It's the full moon

It's late. I want to sleep, but my brain is keeping me awake. Whenever I have a sleepless night like this, at some point I give up on sleep and get out of bed. I always stop and look out the back window to check the moon's status. Tonight, it's full. Of course. What is it with me and the full moon?

I'm so tired, but not sleepy. I worked out every day this week. I've earned a good night's sleep, haven't I? Wouldn't it be great if we could occasionally get a tune-up of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala?

The stories I hear

I know I've been quiet lately--I've been making new friends and indulging my ADD on Twitter. That being said, I miss blogging and think about my blog every day. There are still a lot of thoughts in my head that need to be explored and put into some sort of order. I'm working on that.

In the meantime, I want to share something that has been making the rounds in my world of refugee resettlement. UNHCR asks the question, if you had to flee your country, what would you take with you? Why? I actually explore this question with the people who attend my seminars and presentations. What you think you would take is probably not what you'd end up with at all.

When I first looked at this slide show and read the stories that accompany the pictures, I broke down and cried. The reaction surprised me because I hear stories like this--first person accounts of loss and survival--on a regular basis. Only the names and locations have changed.

I encourage you to take the 15 minutes you'll need to look at these pictures and read the accompanying stories. Working with people like those profiled here is the core of my life's meaning. It's the reason I haven't killed myself, and it's the reason I get up on the days I don't want to. I try not to indulge that dark side of myself because I believe I have something to offer to those who who are in far worse circumstances than I have ever experienced.

I'm not sure if this will help you understand me better or not, but these people are exactly the kind of people I try to help every day. I can't change anything that happened to them, but I can help guide them as they try to navigate a new chapter to what has often been a heartbreaking story.

The most important thing
"What would you bring with you if you had to flee your home and escape to another country? This is the second part of an ongoing project that asks refugees from different parts of the world, “What is the most important thing you brought from home?” The first installment focused on refugees fleeing from Sudan to South Sudan, who openly carried pots, water containers and other objects to sustain them along the road.

By contrast, people seeking sanctuary from the conflict in Syria must typically conceal their intentions by appearing as though they are out for a family stroll or a Sunday drive as they make their way towards the border."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/unhcr/sets/72157632821759954/

Oh, that again

Whenever my stress gets high and my mood gets low, I get flare-ups of shingles pain. Almost five years after the initial episode, I struggle to accept this is something I'll be dealing with for the rest of my life.

I can't figure out if I have a very inefficient immune system or if my central nervous system is so sensitive that any prolonged stress triggers a shingles response.

May is not a happy girl.

Evolution

I need a new job. I've outgrown the one I have and it's choking me. It's cutting off my psychological circulation.

Time to go, but where? That's the question I can't answer. I think I may be finished with helping people for a living, though.

I'm tapped out.

I may be ready to call it quits all around. I've been treading water, and I'm tired. Just so tired.

And irrelevant.

I'm sad

I'm sad, I'm sad, I'm sad, I'm sad, I'm sad...

I think all the time I've been spending on Twitter has eliminated my ability to write or express myself articulately. Boo to that, right?

That being said, I don't need to write a long essay. I feel like crap. Change is hard. I'm lonely. I want to die.

OK, then, I think that about sums it up.

Here's the thing

I'm so fucking depressed I can barely function. I don't think I've ever had anxiety this bad in my entire life.

Home, sweet home

After I spent a week at my mother's house, I became deeply afraid that my house would become like hers--a small space crammed with teetering piles of collected crap she has no emotional connection with. A dirty, dusty, cluttered space where there's no place to just sit and relax, and no space to spread out.

Frank and I have been trying to declutter our own house and to get caught up on the dusting. This house is chronically dusty, a result of pets, a dry climate, and forced hot-air heat. Dust is my mortal enemy. Nothing aggravates my otherwise-mild asthma faster. Except maybe mold.

There's also the seep-seated hate of dusting that comes out of my childhood. Doing the dishes and the dusting were chores assigned to me at about the age of seven. As a small child, I was overwhelmed by how any things I had to move from any given surface to get to the actual task at hand. Later, much later, I had a job in a shop that carried any kind of high-end, ridiculously priced knick-knack you could think of, from oversized brass jacks to large, porcelain Capodimonte figurines. A big part of my job was to keep these hundred of items dust-free. The tedium of it made me want to keep my own living space free of decorative items that required dusting. I've never succeeded at that, mostly because other people keep buying me doo-dads I don't want. We have boxes of these things in the basement. Boxes.

In the course of my adult life, the level of neatness in my home is always a direct reflection of my mood and overall emotional wellbeing. Since Frank I and I live in such a small house, it doesn't take much to tip the balance from reasonably lived-in to overwhelmed by papers, magazines, bags, books, gadget components, instruction manuals, and who knows what else. Stuff. Just lots of stuff. My mood hasn't been great lately, and so, the piles have grown. I've been feeling claustrophobic, so this weekend we started chipping away at the crap.

The living room has been purged of everything that isn't supposed to be there. The furniture has been dusted, the wood polished, the floor vacuumed, the coverlets washed. I took pictures because it's so rare for this room to be neat and for the coffee table to be visible at all. Next week, we'll start in on the dining room table where several years of paper clutter has been gathered and deposited in anticipation of the world most daunting purge-recycle-filing project.

It's a small room. We've never had a lot of money to decorate, but the couch is a FlexSteel.

When I blog, I'm usually sitting in the brown chair with my laptop.

May is tired

It has been a busy week here in Florida. It's always a challenge for me to spend a lot of time with my mother. She's truly one of the most self-centered people I've ever met, yet she is completely oblivious to the fact that this is the way she is.

