Posts filed under 'My life'
I had a breakdown yesterday.
It had been coming for a while, and I was in denial about it. I was working on this paper for my Celtic Culture class. I had all sorts of research done, and a pretty solid outline which even went as far as detailing what points I needed to communicate in each paragraph. But I couldn’t write it. I didn’t know how. I didn’t feel comfortable trying to communicate my thoughts in a manner which would be appropriote for this paper and so everytime I tried I froze.
Teusday was the day after it was due, and I’d promised myself and my prof I would get it in Wednesday morning. Teusday I was a little crazy. I would yell, and bang on the table, and sulk and whine, and then finally I started to cry and eventually I went to bed. ….but I was sure it was just the paper–that I couldn’t do it. That I was “out of my element”.
Yesterday I still could not work on it. Yesterday I called my boyfriend (the most wonderful guy ever) and snapped at him for anything he said. Yesterday I wanted to throw the phone, throw my books– so I put it aside and went to edit my psych paper. And yesterday I couldn’t do that either.
For a couple of days Gabe had been trying to help calm me down by saying, “Don’t stress about this paper. Just relax and work on staying happy.” And I would think “Shuttup, I am happy. I’m fine. My light therapy is working. It’s this stupid (explicitives removed) paper”.
I was not happy.
Yesterday I admitted it to myself. I had been fending it off for a few days-but the truth was I was angry, frustrated and on the verge of tears most of the day for three days in a row–I was not happy at all.
So as planned I went to talk to my prof about the paper, but contrary to the plan I ended up admitting all about this S.A.D. thing. And she was so understanding. We had already talked about the penalties involved in handing it in later, or after exams and they were big (and I was soooo okay with that), but when I got to the S.A.D. bit she melted and said “ok, Padraigin, then we’re dealing with something different. This is medical. I’ll tell you what. Do not do your essay. Focus on exams. Enjoy Christmas. And get me your essay in the new year”.
I cried for about an hour. First in a parking lot behind her building folded over in a ball. Then walking to somewhere I thought would be more private. Then sitting up against a wall in a hallway on campus. I felt guilty, and worthless, and releived all at once and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Plus I worried about what it meant for me. Would I have to consider meds all over again? What if my light isn’t working? I messaged my roommate, and prepared for a night of brainless vegging with the T.V..
Then I realized my psych paper wasn’t due for another hour and I still had time to edit it. So I got up, went to the library and edited that paper. Which may not seem like a big deal–but it was. It was me proving to my body that I could do it.
Then I was o.k. The depression was gone. I ate some food, got energy–and was motivated all night.
So does that mean it wasn’t real to begin with? I really don’t think so.
I think it means that my light is working, but it isn’t magic. This time last year I was sleeping all the time, I had dropped one of my courses and I wasn’t ever showing up to work. I’m doing a lot better. But then I added an essay that I didn’t have a clue how to write to the mix, and it extended past its deadline and started threatening to need attention during exams–that’s stressful for absolutely anyone, and I’m in a time of year where I have to respect and be nice to my body.
This light and my shakes are not all-powerful. I’m not supposed to be able to do any and everything I want to do. I need to get to a balance between what I would like to do and what my body can handle.
I’m not proud of having an open-ended extension (for the record). I feel pretty guilty about it, because I was raised to think that you can’t get down from the table until you’ve eaten all the food you put on your plate. I signed up for all these courses–that was my choice…
But I will learn. I will learn what I can handle and I will work within it. It will be a process, but it’s a process that is well on its way…
November 30th, 2006
My dreams are close to the surface of my consciousness today, and I don’t know what that means.
Standing by a photocopier, sitting over my notes, working away at the lab I’ve suddenly felt and imagined myself in a setting of a dream I’ve had at some point in my life–not like deja vu: not as if where I was just then reminded me of the dream. The setting could be from any dream that occured in any of a million places. And one-by-one I have been overcome by the elaborate constructions of reality that each of those dreams held even as I’ve sat here in this reality we share.
Some were of dreams I’d forgotten about, that took place years ago–whose details I still don’t remember. I just remember what it felt like to be in them. And in every case it somehow felt differant than how it feels to be here in this life.
November 18th, 2006
As a young, middle-class, white Canadian I have had the joy of being told I could be or become anything I wanted: to follow my dreams, to follow my heart–to do what felt right. I do not belive that this is the ‘right’ way to raise/indoctrinate a person by any means, but it is how I was raised and is thus the framework within which I have always constructed (and edited and revised) my life plans.
It is a simultaneously challenging and exciting thing then, to now have the one desire that is paramount above all others be that I spend my life together with someone else–to support one another in all facets of our life, to build a home together, and eventually to raise children together.
