A follow up note

Last time I left off, I was suicidal.  Again.

Not as bad as the last time, but still pretty bad.

This time, I ended up going into the hospital.  A little “staycation”, as it were.  Not planned, of course.  I was just trying to do the intake interview for an Intensive Outpatient Program, which I could accept that I “needed”.  Then the lady told me she wouldn’t let me leave.

Sign the papers, or be committed by the state.

That’s a decision I hope not to have to make again.

My trip lasted about 4 days.  It was over a weekend, too, so I didn’t even get the full benefits of regular meetings and such.  Lots of drawing and coloring though.  A very, very expensive art class.

But, it changed things.  In a great way.  I learned that I was fighting depression, which was a problem.  But the bigger problem is that I was terrified of people.  I had no safe place, anywhere.  And without somewhere to feel safe, even if in my own head, I was spiraling out of control.  I lost my grip.

In the hospital, they have rules.  Boundaries.  Things I should have but don’t.  They’re imposed on everyone, and so they dictate the terms of the relationships you make.  I loved this.  At the time, I thought, if only I could figure out how to bring those rules out in the real world!  As I saw more and more of what that meant for interacting with others–that there would be no judgment and that you could be safe–I felt the weight lifted.  I felt like I could be myself, without being attacked, belittled, shamed, cussed at, or manipulated.  I was able to spend an entire day in the group room…with other people!  I had been almost certain that would never happen again.  I even felt playful at one time, which I hadn’t felt in so long.

It was a gift, this time in the hospital.  Because I saw that I needed to address the terror I felt about people.  I needed to build a safe place in myself, and work on creating the safe places outside, with others in order to sustain myself through the dark times.  This changed everything in how I approached healing.

I got out, and the next day I went to IOP.  I was still scared.  I couldn’t tell an emotion from a hole in the ground.  But I was headed in the right direction.  I was asking for help, which for whatever reason, is so hard for me to do.  I’ve been doing that, a little at time.

I’m still scared of people.  Still wary.  Still feel my heart race when someone gets too close.  But I keep reaching out, even if just a little.  Like my friend in the hospital told me: you give a little trust, and see what happens.  Not too much, like casting a fishing rod and winding it back just a bit to see what you get.

It’s a little odd.  It still feels pretty isolated sometimes, to always be on guard.  It’s safer though.  I’m more observant.  I’m looking out for myself.  I give a little trust, and if it’s respected, great!  If not, okay, I hold the line there.  More positive actions must be taken to advance!

It feels good to know that I’m doing this because I’m worth being respected, and that I have value as a person, and as a friend, which shouldn’t be pissed away or taken advantage of.  One of the great lessons in the last several months was examining how I treat other people, and how people I love and who love me, treat me.  And for whatever reason, I started using that as the barometer.  For example, I’d try and imagine someone I trusted deeply behaving a particular way (a behavior I wasn’t sure of or that caught my attention somewhere in the back of my mind), and then considered what I would think of them–and what they would presumably think of me–if they did that thing.  I started being able to see when the lines were being crossed.  Not only did I start seeing it, but I also started feeling it in a way that I could sense it in the moment and act on my feelings.  Somewhere a well is filling inside me, because I’ve been able to tap into it several times since then–to be in the moment, to approach a situation with a sense of confidence, of calm even.

It hasn’t stopped the utter terror I’ve felt in response to threats, which I’ve unfortunately received recently (it can come with the job).  I still had the panic attacks and my anxiety was spiked for days.  When it came to game time, though, I did tap into it.  It was there, somewhere.

I’m not perfect yet.  But it is so far from where I came.

back to basics

Today, I went to the gym.  And for the first 75 minutes of my workout, I wanted to kill myself.  Although my muscles were working, I wasn’t there.  I recall feeling like one of those fungi-infected ants that were featured on Planet Earth.  My body knew what to do, so I let it do it’s thing while I plotted my own death.  It was no longer what my therapist called “passive suicidal ideation”.  I considered alternative means of doing it, if I would leave a note, and if I did, what it would say.  I eventually concluded I wouldn’t need a note, because fuck ’em.  I wondered how much dog food I should leave out before someone would eventually come check on me.  I thought about the people in my life that I actually valued, which I could count on one hand, and how many more I knew and were fairly sizable parts of my life in spite of not being particularly valuable.  Valuable might not be the right word…healthy, perhaps.  Point being that I was just not interested in life anymore.  It’s not a gift; at least, not for me it isn’t.

This is not atypical for me these days.  I wake up either with piercing anxiety or crushing depression.  Working out has been my only hope for a few hours of respite during the day, and I’ve been doing it every day for 45-120 minutes a day, depending on how bad my mood is.  I leave with a bit of internal peace, and a few too-short hours later, the bottom drops out again.  I did have two good-ish days last week, but then it was back to low-town.  My life, as I’ve told my therapist, is ruled by shame, the vicious bitch.

Somewhere around the 75 minute mark of today’s work out, the peace finally came.  I had almost walked out of the gym at the 25-minute mark, the 45-minute mark, the 55-minute mark, and the 75-minute mark.  I shudder to think of how I would feel now if I had.  In place of plans to off myself, I was making plans to live.  And not just to live, but to really take the bull by the horns and DO something about my shitty mood and my shitty life.  I guess my survival instinct could use a tune up, but it did eventually kick in.

