WHAT IT ALL COMES DOWN TO

I have several thoughts running circles in my head, but I feel certain that they are related. We shall see if they meet at the end of this post...

I have a stack of bills that I have been meaning to pay for weeks now. Every night when I get into bed I have a variation on the same conversation with myself, "Tomorrow you really need to get those bills paid." I can see the stack from where I am sitting. They are still unpaid.


Before my life completely disintegrated back in 2006, my mother came to my house for Christmas in 2005. She nearly keeled over. I had unopened bills (and other assorted mail) scattered throughout the house. The dining room table. The kitchen counter. The couch. The coffee table. The end tables. The office. And the list goes on. I think she might have found some in the laundry room. Could I explain this behavior at the time? No. My migraines were off the charts and I was about to lose everything. But why I was decorating my house with the mail? Not a clue.

A few months later I went to a Divorce Recovery Class, at a local church, and one of the things that they indicated was common after divorce was behavior like the above. It happens a lot if you are financially sinking. It is a defense mechanism that your brain turns on to fool you. Or for you to fool yourself. Whatever. It doesn't really work. When the electric company turns out your lights, and you find yourself in the dark because you haven't paid your bill, reality sets in quickly.

Some of you have embraced my week of crushes and others have gnashed your teeth, waiting for it to end. For me, it was a coping mechanism come out to play. My migraines have been cranking up the volume. We are in a season of thundercrackers. The changes in barometric pressure do not help. However, it is really my personal stress that is getting me. I have to take this online course and then I can officially file for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. The course is $35 and I am dragging my heels. I did my first phone call to get my SSD stuff going yesterday. That was a place I never really wanted to go. I fought that for four years and my parents are paying the price. Pride can be a real bitch. Sometimes it's the thing that keeps you standing, and other times it's the thing that brings you to your knees.


Last, but not least, there is the case of the missing car key. I sold my van to my uncle, but I only had one of the two remote car keys. It turns out that Dodge has made their keys in such a way that getting a duplicate key will only allow you to open the door. A duplicate will not keep the car running. After 10 seconds the car shuts off. So, we have been searching high and low for the second key. My step-dad has been bringing boxes from the storage unit, my mom has sorted through them, and, for a good bit of it has made the decisions on where it goes from there. However, a lot of it has come back to me. Keep? Trash? Goodwill? This is every day. If you're thinking that this doesn't sound stressful, well it probably isn't to the average person. Just thinking about this, cranks my migraine up. You see, this is how the key went missing in the first place. What I decide is trash or Goodwill today, might become vitally important four years from now.

Pride. That is the problem here. I don't want to pay the bills because when I run out of money I will have to ask my dad for more. If I don't pay the bills, I still have money. I don't want to take the online course, because if I don't take it then I can't file for bankruptcy. Will I file eventually? Of course. I have to file. I have no other choice. I am just staving it off temporarily. SSD is already in motion and I need it. My pride is already taking its licks there, and I can't do anything about that. The key. Well, I hate that key. I hate that I can't remember that key. I have zero recollection of where that key last lived in my house, so I have no idea what box it might be in. I hate that it might have gotten pitched along with a bunch of other keys that I determined to be useless. I hate that I just DON'T KNOW. What I hate most of all is that most people would know because it is the key to the vehicle that they were currently driving. Most people stay on top of important things like keys. My mother knows where all of her important keys are. As do my father, brother, and the rest of my extended family, I am sure. I am the only whack job in the bunch who can't keep track of keys. Important keys.

And so, I needed a distraction from all of that pressure and stress. Frankly, I still do. So, please take a moment and look over my crushes from last week. You don't even need to watch the footage to get an idea of my patterns. You can pick up a lot just from READING the descriptions to play along. I need some fun. I keep thinking of Donny Osmond from the last season of Dancing with the Stars (that I watched) when they showed a clip of him and he said, "What can we do to make this fun?" He was having trouble learning the dance move. They then flashed to an interview with his family and they asked about him, and one of his kids said that one thing their dad was notorious for saying was, "What can we do to make this fun?" You gotta like someone who doesn't just want to get through life, but wants to make it fun for the people around him.

