The Push

I'm sorry that I don't write anymore unless I'm trying to sell you something or showing off my consumerism or killing mice. I wanted to start blogging daily this year, to go along with my 365 photo project, but I didn't have time and then I didn't have much to say and so I just didn't.

The truth is that my anxiety has come back pretty bad over the last year and I am housebound again. Not to the degree I was before but I can't leave the house alone anymore because I'm afraid to close to door behind me and other odd quirks that make it very difficult to live. A lot of the old mental patterns from my early 20s have crept back into my head, the fear of standing still, the fear of walking in front of someone, the need to wear certain clothing in certain colors, etc. Things that are more obsession rituals than anything else. The ironic thing is that I'm more stable and sane (ie: not manic) than I've ever been in my life yet these thoughts and fears persist.

So my daily life basically consists of nothing. I go to my parents house a couple times a week to visit my mom and do my laundry. Sometimes she takes me to the grocery store. Randy and I will go shopping together in the evening once a week or so. I can't go to the post office anymore so I am just buying stamps in bulk at the corner store and mailing things that way. That's the extent of my social life.

I very rarely see my friends, maybe once every three months, and I've lost touch with almost all of my online friends. I have over 100 friends on facebook but I would say that maybe 3 of them are actual friends. Somehow I don't think I'm the only one like this. It's lonely to sit and see so many faces but not feel connected to any of them, even in an abstract online way.

I've been coasting along, not really depressed but not really content either. I was waiting for something to happen, something to push me back into life. "I'm not really living I'm just waiting time." I feel sorry for myself but I don't know how to be myself. I don't like the person I am. I don't act the way I want to act. I question my motives, everything is to be safe. I don't want to be agoraphobic anymore, it's extremely limiting. Everything revolves around being safe. I am not safe anymore.

This morning is my breaking point. My phone rang at 8 am, on the dot. I knew it was my mother because she knows that's when my alarm goes off. I knew it was bad news but not bad enough that she wanted to wake me up early to tell me. No one was dead but something was happening.

My dad lost his job today. Not in the pink slip traditional way, but in the "if you don't take this other job we're offering you then you're going to be demoted" kind of way. You spend 30 years working your way up a corporate ladder only to be told that you're too old to be profitable. Only they don't use the word old, they say risky. It's less offensive, apparently.

This is a roundabout way of saying that my parents are moving away and I am scared and sad. I can go with them if I want or I can stay here with Randy. My parents actually said that Randy and I could come and they would buy a house big enough for all of us but Randy won't go (and I don't blame him, he has a life here, unlike myself.)

I know people leave their parents all the time. They live thousands of miles apart and they are fine. Of course I don't know how many of them are agoraphobic and bipolar but I imagine that some of them must be. I keep saying that this will be good for me, this is what I need, this will be the push I am waiting for. (My mom is just as agoraphobic and dependent on me as I am on her, so it will be good for her too.) Maybe we need to get away from each other.

I don't want to end up being one of those weird daughters who gives up her own life for her parents only to regret it when they're dead. At the same time I don't want to be one of those far away daughters who only gets to see her parents twice a year and regrets it when they're dead.

I'm only two hours into what is going to be the most difficult (and possibly rewarding) experience of my adult life, other than Babas illness and death. You know that saying "Today is the first day of the rest of your life"? Well, here it is. It's about time.