I decided that today I would start learning how to take care of myself.  At the ripe-old age of 31, I needed to go back to basics, because I just did not have the slightest idea of how to do that.  I was practicing all the prescripted things they tell you to do when you’re depressed.  Exercise, eat well, get sleep, reach out.  The problem with that advice is that you need to be doing it ALL THE TIME, not just when you’re depressed.  Because basically, you’re just putting money in the bank for a rainy day.  Or it’s like a CD account, where you put money in but can’t access it for a while.  Meanwhile you feel like death would be a blessing.

I envisioned myself going through my DBT workbook, sprawling out in my office, sheets of paper all around me with diagrams and questions and events and processes.  I was going to keep investing and keep trying because I believed it would pay off, eventually.  If I could make it.  And besides, it wasn’t going to get any worse so I may as well try more strategies.  The shotgun approach to depression.

I got home and almost got myself into a Candy Crush tournament.  Not today, I thought.  I pulled up Amazon on my laptop and searched for a book my therapist recommended to me.  It uses a CBT approach and I’ve only been moderately impressed by that method so far, but I decided that, in combination with my DBT workbook, it couldn’t hurt.  While reading that page, I looked at the books that other customers also bought and opened a few more tabs with those.  In total, I ended up getting four new Kindle books.  I began to read.

It very quickly became evident that my whole goal after my last depression was wrong.  Back then, I had decided that I would not suffer anymore.  I was done with it, tired of it, and would do whatever I could to NOT. SUFFER. AGAIN.  I simply refused to suffer.

Cute, right?  This plan was fundamentally flawed from the start.

As I read, I feel like I’m starting to see things form in the ether.  Maybe.  It’s only day one and this particular leg of my journey is just a few hours old.

 

 

emotional terrorism

if you saw me right now, you wouldn’t notice much.  perhaps a little more furrow in my brow and a slight pursing of my lips.  i would lay my hands down in my lap so you wouldn’t notice the tremble.  you wouldn’t feel the spontaneous, uncontrollable muscular twitches on my scalp, or the painful tension in my jaw that occasionally prevents me from opening up my mouth.

click down.  click right.  release.

you also wouldn’t hear the earth-shattering, petrified scream of terror that occupies my mind several hours a day, or the urge to cry at all moments.  especially not the unsettling thoughts of peeling off my own skin and running as fast as i can, as far as i can, and never looking back.

run, run, run, run

in persistent flight mode, the slightest unexpected thing could send me over the edge, letting out the long, horrified shriek i’ve so far been able to contain, or reducing me into a crumpled pile on the floor, shuddering, crying.  the safest place is the paralysis stage, when limbs feel heavy and the mind goes to a strange, empty place that can’t quite be captured with words.  it’s a bit as if you found yourself in a heavy fog, floating.  no thoughts can enter that space.  just quiet.

shh

you look around.  you see things, knowing implicitly what they are, but not quite processing them in the way that you would normally.  it’s a mindless place, a place where autopilot helps you navigate space, where you can be among the natives, appearing normal but not quite able to understand what they are saying.  this is where your hypervigilance comes in handy.  without a single thought, just using body language and facial cues to know when to smile, laugh, or look serious.  you leave, not knowing what you talked about.  hearing words – some of them seem to make sense together – but your mind slipped away again so you lost track of the point.  nevermind.  no one noticed.

you know you have work to do.  meetings to attend.  a dissertation to complete.  this place won’t help you, so you do the things that are supposed to help.  you hold your worry stone.  go to therapy.  take your meds.  take a bath.  get exercise and plenty of nutrients.  reach out to friends in whatever meager way you can compel yourself to do it.  try to distract yourself with busy work or netflix.  yet you still wake up, heart racing, tears at the gate, tight chest. bracing yourself.

what awful, hateful, spiteful things might you hear today?  what of your person might be under fire?  what things you care about might be used against you?  is everyone safe?

it might be quiet for a while.  what does it mean?  is it finally over?  maybe the defenses begin to come down and you see the vast emotional wreckage, the blistering, hemorrhaging sores that have been opened and reopened, and scrubbed with a wire brush, and you know you can’t take any more.  all the troops are down; you have nothing left.  just motions and time.  go through the motions until new resources are born to repair this mess.

airstrikes by text message.

you hoped too soon.  this isn’t over.  not by a long shot.

perhaps if you contort yourself, your emotions, your values, your beliefs, maybe you can twist yourself into a foxhole.  maybe, if you compartmentalize enough, and don’t think about all of the verbal, acidic spittle or the award-winning mind fucks, you can dodge the attacks.  walk the narrow line, else a reign of terror befalls you.

why won’t you leave?

you can’t.  it’s not compatible with your person.  you cannot, in good conscience, abandon your position.  too much is at stake.  i weather the attacks so the little ones don’t have to.  it’s too unstable right now.  just a little longer.

hope, pray even, that the treatment sticks.  hope it’s just enough to get by, to get everyone in the safety zone.  set up the fort, get contacts in order, build the safety net.

