Progress

The other day I was on the phone with my brother, talking about when I'd move (currently month-to-month).

I told him how my roommate had said she wants to stay until we get kicked out, and doesn't want to move for at least nine months. I said maybe I should stay where I am.

He reminded me that all summer I've been saying I want to move this fall. Then he dropped the bomb.

"If you aren't all moved this fall, then we won't be able to leave our dog with you when we go to Florida in December."

What? WHAT?! I asked if CrazyGirl knew he was thinking of that. He said, "Actually, it was her idea." What? WHAT?!

So I said okay, I'll make it a point to be all moved by Thanksgiving time. He replied, "If you're going to do that, then be all moved BEFORE Thanksgiving, so we can leave the dog with you then too, while we go to Alaska."

What? WHAT?!

That'd be TWOOOOOOO doggie visits in two months! Technically, it's CG's dog. This is HUGE!

After that little exchange my brother and I had, I literally couldn't talk for quite some time. Just sat there, grinning like an idiot.

I'm fascinated that CG has made this leap. A huge part of what she was so upset about on the other blog was that I talked about how poorly I felt she treated the dog. Now she's okay with me dogsitting?!

Wow.

What was that about time healing all wounds?

Delete

I got something cool. I posted pics of it on my other blog. My parents saw it. Then they went to some family party, where a cousin had something similar. My father told his sister I had one, and he'd send her a picture. So he did. Then he told me.

After mildly freaking out, I very nicely asked if he'd sent my aunt a link to my blog, or just the picture itself. He just sent the picture. I thanked him, he you're welcomed me. However. Let's break this down, shall we?

I started a blog with the express intention of not telling my parents. With the exception of not writing about them or my brother and his girlfriend, I haven't changed too much of my writing. Which means that now my parents know things about my life they wouldn't otherwise know. Which means my parents are reading my blog in order to know what's going on with me.
Since my mother and I are not communicating, and my father and I barely are.

I passively-aggressively delete comments my mother anonymously posts to my blog. Despite her having to find out about my blog from someone other than me, she apparently hasn't grasped that I didn't want her involved with it in any way. It seems she doesn't take that hint from my deleting her comments. Why don't you just be assertive and tell her to please stop commenting, you ask?

1. She'll deny she does it, and although she doesn't know this, I can't prove it's her (but I know her well, and know it is).
2. She'll not deny it, but claim it's for the public and she's free to comment if she wants. Which I agree with. But really, if there was a way to block her from reading, believe me, I would have.
3. She will say that if I'm writing about things I don't want her to see, then perhaps I shouldn't be writing about them (and in fact, shouldn't be doing whatever I'm writing about having done). I agree that this is a good way for a child or teenager to deal with life. "If I wouldn't tell Mommy that I smoked this cigarrete, then I guess I probably shouldn't smoke it at all." But I'm almost 30. I don't need that boundary. The bottom line is, this is a part of my life I do not want her involved in. At all. And she will not respect that, and I know that, and my deleting her comments is all I feel like I can do. Even though it feels very immature.

At some point, one of my parents WILL tell my extended family about my blog. Either by accident, or not caring that I don't want people to know. Or my brother's girlfriend will do it.

My extended family is very competitive. Nobody admits to any weaknesses or faults. They have no idea that I've wanted to die for my entire life, that I've always hated myself, that the only attention I get from men comes in the form of homeless guys spitting at my feet, etc. And I don't really want them knowing these things. I don't want to discuss my issues with them, it won't bring us closer, I don't want to be treated any more like a freak than I already am, and I don't want to be talked about more than I already am.

But eventually, someone is going to tell them. In some way, I'm sure it will come out. I am seriously considering yanking the whole thing, and starting all over, with a different title, different "persona", different design. Right now I think the only thing holding me back from doing that is I haven't come up with any of those things. Yet. But I am walking around feeling like a bomb is about to explode.

Part Two

So I've just accidentally killed the squirrel. And really, it's just a squirrel. Although it's awful, it's not AWFUL. Because it's just a squirrel. But when you're cracking up, your responses to things are out of proportion. It scares me to think had the squirrel been a cat I might have laughed. I don't know. I was not well in the head.

But.

But I have a dozen years of therapy under my belt (which will claim until the day I die were a big waste of time and money). And I have the two plus years of extra special therapy from my private high school, which was worth so much more than the dozen years of shrinkage. So even if I was cracking, the good thing was, due to all that therapy, I knew I was cracking.

I knew that it was a bad sign that I often found myself standing in the blazing Florida sun, in the parking lot of my office, crying hysterically to my mother or brother via cell phone about how overwhelmed I was at work that I didn't know what to do first. I knew that it was a bad sign that every day after work, I immediately got into bed and pretty much stayed there until the next morning.

I was cracking. And I knew I needed professional help. Finding professional help in South Florida when you don't have insurance is not easy. I kept calling places, only to be told they would first have to do a four hour, $700 evaluation. Or that they were not accepting new patients. Or that they were only open between 1:34 and 1:37 p.m. the sixth Tuesday of each prime numbered month. "Are you going to kill yourself?" they'd ask me. "You're making me WANT to kill myself by not helping me." Click.

