More of the Same

Monday night

Geez, you guys, why don't things ever slow down for two seconds?

Ever?

I've been on the new drugs for a week now, and although it is probably too soon to tell, I think the Prozac is starting to do some subtle, tiny tiny subtle work on my brain. The lowered Adderall is helping, and although I have yet to take any Ambien, knowing that it's an option is sort of okay. Work is making me tired, along with my mental health. It's busy there, so busy that I feel as if I am bothering people when I request training or something to do, but I think it's okay so far. One thing that's hard is that since this is a small town, everybody knows everybody. But none of the customers know me, and I know none of them, and I feel that it makes everything sort of...awkward. But maybe, not really. I don't know. Training itself is awkward and I'm not exactly thrilled about a solid year of it, but I assume it'll get better. Today I begged for something to do after a morning of a) twitching around at my desk or b) reading the paint manual again, and tonight before I left I explained again that I was ready and willing to be doing stuff. Anything.

Sometimes, and by sometimes I mean all the time, I get these strange overwhelming waves of "WHAT IS HAPPENING, WHERE AM I?" I know my husband is experiencing the same thing. And I know I've talked it all to death, and you don't care and WHEN will I get OVER IT, but it's still there. The summer was so crazy, with the wedding and traveling and deaths and job craziness and me being let go at work, and then all that real estate crap and buying a house in a different time zone and MOVING. Sometimes I think that our summer wasn't that crazy, but then I remake that list in my head, and freak out again. It was all so fast. It went so fast, and I cannot accept that it is October. And yet it is, and somehow June seems so very very far away. And I can not remember how the air smells in Wyoming anymore. Everything seems as if it has always been warm and wet, as if there were never two years of cold dry, and the clouds that reached up to touch the very ceiling of the sky are vague and brown in my mind.

Everything went so fast, and somehow we are, impossibly, in a new state and new town. We have new bank accounts, and I have a new job and new coworkers and they ask me if I want to stay in for lunch because they're all ordering pasta, and, what? When did we move here? Who are these people? Will I ever stop feeling so distant and confused? When will the cat quit getting lost in this tiny house? When will this all click into place?

There are little differences, like how the squirrels are fat here. But there are bigger things, like how the sky feels, and how thick the air is. The people. Communication. I am from the Midwest, but I am from a different part of the Midwest. We've noticed we have vague communication difficulties with the people who live here. We have conversations with employees in stores, asking where to find such and such, and they do not understand what we want. They question us, and we don't understand exactly what they mean. It's not an accent thing, it's just this subtle misfiring of words. The way they form questions and sentences are the tiniest bit different from how we form ours. Our questions and answers don't line up, not quite. It feels strange, and as if this should not be the case. But there it is. It took quite the conversation at work today for me to understand that I was to go to a store and buy big red paper. Misfiring of words, I tell you, and I don't know how long the communication adjustment will take.

Part of the reason things are so emotionally crazy for both of us, is that we are feeling depressed and confused, but there is nowhere we'd rather be. We want to be here. We say to each other, do we not want to be here? And then realize that no, we want to be here. It's just a crazy feeling of not belonging anywhere. We don't feel a sense of belonging in any state right now, let alone a town or house. I don't know how military families do it. I don't comprehend it, and I feel much like the tree my in-laws hacked out of their ditch on Saturday. Except, perhaps unlike the tree, I've forgotten where I belong, or feel as if I never really did belong anywhere in particular.

Disconcerting, you know?

My desire to hide has come back.

In the meantime, things are busy and rolling along. We are working at our new jobs and dealing with lots of new job craziness. There are big changes going on in J's family. My sister has some major life change things going on, and my brother's wife is pregnant with their first child. He/she will be the first grandchild for my parents. I see them only briefly, a few times a year, so this hasn't sunk in yet. But there you go, we're going to be an aunt and uncle. One of my best friends from back west had her baby at 24 weeks this fall, and I haven't heard from her for a long time. I found this out a month ago, when I called to see if she had ever gotten my email with annoying baby name suggestions, and bam! He was born! And she sounded so tired. He was as well as he could be, she said. I worry about them a lot, and I hope everything is going well for them.

Things keep on going, and they aren't slowing down at all, and it's not practical for me to daydream about hiding in the bed all afternoon. It's not practical for me to cry at night. I feel very unpractical, and I think about throwing away the acorns I've stashed one by one on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. As they age, they dry and they are shrinking away from their little acorn hats, withered and brown.

I feel like such a baby, when there are such worse things in the world, and my petty emotional tribulations are just that: petty.

I feel lame, I think, but things keep going fast and I assume it will get better.

Love,
black sheeped

Tuesday morning

I don't know why some of you like to 'read sad' or however it was that you weirdos phrased it. (I LOVE YOU.) I read over this again this morning and gagged a little bit, but I guess I'll post it anyway.