it’s the only way to be free.

the sound and the fury

i am so angry right now i feel like i could vomit.  i actually don’t know what to do with myself.  i’m just kind of sitting here, confounded.

it’s bittersweet really.

i don’t want to minimize the first part of this story just because i’m angry about the most recent event, so let me see if i can manage to articulate it coherently.

y’all who read this blog or even my “about me” page know that i was diagnosed bipolar II in may 2012.  it was traumatic, to say the least, and brought me to the brink of suicide on multiple occasions.  it has had far reaching effects on my well-being, my relationships with family and friends (and lovers), and professionally.  and still, over a year later, i reap the consequences as just this week people in my professional circle have made reference to “my problem”.

lucky for me (and i do mean lucky), for whatever reason, whether it be because i am a graduate student in psychology, or because i have an insatiable quest for knowledge, or because WHEN YOU ARE DIAGNOSED WITH A SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, i sought out a phd-level clinical psychologist who specialized in bipolar disorder.  of course, i went in for a second opinion, but it was probably a good idea anyway because i had no the fuck idea how to handle this diagnosis and it only made my depression even worse.  i literally lost my mind, and to this day i still experience the fallout from that serious short-circuit to my brain, where i could barely form sentences, let alone understand what the fuck anyone else was saying.  memory, gone.  ever seen memento?  yeah, that was me.

so i kept my end of the bargain.  i went, faithfully, to this woman, every week.  sometimes i really didn’t understand the purpose of our sessions but in hindsight i realize they were more about gathering data about me.  what am i like?  what are my behavioral tendencies?  how do i react to stress or challenges?  how do i react to great experiences?  what is the pattern of my mood fluctuations?  you can’t really figure all of that out in an hour session; it *requires* multiple observations over a long period of time.

this is much unlike the practice of she-who-shall-not-be-named, the evil cuntwad who diagnosed me within the first ten minutes of our first session.  we’ll get to her in a minute.

almost a year and a half has passed and i had actually forgotten (not really, more like…set aside) the fact that i was seeing a psychologist weekly to get a second opinion about my bipolar diagnosis.  then, when i returned from the great pacific northwest, after my aunt threatened my life and a bunch of other shit happened (yeah, i haven’t blogged about that yet), i was sitting in her office trying to figure out how to navigate the situation with my aunt and the rest of my family and it happened.  i don’t recall what immediately preceded this moment.  i only have the flash memory of what she said.

she said:

i don’t think you’re bipolar

and i heard it and i stopped and i said, what did you say?  i’d heard her, but i just wanted to hear it again.  to savor the moment, maybe, i don’t know.

i don’t think you’re bipolar

and this was just, like, too much for my brain to handle, so i didn’t follow up with anything.  i kind of just let that idea enter my brain and percolate a while because i could not fucking handle it in that moment.  so i missed maybe a beat, and kept talking about my aunt.

a few weeks have passed since this moment, and i can still barely look it in the face.  it may be shock, but when i think of it it’s like a flood of emotions and an absence of them at the same time.  i don’t really know how to describe it otherwise.  so i kind of downplayed it.  i took it as a working hypothesis, rather than fact.  simply that the evidence indicated that i was not bipolar.  there is no certainty.  and that’s been the only way i’ve been able to deal with it.

until this week.

this week, on three separate occasions, two individuals have mentioned “my problem” in passing.  as if it’s ha-ha, nudge-nudge, funny.  and maybe i was okay with that before.  maybe my response to those comments was permissive, or encouraging even.  but this week, they just made me fucking angry.  and as each one occurred, i became more and more angry, so that i was just operating with a general level of irritation about it.  my daydreams were usurped by imagining telling them off for making jokes about my being bipolar (because HELLO, I’m NOT now…as if they could know), and the furious fucking letters i would write to the campus psych services, the psychiatry ethics board, and hell, the a.p.fucking.a. about the evil cuntwhore witch doctor who both diagnosed me prematurely and then told me i was “immature” when i hadn’t told my advisor that i was diagnosed bipolar, leading to these comments in the fucking first place.

so that’s what i talked about in therapy today.  i was nearly brought to tears recounting the breadth and depth of damage done by this woman, recalling wanting to die, desperately, and the damage it caused to my relationships and myself.

and do you know what my motherfucking therapist told me?  i couldn’t fucking believe it.  she said:

i had another patient come in, who was diagnosed right away with bipolar.  the same woman who diagnosed you.

let’s just sit with that for a moment.

..

…

..

because this means a lot of things.

this means, 1) i was fucking vindicated, 2) there was reason to suspect that her diagnostic decisions were a pattern, 3) she is, as i suspected, a danger to others.

those are really the most important ones right now.  so yes, we have an n=2 (sample size of 2).  but that’s two who happened to end up going to the same psychologist to talk about it.  probabilistically, then, there are probably more.

and remember, i consider myself lucky – LUCKY – to have had the insight or drive or whatever the fuck it was to GO SEE ANOTHER PROFESSIONAL.  what about those who don’t!?

so now, i am sitting here, ready to vomit, because i’m angry on behalf of myself and terrified for others who might suffer the same fate, who might not, for whatever reason, seek alternative opinions or care and who will LIVE ON AS IF THEY HAVE A SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE.

and it is fucking DAMAGING folks!  Many of my readers know this implicitly because they or a loved one experiences it themselves.  MY PROFESSIONAL REPUTATION IS FOREVER CHANGED BECAUSE OF THIS.  MY FAITH IN MYSELF WAS COMPLETELY DEMOLISHED, DESTROYED, AND I WANTED TO DIE.  DESPERATELY.  FRIENDS AND FAMILY DISTANCED THEMSELVES AND I WAS ISOLATED AND ALONE.  somehow i survived.

