Although I’m feeling a little better today, I’m still spending more time than I’d like struggling to get my emotions to match my life. I totally get it now. All those people who seemed to have it all that would act so miserable, and that I was quick to write off as spoiled, ungrateful little drama queens/kings who simply couldn’t be satisfied. But now I know that sometimes our hormones simply don’t give a shit about what’s going on in our lives. I may have a bit of a stagnant life at times, but I otherwise have a very good life many may envy. Yet I have felt nearly every negative emotion known to humankind for most of the month of June. So much for being my favorite month of the year. Never would I have thought that my own mind and body could turn on me like this and drive me absolutely batshit crazy. What’s a little scary is that now I’m getting depressed more often on top of anxiety. I’m PMSing now too, but it remains to be seen if I get a period to go with this PMS. I’m sure I will, I just wasn’t counting on that until August.

Many times last night my mind visited the thought of downing my entire bottle of lorazepam, but fear of it not killing me and the thought of letting others down stopped me. I realize, though, that there are only so many more years I can consider others and put them before myself. The not knowing exactly what’s causing what and for how long it will go on is what makes it so hard. If there is something out there cursing me, then if I kill myself I would no longer be at its mercy, right? But then I can’t know if I might be at something else’s mercy in the afterlife if one exists. I kind of feel like I’m in a no-win situation and that this is one particular battle I’m destined to eventually lose as it continues to tear me down and break my spirit. Nothing has been able to help me long-term yet, so maybe I’m simply not meant to be helped. Maybe if there is a God, this is what it wants. It wants to slowly torture me until I end up throwing in the towel and ending it all.

With the exception of Tom, who I never would’ve gotten nearly this far without, I feel so alone and abandoned. I mean just look at my online life now compared to a couple of years ago. Many of the people I was associating with and that was following me weren’t good, and I may have been the one to cut ties with some of them, but they were there. I’m not saying that bad friendships are better than no friendships, but I don’t have Kim and Molly’s shit to look forward to getting up and seeing what they’d been up to while I slept. Aly, Andy, Kathy, Nane and Maliheh… they’re all history. Again, perhaps it’s for the best, but having just a small handful of acquaintances isn’t the same. Still have mixed emotions about Tammy being so far away, too.

Our top two guesses for what I’m going through are still a combination of my medication and perimenopause, though we cleansed the house with sage early in the morning just in case. Still don’t know if I believe in spirits or demons, but maybe negative energy that’s accumulated over time has a part in things. The people that had to leave this place before didn’t leave because they wanted to, but because they got old. That right there could leave behind some negative energy, even if it might have taken a year for it to catch up to me. So while I still say God is just a coping method people created to help them get through life (along with a weapon to threaten and control others) and spirits of loved ones are just their way of being unable to let go, I admit that without scientific proof or any first-hand experience with these things, I can’t rule out any possibility. I’m willing to try almost anything once.

I read an article on the telltale signs of if you’ve got spirits, demons or negative energy in your home, and I must admit that some of them struck an uncanny sense of familiarity. Like the times I’ve woken up feeling almost like I couldn’t get enough air yet my lungs didn’t feel congested or blocked in any way. Nor do I have sleep apnea.

Then there are certain sounds I’ve heard around the house, thinking Tom is getting up or walking up behind me I wrote off to the house simply settling. I know no one actually died in the house, but I suppose negative energy is still possible.

Speaking of negative, I’ve been trying to get out of the habit of telling myself things like, “You’ll never handle this,” “You could never make it through that,” “You’re not strong enough to do this,” etc. I realized that the more I tell myself these things, the more I’m likely to believe them, thus making them true. The only positive thing I feel I can say right now, though, is that I’ve been sleeping better. I’m just trying to keep busy and not spend as much time alone. The latter is a little easier said than done, however, when you don’t drive and you have CRD.

I’m also afraid to trust people because I have been burned so many times in life. I’ve reached out to people who have actually welcomed and encouraged me to do so, only to later be accused of simply “wanting attention,” so that’s part of why I tend to keep anything negative to myself. I figure why depress or worry others along with me? Besides, it’s no one else’s business. Either way, so many people can start off seeming so wonderful, so real, so honest, so compassionate, so loyal… and then one day they’re gone. Sometimes they’ll tell you why they’re abandoning you, and sometimes they’ll just silently slip away without explanation. Sometimes a part of me deserved it as I can’t always be perfect myself, but other times I have been nothing but good and supportive and honest to certain people just to find that it didn’t mean shit in the end, and to end up cast aside like yesterday’s trash.

I drank for the first time in 3.5 years last night, but it didn’t do me any good. It was just a strawberry daiquiri wine cooler. So much for drinking my anxiety away like I’ve heard some people do. But then their anxiety may be generalized anxiety or social anxiety while mine is physiological. Perhaps it’s for the better that it didn’t help. No point in trading in one problem for another.

Tom believes that of all the different things we’re doing to help me feel better the cleansing will help, and my body will settle into the new medication dose in about a week. As for the cleansing ritual, he was pointing out that if something is widely used it’s usually for a reason. So I guess time will tell if it helps or if they’re all just crazy and delusional.

Decided to give the clonidine another try so we picked up a refill. Don’t know that I’ll ever really use it, but it’s here if I change my mind.

We signed up for a 30-day trial of Office 365 Home. The only thing I don’t like about it so far is that I have to re-record my macros that automatically insert dates and times, and it wants to put a space between the first character of each paragraph. It has a mail program that Tom likes, and a lot more cloud storage than Amazon.

He put oil in the car, air in the tires, and trimmed some trees.

We went on a quick walk late last night and checked out the notice in the door of the house diagonally in back. It was abandoned as we figured it was, probably by someone who didn’t have kids to take care of cleaning the house out and putting it on the market. There was still some stuff inside the house. Anyway, that was their second of three notices. Their space rent is lower than ours but then the woman was there a lot longer than we’ve been here. Yeah, 4 years here and 3 years as a madwoman whose life as she’d mostly known it to be seems forever lost.

I had a couple of dreams in which I was living in a rural setting. Jesse lived a few hundred feet away. In the distance, I could see men, some white and some black, milling about his place in tuxes.

A split second later an attractive black woman was in our house. Tom wasn’t home at the time. The woman told me she and Jesse just got married, and that someone had complained about their dogs. I worried they would think it was us when it wasn’t.

But then the black woman became a Latina woman with friends and family scattered about the house. Most of them were in their 20s and I didn’t know a soul. Latino Music was playing that they probably didn’t know I could understand, and I was worried they would steal things.

Then I was cleaning a guinea pig’s glass aquarium, and then we lived in another place that had a long straight black driveway flanked by recently mowed lawns. Two old cars were parked to one side where we were keeping a couple of rabbits. I went to refill their water bottle which was outside the cars, making me wonder how they could drink it. Then I was worried I’d been neglecting them by underfeeding them and not giving them enough attention, so I ran into the house to fetch some carrots.

So how did Aly go from looking for someone near San Francisco to moving in with “Master J” as his sex slave which she’s revisiting The Rules on? I question his sanity too, knowing how drawn she is to the mentally fucked in the head.