| [ |
music |
| |
Madeleine Peyroux, "Instead" |
] |
Today Ian and I saw a counselor to help us through this interminable shit storm. I've been in serious crisis mode for about a week now after this two and a half month build up, and I'm glad that she was able to fit us in on such a short notice. We got the recommendation for her from our new OBGYN just yesterday. (We switched to the lovely doctor who took care of us the day my water broke and I have said on no fewer than three occasions this past week that I am going to marry her. She is exactly how my doctor should be.)
So far we like our new mental health professional, despite the fact that sometimes when she is particularly gesticulating she also makes this face that seems to say I am going to vomit. I wasn't sure what to make of her at first, but Ian took to her right away, specifically commending her for not bolting out of the room as I continued to pull issues out of my Mary Poppins bag of emotional fuckeduppery. In my effort to cut to the chase and get on the path to healing as efficiently as possible, I basically laid everything, or nearly everything, out neatly in a semi-orderly fashion. In a scant fifty minutes we touched on the pregnancy, the loss, Jonas' NICU stay, my father's illness, my mother's flippant suicide speak, my own suicidal reflexes, Josh, my job, Ian's job, the recession, and the greusome impulses and imagery brought on by post partum depression (including but not limited to cutting out my own tongue and gouging out my right eye with my toothbrush). I'm not particularly shy about just how crazy it is that I have every right to be so I have no shame at diving in right away with someone who has made a career of listening. Also, I want to know right up front if she can handle the long history of depression and LIFE EFFING SUCKS that comes with being my therapist. Not surprisingly, we are scheduled to meet with her twice a week.
Right now, I feel "okay" despite the fact that after weeks of "maternity" leave, I am scheduled to return to work on the 21st. Sitting here at my newly installed desk (at which I am meant to finally finish my Great American Smut Novel), I cannot imagine a worse fate than going back to my job as a team manager four days before Christmas. But unless Ian manages to score the job he's been working on lately, I won't have much of a choice. I have no idea how I would 1) deal with going back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, or 2) make it through a whole day, let alone weeks, of not having a breakdown between the hours of 9 and 5:30. I've read blogs of women who have been through similar situations and have gone back to work after nary a month of leave... I just don't know how they did it. I understand that they had the practical necessity of returning to their jobs as I have now, but I am still unfit for public consumption after 10 weeks. How these women make it back to work after just three or four is beyond me. This adds to the feeling of severe failure and lameness that has become my common existence.
In any case, this is how I am doing. I am depressed, but not insane (being horrified by the horrific impulses and images obsessively plaguing me is a good sign, it seems) and seriously, seriously wishing that there could be some way that I wouldn't ever have to go back to Bank of America. Though it has been blackened and stretched and wrung and basically defiled, my soul still feels more like my own lately since I haven't had to go to "that place" every day. And fuck if I don't want to give it back.
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
fromtheinside's Friends Page
artistic