Because suddenly “doing what you want”, must be read in a new light. It is “doing what you want, considering that ultimately you want this relationship to flourish and through it both of you to grow, enjoy life and build a loving home.”
So suddenly the biggest choices in my life require the very serious consideration of another’s life goals, and how my choices will impact him and vice versa.
This arose powerfully at first a month or so ago when I was putting together my next trip to Ireland. I wanted to go–that was simple enough– and I had the money to do it. But I wasn’t willing to spend a 10-day holiday away from Gabe, even if it was in Ireland, and while he is indescribably excited about meeting my family and friends in Ireland the money for such a short trip (when we would be going again in the summer) didn’t seem immediately warrented.
I (for better or for worse) tend to put a great deal of stock in my gut feelings and intuitions about choices like this, to try to balance exactly how I feel with what I think. But here I found myself in the position of needing to make a choice with someone while balancing both of our intuitions with both of our thoughts on the matter. It was such a strange feeling to be stuck in this place where a choice had to be made, but I didn’t have immediate access to all the information I needed to make it–in fact by its very nature it was a choice I couldn’t make alone.
Now we find ourselves discussing the much more life-altering choices of what to do next year–my final year of my undergrad and his first year having completed his. What city will we live in? What kinds of jobs will we try to get? What will we do for the summer?
How much of what we want as individuals can be brought together in a unified plan? What sacrifices will have to be made?
Are the sacrifices warrented?
I think I am starting to understand the idea of being blinded by love. But I like it. I can feel myself growing. I would like to stay here as long as I can.
October 23rd, 2006
What do you do when you feel yourself starting to want to make bad decisions?
Do you ever find yourself sitting back looking at your life, and noticing how splendidly it is all rolling along, and suddenly think “Wow I really wish I could _____ (insert a stupid act that would jeapordize something good about your life)”? Or perhaps if your not as obsessively overanalytical as I am it comes in as more of a retroactive assessment of an act you’ve just commited. i.e. “Shit why did I do that? That was really stupid. Things were going really well.”
This is all quite abstract and ridiculous–I know…but it is a concept I’ve been tossing around the last couple of days. I feel like spicing things up. I feel like getting dirty. I feel like screwing something up.
Suggestions anyone?
(yep, symptoms have arrived)
September 27th, 2006
Last year I spent a great deal of time from early October though until mid-January determining that I seemed to have Seasonal Affective Disorder.
A summary of what this means might look a bit like this:
1. apparently the winter blues hit me a little (read: alot) harder than they do most people
2. during the winter my desire to sleep increases like crazy as does my desire to eat incredable amounts of straight carbs
3. for a short period in the spring and fall I can expect to be relatively hyperactive
So the story goes that I think I am coming to the end of the hyperactive period. Damn it felt good. Seriously.
The last couple of days haven’t been quite so great. It’s getting a little bit harder for me to get my body to agree with me when I suggest it might be time to get out of bed (or move at all). I’m starting to get “damn I’m tired” headaches. I can ever so slightly feel that sense of being asleep on my feet as I go about certain tasks, and I’ve started falling asleep in class (I know I know, falling asleep in class is normal. …but we’re talking conking out and dreaming during a fully interesting lecture!).
So tonight when my roommates and I were down in the basement I brought my super duper 10,000 Lux Bright Light Therapy System, which I will probably start using some time in the next week or so.
I imagine, think, hope that this year is going to be alot better. I believe (in part out of necessity) that it will. I know what to expect, I can identify the symptoms–if only for those reasons this year will be differant.
That is all 
Bring on fall leaves.
So find a sweater
And you’ll be better
Until the kindling is tinder dry
We can be quiet
As we walk down
To see the graveyard
Where they are now
I wonder how
They brought their piano
To holdene hill
From old berlin
Be hard to keep it
It well in tune
With winters like the one
That’s coming soon
Cause auntumn’s here, autumn’s here
It’s time to cry now
That autumn’s here,autumn’s here, autumn’s
It’s ok if you want to cry
Because autumn’s here
I think that ghosts like
The cooler weather
When leaves turn colour
They get together
And walk along ways
These old back roads
Where no one lives and
And no one goes
With all their hopes set
On the railway
That never came and
that no one stayed
I guess that autumn
Gets you remembering
And the smallest things
Just make you cry.
Autumn’s here, autumn’s here, autumn’s here that autumn’s here
Autumn’s here, it’s time to cry
Cause autumn’s here ooooooo
Autumn’s here, autumn’s here
It’s ok now, cause autumn’s heeeere
woooooo wooooo
–hawksley
September 25th, 2006
So I’ve finally posted some pictures again–like this one of my old room–and quite a few of my new roomies. Hop over n’ check ‘em out.
