not a life worth living

The goal of my therapy, when I had access to therapy with the world's leading authority on my specific disorder, was to work towards living 'a life worth living'.

I am not living a life worth living.  I fall into deep wells of emotional pain that are excrutiating, draining me, depleting my being and everything is very hard to do.

In January and February of this year, I believe I was the most depressed I have ever been, and that is saying a hella lot because depression is my oldest and closest friend/enemy. I think my depression sunk even lower than is typical for me because my health has declined. Something is wrong with my lungs. It is probably COPD. My arthritis gets worse all the time. I hurt physically all the time. Physical movement wipes me out, and that is when I mostly use my electric scooter and hardly move. I keep swimming largely because I don't hurt when I swim, although I do have to stop, while swimming, more and more just to catch my breath or to hack cough awhile. The coughing is also probably related to COPD.  We'll see.

Of course physical pain and suffering exacerbates my ongoing depression struggle.

Here is what happened today. I called my county worker, the one who calculates how many hours of in-home help I need. I called to ask her (1) how to get a list of folks looking to do this kind of work because my guy is probably leaving and (2) to ask how I might go about getting my alloted hours increased.

I asked questions. Politely. And the county worker became verbally abusive, yelling at me and then projecting her anger onto me and shouting at me that I was angry and I was shouting.

I know it is okay for me to ask her questions. I don't think it is okay for her to be verbally, loudly, angrily abusive.

So I asked for the name and phone of her supervisor, which she gave me. The supervisor was polite. First she said she had to talk to the angry abuser gal but by the time she and I were finished, she had agreed to assign me to someone else.

In the big scheme of things, that woman's nasty abuse doesn't matter. And I know it doesn't. But it tipped me into one of my black hellholes. I've been crying ever since, wanting to binge on sweets. Luckily, I don't have sweets in my home.

I don't want to be alive.  And maybe this influenced me:  I went to get an xray of my lungs this morning, which is just past the dollar store on Shattuck.  I don't buy any of the very bad food sold at the dollar stores but I buy laundry detergent, cleaning products, scrubbies and other non-edible stuff. I bought a box of Puffs today, that's all I bought. But I decided to go up and down the seasonal aisles. Mother's Day shit was all over. 

I remember my first Mother's Day with a living child.  May 1983. Katie's dad forgot to make any reservations. Mother's Day is a major brunch Sunday and without reservtions, its just about impossible. Plus I was breastfeeding and when he tried to force me to go driving around looking for a place we could get into, I pointed out that Katie was going to want to breastfeed within the next hour and I would prefer to stay home until she ate. He was furious, shouting, red faced, "You are crazy if you expect me to believe that you know when she is going to want to eat." Crazy to have maternal instincts? Crazy to know my baby very well, to feed her from my own body and to know more or less what was going on with her most of the time? That's being a mother. But he was severely abusive and I was severely cowed so I let him drag me out.

And, sure enough, by the time we found a place to get put on a waiting list and settled into waiting, she wanted to eat. He wouldn't let me feed her in public so she and I sat on a toilet in the ladies room. Mother's Day with no respect for the mother!

And he insisted on buying me a very large microwave. His standard for that microwave was it had to be big enough to cook a turkey in it, even though I didn't (1) want any microwave and (2) I knew I would absolutely never cook a turkey in a microwave. Who would? Plus I felt am appliance was not much of a Mother's DAy gift. How about flowers? Or a new article of clothing? That microwave was something he wanted and it still rankles that he forced an appliance on me and pretended he had given me something great. An appliance for fuck sake.

I did feel some satisfaction when my darling infant cried out to eat just when I had predicted she would. Perhaps she had understood my exchange with her asshole father.