The very thin rope I was holding on by was fraying quickly. I didn't want to be put into a hospital on a suicide watch. I didn't need that. It would solve none of my problems. What I needed was for somebody to sit down and help me figure out how to grab back control of my life.

I called my brother. He suggested I hang in there, and in the meantime, put in for vacation and come visit him. So I asked for a week off from work.

I called my mother. My mother, who has a background in psychology. My mother, who supports therapy wholeheartedly for me if I need it (as long as I won't be bitching at her). My mother, who did (and does) nothing all day except eat, watch tv, send people lame forwards of e-mails she gets, and sleep.

"Mommy will you please help me? I need a therapist. I don't care if it's a psychologist or LSW or anything. I'll go anywhere except Miami. I can get there by 6 p.m., and sliding scale would be great, but I'll put it on my credit card if I need to. Please just find me somebody. I'm at work and can't keep sneaking away to make private phone calls. Please get me help."

"Zoe, I'm sorry, but I'm very busy. I don't know who to call in Florida. I don't know how to help you."

OH MY GOD. Are you freaking KIDDING me? Did you just tell your only daughter who you claim to love oh so much that you are too busy watching to see if Lily and Holden get back together on As the World Turns to help her find psychological help before she loses it completely? You, the mother who always said "I just want you to be happy and healthy" are turning your back on your daughter who is telling you she is not healthy or happy and getting steadily worse?

That was the beginning of the end. Right there, when my mother refused to help me. That was when I lost a huge chunk of respect for her. That was when I stopped believing most things she'd say that centered around her loving and caring about me. Because when I needed help, I followed the rules. I asked for help. I didn't do subtle signs. I was direct. I NEED HELP. PLEASE HELP ME. And my mother didn't help me. My mother was the type of person to say "I will always be your mother, even when you're an adult. As long as I'm alive, I will always be here for you."

I was 27 at the time.

So, did you ever get help, you ask? No, never from anyone in Florida. I got a two or three hour phone call from an acquaintence I'd barely known and helped months prior. I sat on the floor in the doorway of my bedroom while we talked and when we were hanging up, I was calmer. Turned out she was psycho herself and I stopped having anything to do with her within a couple of months, but that one night, she helped.

I held it together enough to fly to San Francisco, interview and get a job offer, and ultimately move here two weeks after that phone call. Talk about getting the hell out of Dodge.

The Beginning of the End

I posted last night that the beginning was not when Crazy Girl found out about my other blog, but instead, when all the heart problems started last spring. I was mistaken. In thinking about it further, the beginning of the end happened in Florida, before the idea of moving to San Francisco had even occurred to me. It was when I started my slow descent into my nervous breakdown. The one that prompted my brother to invite me to San Francisco for a vacation.

At the time, I was working for the Deputy General Counsel of a sub-prime mortgage company near Fort Lauderdale. When I was offered that job I'd been out of work for a while, and therefore desperate for anything resembling a steady paycheck that was legal. At least it was a steady paycheck. I've often said that I need to respect anywhere that I work, and it's true. I can't be friends with people I don't respect, and I can't work for people or companies I don't respect. Well, I can. But it doesn't go well.

My first sign that this job would be trouble was when I worked a bit of overtime during my first month there. The following morning, I asked if there was a form I had to fill out indicating the overtime. I am a non-exempt employee, wherever I go, as long as I work as an executive assistant, admin assistant, or legal secretary. That means I get paid a salary and am expected to put in a certain number of hours of work each week. By law, anything over that number of hours should result in my getting paid time and a half. In certain circumstances, it should result (again, by LAW) in my getting paid double time. I was told "We don't do that here." I politely and tentatively pushed the issue. "We don't do that for Cindy or Diane (the only other legal secretaries there), so we can't pay you differently, since you have the same title they do."

Totally illegal. But I needed the job. Unemployment had run out, and jobs in South Florida were hard to come by. So I sucked it up, and just decided I would bust ass to get everything done during the hours I was supposed to be there, in an effort to not put in overtime. Unfortunately, my boss was supposed to have an attorney working for him, but he did not. So I was doing all that work in addition to supporting him.

My company had an unofficial policy of denying unemployment to any former employee who applied for it. One of my (unofficial) duties was to review each former employee's file once they applied for unemployment to find a reason to deny them. Then I had to pitch that to the unemployment office. Illegal. My boss, the deputy general counsel, often didn't arrive at work until 11 a.m. Because he was busy sleeping. So while he was sleeping I was (mis)representing myself as part of the legal team to people all over the country. Good times, good times. Was it exciting to realize that I, with my community college associate's degree could do what other people had gone to law school to do? Sure. But it was illegal.