I am just trying to make this fun.

Now, I am going to pay those bills, which is not fun, but I have to do it.

I THREW MY ROCK

I am fresh out of the shower. For my regular readers, you know what that means: I have spent some time seeking inspiration in the Think Tank. In this case, I have just been trying to make order out of chaos. I think a story tends to be more powerful when you know the process. It's sort of like a game of hopscotch. The idea is to get to the end and back but you don't land in every square. There is method to the madness. Well, in that case the method is throwing a rock and jumping around, but you get the idea. Explaining my method makes the blog longer, but richer, I think. I guess this is where I could use some feedback from other writers. I am not sure I want it on this blog because this whole thing was rather traumatic, but any of the old stuff and the stuff to come, feel free to offer up advice on how much is too much.


I have chronic fatigue. I have chronic migraines. Up until 2006 I was an outside sales rep. My health really started to deteriorate in 2002 after I got married. Yes, the marriage had everything to do with the deterioration. Stress is a killer. Don't let anyone tell you different. I became addicted to narcotic painkillers to function. Once the doctor realized where I was and took them away and referred me to a neurologist it all went downhill. The neurologist was blunt. "I can keep dosing you as an outpatient for the migraines but as long as you remain in a chronically stressful domestic situation or continue to bang your own head into the wall, nothing will change." He was right. Something did change. I went from a functional person to a marginally functional person to a mostly non-functional person. Finally I became a divorced person.

The only thing that saved me in terms of my career was that I had been doing that job a long time so I had a large and loyal customer base, could do a lot by phone, had a lot of product in supply rooms and lots of orders coming in by fax. The coup de gras was that I could work in the field when I felt good and lay in bed when I didn't. My house was my office and I didn't clock in or out anywhere. Of course, my income took a hit by my spending less time with customers and more time in a dark room.

I thought when I got divorced that it would close Pandora's Box; I would get my life back. That didn't happen. The migraines continued to get worse and my life continued to spiral out. Finally, I sold my house and moved in with my parents in Florida. I did so with the convicition in my heart that it was temporary. My doctor was saying that I needed to live in a no stress environment for at least two years and I really should file for Social Security Disability. I chose to live off the money I made from my house sale and when that started to look bleak I got a part-time job that darn near killed me. (See my previous blog THE THINGS WE SELL OURSELVES for more on this.)


I did go see a friend of my parents who worked for a lawyer who worked on SSD claims to see what I needed to do to go this route right after I moved. She laid it all out for me. I basically had to convince a judge that I could do nothing. Zero. Nada. If you can do Anything they will deny you. You should sell your car. Get your mom to drive you everywhere. And on and on and on. Meanwhile I had just discovered ASK AND IT IS GIVEN and it was all about the power of positive thinking. How could I believe in the power of positive thinking on the one hand and stand up and declare myself to be capable of nothing? I couldn't. I had always believed in the power of the spoken and written word. I was coming to understand the power of a thought. I walked away from filing SSD.

Then we moved here and the mattress/box spring debacle blew up my immune system (again see THE THINGS WE SELL OURSELVES). I believe I said something about being back where I started. I lied. It's worse. That stupid matrress/box spring literally nuked my immune system. So, yeah, the chronic fatigue and the chronic migraines are back in spades and I'm eating pain killers on the hour. I'm keeping journals of when I take them because I can't remember and I don't want to overdose myself. That would be funny if it weren't pathetic. The kicker is that my immune system, fragile as it was, was holding in check auto immune diseases. Now Pandora's box literally is opened and they have come calling.

So, I sat in my doctor's office and had a good long cry and I got to tell her all of the things I don't say to my parents. And I am not going to get started again now or I just might end up feeling as wrecked today as yesterday. But the thing that hurts the most isn't all of the crap that is headed my way. It's my damn pride. My father has been sending money that he doesn't have for months now until I can get it together. Now it is becoming clear that isn't happening. My only option is to file for Social Security Disability. My parents are paying for my pride. My sin of pride. All the way home I kept hearing Mary Chapin Carpenter in my head, "That of all the things that finally desert us, Pride is always the last thing to go."


And so I threw my rock over and over and I am back at square one.