February 21

Today is Jerry's birthday.

Apologies to all of you who've been concerned about me due to my radio silence lately.  I've definitely been sort of shut down in the past few weeks, and have been dealing with new weird manifestations of something bad happening, mainly panic attacks.  This is the second Monday in a row I've taken off as a personal day from work, and this morning I called my doctor's office, and have discussed matters with her nurse, and am waiting for another call back to find out if they want me to come in for an appointment they've set aside for me this evening just in case.  What I really want, I think, is a psych referral - the counselor I saw a number of months ago was a nice woman and all, but I think bigger guns are warranted now.  I spend so much time thinking "Yeah, it feels bad, but it's not really that bad, others are in so much worse shape and I mostly do fine and go to work and come home," only this morning I didn't manage the "go to work" part and the weekend didn't go real well and I actually cried the way I've only cried once before during all this, right before Jerry died, couldn't breathe, couldn't stop, felt like I was out of control and in some other odd space, outside myself almost.  So yeah... bigger guns.

I thought I was doing so well.  Frighteningly well.  I thought, Well, I'm coping so much better than I ever expected I would.  Now I worry it was all just my brain doing its coping-mechanism-thing.  And that that's not working anymore.

I'm sorry for the lack of communication, but sometimes withdrawal is really the only thing I can do.  In the plus column, over the weekend I got a ticket to see Sugarland in May and one to go to Huntsville the week before that for the weekend of the Huntsville All-Day Sacred Harp Singing.  So I must have some sort of optimism hidden away somewhere that I can actually pull out of this thing I'm dealing with now and will want to do things in the future.  Also, I've started knitting again, which I wasn't sure I'd ever do again: thanks to several guys at work for being Firefly fans, so I've been motivated to make them Jayne hats.  (Google will be your friend if that last sentence sounded like gibberish to you...)  I've made a hash of the two attempts so far, but I'm soldiering on and enjoying the process again.

But apparently Jerry is dead and not coming back.  And I don't know, still, after all these months, how real that idea is to me.  I cannot tell you all how much I do not want to be dealing with all this, how much I want a "normal" life again.  I feel horrible for feeling that I don't want to be sad about Jerry's suffering and death and absence any more.  But I guess that's not really it.  I'll always be sad about that, it'll always be there, no matter how happy a life I manage to have someday.  I just want to function, I want to be happy, I want it not to be tearing my life apart and making me feel like I'm melting down and disappearing into some sort of black hole.

Or maybe this is Prozac side effects catching me up.

So... yeah.  Waiting for the doctor's office to call back.