In the middle of all of this, I was reviewing hundreds of resumes pouring in as a result of the ad we had thrown up on Monster. It was pointless though, since the salary for the position was right around $50,000. Just to put that in perspective, I earn more than that now. First year lawyers getting jobs at big name law firms earn six figures. It's widely known that going in-house will earn you less (supposedly in exchange for a calmer lifestyle that won't keep you chained to your desk), but still. I repeatedly told my boss that our target should be some old guy who retired to Florida and was driving his wife crazy being at home and needed to get out of the house. A guy who needed to use his mind but didn't want to bust his ass. A guy who didn't need the money. Especially since the money wasn't there.

My boss refused to consider people like this, and insisted he wanted someone young, with 3-4 years of experience. I always told him people like that want more money than our company was offering. He didn't care. I kept reviewing resumes. Meantime, without that lawyer spot filled, I was given no choice but to step in. I did everything but sign things and show up in a business suit at a court house.

When you work as a legal secretary, the lines should be very clear as to what you are and are not allowed to do. You are allowed to call the Court to set up a hearing. You are not allowed to appear telephonically at that hearing, as you are not a member of the bar. Only lawyers are members of the bar. I was stressed. I was doing things I knew were wrong. I couldn't just go get another job, because I'd been at this one less than a year, and my resume was spotty. I needed the job stability.

Doing what I was put a lot of pressure on me. My boss was basically saying "Do all this illegal stuff, but don't fuck up, because I could be disbarred for allowing it." No pressure.

Did I mention that I had no health insurance? Oh, my company offered it alright. But they paid me so little that I couldn't afford the $70 per month to be taken out of my paycheck. I worked when I was sick, because I couldn't afford not to. I had to leave the building on my lunch hour, so my boss would not come find me and drag me back to my desk, claiming an emergency. (I read the book Fast Food Nation while sitting at the Wendy's across the street from work.) Often I sat in my car on my lunch hour. I brought my lunch from home every day, because I couldn't afford to eat out.

Oh, and did mention that I had no friends? No support system at all? Except for my grandpa who I saw roughly every other weekend. My father's motto has been "Jobs are not supposed to be fun. That's why it's called work. If jobs were supposed to be fun, they'd be called play." So when my grandpa would hug me and ask how work was going, I, having been raised by parents who'd always told me to fake it, would smile brightly and respond, "Great!" Who would want to burden their 85 year old grandpa about something he can't help with anyway? Not me.

I spent twelve years in therapy. As a result, I often take what I call my mental temperature. I wasn't feeling well, in the spring of 2004, but chalked it up to stress at work, and the stress of paying rent that was too expensive. My lease was almost up, and I was preparing to move, which would cost money I didn't quite have.

I started feeling worse and worse. I had a hard time concentrating. I ran over a squirrel one day on the way to work and it took every ounce of willpower I had to keep driving while I called the authorities in charge of picking up road kill. I needed to stop driving and be upset about killing something that had been living, but couldn't risk being late to work. I needed to stop driving and cry and then pull myself together, but didn't have the time. So I arrived at work, emotionally a total wreck.

To put it plainly, I was cracking.

I Gave At ... Home?

My office is doing some walk to raise money for the American Heart Association, and so far two people have asked me to donate on their behalf.

"It's for a good cause."

My going to New York for a grand total of four weeks, split into one week and then a three week stay, were also for a good cause. My father's open heart surgery.

That was last spring. Right as that was happening my brother began having HIS heart problems, and I wound up going to Los Angeles for two of his heart surgeries.

So quite honestly, I'm feeling like I've given enough. I feel like I gave everything that I'd been for 28 years, and in this last year, everything's gone to shit.

Because all the problems, everything that eventually led to starting this blog with Chloe, didn't start in February when Crazy Girl found my other blog. It all started last spring, when I was in New York. When I sat at the kitchen table with my parents during dinner and they screamed at each other. When I was loading plates into the dishwasher, and as I leaned over, I threw up in my mouth from the stress of living in a household where people treat each other that way again.

I'd forgotten what it was like. I'd stopped being used to it. For most of the four years that I lived in Florida, I did not have a roommate. It was just me. My house was quiet. It was a calm place. I specifically wanted it that way, because I hated the rage I could feel coursing through my parents house.

It didn't start when my father told me he'd found out about my blog and I cried outside the gay Safeway with bags of food at my feet. It started last spring. When I threw up in my mouth.

And it hasn't stopped. And October, when the Parental Unit arrives, is getting closer and closer.

So no. I will not be donating to this heart association. I donated when I slept on a wooden bench of a hospital lobby in New York after having not slept in over 30 hours. I donated when I smiled at my father and said, "Don't die!" before he was wheeled off to surgery. I donated when I told the doctor, "We're NOT leaving" when he wanted to kick us out of the recovery room. I donated when my dad slammed the door of his bedroom two weeks after his surgery and I jumped, scared. And then cried. I donated when my mother asked "But why would anyone call YOU?" in response to my friends calling to check on my sanity and sending me goodies in the mail (my father called them pity packages).

I'm donating now, every day. I donated today when I called my brother at work and he didn't answer and I worried about him. I donate every damn minute. With my time, my emotions, my thoughts. Just not with my money. I think that's good enough.