I guess now that I’m thirty, I’ve got to start acting like an honest-to-goodness grownup.

… pfft, this blows.

Anyway, thirty has been pretty okay so far. I finally have a stable job, and it pays most of the bills. Steve, my boyfriend, helped me draft a budget at the start of 2012, which is very strange to me. I barely make enough to get by, so why should I budget anything? I mean, I know that “responsibility” is the answer, but my goodness, I’m trying to have some fun for once in my life, and responsibility doesn’t really fit into that.

But does responsibility fit in with where I want to go in my life?

I’m getting to the point where I know I want to move. Portland makes me happy, and not just because of Steve, but because I truly enjoy it there. I’ve never lived in a big city before, and I’m itching to do so. Portland is a wonderful choice, too, since it’s got many of the amenities of a metropolis but the comforts of a smaller area. Portland, to me, is Olympia ran through a copier, blown up as big as you could.

The problem is that Portland is, well, not Olympia! I do love Oly to death, and I could probably be okay sticking around here, but my main concern is that I now work for the state government. I’ll be out of probation in two months and then I will be pretty much set, and then I can look into transferring down to Vancouver or something. Oh, but balls, all the good jobs are here because Olympia’s the state capital! And satellite offices tend to be lightly staffed! aaaaugh

The benefits and hours are great when working for Washington State, but I worry that I will be trading in security and comfort for my dream. Honestly, if I were to be completely practical, I would make that sacrifice. But is it what I want? Will I be happy? I guess if I lived in Seattle, I could always commute down to Oly for work, but there no way I could do a four hour commute from Portland every day.

Let’s see, what else happened in the year-plus that I fell off the earth?

Lorelei turned ten! She’s such a big kid now, and really starting to become a handful. I made a bunch of new friends, went to San Francisco and the Oregon Coast and PAX, hosted my first Thanksgiving dinner, and began to read a lot more. Some sad things happened as well — my grandmother passed away, I had to part ways with a few friends, health issues abound — but all in all, life has been pretty okay to me.

Hopefully this trend will continue on.

My therapist probably wants me to write again. I know my ARNP definitely wants me to, as does… well, every single person who has probably gotten to know me past “Hello, nice to meet you.” Too often, though, I find myself too mired in depression/anxiety/anxiety brought on by depression brought on by anxiety to feel anything but empty. hollow. lost.

So, I guess that’s what I’ll be writing about.

welcome to my adventures in anxietyland

Today I found myself in what I call a “kinda bad place”… which, when I think about it, is probably not a term uncommon to the average person. Anyway, I laid in bed until about 12:45, when I fielded a phone call from my best friend. “Let’s see a movie,” he said. “Okay, but I need to shower,” I told him. My hair was all gross and I really didn’t want to, because for some reason, I’ve begun to develop a fear of showering alone. In the house, I mean. Alone in the house, and the cat doesn’t count (but I really do prefer having him in the bathroom). In fact, while I’ve never _preferred_ to be alone, I find actually being by myself is quite unnerving. Even if the other person is in their own room, or on a different floor, or even in the garage, it’s better than the alternative. I don’t really know how it began, but I have suspicions.

When I get depressed — wait, let me just stop there. I don’t know if I can phrase it like that with a straight face. I am _always depressed._ It is a state of being for me, as ever-present as the clouds in the sky or the mole on my shoulder. I cannot say that I just “get” depressed, for really, it’s just a matter of degrees for me. Am I pushing through it today to the best of my abilities (read: not great)? Am I curled up in a ball atop my comforter, sobbing into a pillow while my cat watches me? Or am I just here: blank, empty, present only in body? I am never really in a state of pure happiness. There are times where I am content, where I feel the voice in my head is just a whisper instead of a banshee. Most of the time, though, I cannot court one thought without another coming right up behind me, challenging it in every way possible.

When I was younger, my initial coping mechanism was to lie. To myself, to others — it wasn’t the recipient that mattered, but the lie itself. If I were to try and suss out why I did so, to separate myself from my actions and advise (my “boot” — I will touch upon this later), I would say that it was a matter of control. I would lie because those words, for a brief moment, were my truth. Sometimes I would make myself believe in them so that way it felt better, like I wasn’t hurting anyone. The instinct is still there, to deceive, but I push it out of my mind. I can do it so easily, too, and the only reason why I am a “bad liar” now is because I have made myself expose my tells, exaggerated them so they could be seen by even the most naive person.

Even though I’ve only made a concerted effort to regularly update this space in the past few weeks, it didn’t mean that I wasn’t trying at all. I have a nasty habit of starting posts and then becoming hyper-aware of their content, leaving them to languish in the crispy depths of WordPress Draft Hell.

Most of the drafts that I deleted were less than twenty-five words long and thus felt absolutely no guilt about deleting them, but this one just stuck out to me for some reason. Maybe it’s because the subject is a(n albeit weak) symbol for other things in my life; maybe it’s just that it was a moment I’d rather not forget. I’m not sure. It doesn’t really matter, though, because either way I’ll go ahead and post this little snippet from over six months ago.

Oh, and sorry that the photo is so terrible. For something I love so dearly, I haven’t one decent picture of it. This must be remedied posthaste.

August 30, 2010

There is an armchair sitting in an fairly empty apartment in Portland, Oregon. It is blue and purple and gold and green and red and mine.

It spoke to me as soon as I saw it online; its copy was as cheeky as the print that covered it, and I felt something stir within me. However, it was there and I was here and I knew there was no way I could get it. I had resigned myself to a life without the perfect chair, but when I came back to Portland after two weeks of quiet, tempered longing it was sitting in the middle of the room, waiting for me.

The rules of The Chair are as follows:
1) No hanky-panky in The Chair; and
2) Always treat The Chair with the utmost respect.

Eventually, I sat down, resting my head against one of its wings. I pulled my legs up underneath me, curling up inside its small corners, huddled up in a ball.

“This really is my chair, isn’t it,” I murmured, dazed within my cocoon of happiness.

“It really is,” he replied with an audible smile before heading back to work.