BUT THE NEXT PERSON MIGHT NOT.

THIS IS NOT OKAY. 

so i ask you, mental health community, what can be done?  who can i report to?  where do i sent my letter of complaint?

HOW CAN I MAKE SURE THIS WOMAN NEVER HURTS ANOTHER PERSON AGAIN?

and if i can’t do that…

HOW CAN I MAKE SURE THIS PATTERN IS ON HER FUCKING RECORD?

so that maybe, just maybe, when the next person complains, they will have a second complaint – my complaint – on record to show that YES, this is indeed a pattern, and YES, this woman is not professional and possibly not ethical, and YES, she is a risk to others.

please tell me: what can i do?

kafkaesque

the next morning, my feelings had followed my behaviors and i felt okay.  besides, we were going to see old ruins, an activity of which i am a big fan, so i woke with excited anticipation.

the day began early.  we were to meet downstairs at 7am to get on the road because it was an hour and a half drive.  i should have known better by then, but i still felt frustrated when we didn’t leave until 9:30.

the feeling only grew when, after an hour and a half passed and we were still driving without an apparent destination, i realized we were lost.  the mexicans hadn’t prepared.  they hadn’t looked up directions, but just kind of proceeded on distant memories, driving in the general direction of the pyramids.  we stopped, asked for directions, and turned around several times.  two hours passed, and then three.  linda and i gave each other exasperated looks.  another day, wasted.

finally we arrived.  i let the frustration go, replaced by my earlier feelings of excited anticipation.  you could see pyramids in the distance, and we got to choose which one to visit first.  we chose the one with paintings still visible and parked.  getting out of the van, and not having to face teaching, the failed execution of my meticulously planned curriculum, or abused women was like a breath of fresh air.  everyone seemed released from the burden of the week’s activities.  my advisor was jolly even.

i borrowed thor’s camera and took to documenting our trip.  i took the liberty of occasionally walking away from the group to capture the ruins, climbing up pyramids or walking off the beaten path to get a new angle, or to take a detail shot of the construction.  we walked around for about two hours, in and out of pyramids, through cavernous rooms with stone carvings and painted walls.  those that had been preserved were spectacular in their rich colors and designs.  then thor asked if we were hungry at all, which, of course we were because it’d been a long morning and breakfast was at 7am.  he suggested stopping to eat somewhere quick, or getting a quick snack like ice cream and then continuing on to the next pyramid.

the mexicans had other ideas.

we loaded back into the van and drove around for 30 minutes, passing several restaurants.  i wasn’t sure what criteria they were using to make a decision, so i just waited to see.  finally we pulled into an empty restaurant.  not really a good sign, but they seemed to be okay with it.  we sat down.  i ordered a shot of tequila and another cocktail.  because fuck. yes.

the food came.  it was hit or miss.  then, a huge platter arrived with little bowls on it.  linda looked at it with disgust and pushed away her plate.  i wasn’t sure what the big deal was so i peered into the little bowls.

the little bowls were filled with insects.  some of them might have even been moving but i don’t really remember.

one of the mexicans took a tortilla and dumped a little pile of insects on it.  he might have added some lettuce and salsa.  then he rolled it up and took a huge bite.  my stomach turned.  i drank my tequila.

thor told me to try it.  i said no, but by the end of my *next* shot of tequila, i was ready.  there were three puny little insects in the bowl.  i picked out a medium sized one and put it on my tongue while thor took a picture.  linda scooted her chair away from me in revulsion.  i took the plunge and pulled my tongue into my mouth.  the little insect rolled around a little before i ground it in my teeth.  the shell disintegrated with a small crunch.  it tasted a little like barbequed chicken.  i smiled and put my arms in the victory position while thor took another picture.

by the time the meal had ended, it started to rain.  we tried to go to another pyramid but it had closed.  it was the end of the day already.  we’d spent 2 hours waiting and 3 hours driving to spend two hours at an actual pyramid and another 1 or 2 hours sitting at a restaurant.  we had to head back to our hotel.

the next day, we were to leave to our next mexican destination: hermosillo.  i was SO happy to be leaving mexico city, to leave the dirt, grime, dejection, pain, and frustration behind.  i teased linda, who for some unexplainable reason had chosen a flight that left at 6am, and would have to wake up at 3:30am to get to the airport.  meanwhile, i relaxed in PJs, packed in leisure and spent the evening watching netflix and playing candy crush.  we’d made it!  in hermosillo, we would be staying in a lovely hotel, with a pool and exercise room and good food.  the city was nice, clean, and relatively similar to where we lived in the states.  it was going to be a vacation, compared to the last week.  i fell asleep peacefully, ready to turn the page and escape mexico city.

