We went out for a bite to eat last night as well as to Walgreens. I got some really nice nail polish. It’s a bold, shimmering shade of violet. 

I also dreamed that I won $350 worth of flooring, only I was living with my dead parents. 

Speaking of my parents, the answer to something I’ve always wondered hit me the other day, and I can’t believe it took decades to do it. Really, the answer was so damn obvious all along. 

For years I wondered if I was taken away from my parents in my teens or if they gave me up on their own. Of course they gave me up on their own. I’m not surprised, though it was more likely her idea and he went along with it… as always. She hated kids and with me being so much younger than Larry and Tammy, she just couldn’t wait for me to hurry up and get old enough to get out of the house. In those days you were pressured to have kids, unlike today where you’re often pressured to skip kids and work, work, work. 

I’m also not surprised because hey, this was the '80s. Even if I’d shown up to school plastered with bruises, the odds of me being taken away were slim. It was (and still kind of is) very hard to get a kid removed from their parents. 

It was what she did that final morning at home that answered my question. Again, I just don’t know why it took me so long to put two and two together. Perhaps it’s cuz no one wants to believe their own mother gave up on them. Oh, but mine sure did, and if there’s an afterlife in which she could possibly look down on me, I wonder how she feels about it being published online for all the world to see. *looks upwards* Yeah, you didn’t think of that, bitch, did you? 

It was spring of ’82, just a few months after my 5-month “sentence” in the Brattleboro Retreat up in Vermont. It wasn’t really a “retreat,” of course. They just called it that. But what it really was was a psych hospital run like a prison. 

During the months between December and April, I never returned to public schools. I attended an alternative high school in Springfield. It was a small building and there weren’t many of us. Maybe about 15-20 students. A guy that most of us got high with every morning, picked us Longmeadow kids up in a van and drove us to the school. I liked this little school. We had tons of freedom there. Not many kids, then or now, could get high with their drivers, take breaks at the school whenever they felt like it, and openly smoke cigarettes as well. 

I overslept one April morning and my mother woke me up in a panic, saying my ride was waiting. She rushed me into the bathroom, into my clothes, and out the door. I don’t think I even ate that morning. I was utterly exhausted, too. 

Looking back on it now… why was it so important she make the driver wait like that so I could go to school that day? Normally, wouldn’t one’s mother tell the driver, “Hey, she’s still asleep. I won’t make you and the other students rudely wait for her. I’ll get her up and bring her in myself later, or we’ll skip today altogether.” 

But she knew I wasn’t coming back. She’d had her fill with being my mother on a full-time basis and she knew that was my last day living there as a minor. That contact she said we weren’t “allowed” in the beginning; that was her idea, no doubt. 

Knowing the answer can’t change history, of course, but it’s answered my question and settled my curiosity… as well as reinforced my hatred for the bitch, for some of the places I ended up were far worse than living with the tyrant from hell. Far worse. 

As I said before, I don’t know if there’s a God or an afterlife, but if there is, Mommy Dearest, I hope you’re rotting in hell, you bitch, and that the God who protected you when you were alive is making you pay tenfold! 

Later… 

I thought I was getting better but instead, I got worse. Over the weekend I was borderline anxious, but as soon as he left to go to work yesterday morning I was in for 4 hours of hell. My heart raced up a storm and I was terrified that I was going to have the kind of attack I had on the 29th, even though that attack was clearly due to the dosage increase. I thought I would get better since it’s been decreased, but I am still having anxious moments where I feel like I will never be the person I was before these days began. I miss the days of having absolutely no clue of just what the true meaning of the word “anxiety” meant. It’s like she “broke” something within me when she tried to get me to tolerate 88s, even though I know she didn’t. Still… I’m wondering if I can ever be put back to the way I was for the most part from May to October. Why am I just so destined to suffer so much of the time lately? Again I ask myself, what the fuck did I do to deserve it? I feel like I have suffered more in the last year and a half than I have in the last decade. Maybe more. 

It got to where Skype wasn’t enough and I had to actually call Tom. Hearing his voice helped calm me down. Had someone told me a couple of years ago that I would be afraid to be alone as an adult I would have laughed my ass off. I just never would have believed it in a million years unless I was alone in the flimsy trailer with a million grizzlies trying to break in or something. What will I be terrified of next? Will I become afraid of the dark? 

I skipped my pills today hoping it would take some of the edge off the anxiety since there’s a chance I could still be having lingering effects of the increase. I still worry about how I’m going to feel when he leaves the house in a few hours. I try to remind myself it’s not life-threatening and that nothing is going to kill me, but it’s still terrifying. Like smoking a joint and trying to tell yourself not to feel high, or burning yourself with a cigarette lighter and telling yourself not to feel pain. There’s nothing to be afraid of, BUT I AM. I am still honestly terrified nonetheless, and I don’t understand how Tom can believe I’m getting better little by little. Yesterday sure felt like a setback to me, though he said it was just because it was too soon for me to be left alone after what happened on the 29th, and he also believes I’m worried about my adrenal gland test. 

We all have our fears, be it heights, spiders, flying, or driving, and some of these fears we can conquer while some of them we just can’t. But I once lived without this kind of terrifying anxiety and I would like to think that I can live that way again, even though things do change with time. Our appetites go up and so does our weight with age. Our hair turns gray and our vision gets worse. Well, I guess I have just become a very anxious person and if none of that is connected to my medication at this point, then there’s either something else going on or I truly have developed a horrible anxiety disorder that I’m going to have to struggle with for the rest of my life. I read that while most anxiety disorders develop young, medical conditions can cause them to develop later on in life, hypothyroidism being one of them. As I told a friend recently, I really hope there is no God, for it is sitting back and allowing me to continue to suffer without doing a damn thing to intervene. 

I did have a dream that someone told me there was something wrong with my bladder. I needed a blood test done for something, and in the dream, they could produce instant results. I don’t know exactly what was wrong with it, and while death didn’t seem imminent, it seemed that whatever was wrong was serious enough. In reality, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my bladder, although I do pee more than I’d like. But could there be anything wrong with any other organ? I don’t think so and I sure hope not! Something’s going to kill me someday, and I don’t see it in the near future. Not unless the anxiety becomes too much for me to live with and I just can’t get it to back off. I still see my PCP and the shrink in about a month, so maybe it’s time to ask for something a little stronger and a little more permanent instead of something I take on an as-needed basis. It’s just that I’m afraid of a bad reaction given my shit luck with medication. Tom doesn’t think I’ll need it by then, so we’ll see who’s right. 

I worry about our vacation too, though I am less likely to feel anxious when I’m around others and I know they’re not going to be taking off for work in a few hours. 

Bailing out of NaNoWriMo with 15,282 words. I just can’t get into story writing/reading these days. My interests fluctuate at times. These days it’s coloring, TV shows and Pinterest. But I did write two stories, one about 8K words and the other 7K. 

I also had a dream that my mother brought me to a shrink, only the one doing the psych eval was Jenny Seagrove, LOL. I realized I’d forgotten my glasses and thought it a shame that Jenny had to be all blurry. 

In another dream, Tammy was telling me it was 37° at her place yet it felt like 15°. We’re going to drop into the upper 30s tonight. Really wish I could be in Maui! 

Then I had some dream where I realized that in less than a year we would be getting a new washer and dryer, and also that we would only live in this house for another 7-8 years instead of 12.