I spent the week helping her get around, cooking, monitoring medications and ice packs, and being subjected to more game shows than I thought anyone could watch in the course of a day. I also spent several hours each day cleaning up around her property. Plants sure do thrive here in Florida. Toads, lizards, and bugs that look suspiciously like roaches also seem to be here in abundance.

I went to the Home Depot at 22nd and 28th (more or less), and bought some yard tools and gardening supplies that led me to several observations:

• First, plants cost a fraction of what they do where I live.
• Plants that we grow as houseplants back home are sold as outdoor garden plants here.
• Whereas back home we have a choice of 20 kinds of compost, here that selection is limited, but bagged soil comes in at least a dozen varieties.
• You can buy different gardening tools here, including a razor-sharp machete-like sword thingy that seemed like a bad idea for me as I have a less than spectacular history with fire and sharp objects. I realized later that given how things grow here, a machete is absolutely appropriate.

I've had a lot of time to think about a lot of things while I've been here. And to not think about things. I realized that not only do I have no burning desire to get back to my own life, I've barely thought about work this week.

I don't want to go back to work. I don't like my job anymore. Any joy I derived from it has been sucked out by budget cuts, bad management, and a numbers-driven focus shift and mission drift that no longer put people first. Vulnerable people. I'm in this work for the people.

I'm tired. This isn't the kind of "Oh, you just need a break and to recharge your batteries" kind of tired. I'm tired of working for a living. This is something I do need to think about, because I think that at this point, I could easily self-isolate and become invisible to the world. If I could afford it.

I am not a lazy person, but I no longer have much desire to get up every day and stick to a routine. I want to write. I want to create. I want to ride my bike. I want to direct the course of my days.

When I did think about work this week, I experienced tremendous waves of anxiety. When you no longer enjoy what you do, you should change it, right? The next logical question is, What do you want to do, May?

I honestly have no idea--maybe because I really don't want to work at all.

Chillin'

I'm freezing. I'm sitting at the St. Anthony outpatient/surgery center, deep in the heart of an industrial park in St. Petersburg. It's a cool morning, but the air conditioning here in the atrium appears to be on, nonetheless. I'm glad I brought a pashmina, anyway. Perhaps coffee would have been a better beverage choice than the organic mango smoothie.

Mom is upstairs having knee surgery. On the way in, I pointed out the beautiful, state-of-the-art physical therapy facility that's just behind where I'm parked at the moment. My mother said, "Yeah, I know. I'm not doing that. I don't have time. It's too expensive." She does not get the reality that surgery is just one step in a larger process, and I am frustrated from trying to explain it her.

This is my fourth or fifth time--and second time in less than three months--being the "patient helper" for someone having surgery. Frank had a procedure recently, too. This seems to be the only thing I miss work for. I've become really good at understanding pre-op and post-op instructions. If only the patients would be more cooperative.

I actually enjoy the time when the patient is in recovery, but not yet ready to get up. During the wait for the blood pressure to rise and vitals to stabilize, I find that talking to people who've recently woken up from anesthesia is like talking to someone in the early stages of dementia. It's really quite amusing.

I'm exhausted. Spending time with my mother is exhausting. This trip, I've really noticed a significant degradation in her driving skills. She drifts in the lane, she can't tell where the front of the car is, and she struggles with the steering wheel. I know it's not the car--we both drive the same model Jeep Liberty. I'm surprised that my mother hasn't been sideswiped (yet).

I'm also exhausted because my mother's cat has decided to sleep with me this visit. Last night, he slept next to my head. It turns out, he not only snores, but also talks in his sleep. The cat slept great; me...not so much.

I need to go upstairs. Mom should be out of surgery soon.

We've been here before

I reiterate. If you come to visit me, in my 1100-square-foot house, you will have a proper bedroom, a nice bed, closet space, and a dresser just for you. For more on that, read this post.

You will not be expected to sleep on a futon, in a tiny room crammed with crap, with no place to unpack so much as a pair of socks.

My arrangement says, "You are welcome here and I want to accommodate you." My mother's arrangement says, "Your being here is all about me. I don't really care how you feel or if you're comfortable. Go change the kitty litter for me."

It's going to be a very long week.

My mom's version of giving me closet space. Great for clothes less than a foot long.

My suitcase is on the left at third base. The room looks bigger in the picture than it really is. Every drawer is crammed full of stuff. Crap, mostly.

Blogging in the air

Somewhere over Little Rock. That’s where we are according to the air tracker GPS function that lets you see where your plane is. At the moment, we’re flying over a very large river. The Mississippi.  Anything that looks that big from the air has got to be huge at eye-level. Of course, I know that because I’ve been across the Mississippi by car and by train.

I’m on my way to Florida. St. Petersburg. Pinellas Park. I have been summoned as my mother is having knee surgery this week and will need some help getting around in the days after the procedure. Thank you, Mr. Clinton for FMLA which is making it financially possible for me to do this.

I don’t actually want to be on this trip, but it’s the kind of thing that adult daughters do. Adult sons…not so much.

I’m pleased that I can access the air tracker without having to actually pay for the WiFi. Thank you, airline.

[May takes a break from trying to write, forks over the $5 fee, and does some other things online...]

 Oh, I'm back. We're somewhere over the Florida panhandle. 

I should have had a drink on this flight to get myself ready for this trip. I have Xanax, but it just makes me sleep.

I plan to blog during my trip so that sanity prevails. Stay tuned.

It's true.

Every time someone gets killed by a gun, an NRA member gets a joyous hard-on.