little did i know…that mexico city wouldn’t let us go so easily…

dia de los muertos

the last day of our first workshop was upon us.  linda was back, so she taught the last day of classes.  by then, i had relinquished the idea that the students would get as much out of the workshop as i put into it.  linda hadn’t prepared the materials.  she hadn’t engrossed herself in the topic like i had.  even though i had presented all of this information in our u.s. trial run, most of the details were glossed over, meaning that students missed out on a lot of the applicability and integration of the subject matter that i had built in to the “curriculum”.

thor didn’t seem to mind.  he didn’t mention it; in fact, he said the presentation was great.  i’m not sure why; there was so much missing, educationally.  it felt like a sham.

i felt frustrated.  i had spent so many hours working to make the course seamless.  in the midst of the end of term clusterfuck, i still pulled together an awesome course with cross-referencing materials…the whole enchilada.  i didn’t sleep a few nights, but i fucking pulled it off.

in other words, my work was going unrecognized and that pissed me off.  i had set the bar high and met it, but clearly i could have done a lot less and it would have been just as well.  i could have slept, maybe.

we called it a day early because the next day we were getting up bright and early to go visit some women in a poor town.  these were abused women, which thor seemed to take lightly but i knew i wouldn’t be able to.  after some reflection, i decided to tell him that the experience could upset me because of my early environment.  i didn’t go into detail.  he seemed surprised to find this out, but said it was fine and that i could leave if i wanted to.  but that i should still go if i wanted to collect any data using this “sample”.

suit yourself, thor.  i’ll give it a whirl.

we woke early and got ready.  the mexicans were late to pick us up, as usual.  the ride was long, over an hour.  i wasn’t prepared for the level of despair i was about to see.

the town was, by far, the most dilapidated collection of “buildings” i’d ever seen.  god had clearly abandoned this place long ago.  it was like a ghost town.  the people, like rats, scurried to and fro, quickly hiding within buildings.  it was apparently not safe to remain outside long.  old, worn, dejected faces stared without expression, eyes vacuous, as we rode by slowly in the van.

we arrived at some kind of compound.  it was completely surrounded by a tall fence, completely covered by graffiti, and we had to wait for the gatekeepers to let us in.  the little compound turned out to be some kind of school.  young children in uniforms darted around.  a few older women with painted on smiles greeted us.  i accidentally used the informal “you” in my introduction.  the smiles disappeared.

we walked into an old classroom, empty but for the group we’d been teaching and a few of the women.  no abused women yet.  i scouted out the joint for a seat with an easy exit, just in case.  but when the old audio system was set up, i realized i wouldn’t be able to hear from the back of the room so i picked one in front, off to the side.  slowly women trickled in.  i felt my stomach turn.  in each of them i felt and saw my own experience.  there was nothing physical about their appearance that would cause this; i was merely projecting my experience on to them.  i saw one man come in too, and thought, yikes, how many ways could this go wrong?  i’d assumed he might be one of the abusers, coming in to see what ideas these outsiders were putting in the womens’ heads.  i have no idea if that was actually the case, and i didn’t like that i’d thought that way about a perfect stranger.  but i knew i was off center in this whole thing, so i let it slide.

finally thor began to speak.  he asked first who’d been involved in an abusive relationship, or who’d had parents who were abusive.  almost all of the hands shot up, and that’s when the tears started.

i tried to hold it together, but they came in a steady stream.  i tried to stifle my sniffs and turn my face away.  women in the room saw me crying and were expressionless.  their glances passed over me without indication or acknowledgement.  instead, they listened intently to my advisor’s questions, and were more than willing to share their own experiences, through tears.  their voices were filled with so much desperation, so much need for help or guidance, plagued by pain and hopelessness.

but we weren’t there for help or guidance.  we were there so we could put on our little scientist hats and collect data.  what a fucking sham.

i made it 30, maybe 45 minutes, before i realized i was just sinking.  i couldn’t stop the tears, and i’d felt myself leave the room and go into a void.  i couldn’t process, i couldn’t translate.  i could only hear pain.  i left the room.

i went back to the van and sat and stared.  my mind was blank; i felt empty.  linda came out and sat with me.  i didn’t feel like talking so i just didn’t.  i didn’t care that she felt uncomfortable in the silence; her presence was more of a nuisance than anything, not of any fault of her own.  i was just in a dark place.  i went to the back of the van and laid down on my stomach, staring at the floor.  linda got out of the van and started talking to some of the school children.  i continued staring at the floor.

a long time passed.  finally, the “meeting” was over, and the van door slid open and i could hear thor asking where i was.  i mumbled something to indicate my location.  people started loading into the van and i realized i had to get up.  the kids we’d been teaching climbed in; i gave them the same vacuous expression offered by the townspeople.  i didn’t speak and was only looking forward to returning to the hotel and hiding under a blanket for the rest of the day.

