Shiny New Life

I am known, for better or worse, to surround myself with drama - typically not of my own creation, though sometimes when it gets really dull, people wonder.

Through the last six months of "head shrinking" - I've realized that I am an adrenaline junkie. I don't know how to function in a mode that is not the physiological equivalent of "fight or flight." I have done a fair amount of reading about the "chronic state of phsyiological stress" lately. In short, something has to change.

In the past several months, I've made strides to begin healing the frenzied anxiety-black velvet curtain of depression nonsense. I've worked at not caring so much about some things. I've tried to assuage the guilt of not saying "yes" every time - or doing everything I should be - because "should" is subjective.

And the drama continues.
* I was forced/chose to change jobs ... it was a good decision, but has come with a month's worth of continued drama, lawyers, legal advice, covering my rear end, analyzing and discovering that much of what I thought wasn't actually true.

* In an attempt to gain control and reduce the anxiety, we moved. The Hobbit Hole was up for sale. I couldn't continue to focus on healing and reducing the almost-daily panic attacks when I was worried about what parts of myself were exposed when people came through the house or how clean it was. But moving in and of itself, even just next door, was enough frenzied nonsense to send me into orbit. Especially since it happened CONCURRENTLY with the job drama (timing was not planned that way).

* Son came for the summer. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a pleasant experience. But he came the day after I quit my job, two weeks before moving day. One can only imagine the insanity.

With the maelstrom of changes, I haven't done so well at focusing on those things I need to be focusing on. There is no routine, no settled contentment. Little things turn into bigger mini-dramas overnight.

We set up the washer/dryer yesterday. The washer was a breeze compared to last year's set-up. The dryer, however, required an unplanned trip to Home Depot, 2 hours and a fair amount of "what the hell were we thinking" conversations between Himself and I - the two people least equipped to be involved in any kind of appliance anything on earth.

This morning, Baby Girl woke up with diarrhea of epic proportion. I could smell the result halfway down the hall, before I even entered her room. It was 5:45 a.m. I finished the batch of laundry I'd started before bed, picked her up (no way even she could sleep through that stench), cleaned her, changed her and dumped her back into bed with Himself. I embarked on another three loads of laundry - because, of course, the soiled pajamas, changing pad and towel were not even close to being able to be washed together.

And ... a batch of jam. JAM?! On a work day? When Baby Girl has caused an additional mess to clean and there is laundry in various stages of "done"?

But I wanted to learn and do new things this summer. Canning was part of it. A perfect storm of house capable of providing off-season storage space for the massive water-bath canner and free fruit provide the opportunity. Still, jam on a work day morning was out of the question - except yesterday's drama prevented me from doing anything with the two boxes of apricots taking up the microscopic amount of floor space in the kitchen ... and the top ones, from the top of the tree, were rapidly ripening beyond the point of no return.

I had no choice.

New job. New house. Annual visit from Son. Baby Girl's first encounter with diarrhea. Canning. Picking. Installing appliance(s). Packing. Unpacking. Waiting a very long time for a paycheck. Full-time work after a three-week hiatus. Five loads of laundry in 12 hours. Preparation for next week's camping trip. And on and on and on.

Even the shiny new life is wearing me out.