September 22nd, 2006
1.) It’s 10:30pm and my boyfriend calls from Montreal to wish me a good night. He tells me he’s out with a friend, and a friend of a friend and that their conversations about politics and defining yourself have been incredable; that they’ve been sitting on a patio drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and talking and being inspired, and I’m happy and can’t wait to spend time with he and his friends in Montreal.
2.) As I hang up the phone I find myself wondering again, as I have many times this week, what I’m doing right now. Sure, of course, I’m studying things I am incredably interested in. And I have a job that’s putting me through school which is pretty awesome. But these courses I’m taking 9 times out of 10 they are not connecting me with people with whom I have inspiring life-changing conversations with. In fact, the combination between my introversion and the anti-social nature of my post-secondary school of choice has left me with a staggeringly low number of friends at university–but isn’t connections between people what this whole life thing is all about?
3.) Meanwhile I study psychology and philosophy and religion because combined those are the things that fascinate me the most; but what ignites me is talking about environmental issues, population growth, and the lack of literacy and education around the world–so am I even studying the right thing?
4.) This summer I have fallen madly in love. And it’s been incredible. And it’s had me rebuilding all sorts of plans. And it has me thinking ahead toward a practical life plan involving the proper allocation of money with which to raise children and how I can incorporate staying at home for a few years into a plausible career…And that’s not the track I’ve spent most of my life thinking about.
5.) My own hypocrisy irritates me. My inability to reconcile my lifestyle with what I believe in frustrates me. I try to be patient with myself (because change is difficult), but I worry that eventually I’ll just give up, and instead of building schools in 3rd world countries, and being involved in grassroot organic food co-ops I’ll end up in suburbia driving a gas-guzzling vehicle, buying genetically-modified food at my local grocery store and raising my kids to be as materially focused as I am.
Which breaks my heart. Not even because I think that kind of lifestyle is “wrong”, but because it’s not what I want for myself, or for my kids.
But how do you fund a grassroots lifestyle?
How do you make that about face from the world you’ve been brought up in and say “Listen: this is how I’m going to live my life”?
6.) How do you get to a place where you know that every choice you’re making is not just one you can be proud of and accept, but one that falls exactly in line with the person you want to be and the changes you want to help make in the world?
It’s time to start a new year (because I am a student and my year begins in September), and these will be thoughts I will struggle with as the year goes on.
August 28th, 2006
“What happened?”
“Something called ‘love’”
“Did you fall and get it all over you?”
“I did. …
*considers carefully*
But it’s not as messy as it has been in the past. …
*reconsiders joyfully*
I mean, it’s messy in the sense that it’s all over the place. …”
August 24th, 2006
My nerves are shot. I’m so quick to lose it.
“Shouldn’t you be down taking notes.”
“No it’s fine.”
“Don’t you need to record if the baby eats anything or bumps his head?”
“Well that yes…”
“I mean couldn’t we have this conversation later?”
No. Totally not. I’m angry. I’m frustrated. I resent being challenged in front of a client while I’m trying to run a lab visit. A visit which you were refusing to help with in the first place, which you were late for, which you interfered with before it even commenced. This is a conversation I have to have now. Because whether I’m right or not isn’t even the point. The point is that you can’t argue with me while the visit is going.
The dichotomy I am often faced with in this job is on one hand having more responsibilities and authority than I think I deserve and on the other hand struggling with the fact that my coworkers fail to acknowledge my authority when I need them to.
August 22nd, 2006
I’m from the country. And I mean that. Here in Toronto I am often teased among friends for being from “Guelph”, a place which must have more cows than people…but what I can never quite convey is that I am not even from Guelph. People in Guelph teased me for being from the country. I’m from a little tiny neighbourhood of cottages which hugs a lake that noone knows about, and I grew up climbing trees and paddling canoes and building elaborate forts in the forest.
This I share as a background for just how fantastically at home I feel in my new home. I have just moved into the outskirts of Forest Hill just north of Casa Loma (and when I say “just north” I mean I can see it out my south-facing window). Today I was walking home from the bus, through the beautiful neighbourhood adjacent mine filled with houses I can’t believe anyone could own sitting on lots with real-live trees like you never see them in the suburbs–and I suddenly realized that I’d never noticed how much I missed those moments when the rustling of leaves is the only thing you can hear and it’s louder than your thoughts.
I think this neighbourhood will do me just great until I can get out of the city :).
August 20th, 2006
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