Friday, October 25, 2013

A change will do me good (let's hope)

I am moving back to Mississippi. I have packed up my clothes, groceries, and has many shoes as I could carry. Hint: it's not even scratching the surface of what still lies in my closet, and I cried nearly the whole time I was packing. This has been my home, my touchstone, my retreat mostly lately, but it's mine.. I truly believe I'm making the right decision. Further, I truly believe that my future decisions have to be about me and me alone. People are going to formulate opinions: Emily's gone crazy, she's fragile, she can't handle reality. They might be right. But rather than bull-shitting my way through knowing I need counseling and support before I secure my next step, I'm actually going to do it.

I have a depressive personality. I've had it since college, the first time I took an anti-depressant. Mostly, I seem fine to other people, upbeat and social and always cracking a joke, and mostly I am. But the lows I experience with this affliction, especially when major life upheavals happen, like my father, grandmother, and brother dying, along with the end of my marriage, are the lows that cause me to sleep 19 hours a day and wish I could disconnect my phone so I don't have to worry anyone when I don't answer and just want to sleep.

I have so much potential. It's there, it's like dangling from a tree I can't reach right now, and I have to find the mechanism that controls the potential that leads to my happiness. I know I'm capable of happiness; for a depressed person, I'm pretty funny. That's what helps me deal with things, courtesy of my father. I don't know if he was depressed, but he had a dark sense of humor that I wholeheartedly inherited. I'm genuinely trying to find my way and my purpose and my happiness again. I know it's there. I don't think it exists in the pre-accepted normal professional life, and that's okay. I can gain the tools to find what my "special" purposes is.

I don't want to be some 40-year-old living off her mother, whining about why society didn't treat me fairly. I have no bones with society, except the Tea Party, and that's a whole other conversation. I just need motivation to get off my lackadaisical ass and do something. Teach, help impoverished communities, work with children, counsel, and still maintain my writing. I dunno. I feel our generation was given a set of tools that stopped applying once the economy took a dive, and I need to chisel my way out. I am not this whiny, self-centered person, and I am smart and capable and want to teach and help in a greater, macro-way. I just need a good freaking counselor to tell me to stop crying that my marriage is over and tell me it's not completely my fault. I don't think that's asking too terribly much. If it is asking too much, screw the psychotherapy industry. Trust me, I got issues.

On a side note, after I cried while packing my house, I watched "Hot Tub Time Machine," which I highly recommend to cure the doldrums.

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