Anatomy of a breakdown….

The last fucking thing that I feel like doing is making my boss a contact list when all of the GD numbers are listed in our directory on our internal web. She’s so old school – it drives me nuts. She keeps paper copies of every damn thing she receives by e-mail AND saves the documents in our shared drive too. She’s a walking make work project.

I noted a fave today with some advice insight into marriage – given that I can’t even write about my thoughts on it here – writing it would be admitting it – it probably wasn’t fair of me to note her. Fave…you know who you are…I’m sorry if my note was out of place…

Things have been a little rough this week. Well Monday was more than “a little” rough. The anatomy of the breakdown….

Monday morning, getting up and getting ready for work isn’t all that clear in my head now, 2 days later. Nothing sticks out as it being out of the norm…I’m sure I was tired as I always am, we did eat kind of poorly on the weekend, so maybe that had some bearing on the rest of the day…I’m not sure. I know that the first feeling I had at work Monday morning was intense frustration and lack of patience with my boss. She asked me to do something but wasn’t able to give me the information that was needed to complete it and the information she did have was NOT making sense to me. I could feel the lump rising in my throat, but the tears didn’t start right then…I updated my status on facebook to relieve some of the frustration I was feeling. When Rob saw my status he called me and asked what was wrong – I wasn’t able to explain it at that moment with my boss hovering in my cube…that seemed to intensify the feelings I was having. After that we e-mailed back a forth a few times – nothing that really “set me off”, until we started “talking” about money…it always comes down to money. We put an offer to purchase on a used car the week before and Rob finally heard back, mid-email conversation, what the payments would be…more than our effing Explorer for an older, Nissan Sentra – WTF?! Begin panic attack…I think. At this point my mind started racing, I pulled up my budget worksheets and saw that before we even get one payment down on this little puppy we’d be in the hole with not enough money to buy groceries…for some reason it’s always the grocery money that gets over-spent…. Looking at the budget, looking and bank accounts, back & forth with Rob about my concerns, my panic, my what if’s…I felt really pushed into something that I knew was not for the best of our finances. Buying a car solves a lot of other problems, but money is always the clincher…for me anyway. I don’t know what I wanted from Rob while we were e-mailing, but the “don’t worry baby” and the “we’ll figure it out” wasn’t helping. What would you figure out that you can’t afford something AFTER you buy it?! Telling me not to worry is like telling…I don’t know….someone who is afraid of heights not to look down from somewhere…it just doesn’t work that way. So, the tears started – first because of money, then because of lack of spousal support and planning and then simply because I was crying. I don’t think I’ve ever had a real anxiety attack before…or if I have…this one was the most intense feeling I’ve ever had… I locked myself in the phone room at work for an hour with my Kleenex box and a journal…I tried writing in my journal to see if I could figure out what was going on, but the right words just wouldn’t come, which led to more frustration and anxiety. It lasted all afternoon. I couldn’t keep it together. I cried myself silly all afternoon. And just when I thought it would be ok, someone would ask if I was ok and my eyes would just well up and overflow again. By the time Rob picked me up at 5:30 I was calmed down a bit – everyone had left work about an hour before, so I had some alone time, watched an episode of the Hills on-line and kind of re-focused my thoughts. But, as soon as I saw Rob, and maybe the fact that he didn’t ask me if I was ok (I’m not sure really), I started bawling again. I cried the whole way home in the truck – just wracking, hyperventilating sobs…quiet ones, but sobbing just the same. The final straw was getting home, still crying for no apparent reason, and we had a disconnection notice for our Electricity in the mail. I had made a payment the week before but it wasn’t received before they printed the notice. The notice asked for full payment (which I knew wasn’t possible) by the 13th or our power would be cut off….the sobbing got louder as I looked at this…feelings of failure, being overwhelmed, simply exhausted from 8 hours of crying and everything intensified and got worse than it had been all day…and the cherry on top?! Rob yelled in frustration at me not to worry about it and tried to send me to our room. The shock of having my husband sending me to our room, stopped the sobbing briefly, only long enough for me to SCREAM “never fucking talk to me like that when I’m like this” and I grabbed the truck keys and left. As soon as I got into the truck, I realized, I had no where to go. The only 2 friends I would consider going to in this situation are living with their boyfriends and I have no idea where their houses are. My crying, hyperventilating, everything got worse as I realized and started shouting “I have no where to go, I have no where to go” – I was panic stricken. The only thing I could think of was to go to the hospital…so many reasons for this flying though my head, but enough sanity to know that I needed help right then and there. I cried, sobbed the whole way there…worrying that I didn’t have any ID on me, no health care card, no money, no cell phone….I was worrying about, if I parked in the parkade and admitting wouldn’t take me or if they did and I was discharged soon after, I would have no way to get the truck out with no money on me….I drove up to the Emerg entrance – there was one car in front of me, and it pulled in to the only non-pay parking spot available…another blow….sobbing, sobbing, screaming “I have no where, no one to go to” I’ve never felt so alone, so scared, so every-negative-emotion-I’ve-ever-felt-all-wrapped-into-one-and-multiplied-by-100. I felt like I was one step away from rock bottom. Hyperventilating started again…so bad at this point I was getting dizzy and seeing spo