as it would turn out, we had a full day ahead of us before we’d return to the hotel.  i came to understand this through bits and pieces of the conversation.  they wanted to take us to some archaeological site nearby.  i didn’t give a fuck, but we were over an hour away from the hotel, so i didn’t really have a choice.  we went to the dig.  i got out of the car just to get some fresh air, and walked around like an empty shell.  i climbed the side of a pyramid and sat on a corner overlooking the town, which i discovered was actually an extremely large city spanning an entire valley and up a mountain across the way.  i saw a lot of gilded domes.  churches.  these people were gonna need god to survive this mess.

finally, we got back in the van and i hoped we were returning to the hotel then.  instead, we drove through the town and came upon a huge crowd of children filling the streets.  school had gotten out.  it was a sea of people, and we crawled through slowly.  old merchants sold trinkets and candy to the kids.  it must have been the most lucrative time to open up shop.

the sliding door opened again.  a few people got out and i breathed easier for the space.  but then, the students we’d been teaching started getting in.  they filled the seats beyond capacity and loaded into the back and filled the floor.  i was squeezed tight between the side of the van and another student.  i started to feel claustrophobic, but again, i was an hour away from the hotel so i didn’t really have a choice.

i gathered from bits and pieces again that we were not returning to the hotel, but instead going to visit the city center.  i placated myself by imagining the hotel room.  i felt my pj’s on, lying on a pillow in cool air conditioned air with headphones on and some random show passing over my retinas.  when i came back to, i was still a sardine and we were heading into traffic.  so now i was a sardine in a van that was a sardine in traffic.  i couldn’t breathe.

i don’t know if you’ve ever experienced traffic in mexico city but it is despicable.  the van was old and the air conditioning couldn’t compete with the 15 hot bodies inside.  it was so hot i wanted to peel my skin off.  i started to sweat.  now i was a sardine in a van in a microwave.  i got very close to screaming and launching myself over four people to get out of the van.  i closed my eyes and practiced my breathing exercises.  this is temporary, this is transient.  it won’t be this way forever.

finally we arrived at the city center.  i had to get out of the van so we could walk around.  i was suddenly in the middle of a huge metropolis.  we passed by fancy restaurants and boutiques, filled with shiny and expensive things.  i felt offended.  the juxtaposition of such despair with such extravagance was painful and disgusting.  we walked into a restaurant.  i walked straight back into the bathroom and tried the door.  it didn’t open.  i stood there, mind blank, face empty for probably 7 minutes before someone came out and i realized i just hadn’t used the knob correctly.  i walked in and saw in the mirror that my shirt was inside out.  i don’t know when that happened.  i was a mess.

i went out and sat at a large round table.  there was a brief, few minute period of respite before a live musician began to play.  the sound was disproportionately loud for the space.  the music notes filled the empty space in my head and i couldn’t escape.  maria sat near me and turned to me.  she said, in her broken english, that she was so sorry for my experience.  she said her students are trained for a full year before even getting to interact with these women and i’d gone in with no training and a history that made the experience hit too close to home and she felt terrible.  she, too, had a similar experience growing up and she, too, leaves and cries for having seen it again.  tears welled up in her eyes, and then tears welled up in my eyes and i felt her pain and she felt mine and we kind of cried there together in the middle of the table, surrounded by 15 other people going about their conversations.  i decided to try to snap out of it on her behalf.  so i put my fucking game face on and swept my dissociative state under the rug.  i’d have to deal with that later.

the day continued.  we walked around and i made conversation with the students; i think most of them had grown to like me, and that feeling congealed when i made some smart-ass comment in spanish in the giant church in the city center.  i don’t remember what it was; i only remember them choking on laughter with looks that said “THIS gringa!”

i don’t recall much about the rest of the day.  i was depleted.  i went to bed, and awoke early again the next day for our visit to the giant pyramids an hour and a half away.  it was our “play day” and by that time, we deserved one.

 

[un]loading zone

i think i’m ready to write again.

i’ve not been able to until today.  i haven’t been ready to face it all again.  and there is a lot, which is good because my evaporative cooler broke and it’s too fucking hot to move.  besides, the computer is in the coolest room of my house at this hour, so win-win.

i’m not sure why i’m ready to write now.  i realized while i was running an errand that i feel really uncomfortable.  a general feeling of anxiety and i feel uncomfortable in my skin.  this could be for a number of reasons, including some of the events i plan to describe today.  it’s not been helped by the fact that at least 3 different people unloaded a bunch of vitriol on me; not toward me, but about events going on in their lives, but i can tell it has taken its toll.  just unhappy fucking people.  and unhappy fucking people are energy suckers.

i’m going back to mexico to describe the rest of the trip, because it will become relevant in another story and plus i still have some processing to do with regard to that trip.  besides, it’s a pretty good story on its own.

so brace yourselves, if you plan to read this.  it’s gonna be a wild ride.

punked

So, I got my heart smashed to smithereens last night which is never fun.  It doesn’t help that I also have debilitating cramping, so my heart, uterus, abdomen, and brain are all just going to town today.

Interestingly, it could be worse.  I experienced worse last year when I looked into the face of death and welcomed him with open arms.  Comparatively, this is way better.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a supply of xanax to help with the physical agony, which would otherwise stick with me for weeks, if not longer.  I find if I can calm my body, I can calm my mind.  I just haven’t figured out how to do that on my own yet.  Don’t worry, it’s on my list of things to do.

