NOT a Workhorse

Dear Universe:

Please don’t let my brother become one of those self-righteous eejits now that he’s on medication. Please. I don’t want to hear three times a day how I need to get counseling. I lived with his uncontrolled ADHD for decades. Don’t I get a few years of non-medication in return?

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Crap-spackeled mother fucker.

The above topic (me getting counseling, not the crap-spackled mother fuckers of the world) came up again last night. Another statement about how I should REALLY make that call or get through the on-line registration. Oh fuck. It’s become a thing that’s popping out of my brother’s mouth with frightening frequency. Even through my anxiety goggles I know he wants the best for me. But the goggles put a weird perspective on it; I know he’s saying “I want you be be healthy and happy” but all I hear is “There’s something majorly fucking WRONG with you, woman, go get it fixed”.

*sigh* I took that half of a sleeping pill last night. In return, I received a solid 8 hour snooze. HOWEVER … Sleep didn’t go beyond 8 hours. My body just battled itself awake. Cough, cough. Sneeze. Blow the nose. Gotta pee. Toss and turn. Cough some more. Fuck. Just get up. I do feel like I’m more rested than usual, so I guess it worked. I guess.

Today’s the day all immigrants hate: I have to get my hair cut. I read this somewhere – sorry for the unlinked statement – that getting your hair cut is one of the worst things to try and do when you don’t have a good grasp of the language. It’s difficult to communicate how you want your hair to look, and you often end up with a sub-par cut because you couldn’t talk to the hairdresser. I’m not so worried about it. I’ve had great haircuts and horrible hair cuts. I can live. The thing I’m not looking forward to is the long, eerie time sitting in the chair and not chit-chatting. Go and ahead and laugh; I would if I were not in this position. But I challenge you to try it; try going and getting your hair done and saying NOTHING to the hairdresser by way of conversation. It’s a long hour or two. A very long hour or two.

I gotta burr under my skin. A statement made by one of my instructors really is kicking me around today. Here it is: ‘If you really want to learn, you must talk, talk, talk. Don’t use English. Only use Dutch.” For fuck’s sake! I’m surrounded by the fucking language, thank you very little. I can’t turn on the fucking television without hearing the language. Even if the program I’m watching is in English, the adverts aren’t. Make a phone call? Dutch. Go to the shop? Dutch. Everywhere I GO I hear it and people try to talk to me. I can’t fucking get away from it. Do it more? Sit at home and try to talk with my brother in Dutch 24/7?!? I’ll go fucking mad. I had to point out that I’m writing in ENGLISH and dealing with grammatical issues in my native language is fucking tough enough. A certain percentage of my brain power MUST be devoted to English. I don’t know that I’ll ever write in Dutch. It’s such a clunky language. Maybe when I’m a better reader I’ll get some Dutch poetry – there must be some, somewhere. Find out how THAT works, ’cause the spoken and written language is so dry it’s hard to imagine anything effusive in Dutch. Fuck. In the meantime, I’m still working on things like “In this store, people buy bread and cakes. This is a bakery” (sorry; I would have given the Dutch but auto-correct just can’t handle it).

All I wanna do is dig my heels in and say no. No, I won’t quit smoking. No, I won’t talk to anybody. No, I don’t need any sleep. No, I won’t learn one more word of Dutch. Everybody fuck off. Really working on not going there. Taking a lot of deep breaths. Running my hands through my hair, which is my stall tactic when I need time. Doing my best to keep keepin’ on and not rip off people’s smug smiling faces when they tell me to pick up the pace, do more, or reach higher. I’m juggling everything I feel I can right now. Please, please, don’t make me feel like I should be doing fucking more than this. Be my cheerleader, tell me well done. Don’t push me. If you keep nudging me you’re gonna get a goddamn tiger’s claw right across your face.