ts in my vision (in hind sight it was a good thing I was stopped at a Red Light at this point so I could take a few breaths and not pass out while driving). I felt like a caged animal, frantic, uncomfortable, uncertain. I drove back home, crying and screaming the whole way there…. I sort of wish there had been a way to record it so that I could play it back for my therapist – I don’t fully remember what all I was yelling about – a lot of I hate myself, I hate this disorder, I’m a failure, I’m going to be like this forever, everyone hates me, I hate myself…on and on and on. I still had being admitted to the hospital on my mind as I drove…I really couldn’t see any other option…well there was one I suppose, but that’s why I felt like I needed to be admitted. I went home, went flying in the house yelling for Rob, asked him, begged him, to take me to the hospital and he wouldn’t. It’s not a bad thing (again in hindsight) that he didn’t take me…but I was so lost, I saw no other way to feel better. He came out of the computer room and held me while I sobbed and wailed and had snot dripping out of my nose onto his shirt. He didn’t say anything…he just let me cry….and wail over and over, “I need help. I need help” I can’t live like this”. I don’t know how much time went by standing in the hallway, crying, going from screaming to barely whispering, running out of breath, gasping for air…I almost suffocated he was holding me so tight – I just stood there leaning all of my weight onto him, but not holding him. I went to the bathroom to blow my nose and look at my raw red face. When I came out, Rob somehow gently guided me to our bedroom and a layed down. There he held me tight for almost another hour, in silence, while I cried and cried. I don’t remember saying very much at this point, and sometime along the way, my tears lessened, my breathing evened and I was able to think more clearly. Nothing was resolved per say but then again, I don’t really know exactly what brought this all on. I did some more reading about my disorder and did get some comfort knowing that this is all part of the disorder and it’s not me…the real me anyway. I had therapy first thing Tuesday morning and we over this with my psychologist – it would seem that I’m getting worse rather than better, so it’s time to look at a couple of different options. We’re going to put the CBT stuff to the side and work on more behavioural aspects (ie: no more talking about personal finances with Rob while I’m at work – it always leads to something similar), I’m going to get referred to a psychiatrist to look at my medication and make sure that I’m taking the right meds and the right dose…perhaps even a cocktail. I’m exhausted from this all. My concentration is seriously lacking, but all I can expect from myself right now is to just hang on.

We did end up getting the car – we picked it up this afternoon. It did work out a bit better financially than we originally thought, but I still have doubts that we’ll be able to make this work. It looks ok on paper, but Rob & I haven’t been so good at sticking to the plan yet – I guess we’ll have to start or we’ll be getting the car or the truck taken away. Rob did manage to get conventional financing, so as long as we’re on schedule with payments this will be really good on his credit report. We probably won’t be able to camp this summer…there wont be much disposable income left. I thought about getting a 2nd job, but I’ve been there…I don’t have the proper health, energy or state of mind to take something like that on again. Maybe in the future when I get some of this stuff taken care of. I’d love to get a grocery store cashier p/t job…Sunterra would be awesome, but I have other priorities that need to come first. It has only been 7 months since I last worked 2 jobs, but I’m having a hard time handling one right now. I wish time off was an option, but LTD is only 66% of my salary. My therapist says that you get more permanent results working on this while still living your everyday life…it helps you cope IRL rather than get better in a situation that doesn’t reflect reality – reality would be all that more difficult afterwards. I don’t know…I’m glad my mind is a little fuzzy about Monday. It’s not something I want to think about and remember vividly. I want to get better and hopefully that will come before something like this happens again…it seems to be worse and worse each time.