Okay, so perhaps I have a problem. Perhaps I’m addicted. Perhaps I need to blog. I mean, only a few short days ago I said I couldn’t do it for practical reasons. Yet here I am, starting at 7 a.m., against the odds because I have crap I want to say. Prognosis: undetermined…

At least my crap is good. Well, the crap I want to say. You know what I mean.

I am proud of me.

I’m not the sort who hands out praise to herself very easily. Almost everything could’ve been done better, faster, prettier, what have you. But today, ladies and gentlemen, I am flat out proud of me.

I am amazed sometimes of what I am capable. I think the memories of my limitations left by the accident and the stroke seems to seep (in my mind, at least) into what I think I can handle. Let me give you the day of December 31, 2008.

A few days ago, the gentleman at the body shop said my precious Honda was all fixed up and ready to come home. I was elated. I was elated until I realized that I didn’t have the amount for the deductible required to bring my baby home. But I went to work in my head figuring this and that and with some, I must say, remarkable management, I pulled it off. So here was my plan.

I had to meet someone in a parking lot so they could give me money they owed me. I’m usually not a stickler for this but basically, if you owe me money, now is a great time to pay up. I knew the person I was meeting has issues with time (taking longer than anticipated) so I took that into consideration and crammed some more bags of cans into my mom’s car to run them by the recycling place. (If you recall, that’s how Black Friday began…)

Well, Barkley was looking at me so intently, so eagerly, that I had to invite him to join me for this adventure. I’m sure he wishes now that he had passed on this one. So off to recycle we went. Due to my mother’s responsible crushing of cans we were able to get much more taken in (and thus paid more) with fewer garbage bags. So then I went to the parking lot and waited. I waited longer than I thought I’d have to but it did allow me and Barkley to take a little walk on some grassy area; don’t worry – I keep poopie bags on his leash so we don’t leave little surprises for anyone. I also managed to rearrange quite a bit of crap that I had managed to accumulate in mom’s car while my own baby had been away.  I was only just starting to become concerned about the time when my companion arrived and business was taken care of.

Now, my concern about time was not merely that I don’t like being out in public. I had additional pressures. Here’s a little family history: I am the youngest of all 7 of my cousins. Leigh, the only other girl is about 2 months older than me. The next oldest is Jay. Jay and I have always gotten along. We played together more than Leigh and I did and I’ve always enjoyed his company. Naturally, Jay married a truly amazing woman named Jennifer. Again, not blowing steam up anyone’s anything. They are both remarkable people and now they are remarkable people with 3 remarkable daughters. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Jay and Jennifer currently live in Omaha, NE. I don’t know why, either, but that’s where they hang their respective hats. So when they come down for Christmas, it’s not usually ON Christmas Day but usually a few days post. Why on earth am I telling you this? Well, today was their last day here and mom hadn’t yet been able to visit with them or give the girls their gifts. So she needed me to have her car back by a certain time so that she could meet them for lunch.

So my anxiety was lessened when my business transaction was complete and I could call my mother and tell her that (much unlike me) I would be on time in returning her vehicle so she could do what she needed to do. She was happy to tell me that her sister (Jay’s mom) wanted to pick her up since the restaurant was right down the street. She invited me to come and I did my vague avoidance thing citing the pick up of my automobile as my main reason. But then she pointed out that I did, in fact, need a ride to pick up my automobile and offered to do so if I would dine with the family.

My issues with my family are an entirely different blog. No, they’re a book. Suffice it to say I really had to think about this. However, an additional factor that played in was an enormous argument that my mother and I had the day before where she pointed out several selfish behaviors of mine that I couldn’t deny.

SO… back to the task at hand. Simply retrieving the money was not enough as it was in check form. Currently, my account is quite overdrawn so depositing the money would basically be letting it be sucked in to a black hole vortex type of thing. Again, don’t get me wrong. I pay my debts. It takes me a while when I’m not working and still paying for all sorts of new prescriptions and medical bills but I do pay my debts. Just not today. So I go to the bank that has issued the check, agreed to the fee they charge to cash their own check if you do not in fact hold an account at their fine establishment and when on to the next place. Meanwhile Barkley thinks we’re just having a grand ole time. Well, I had another check to cash that would give me enough money to pay the deductible.

Missy’s Law kicks in. The check was from the same bank at which my vortex resides. So naturally they will want the money from the check to be sucked into the vortex rather than make its way into my little hands. But I give it a shot. I run to a local branch and the teller shows some sympathy but not enough to cash my check. Enough, however, not to confiscate my check and insist that the bank gets its come-upins. My greatest gratitude to that teller for helping me out in this situation. I asked if I should just go to a check cashing place to resume my business. She nodded with a smile and I went back out to the car where some passers by had stopped to show some concern about the dog being locked in the car.

