Things I am currently freaking out about, with extra tears because I am hormonal:

• Troubles dying (actually justified; we have a vet appointment on Friday, because for the last three weeks she has not acted like her usual self, and she is losing weight)
• My parents dying
• My ex-husband dying and kids being traumatized by the loss of their father for the rest of their lives
• My kids developing schizophrenia and/or getting addicted to drugs
• Never having a close friend again (and obviously the problem is with me, since none of my old friends miss me, and are happy with their new best friends, and I don’t know what I did that caused the friendships to die)
• Never fitting in at work (sitting in a Leadership Academy session at work, and feeling so alone as I type this)
• That something is so fundamentally WRONG with me that nobody except my immediate family will ever care if I fell over dead tomorrow.

So yeah, fun is not being had.

I have tried writing a few posts, but they ended up being really pathetic (as in, “woe is me, nobody loves me and appreciates me, I think I should find a cliff to jump off”), so yeah, mental health is apparently not my friend when I am trying to blog.

Long story short: I am alive; I am still trying to get my daily steps in; I am horribly behind on everything at work and totally failing to catch up so far; and despite not having to do adult things like cooking and cleaning, I still don’t have any time to do what needs to be done. Ugh.

I feel exhausted. I take my iron pills. I take my anti-depressants (though at this point I am pretty sure the only thing they are doing is making me fatter). I go for walks. I woke up at 11 am today, and could have slept another couple hours, easy.

This was literally my Saturday:

• Got up at 11 am
• Drank coffee, refilled my pills for the week – and then it was noon.
• Went shopping with Mom – cat food, Menards, Home Depot (needed to buy paint and polyurethane for the new doors dad installed to isolate the great room from whichever one of the cats likes to go in and pee on furniture there). Got home around 2:30 pm.
• Went on a 4.5 walk. Got back home at 4:30 pm (I am not a fast walker).
• Started a load of laundry, cleaned litter boxes. Then laid down to rest and next thing I know it was after 6 pm and time for dinner.
• Ate dinner, put laundry in dryer, snuggled with Troubles, did more laundry, put laundry away – and then it was 9:30 pm. Basically, I have NO idea how I lost the five hours between 4:30 and 9:30. Dinner and laundry took two hours, max. What happened to the other three????
• Tried doing some work, but the server was not cooperating. Hello, 10 pm.
• Worked on updating my oldest son’s program of study, because he failed a required course and therefore will need another year to finish his associate degree (assuming he does not fail anything else). I am trying to help him see what he needs to get done, and how his courses are connected to each other. He is on the spectrum (but it is his social skills that are affected, not academic), and did NOT do nearly as well his first semester as I hoped (as in, failed one course, almost failed two others, got a C in one, and the only good grade (B+) was for a gen ed course – which makes me worried about how well he will do in his chosen program (Computer Simulation and Gaming). Related: I am glad I can do flow charts in Google docs, but the fact that the “Save and Close” button disappears every time I right click to bring up a menu instead of going through the drop-down options on too is REALLY annoying.
• Started writing this post a little after 11 pm. It is now almost midnight, and I am going to hit “publish” and go to bed (or, more likely, spent an hour or so goofing off on my phone).

So far, not a total failure 🙂

I have actually managed to walk every day, and built in enough extra steps that when I fell asleep at 8 pm on Thursday, my average is still above 8,500.

I spent Sunday making more cards, and walked to the post office at night to drop them off. I need to make one more card that should be sent out ASAP, and then I can start building up a stash 🙂

I adulted. Made appointments for (1) a haircut (going to go very short again; and who knows, some day, will add unnatural color to the tips), (2) an eye exam (I am so glad that I had LASIK surgery 15+ years ago, but I think it might be time to get glasses for driving and working on the computer), and (3) my car to get its oil changed (and old license plates drilled out… Wisconsin is back to “every ten years, we are gonna force you get new plates” approach to making sure people’s plates are actually readable, and while my old ones are in very good condition, I have been sitting on a pair of new plates since July, because my old plates have literally became one with the Jetta. My poor mechanic has his work cut out for him.)

My original plan was to drop the car off tomorrow and take the bus to work (since I have Leadership Academy), but Milwaukee is under a Winter Storm Advisory, and the college is closed tomorrow. So, at 9:45 pm, I had the bright idea to rope in my ex to drop the car off tonight, with a note to my mechanic: “and as usual, let me know if anything is about to fall off. Like whatever this was holding up:” (piece of plastic taped to note)”. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow if I am lucky my car has not fallen apart on me 🙂

Where does time go? I don’t have to cook or to clean (thank god for parents), but still, by the time I am done working, eating dinner, and taking a walk to get my steps in, it is time for bed :( How do other adults do it? How do normal people find time to do things they like? Why do we not have six-hour, four-day work weeks already?

….

I just re-read what I wrote, and good god, I am boring. No wonder I don’t have any friends.

I used to make resolutions every New Year. THIS will be the year when the new, awesome me will emerge from the cocoon of the old, pathetic me. Followed by the inevitable failure of not only to emerge, but to even start on the cocoon. Feel like a loser for the rest of the year, rinse, repeat.

So, this year, I am not doing resolutions or goals. I have a list of things I would like to make some headway on accomplishing. Any progress at all will be a win.

• I would like to increase my daily step goal from 8,500 (which I have been failing to consistently achieve for the last three months) to 10,00 by the end of the year. The plan is to try and average at least the daily step goal for a month. Then, at the beginning of the new month, add another 250 steps to the goal, and see if I can sustain that. If I cannot, give it another month. If I can, add another 250 steps, and so on.
  
• I would like to achieve a “less than 100 emails that need action” in my work inbox by the end of the year. Right now, there are almost 6,000 emails languishing there. I suspect that 5,500 of them need to be either deleted or moved to “completed” folder. The rest of them, unfortunately, are things I have dropped the ball on. I want to do better, and that’s a start.
  
• I want to re-start tracking books I have read or want to read. Way back when, I had a LibraryThing account. Then I moved to GoodReads. But both seem to be really ISBN-driven, and GoodReads front page is annoying (no, I do NOT want to see if somebody “made progress” on a book! Grrrrr) and I just don’t need that much information, so perhaps creating a Google spreadsheet is the way to go.
  
• I want to start doing crafts again. I bought a number of diamond painting kits from paintgem.com, and they are PERFECT for creating cards with. I can work on the little pictures AND listen to audio books at the same time. It’s a win-win, and I will actually have something tangible at the end of it (unlike the hours I spent doing “color by number” on my phone – which is also fun, but does not encourage me to actually get out of bed).
  
• And finally, I hope to make some peace with myself. I need to learn to give myself the same grace I give others. Somehow, I need to stop thinking of myself as worthless. I need to stop putting myself down in my head all the time. If somebody says something nice to me, my first reaction is that they are lying or that they don’t really mean it. How do you start to like yourself, when half the time you wish you were dead, because then you won’t have to deal with the consequences of your actions?