that I am complex as hell and my mental illnesses only compound that fact. I am intelligent and caring but I am also constantly in desperate need of attention while trying to avoid human contact. I am the very definition of a paradox, never to be resolved in any sense be it in the physical or psychological. I have no hope that will change at any point in the future unless a miracle occurs in the realm of psychology. There is no drug for borderline and the ones they keep giving me for my anxiety and depression are not working. Pristiq, the only one that ever worked at all is $130 a month and enables me to function for about 2 hours a day. 

How can I be expected to exist like this for the foreseeable future? I need purpose and have none. I need a reason but cannot see one. I want to find something which would justify my existence but am failing miserably. Is that a fault of myself? Am I such a failure that I can’t even come up with a solution to the simplest, most basic question we all must deal with in our lives but I am having trouble even defining what that question is. 

Perhaps it’s a question of what contribution I leave for the following generations. What if it’s how I help my fellow man in the present? Should I be fighting for a better understanding of our past so that we can have a better future?

I am lost and helpless.

And I have to go home.

Morning Frustration

 After I first left my job at Ricky’s, I used to go in for coffee so I could write. I was already planning my suicide but it was a safe place to go where I knew I could write in peace. It didnt hurt that I was still getting free coffee from the owner. There was a server who didn’t like the fact that I would take up one of her tables in the corner and not have a full meal so eventually I started going to the local Starbucks to work. 

At Starbucks, I could be left alone and I made sure I was a gold star customer there, entitled to free refills on their coffee and teas. The only drawback with trying to work at Starbucks in this area is that the church crowd comes in for hours at a time each day to congratulate themselves on being born into the correct Christian belief system, as opposed to one of the tens of thousands of other religious systems. One day, I made the mistake of engaging with them and pointing out the holes in their logic to which they were not impressed and explained away my points by saying that you just had to have faith. Leaving quoting George Michael’s most famous song on the table, I resolved to never debate them again and always have headphones with me so that I wouldn’t have to even acknowledge them ever again. It was a peaceful solution which worked for me and if they saw me as a heathen deserving of hellfire, so be it. 

Covid has put a kink in that solution. A place to sit in any of the local Starbucks is a rarity these days and because I rely on transit to get out and about, an anxiety riddled problem in its own right, I could be trapped at a coffee shop without a place to sit and work without my ride home coming for at least an hour. I could ask my mother for rides but at 78 I don’t like bothering her or her aching back unless it’s a necessity. I could also use taxis, Uber or Lyft to get around, but the problem of seating still applies and I could be paying upwards of $20 each way for the privilege of standing with a rapidly cooling coffee and nowhere to get any writing done.

Now, I don’t want you to think that me not having a chance to write is anything more than a first world problem to most people but to me it’s a little more important than that. Writing is often the only time I get out of the house and when you’re a shut in like I am any chance to be comfortable in an environment outside my home is, for lack of a better word, a real blessing. Going beyond that, my writing is also often the best distraction I have away from my mental illnesses. I need to write to keep somewhat sane. NUmerous attempts have been made over the years to write at home without any success: I am uncomfortable trying to do any mental work in the condo to the point where I get nothing done. When I was back in school I could not get any work done at home. If you were a forty-something man living with your seventy-ish mother I doubt you’d ever get totally comfortable trying to accomplish any task which is completely self serving.

So I write when I’m not home.

And that brings us today. I am doing the fruit and veggie shopping today so I stopped at Ricky’s, hoping the staff would leave me alone so I could accomplish something of substance even if it would only be myself who would appreciate it. Two tables away, that distance being welcomed due to social distancing, is a group of three men from one of the three local Christian schools how to organize a prayer group for a COVID stricken household. Putting aside how useless prayer is and how much more help they could be if they just did some practical things like shopping for the household, that means I’m stuck once again next to a group of men whose ideology I find morally repugnant and have to listen to while I am trying to get some creative juices flowing. 

Sitting next to groups like this is not the same as if they were a Christian family. It seems to me, based on my experiences, that once you introduce a woman into the mix the arrogance of men believing they are chosen to be above all other than God herself is tamped down to a background level. A pseudo humility seems to kick in, keeping the conversation at a polite if not secular level. Instead, one of the three men just compared himself to Peter from the Bible. Imagine the arrogance which must exist in a person’s mind to see themselves as equal to a person they see as an actual saint. 

Now I have been accused of being arrogant throughout my life. I am smarter than the average bear and I have known it for all of my existence but no matter what my opinion of myself was, at any particular time, it was never so high that I thought I was better than the majority of the people standing beside me. Drug addicts, most criminals, and especially women and other underrepresented populations in our world were always just another group of people who existed with me in this crazy broken world.Sure, there are criminals (and politicians) whose existence makes me reconsider the idea of non-violence but they are the minority of this world. These men to my left are not like me. They see the world as fallen and themselves and those who agree with them as the only ones worthy of saving. No matter how far I stretch my mind, even if I go back to the days when I too was a believer, I cannot ever remember or consider that the rest of the world was beneath me in that manner. Even now, as I listen to these arrogant men I am unable to see them as anything more than victims of a cult-like belief system which has twisted their morality beyond its breaking point.

