Breathe....something I keep forgetting to do.

This song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKO-5u2z4EQ That is all. I need to remember to breathe.

Songs from my youth. Plus Bo and Hope

I'm pretty sure my mom shouldn't have watched so many soap operas when I was a kid. I blame soap operas for the craziness of my youth. They were on TV and by default, I watched them. As a result, I always wanted to fall in love. I blame Bo and Hope on Days of Our Lives. They were always so darn happy. (You know, when one of them wasn't dead or being controlled by Stefano). ;) I can remember laying in bed when I was pretty young (I'm talking like 9), just day dreaming about falling in love. Yeah, it's safe to say I was a very odd child.

This brings me to the Title of my blog. I've been trying to write this song about a specific series of events from my youth. It made me think about all of the songs I used to identify with during that period of time. So, I thought I'd post the ones I can remember. 

Without You by Motley Crue. Yep, this was on a loop for a while. The guy I liked was just not that into me. I'm sad to admit that Motley Crue ever did it for me. What an annoying voice that dude has. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3QhVeHr-gM

King of Wishful Thinking by Go West. I have no idea if this is the original video or not, but if it is OMG that was the lamest thing I've witnessed in a while. It's equally lame that I was so obsessed with this song. I've always had a thing for meaningful lyrics. This song was my pep talk. Sure, I'll get over you, assuming I don't die a horrible death. (yes, I was dramatic even back then). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaZaTlcbYxw

Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough by Patty Smyth and Don Henley. This song used to depress me, but I loved it so much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdzbjUWu2VU

I Can't Make You Love Me by Bonnie Rait. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW9Cu6GYqxo I spent so much time when I was younger trying to *make* people love me. I was like, "DUDE, I'm here look at me, I'm totally awesome." I always liked this song but refused to believe that the guy I liked didn't really love me. That was Bonnie's problem, not mine. 

I was absolutely convinced that the guy I was madly in love with (at 11, 12, 13, and 14, probably even 15, 16, and 17 too) would one day love me back. I knew it like it was a fact. I never had a doubt in my mind. Even when I got sick with Crohn's Disease and the doctors pumped me full of steroids that made me hideous, I still believed that one day he would see how much I loved him and he would love me back. I don't think during those years that it ever occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, he really just wasn't at all interested. Seems almost conceited now that I thought that way. 

Having grown up and moved on many years ago (I won't say how many because that makes me sound old), I would think about my youth from time to time. It wasn't until I started writing this song that I had my epiphany that I had fooled myself into believing during my entire pre-teen and teen years that the Bo and Hope style romances of Days of Our Lives were actually real. Having read a condensed version of their love story, I can safely say "Fuck all that". lol  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Brady_and_Hope_Williams

Anyway, I'm glad that soap operas and fairy tales aren't true because reality is much more exciting. I'm also glad that I had the experiences I did because they made me into who I am today. Let's face it, I'm pretty effing cool. 

An Old Friend

An old "friend" decided to make an appearance today. My initial thought was to run screaming, but I knew I'd be followed. I just sat down and observed. Well, my "friend" got bored and left. I'm sure it will come back and visit again, and I might not be as ready next time to rebuff the visit, but at least I know I was able to this time. My "friend's"name is Anxiety.

Ah yes, I have a blog.

So recently someone came across my blog and asked me about it. I'll admit I felt slightly cyber stalked. I felt this way mainly because I had forgotten I had a blog and when I Googled myself looking for it, I couldn't find it which told me a little bit of "Cyber Digging" was probably done.

I haven't written here for a very long time. I suppose I've been busy. More likely though, I haven't felt like "sharing". A lot has changed in the past couple of years. Up until a year (close to two really) ago, I still felt like Ohio was home. That's not to say that this didn't feel like home, but I always referred to Ohio as "back home". It doesn't feel like home now. It feels like some foreign place I lived in a million years ago in another lifetime. I'm not that person any more and I'm cool with that.

One things I've learned about moving away is that life goes on. Seems pretty simple and enormously cliché, but it's really true. People have their own lives, but moving has excluded me from their lives. I'm off the radar, out of sight out of mind -- so to speak. Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder, either.