I hesitated for a minute to write about this, mostly because the person in question has access to this blog and could read it.  But then, I said fuck it.  This is my goddamn blog and I’ll write if I want to.

So.  The story.  Where to begin…  I suppose it’s in my best interest to start at the beginning, way back, 5 years ago.  This might be a long one, so if you’re all tl;dr the bottom line is I got rejected by a friend I’d developed feelings for (despite my best efforts not to) and now I have to deal with it.

Sometime between 2006 and 2008 I saw a most beautiful specimen of man and immediately thought he was the hottest guy in the department, hands down.  We were in different MA programs at the same university, and ended up having a class together.  I thought he was a little weird, to be honest, because it was as if he went out of his way to avoid me.  Once at a study session, the last seat remaining in our group was next to me and he made a point of dragging it around the table away from me.  That was mildly annoying and kind of stupid, and then he said something that really annoyed me so I wrote him off.

It turned out that we had mutual friends, and it was like a switch had flipped and he became nice and talkative with me.  I was kind of surprised, but whatever.  I think by that time I knew he had a girlfriend so I just ignored him.

Still, having mutual friends meant that we ended up all hanging out.  It turned out that we were actually pretty similar in terms of interests, humor, and the like.  Still, I couldn’t deny my attraction to him, so I blew him off as much as possible.  I actively made myself forget about him as soon as we weren’t in each other’s presence.  After all, what would be the point of getting caught up by someone who is not available?

There were things that happened that I thought a little peculiar. For instance, there was a group of us hanging out, and there was nitrous to be had.  The guy was providing the soundtrack through headphones, and the song he put on for my first go was so overtly sexual that listening to it on nitrous was like fucking right there in the middle of the room.  I’m pretty sure I had a mental orgasm in that moment, O face and all.  I never was any good at poker and this was no exception.

Once we were at his house, girlfriend present, and we were having some crazy conversation about something, and he was pulling out all of these books and showing me things, and I couldn’t figure out why on earth he was trying to impress me, but there it was.  I must have passed out at some point, because I woke up in the morning on the couch.  His girlfriend recounted the story to me: she woke up, and he wasn’t in bed with her.  Ready to flip her shit, she came bounding out into the living room and said she found us on the couch together, sleeping.  Of course, nothing had happened.  I had just fallen asleep.  But him?  His bedroom was like… 15 feet away.  Why wouldn’t he just go to bed?  But, that was as far as I ever let those questions go.  I’d leave, and forget about it again.

We’d often hang out in a group and his girlfriend would be there.  I kept my distance from her too because I knew I was attracted to her boyfriend and that’s just dick.  I came to admire their relationship, because he was so devoted to her.  So kind, and affectionate, and present.  I wasn’t jealous per se, but I came to a place where I considered that to be a kind of paragon or role model for a relationship I hoped to have some day.

She, on the other hand, was clearly retarded.  She would flirt with other men a lot, and act in ways that would be completely unacceptable if it were me in his shoes.  I would look at him, kind of curious, but never say anything.  I assumed it was just another case of men putting up with wacky shit to be with a beautiful woman.

I guess it made me a little less surprised then, when she left for a month to Europe, and I started getting texts from this guy to hang out.  In my gut, I knew what was up, and so I avoided them for as long as I could.  Then one day, he asked again and I figured that if we went to a public place, nothing could really happen.  So I told him to meet me at my place and we’d go from there.

As it turns out, we never left my place.

He brought a bottle of scotch, poppers, and, later I would find out, a cock ring.  I didn’t have a chance in hell.  That didn’t mean I didn’t try.  I thought, okay, pre-party and then GO.  Get out of house.  ASAP.

Nope, that didn’t work either.

I’m not sure how it started out.  It might have been a massage.  I was already solidly buzzed at that point which meant all my noble inhibition was gone.  In its place: means, motive, and opportunity.  So it happened.  We hooked up.  I can’t be sure, but I don’t think we fucked, although I gave a mean blow job and it was super sexy and just an elixir of euphoria.

After he left, I figured he was just being opportunistic given his absent girlfriend, so I wrote it off as a one time thing.  Nope.  Wrong again.

He continued trying to hang out and we did.  There was an incredibly sexy experience in a hot tub.  Good lord.

I’m sure some other shit happened, but I don’t really remember and in any case, his girlfriend eventually came home.  I didn’t really feel all that guilty about it because I’d seen her do some real dumb shit and treat him like garbage so whatever.  It was his problem, not mine.

Plus, he had cheated on his girlfriend, which meant my whole idealization of his boyfriend behavior was no longer accurate.  It made it a lot easier to write him off.

I continued to assume this was just something spawned out of opportunity.  Besides, I was getting ready to leave the state and figured I wouldn’t see him again.  Also wrong.

I ended up seeing him virtually every time I visited home.  We hooked up a couple of times in that period, if I was single at the time.  That’s all it was to me though.  Hang out with a hot dude who I could connect with.  Leave and forget about him.

I visited home less and less, but I kept hearing from him.  Texts every once and a while.  I think I only initiated conversations a handful of times, if that.  Otherwise, it was him checking in.  It was fun because we were intellectually on the same page and shared the same dark sense of humor.  It was nice to have a friend check in; he was really only one of few who made an effort to keep in contact with me after I left.