Note: I am very against locking dogs in cars. Their little bodies have a fur coat that heats up especially when trapped in an environment that greenhouses said environment. And in Texas, forget about it! People who think the dogs won’t suffer should be forced to wear 8 layers of clothes and sit in a locked car for an afternoon. HOWEVER, let me remind you that it is December 31 and the temperature hasn’t reached any sort of dangerous level. Plus I had already decided that if there was more than one person in the line in front of me at the bank, I would just leave so my dog wouldn’t be the dog trapped in the car.

Well, it turns out the passersbys’ concerns were minimal and more interested in what a cute pooch Barkley is and what is his breed and whatnot. Normally, I will talk for days about my dog but I’m on a timeline here. So I politely but briefly answer questions and quickly drive away. Now I have to go to a check cashing place (which I should’ve done in the first place but this is how we learn) to get jacked with some enormous fee.

Note: Check cashing places freak me out. They are the perfect place to get robbed (people know you’re coming out with cash), they rarely seem to be in upscale neighborhoods (like banks), there is always a line, and no where to park.

So again, my dog is in the car (shaded) but out of my view. And, to my surprise, there’s no line. Well, to make a long story short (not my forte) it’s a huge ordeal, they jack me with the fee and by the time I’m able to leave with my money, there is a line of 4 shady looking fellows behind me. I’m just taking a guess here but I’m assuming none of them were planning to use their cash to by cologne or perhaps deodorant. And one guy I’m assuming didn’t even own soap.

So I rush home and as I pull up to see to my aunt and cousin Leigh retrieving my mom from the house, I honk. But I’m still not off the hook; I have to go in change into something less like me and more like my family, let my dog settle down, and so on. They go ahead and head to the restaurant and leave me to my primping. But it’s much less primping and more deep breaths telling myself that I can do this.

My family brings out my anxiety disorder more than any other grouping, grocery stores included.

Part of it is because my mom wants me to present myself as perfect, or as near as I can be. If I don’t, she will praise and brag on me. If I do, however, she will joke about the flaws in my life. It’s a no-win situation so a few years ago after an ugly incident I just stopped attending.  So now when I do attend, everyone is delighted and I have to choose which persona to be – the perfect child or the humble accepter of my flaws being flaunted.

It was weird though. I was riding such a rush from hurrying to do everything in time that I entered as just me. And I enjoyed lunch. I enjoyed Jay and Jennifer and am officially enamored with their daughters. And even got to quote “Mr. Mom” and “Annie” somewhere in the conversation. That’s family I’m proud of!

After a delightful lunch and many hugs, mom and I opted to get my car. Of course, I had dropped the wallet with all of the deductible in the restaurant but realized it before we left the parking lot. When my heart started beating again, we were off to Herb’s Body Shop to pick up my precious.

So that all went fine. I had enough money to fill up my tank with gas and buy mom a little something. So I come home and realize it’s New Year’s Eve. Then the realizations start hitting:

1. I’m alone on New Year’s Eve.
2. I haven’t been single on a New Year’s Eve in TEN years.
3. Kelly is probably with his friends talking about the amazing turn his life is going to take without the burden of me
4. The man I had the affair with is meeting his soon to be wife’s entire family for the first time this eve
5. I haven’t made any resolutions.

That one stopped me. I could go with the old faithfuls that I still should do but this is what I resolved to do instead.

This year has been an insane one to say the least. Dental issues, stroke, marriage, affair, annulment, unemployment – and only one of those things was a good thing. The marriage. To clarify, I am speaking of the marriage. It was brief but I’ll never regret marrying the man I love to the depth of my soul. Everything else was not ideal to say the least. I digress.

It seems every time a tragedy or misfortune comes my way, we (being a team of family, assorted doctors, and myself) make changes. This sounds like a good thing, right? But let me clarify again. We make changes in my medication. And we wait for those changes to kick in and, yes, sometimes they make big differences. Prozac, even with its bad reputation, has given me a sanity that I haven’t always known.

Meanwhile, however, I go back to my routine which is usually to isolate myself from friends, become consumed in work or projects or whatever. And whatever doesn’t fix the problem.

So why am I proud of myself?

After reviewing that list of 5 stressors from above, I made a decision. A resolution if you will. I resolve to make changes. Sure it seems vague. But I like vague. I am, after all, a therapist. I started last night.

Even though what I wanted to do was curl up under my covers and pet my dog til I fell asleep, what I did instead was jump in the shower, get dressed, dried my hair (if you could see how much hair I have, you’d know that when I go to dry it, I mean business), and I called my friend Melissa to verify she was going to a gathering we’d been invited to.

I made a change. I didn’t isolate. I didn’t cry myself to sleep. Sadly for Barkley, I didn’t pet him til we fell asleep either. I didn’t go to get drunk. I didn’t go to meet some guy or girl to take home. I went to be with people that I enjoy, whose company I have missed over the years. I went to be social but not because I needed to be social but because I wanted to.

And I had an outstanding time.