I keep in contact as much as I can with the people who are interested. The numbers seem to dwindle more and more as I stay away. I'd be lying if I said that didn't bother me a little. I guess what bothers me most, though, is the reality that I'm probably never going to see most of these people again. I'm not so naive as to think that my friends and family are going to disrupt their lives to come and visit me. I'm also fairly certain that unless I win the lottery, I'm not going to be rushing back for a visit either. Truth be told if I did win the lottery, Ohio isn't the first place I'd go. I'd rather meet my 5 friends, mom, and any interested family members in Hawaii or something.

I have no idea where all of this came from. I sat down to try to find the blog. I found the blog, and thought I'd write about being cyber stalked, but somehow it's turned into this. Maybe I'm feeling a little sad because one of my friends is getting ready to move away. It's with that sadness that I've possibly reflected on the fact that when she moves, I'm unlikely to see her again either.

Well, there's always email. We know how well that seems to be working out.

Oh and to my cyber stalker.....please don't read into my "tone" too much. I'm merely thinking out loud. ;)

It's been a year.

I just realized it's been nearly a year since my last blog post. It's funny because I stopped writing in my blog for a couple of reasons. 1) I forgot my password, not realizing that I just log in with Google and 2) I felt better. I don't need to sit and write about things when I feel good. Writing is therapeutic for me. That's why I write songs. As it's been pointed out to me in the past (by people who would do better to mind their own business), my songs aren't very happy. I think that's because my inspiration for writing comes with things that are hard to say out loud. It's different with songwriting for some reason. Some of my favorite songs that I've written have come out of some really dark moods.

A lot has changed in the last year. I got to the point where my panic attacks were nearly completely gone, and now here I am sitting and writing, which means they're back. Not full force like they were, but lately I find myself getting panicky again from time to time. It's been a crazy year. I did my first ever musical, which is something I've wanted to do since I was in elementary school but was always too afraid to try. I also got very sick with the flu and was pretty convinced I was going to die for a week I felt so horrible. It was around that time that I sat down with my mom and unloaded some secrets that I had been harboring for the last 20 years. She, in turn, was able to tell me some of her own. I think it was probably the most empowered I've ever felt. It felt like a weight had been lifted off of me and hearing her own story just seemed to click a lot of things into place that I had always wondered about. It was around this time that I took to songwriting again. This time the song came to me in a rush while I was doing dishes. I'll be the first to admit it was definitely my most unshiny happy people kind of a song. To say that it got a reaction would be a teensy bit of an understatement. Without going into too much detail, my writing this song and posting it (like I do all of my songs) on youtube (for my therapeutic purposes) made one of the people it was about contact me after quite some time to ask who I was talking about in the song. Ironic, eh? The only person who asked me what the song was about was the person it was about. Funny that.  I ignored the message. And then a few weeks later, I got a friend request on Facebook from said person. That did it. I have a little bit of a temper and if I feel provoked you're going to know about it in a hurry. I (without profanity) told this person who and what the song was about, and, that said person's little secret isn't as dead as they thought it was. Then I walked out the door and went to a party. The party was quite fun btw. I then came home to find three shouty capital messages from someone else. Talk about being blind-sided. I didn't realize that a paragraph response to someone I loathe would elicit such a strong reaction from someone I loved. Yeah, the ranty pointed message wasn't from the same person that I wrote the message to, it was from someone else. Long story shortened even more, lots of things starting clicking into place. Basically, if I had listened to my dad when I was a kid and looked at all of the people he wasn't really fond of, I could have saved myself a lot of problems growing up and as an adult. My dad was the best judge of character. If he didn't like you, there was usually a pretty damn good reason.

My Anxiety Story -- Part 5 (The master of avoidance)

The first few months after my sister died and I was misdiagnosed with a blood clot in my lung were pretty rough. I lived in a constant and perpetual state of fear. Every moment of every day was consumed with a giant "what if". All of the things I enjoyed before (singing, going for drives, going out to eat, drinking with my friends) were now things I dreaded and avoided. In some ways it was lucky I had decided to leave my band because I honestly don't think I could've gotten up on stage at that point. It was that quick. I had been performing twice a week for a year and after my panic attacks started, I couldn't even think about getting up in front of people without having a panic attack. For a long time, if Trevor and I went for a drive it had to be within a twenty mile radius of Zanesville, (the place where the hospital was). Ironically, I didn't trust a single doctor that worked there, after all they misdiagnosed me, released me with no real answers, and then sent me a $3,000 doctor bill that I had to pay off. Still, somehow, my own feeling of security revolved around being able to get back to that hospital if I needed to.

