To the stars through adversity. One of a friend’s favorite sayings (yes, I remember). I’m beginning to get it. And with that person’s voice in my head I’m fighting tooth and nail to spend as much time in the stars as I can.
Apart from getting all intellectual and latin on you, I want to start this evening with my quote of choice today, again from Sylvia Plath, who recently seems to be the spokesperson for my psyche recently: ”I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
It’s very me. I keep busy to stay happy. Idle hands and all that. I stand still and my head melts. While I know that releasing the yuk from my head in the form of a blog is a good thing, it does allow for introspection which on the bad days becomes increasingly dangerous. However, I will concede that the pills are working and the jumping from one to the other extreme is far shorter than it has been in many months. I’ve had several moments recently where I felt properly content. Like that proper cat laying in the sun thing (actually I was in fact laying in the sun in the bay window on our bed just with my eyes closed being totally still and not hearing any screaming in my head). Cats do content very well – makes you wonder if they have some secret supply of feline prosac somewhere, either that or I seriously question what’s in catnip.
This weekend has been total proof that the happy pills have taken full control of my mind (in a good way). It was meant to be a wonderful few days with midget birthday parties and all sorts of festivities planned. Unfortunately, like so many of my own childhood moments of joy overload my parents had an almighty falling out (for the regulars, you’ll know that we do the big extended living with family thing). Like most kids I remember them having screaming matches while I hid in my room. With Mr T, we have a pact to never ever do that. Especially because I just cower when people raise their voices (unless I’m at work weirdly when it’s water off a duck’s back). Of course we fall out. No two people can live together without driving each other insane occasionally. But we don’t shout. We have a deal to talk and accept when the other tells us we’re being irrational and probably need chocolate. We’ve developed these weird code words that invariably make us giggle – I generally tell him he’s acting like his sister and he calls my moments of stroppiness ’blob strops’, I know it’s vulgar, but it makes me laugh. Anyway, with my parents this one is different. It’s become a 48 hour silence pitted with the occasional outburst. Neither will communicate and to be honest, I fear the worst. They need space to talk, so we’re going to vacate for a few days. And even if the silence continues, it means the midgets don’t have to witness it as right now they’re unaware as we’ve kept them busy all day.
So why does this mean the pills are working? Well, apart from me having a minor breakdown after getting yelled at this morning (tbh, I think that was more just me having hoped it would have blown over by the morning and being disappointed that they’d let it interfere with midget’s birthday. That combined with it being important to me that today was perfect because I missed her birthday last year as I was in hospital), I’ve carried on. I’ve not flown into a panic. I’ve not fallen into some horrible depressed state. I’ve looked at the practical side of things. Instead of trying to talk to them both and smooth things over, I’ve told mum at least that it’s their problem and I will not be their marriage counsellor. I did enough of that as a teenager. They can do whatever they need to do, I have my own marriage and children to look after now. I don’t know how I actually feel. I do know that I don’t want to be sitting here in the middle of it feeling very awkward and gooseberry-like though.
