First Chance

This is the first chance I’ve had to write here without someone over my shoulder. In the old days, I would write at work, but the new job tracks all activity on your computer in case the FBI or the SEC needs to track activity on a customer’s account and I really don’t want my private thoughts to be part of official records. I should get used to writing on my phone, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same. I want to feel the keys under my fingers, not the screen.

Anyway, here is this new but old diary that was once so great and then it wasn’t and then it just *was*. I suppose I have missed this as an outlet and have stuffed many a thing inside since the last entry. I also didn’t realize my whole diary was set to private until today. Oops!

What’s new? I’m married now. It’s been about 4.5  years. We live in the same house as before and we have a kazillion animals (3 dogs and 3 cats). There used to be one more, but we lost him on Christmas day.

Last year I went through a horrible depression where I only wanted to sleep and I wasn’t interested in anything. And I mean, ANYTHING. I would get up, go to work, sleep for 45 minutes on my lunch break, go home and then sleep until the next morning where I would repeat it all again. At work, I was bored and unengaged and dealing with an idiot for a boss. I was also habitually late, which kept getting later and later as the depression got worse and worse. It was all fine for a while, but then I was half and hour late for All-Staff Meeting two months in a row, and our CFO (my former mentor, BTW) noticed and things went downhill from there. No one officially told me that my tardiness was a problem, but one day they decided to fire me for it anyway. When I asked why no one had told me there was a problem that was serious enough to warrant the loss of my job, the CFO told me, “We didn’t want to stress you out.”

::rolls eyes::

So, I lost my job but they couldn’t prove that there was cause, so I got unemployment benefits while I searched for a new one. It also gave me the chance to do some TMS treatments (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) for my depression. It worked! It was a pain because it involved wearing a weird helmet, sitting in a chair and having magnetic beams sent into my brain for 20 minutes at a time. This happened 5 days a week for 4 weeks and then once a week for 4 weeks. If I’d been working at the time, then it would have been a HUGE pain in the ass to get there everyday before or after work, but having an open schedule worked so well. I still have to take meds, but at least I am not a huge pit of despair every day. (Pit of despair = The Princess Bride Reference!)

So, over the last year I’ve had a lot of time to think and think and think. I was also numb for a lot of the time, but when you’re got a lot of free time, you get the chance to think about your future and freak out about it and then question who you are and why you’re here and then freak out about that and really you end up going through cycles of thinking and freaking out and then you go numb to stop freaking out and then you think to get out of being numb and the cycle starts all over again. (What a killer run on sentence. I’m emulating my former idiot boss but at least I’m doing mine for style points.)

In all that thinking, I realized with a vengeance that I am attracted to guys. Now, this probably really isn’t news to anyone, but I have identified and lived my life as a lesbian for so long that it has come as a revelation to me. The fault (most recently) is with my former neighbor now friend who is a super nice guy and is good looking and a big flirt and smart and successful and so on. I had a huge crush on him for a while and pushed some boundaries that seem really silly now, but then again maybe not so silly. The crush is mostly gone because as I’ve gotten to know him better, I see a bit of dorkiness in him, (it’s all relative) and though that may endear him to me in some ways, it certainly curtails some of the sexual attraction. (OD’s spellcheck highlighted “dorkiness” and when I clicked to see spelling options, there was “kinkiness.” Is this a message from the universe?!?)

But, the aftermath of that crush is that my direction has drifted and now I see men in different ways. And this can be very damaging when the men you see differently are family members (well, in-laws, really, I’m not going for the incest vibe) because they are the only men that you’re ever around. It makes for some very disturbing dreams.

I don’t want to identify as bi-sexual because I’ve always had such a weird, icky feeling about that word. It’s horrible, I know. It’s one of those situations where it’s okay for you to be bi, but that’s not something I would every be. Even if there’s a famous actress who identifies as bi and is all about bi power and you’re in love with her. Even that doesn’t matter. And even if sexuality is relative and no one’s “all this” or “all that,” I still don’t feel comfortable. I suppose it will take some time. In the mean time, I just keep on keepin’ on. It’s not like I can do anything about any of it anyway, being as I’m married and all of that. (It’s just those dreams. Those dreams. So crazy!)

And really, I guess that’s it. (It’s not really it, but all the rest of it is just details and mostly boring details, so there you go.)

I’ve recently started listening to Podcasts and I love one called “The Moth.” There are live Moth StorySLAMs held locally and I’ve gone as a spectator for the last two months. I’ve been toying with sharing a story one of these months and March might be it. The theme is “tests” and I can certainly relate to that. This diary (and this entry) can help me get back into the writing mood.

Hip hip! Cheerio! and all that…

The journey is the reward – Lao-Tzu