If you know me, you know that my favorite thing in the world to do is go out to a restaurant and eat. I LOVE food. It's my "thang". Going to a restaurant when you have panic attacks is not my idea of fun. I would have to have a seat as close to the exit as possible in case I needed to escape. (You know how scary mashed potatoes and gravy can be at times.) The whole meal would revolve around me analyzing how I felt. "Did I just feel dizzy?" "Why did that guy just look at me?" "Am I allergic to this?". It was a nightmare. In October of 2004, 7 months after my sister died, I found out I was pregnant with Emma. Trevor and I were so excited. A couple of months later Trevor's work permit finally came through and we decided (well, mostly he decided) he should get a job. He got a job working in Lancaster. Lancaster is where my sister died. Lancaster is where I worked as well (but at the time I was working from home). Lancaster and I had issues. I was afraid to go there. I didn't want Trevor to go there because (wait for it....) "what if something bad happened to him? Those Lancaster paramedics killed my sister. They laughed at her while she died."  That's how I saw it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't still see it that way to some degree. I couldn't stand the thought of him driving all the way to Lancaster while I stayed home, so I asked my boss if I could come in to the office and work on the days when Trevor was working, and work from home the other times. He, of course said yes, because he was a really nice boss. On the days Trevor had to work during normal office hours at my office, I'd go into work and sit and do my job, with tremendous anxiety and effort. On the days that Trevor had to work late evenings or weekends, I would go to the mall where he worked and sit on the bench out front of his job for 8 hours and wait for him to finish. That carried on for three months. People at the mall probably thought I was the biggest weirdo ever, but I felt safer there than I did at home alone. I also felt bored, and ashamed, and dependent....and the list goes on. Sometimes, if my aunt wasn't busy on a Saturday, I'd go spend the day with her while Trevor worked. I felt safe there too, but she wasn't always home when Trevor had to work and  eventually, as I got more pregnant, the thought of sitting on that bench became less appealing. Instead of trying to stay home by myself while Trevor went to work like "normal" people do, I begged him to quit. So he did.  I carried on working from home, but even that became stressful. I worked in a mental health office. I had to type notes about people who had mental problems, from Bi-Polar, to anxiety, to depression, to schizophrenia. On the more severe cases, I'd sit and obsess if I would ever be like that. When I'd type notes about people with anxiety it made me panic because I was one of them. Everything I heard in those little head phones seemed to add to my problems. I couldn't just do my job without obsessing and analyzing everything I heard and typed. When Emma was born, my anxiety got better to some degree. I was forced to focus on something other than my "what if's" for once. I still couldn't be alone though, and I didn't dare let Trevor take Emma anywhere without me. Basically I just got new "what if" thoughts that included her. I started singing again and was fine as long as Trevor was with me. He was my "safe person". When Emma was born we decided we would eventually move to Australia. We put our house up for sale and when it finally sold, I was excited. I was ready to move. I saw it as a chance to escape my anxiety. Unfortunately, it didn't really stay behind as I had hoped. I created it, so it came with me. It was a lot better at first after we moved here. Well, I'm not sure if that statement is really true or not. I mean, Trevor was able to go get a job, and I was fine about that....but my mom came over with us and stayed for six months, so it's not like I was really alone. My anxiety was pretty good for that first six months. My mom, and Emma, and I walked over to the shops each day and I started taking Emma to story time at the library and a play group. After my mom went back, I had a few set backs, panicking when I would take Emma places. I ended up getting a cell phone so I could call Trevor whenever I wanted, and buying a car of my own so I didn't have to walk everywhere. It wasn't hard to adjust to driving on the wrong side of the road because I hadn't driven in 4 years! I made some friends and started inviting people around for "morning tea". I started taking Emma to kindergym and kept busy. Emma and I had a very busy social life.

To be continued...