The stress has impinged on my writing zen. Getting more and more difficult to enter that state and write. Which is pissing me off, which doesn’t help. Having crazy notions like pulling an all-nighter; getting up at 2 a.m. when I know my bro is asleep and start writing. *ironic chuckle* I don’t know that I have enough coffee and smoke to do that right now. But that’s just an afternoon’s fast shopping. I could. I don’t think it’s smart, but I could. Knowing I could helps, somehow. Like a pressure valve I know I can loosen up if things get too bad. Of course, if I get to THAT state, my first stuff will look like this: hiot hip; doin0rj;seijow – ’cause I’ll just be mashing my hands against the keyboard.

Feels like I could – like I SHOULD be living on sugar and caffeine. Pure energy. Meat and carbs slow me down. Me no like. Want more coffee – just drank the last drop. Want sweet things. The house is stocked; my bro’s weight is dangerously low, so right now there’s cookies and cakey things to eat everywhere. That, at least, is a craving I can manage pretty well. I want to manage it BETTER than I do now, but at least I don’t sit down and eat everything in one go like I once might have. It’s rather easy to be kind to myself on the weight issue this morning. The last thing I saw on tv was an ad for a show on Discovery or TLC or some other soft channel that really panders to the less educated. The show was about grossly obese people. GROSSLY obese. People who really did have to be hosed off. People who couldn’t stand on their own two feet because of the extra weight they carried.

That isn’t me.

It really makes me wonder, though, exactly what I’m aiming for with my body. I’ve always seen it as too fat, even at my slimmest. Somewhere deep inside me I MUST have a picture in my head that I think is the way I’m supposed to look. My view of my body is as skewed as anything else, I guess. I either see myself as way too fat or slightly better than I actually am (Which, by the way, is the more dangerous of the two. Those rare moments when I think I look good and then see a photograph that destroys that image are HORRIBLE.). Ugh. How do I tear THAT down? I guess it’s time to buy that full length mirror for my room. Do some naked looking. Just look at my body. Get past all the ‘fat’ issues and accept what it is. I hate that shit. It does work; I’ve done it before and had great results. I just don’t want to do it again. And again. And again.

There’s something else I’m not getting to. I’m guessing it’s all the shit surrounding counseling. Getting help. Getting a diagnosis. Maybe getting better. Can’t really access that, but it’s probably accurate. All this other small shit buzzing around is just that – small shit. Shit I can tackle without blinking an eye. But I’m stumbling, procrastinating. Making excuses. I’ve got a bigger problem…

The memory of my last ‘counseling’ visit is very clear. My expectations walking into the appointment, expectations to see the person I saw last time and to talk with her. It’s a sharp contrast to what I got: someone else, who I didn’t like, and a 15 minute explanation that they weren’t willing/able to handle bipolar cases and I should leave and get an appointment at this other place. My anger; all consuming anger. Oh, that bitch almost died that day and she didn’t even fucking know it. All I can see with this new counseling center is a long merry-go-round like they put my brother through. I don’t want to go into this with hopes for this or that. I don’t want to be let down or feel angry like that again. Ah! There it is, in my tears. I came close to really hurting that woman. I stepped into her personal space and basically threatened her with my body language and vocal inflection. I’m scared of feeling that again. I don’t know that I’ll be able to contain it a second time. Especially if they put me in a room with yet another older woman who reminds me of my mother. Blood may flow. Guess that’s important to tell them when I finally get in contact. We’ll see. I’ve had ‘English speaker’ on my file since I got here, yet most calls I’ve received have been from Dutch speakers with little to no English.

Well. At least I feel I’ve uncovered the hurdle a bit. I can see what I need to jump over and get past. It’s not so big. A couple of tiny jumps, like writing down what I want to say to the hairdresser so I can just read it or give it to her. The water hazard: the online form for the counseling center. I’ll need google translate side by side for that one. The hedge: Dutch. No way around that, I’ve just got to jump as best I can.

Fuck. I’ve turned into that horse my dad always compared me to. Well, at least I’m seeing myself as a jumping horse, not a workhorse…