So, here I sit frustrated and only able to write about what it is which is bothering me rather than the things I would rather explore. There is the most important election of our time occurring in America in 5 days. There is potentially going to be another Armenian genocide any day now. Roving bands of government “police” are killing random citizens in Nigeria. But I can’t concentrate on those things this morning. Instead, I am forced to listen to three men planning how to cram as many people as possible in their school’s gymnasium for Sunday’s non-socially distanced religious brainwashing session. At a time when even close relatives are being warned against gathering together due to the exploding numbers of infections these men are planning, with a clear conscience, another of their weekly superspreader events. 

Another grumble of laughter comes from the table and I am forced to wonder if they realize they are planning the potential death of one or more of the people they are claiming to care for? Somehow, I doubt it. After all, the afterlife matters more to them than anything which happens on this planet, any situation where they can be tangibly helpful, any outcome which comes from the actions they take or fail to take in this world. I wish they could see the world as I see it: a chance to help people escape suffering in the only life we know we will ever get.

 

Being Nice - A Letter

I'm watching the movie Stakeout and I just realized why something you said tweeked me a little.

There's a scene in the movie where the woman tells the man he's "nice" and it really bugs him, cause he gets it all the time. He compares it being called "medium". 

My whole life I've been called nice, when I've been able to shove down my BPD tendencies at least and it's always kind of bothered me too. You only get so far by being nice. Maybe that's why I like it a little when my BPD takes over from time to time, why it feels good to let loose. 

Anyways, I know you didn't mean anything by it and I'm not upset or anything. It's just that you're the closest thing I have to a therapist in my life right now and I needed to let that out.

Stay warm. Be well.

Musings of a bored, depressed and anxiety filled mind

 October 21,2020

I’m sitting in my old work, Ricky’s, the restaurant that pushed me to make the final decision to end my life eight and half years ago. Sometimes being here is a comfort. After all, I spent twenty years working here so despite all the renovations and staff changeover it is at the very least a reminder of nearly half of my life. On the other hand, it’s also the place that caused me the most stress and anxiety I ever faced in my life. To say that I have mixed feelings about being here is a severe and complex understatement.

But I had to do something and go somewhere. I have been up since 3am this morning was becoming restlessness incarnate. On a normal day when I take my morning medication it knocks me out for at least two hours and often for as long as five but today is a wednesday and it’s the day that the gardeners are on site to mow the lawns and use leafblowers outside my bedroom for ninety minutes or so. If I don’t fall asleep before they begin, then I am stuck awake until after they leave and by that time, my meds have worn off. So here I sit, both comfortable and full of anxiety, trying to quell my palpitating heart by writing about how awkward I feel.

Marcia and Laura are both here, two of the waitresses I used to work with back in the day and they keep coming over to me and trying to chat, to catch up with old times but I’d much rather that they just leave me alone. I can’t ever get any work of substance done here because they keep interrupting me so I write this babbling soliloquy instead. I know they are just trying to be friendly but I have my laptop out and am judiciously tapping away with my fingers. You’d think that one or the other would get the hint. I won’t be rude and tell them to leave me alone. I’ll be happy when this COVID stuff is done with and I can again go back to working at a Starbucks, where they leave me alone to my work. 

I have invited Oscar out for breakfast and will know in a few minutes if he can make it out. I’m not really sure I want to spend any time with him but he’s as susceptible as I am to depression so I thought I’d reach out for a change. He has so much going on in his life right now it’s bound to be a stimulating conversation. Oscar has been diagnosed with an auto immune disease which will eventually take his life and has a baby on the way, a decision no doubt influenced by his currently limited quality of life and the ticking clock following him around each day. 

Sitting where I am I can see the front of the restaurant quite well and a couple just tried to seat themselves and had to be stopped by the hostess. In the middle of a pandemic they chose to ignore all the signs asking them to wait to be seated, sanitize their hands upon entry, and give their phone numbers to the staff, in case contact tracing is necessary. They looked quite annoyed when they were asked to follow the rules. It might just be a Karen and Kevin situation. Wait, and a third person just came in to sit at the same table and she refused to use sanitizer. What hell is wrong with people? I’ve been trying to understand this mentality since the pandemic became apparent and have been unable to figure out a logical point of view which would account for it. Is it willful ignorance? Is it simple lack of intelligence? Or perhaps they are conspiracy believers, that the entire world is out to control them by making them hide their face and nose?

To a certain degree I wish I could believe like they do, Dunning-Kruger effect in full effect and keeping me from understanding how little has been done, how many sick people there are and how much worse it is likely to get before the situation improves. I was recently asked if I preferred, in general, the level of knowledge I have now compared to what I had in the past and I said I’d choose my current level although in the past, ignorance truly was bliss. It’s like my lack of belief in a god. Maybe I’d be better able to deal with my mental illnesses if I believed there was a reason for how I felt and yet I am forced to come to the conclusion that had I never believed I may have asked for help much sooner, leaving me in a much better mental state than I am currently in. But as they say, if wishes were horses…