My Anxiety Story -- Part 4 (The moment everything else revolves around)

A year after my dad died, I moved back home, well technically I moved to an apartment where my mom had just moved as well. It was right next door to where she worked (remember she doesn't drive) so it was easier for her to be closer to work. We still had our house, but we never lived there again. I continued to work weaving baskets, driving an hour everyday. On the 5th of October that year, (my dad's birthday) I didn't really feel like going in to work. I decided since I worked night shift, I'd stay up all night and randomly chat with people online. I was talking to this guy named Herman out in California when another person popped up and asked me a silly question about my profile. At first I thought he was weird, but then I started chatting to him and ended up chatting to him for hours that night. We then started emailing regularly and calling each other. Eventually we both sent videos to each other. After ten months of chatting, he flew over to meet me. I went to the airport by myself, really hoping that he wasn't a serial killer. Turns out he probably isn't one, either that or he's very slow. He stayed for nine days and it was wonderful. Then I decided I'd go see him. I'd never been on a plane before, but I got my passport and booked my tickets. Then September 11th happened and I thought for sure I'd chicken out, but less than a month later I was Sydney, Australia bound. Of course I'd picked a 20 hour flight for my very first time on a plane. People at home took bets on how long I'd be gone, whether I'd get to the airport in Texas and turn around and come back, or whether I'd make it the three months I was booked. Flying was AMAZING. I loved it. I made it there and stayed for six months instead of three.  When I got home I found a new job doing transcription in a mental health office. I loved it! Six months later, my mystery man moved to America, four months later we were engaged, and three months after that we were married. I'm still pretty sure Trevor isn't a serial killer. ;) We bought our first home in Ohio and had Christmas there that year. My sister, Carla came to our house for Christmas and we watched some home videos and she made fun of how absolutely ridiculous Trevor and I can be. It was great. I had been singing in a band for a year prior to this and had decided after Christmas that it was time to leave. My last day with the band was to be March 20th. On the 29th of March in the evening my mother-in-law called, she'd had a "bad feeling" and wanted to call us. After we got off the phone with her, I thought about calling my sister as I hadn't talked to her for a couple of weeks. For whatever reason, I didn't do it, probably thinking my mother-in-law is full of shit and there's no need to go calling everyone in case her bad feeling about something turned out to be true. The next morning I got up and went down to the office to start work (I was now working from home doing the transcription). At exactly 8:32 a.m. the phone rang, on the other end was someone from my mom's office at work. I immediately got panicky thinking something was wrong with her, but then she went on to say that my sister's best friend had called and that that Carla's heart had stopped and the EMT's were working on her. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach with a sledgehammer, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think. I ran up the stairs yelling for Trevor to wake up and we drove to the dentist office to get my mom on the way to the hospital. The hospital was about 25 or 30 minutes drive and all the way I prayed that she would be okay, that her heart hadn't stopped, that if it had they'd got it going again. I remember saying out loud that everything was going to be okay, trying to calm my mom down. I was so sure we'd get to the hospital and Carla would be sitting up in a bed and apologize for scaring us all half to death. When we got there this nurse took us into a tiny room. I knew what that meant. I'd been in a room like this before. She was gone. We walked in and her best friend was sitting there and she confirmed what I already knew. My sister, the person whom I grew up with, and fought with, and told my secrets to, my 28-year-old sister was dead. My mom went outside, she couldn't stand to be in that little room. I asked Jackie (my sister's best friend) how it had happened and she said that Carla had called her out of breath and needed help and Jackie called an ambulance and then headed to her house. She sat there not being able to breathe while the EMT's rolled their eyes at her and told her she was hyperventilating and all she needed was a paper bag. She sat there scared wondering why they weren't helping her. She sat there not being able to breathe, until her heart stopped. The doctors said she had had a pulmonary embolism -- a blood clot in her lung. The funeral was hard. I just wanted to be alone to think, or cry, or both, but every time I'd try to get away, someone else would find me and come and talk to me. A week and a half after she died I was sitting down helping my mom make out thank you cards for the people who had sent flowers or food, and Jackie called. She had more information about how the EMT's had treated Carla. I felt shaky after that phone call and couldn't finish the cards. The next day Trevor took our dog for a walk and when he was gone I just started feeling weird. I can't really describe it any other way, just weird. When he got home I said I wanted to go get a cold drink from the shop down the road, water didn't sound good, I had to have Coke. On the way, all I could think of was how Jackie had mentioned that Carla said she