40th Bday Post

I stayed up until the wee hours of my birthday doing my 2013 self assessment for work.  It was actually pretty positive.  I listed all the stuff I've done, quantifying how many of this or that I did.  I found out that despite being so upset because I have more to do than I could possibly get done, I did an extraordinary amount of stuff this year!  Much of what I did was innovative, technical and complex.  I'm impressed with myself, and my boss should be too.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I'll just get a 3, "meets expectations".  The person that I watched be a total badass in 2012 only got a 3 on his review, and left shortly thereafter.  But despite what the boss does with it *I* know that this year I was a badass.

The outpouring of good wishes for my health and birthday has been really touching!  At work they outdid themselves decorating my cube and did a card where everyone signs.  Some people have reached out specifically and said some of the nicest and unexpected things.  Thank you all so much!

I'm going to get off here now and go see what sort of trouble I can get into!

Operation Fix Me

Hi!  So I'm not doing so well.  There's a post down there I didn't even share because I wrote it in half-on crisis mode.  Here's the biggest problem.  Full on crisis mode for me is bad, folks.  My anxiety attacks include lovely things like screaming (loudly), falling on the floor, drooling, choking and gasping for breath.  (I looked on youtube for an example but none of them are as bad as mine.) I can NOT afford to have one of these at work.  If I did I'm sure an ambulance would be called, and I have very very serious reasons why I MUST not be 5150'd.  Of course, trying to make sure I don't leads to additional anxiety.  I had to take an Ativan at work yesterday, it sucked.  My brain was dulled.

So...operation fix me has started.  I told my counselor what was going on (I had an anxiety attack over telling her about my anxiety attacks, so meta!) I asked for two weeks off work.  I told my manager that I am having health issues, and I told my new lead, who I trust implicitly, exactly what was going on.  I have today and Monday off to start, and then I will return to work for two weeks of training up my lead and new colleague to do what I'm doing and then I'm out of there for two whole weeks and I will NOT be logging on for anything less than a balls-out emergency.  Letting go of work is hard though.  Maybe because I feel important there, and I really like feeling important.  Also, my responsibility, which creeps back in in an, "I'm the only one who knows how to do these 100 things, who will do them if I'm not there?"  and "I got three x yesterday that I need to do y to but I didn't get to them even working 12 hours a day, what's going to happen?"   I'm going to get in trouble.  When people ask why something is not done the only thing I can say is, "Sorry, I didn't have time."  No one likes that answer.

Today is kind of worky.  I had to log on to approve a ticket I promised to approve, and later I have to log on to write my year end review, due today and haven't started.  :-/  I'm home though, and hiding on IM so no one can bug me unless they know the trick of checking to see if someone is hiding on IM or really offline.

I'm going to be posting short posts about operation fix me I think.  Today I'm having my nails done, because they are falling off.  We're going to Ikea to buy pillows for the whole family and have some meatballs.  Ikea is a fun place for us, like an adult playground where we ooh and ahhh over the interesting designs and fall in love with the ingenuity of the cabinetry and stuff.  It's getting kind of late, so the nails and Ikea might happen in the other order.  Then I have to take Evy to exchange with her dad for the weekend.

Tomorrow is my 40th birthday, which is playing a part in my anxiety, but I think it's a peripheral part, like, the anxiety from work spills over into everything and makes it bad too.  Poor Sheldon!  He's the one I'm always with when I finally break and have an attack.  I'm sure it's because it's the only time I really feel like I can be myself is with him, but really, poor guy!  He's being really great about it, but I can see he's becoming exhausted as well trying to support everything else so I can keep it together enough to continue working.

Whoops, start over.  Tomorrow is my 40th birthday and I was able to Priceline a nice hotel in Oakland for $60 (thanks to Judge for reminding me again how to Priceline properly), so we'll be playing in the City Saturday and Sunday.  I'm not planning anything specific, I mostly like looking at the people and architecture and pigeons and other city stuff, but a good meal or two will probably be had.  I have Monday off to rest.  My sleep has been utter shite lately.

Still Not OK

I think I've cracked, or am about to, because I can't seem to pull myself together. I'm back at work today (we were allowed to work at home for Christmas and New Years weeks) but I can't stop crying. It feels like every aspect in my life is just bad. Everywhere I look everything's all wrong, it's bad, and I don't have the mental resources to deal with any of it. I'm back in debt, over $1000 now. My mental health out of pocket costs are $235 a month. My work, I don't think I can deal with changing jobs, but I can't deal with the one I'm doing either. We're finally getting a new person at work to be above me, so I go back to being a peon instead of being a peon trying to do peon and senior work both. This is the third time this has happened in a year though, and I feel like I could DO all the senior work if I didn't also have my peon work to do, but no one has given me a chance to try, they just give the interesting work to someone else. It just looks like I'm a great big failure because I can't do both jobs well. My kid just got back from 2 weeks away and her new favorite thing to do is scream "I hate you" at Sheldon. The house is a mess, there's no food and no money AND I need gas, so a couple hundred more will go on the credit card. I can't find time to exercise and I'm not sleeping well at all. Oh, I also have this check to deal with for my 401k rollover, but now that it has gone past the first I don't know how the taxes will work, and also my kid has been termed from her insurance due to the ACA, so now I have to figure out how to work that before March 1 too.

Secret Nutters

So, about 10 minutes after that last post, probably because I let my guard down before it was time, I had the biggest anxiety attack I've had in years.  Thank goodness it was NOT a screaming one, but it  awful enough that I asked Sheldon if he thought I needed to go to the hospital or something.  It's really embarrassing too.  Having anxiety attacks makes me feel crazy and ashamed.

I've been really careful since then to keep an eye on how I'm feeling and try and tend it so it doesn't get out of hand.  I've continued to believe the work stuff is not all my fault and that's helping.  On Christmas I started to feel anxiety coming on and took an ativan for the fist time that wasn't for something like flying or surgery.  I didn't want to break my "streak" of not having to take them but it seemed more practical to break the streak and not have an anxiety attack in the middle of Christmas dinner.

During times of anxiety I also get this really fun thing where I'm able to leap to big conclusions in a single bound.  For example, today we put away Christmas and I saw Sheldon lovingly packing away his Star Trek ornaments into a special box.  Immediately I figure that he is of course separating them so if he decides to leave me this year they will be easy to grab.  I KNOW this is likely ridiculous, and I'm super lucky to have Sheldon and friends who I can say, "Hey, I want you to know that I am feeling this thing that I am pretty sure is unreasonable and it would be really helpful if we could speak briefly about it."

I'm going to be working set hours and making sure I don't get too emotionally involved in work and then trying to get a handle on my mind and health and stuff.  I need to make time for exercise and eating healthy.  I KNOW that doing those things improves my physical and emotional health more than anything else.  I KNOW how to do them, and it kind of baffles me how I just slip so easily back into gluttony and sloth when I feel so much better when I do them and worse when I don't.

I looked up loving kindness meditation the other night, but when I got to the bits where I'm supposed to be loving and kind and forgiving to myself I just couldn't make myself buy in.  When I see my friends having a hard time it's really easy for me to empathize and be understanding about all the things that contributed to their hard time.  When I turn it inward though I can pick at every time I slacked when I should have been working harder, and I know all the times when I played when I could have been working towards my goals, and I can't say I did my best, so how can I be forgiving?