had felt weird leading up to when she died. We went in to get the Coke out of the fountain, I took a drink and left it there and said "I've got to go to the hospital NOW". We drove to the ER and I told the doctor what had happened to her and how I felt really weird, so he did a blood test that will tell you if you have a clot or not. It came back I didn't and he gave me a prescription for some dizzy pills. I felt a lot better after I left. A few evenings later my mom was over at our house to finish up the thank you cards, as I sat down to do them I started feeling "funny" again. I was getting really dizzy and hot, my arms felt like they were on fire. I immediately jumped up and told Trevor and my mom that I needed to go to the ER, that something was terribly wrong with me. We got there and my heart was pounding so hard that when they put those little EKG stickers on me, I could feel them pulsating like they were jumping off of me. They gave me some Ativan to calm me down and then took me for a CT Scan. I had the same doctor that I had had a few days before and he wanted to just double check that there was nothing obvious. I calmed down after that, and then he came into the room and said "It's a blood clot in your lung". That was it. The pivotal moment. They kept me there for a week, doing every test they could think of. Every time someone would come into my room my heart rate would sky rocket, not just doctors, friends as well....everyone but Trevor and my mom. The blood doctor came in to talk to me and said I'd have to be on blood thinners for the rest of my life and I'd probably not be able to have children. I was on a full information overload. My sister had died of the same thing two weeks before, and now they're telling me I can't have children? At the end of that week, after exhausting every other test, including a drug test, they did another CT Scan. There was nothing there. They told me the first one was a "shadow on the scan". They kept me there for a week, all the while I"m on bed rest afraid to move a muscle for fear that this clot is going to move and kill me, and all th while there was absolutely nothing physically wrong with me. Before they released me, I asked the doctor, "Could this be an anxiety thing?" I knew about anxiety, I worked in a mental health clinic, I wanted him to say yes. I wanted that to be the end of it, but he said "I don't like to say things are anxiety and the symptoms don't really fit". That started the thinking, of "if it's not anxiety, what is it?"  I left the hospital and my heart rate would just randomly go up. I used to make Trevor take me to the hospital parking lot and play cards with me until I felt calm enough to go home. We were there outside that ER nightly for months. I couldn't drive anymore. He couldn't go anywhere without me or I would panic. I remember one time he had to go to an immigration interview by himself and I was home alone. I panicked as soon as his car was out of site. I had all of those feelings I had had in the hospital, so I called my mom and drove (very uncomfortably) to pick her up and bring her to my house. I could not be alone. I couldn't even think about being alone without feeling all of those scary body feelings -- dizziness, fast heart beat, being out of breath, feeling spacey. But still, I had no idea what was wrong with me. The doctor had said it didn't "fit" in with anxiety and so I certainly must have something wrong with my heart, or a brain tumor, or ovarian cancer, or.....the list went on. I was now a hypochondriac, analyzing every body symptom and making it into a new disease, something, anything to explain why I felt like this. I used to have Trevor check my pulse constantly. He had to say it was "real good" or I'd panic. If he said it was a little bit high, I would panic. I couldn't check it myself because as soon as I'd try, my heart rate would go up. One of my favorite things used to be going for drives, I didn't really like driving, but I loved riding in the car. Trevor and I used to go for drives in the country to try to get lost before the panic attacks started. After that, I was afraid to go very far from a hospital. As we drove, I'd obsess about "what if" this and "what if" that and if we would go into places, I'd plan my escape route. Suddenly, everything in my life revolved around being able to get to the hospital if I needed to. On the same token, I was afraid to actually go in the hospital because "what if they said I have a blood clot or heart condition and they're wrong", or even worse "what if they're right this time?"  I couldn't even go to the grocery store. I'd get in there and the fluorescent lights were too bright, looking at things on the shelves made me feel dizzy, and with every step I'd take toward those last aisles farthest away from the door, I was feeling more out of control -- "what if I pass out?" "What if I have a heart attack?" "What if it wasn't a shadow on the scan and I really do have a blood clot?" And so it went like that for months. Trevor would go and do the shopping, but I had to come too, and sit the car. If he took too long, I'd start to panic. We started reading things online about anxiety and panic attacks and found that I had every symptom, but in the back of my mind I heard that doctor say that my symptoms didn't "fit" with anxiety. I second guessed everything I read, everything I heard, everything I did.  I couldn't exercise, even going for a walk or walking up stairs was an impossible task -- back then it was because it made my heart rate go up, which made me think of that first panic attack that sent me to the ER, and I was also afraid of having a heart attack like my dad did.

This is where I'll leave it for now.