I can’t really pinpoint when things started to change.  I started noticing things I thought were weird, or didn’t fit within my understanding of our occasional-fuck relationship.  I suppose one of the first things that happened that I can remember has to do with this blog.  He asked to read it, because “it sounded like it’s important to me”.  Yeah, but wtf do you care, dude?  FWB, remember?  Okay, I said, and I gave him the link.

He read it all.  In one day.  I can tell you what day it was too because it’s still the day with the highest number of hits on my blog.  I mean, I know I’m a decent writer, but really?

Still, I logged that under the “peculiar” category in my mental notebook and moved on.  Over the following months, other things happened.  He started texting more frequently.  It went from once every 3 weeks to every other week to pretty much every week.  And then sometimes several times a week.  Again, no judgment, just observation.  I was really bent on not getting caught up in this dude.

He told me he was transferring to Seattle for work.  I was really happy for him because I knew he’d be happier there.  I knew it also probably meant that our friendship might fizzle out, since we’d not be hanging out when I visited home, and he’d get his life going there.  I was okay with that too.  A little disappointed, but nothing remotely overwhelming.

He bought a house up there, and was really excited about it.  Confided in me when he was stressed during the purchase process.  I was happy to be there for him, but I knew this purchase meant he was looking to settle down.  For something more substantial.  I was okay with this, at that time.  Again, mostly just disappointed I wouldn’t chat with him from time to time and also that I wouldn’t have a buddy to go to the strip club with, or bullshit with until wee hours, or talk about crazy shit.  But you know, life goes on and things change.  Not the end of the world.

Then the content of the conversations changed.  It became more personal.  He started talking about trust.  He wanted to know how he could earn my trust.  Then again, this was in the context of sharing sexy pictures, so that was fairly easy to write off or explain within the context of our FWB relationship.

We did have a lot of sexy conversations.  I noticed that I started to get annoyed, actually, because it felt like every time he would text, it would turn into that.  I stopped responding as much.  As soon as the conversation would go there, I’d just not reply, or I’d only respond when I felt like getting into it.  He may have gotten the picture, because the conversations diversified a bit and we started talking about non-sexual things too.  In hindsight, I think he may have just been building rapport to get to the sexy conversations.

He got me a Christmas present; a vibrator to replace the one that my freaking dog ate, little shit demon.  It was hot and sexy, and also well within the parameters of being FWB.

Sometime around then, he asked to fly down to see me.  That one caught me a little off guard, because it’s not like he couldn’t get laid in his area.  I said no because I was still carrying a ton of weight from lithium and stress and I was just not in a good place to focus on anyone but myself.  The invitations kept coming.  He offered to fly me up to visit him.  Several times.  I couldn’t make the time work with all of the obligations I had, but he’d keep trying.  It was becoming a little harder to explain, but I figured he was just really excited about his new place and wanted to share it with friends.  Plus, blow jobs and sex.  Win!

By spring of this year, his “Happy Friday” texts turned into Happy Tuesday, Happy Humpday, Happy Sunday, and so on.  I enjoyed the company, as I was being a bit of a hermit at the time.  Plus, by this time we would have some smoking hot sessions via text occasionally.

I think the game started to change when I pulled my April Fool’s prank.  I’d come up with it last year and couldn’t wait to try it out.  I was going to solicit sperm donors on Facebook.  Yep, I was going to tell everyone I’m ready to have a baby and ask for donors among my FB friends.  I even had people going, too.

I was mildly curious to see how he’d respond, but mostly it was about the joke.  I couldn’t have anticipated what did end up happening as far as he was concerned.  I figured he’d get a good laugh and we could talk about people’s responses etc.  Nope, that is not what happened at all.  Instead, he said he kind of wanted to know how resume stacks up.  Note that there was no pronoun, so I asked him to clarify whether he meant his resume or those of the people who were offering.  He said he wanted to know how his resume stacked up against my criteria and against the competition.  Like whoa.

I kept up the dialogue in line with my joke, asking about genetic traits such as height and eye color.  Then he said something that completely shut me down.  He told me he couldn’t be a biological father without being a FATHER.  And when I asked why that was important to him, he said it was always something he had wanted to do with great intent.

FML

I mean, it was like getting punched in the stomach.  My joke was no longer ha-ha, it had morphed into oh-no.  In part because the whole experience on Facebook turned out to be really empowering, and his reminding me that any potential kids having a dad around is actually really important to me.  But also because then he suddenly became human again, instead of a hot plaything slash friend.  And not only human, but like an insanely attractive, high mate value human with whom I needed to reproduce immediately.  Talk about going from one extreme to the other.  Fuck’s sake!

Interestingly, I was able to articulate this with him (save for the impregnate-me-now part), which meant the trust-building exercises or whatever the fuck they were were working.  In the process of discussing it, he confessed that reading the post about me and babies gave him a raging erection at work.  I had no idea what to think about that.

Still, the levee held.  At that point, it could have been something to laugh about when we finally got together again.  I was decidedly more curious, but I also felt like our friendship had grown through that experience and that was pretty cool.

From time to time, he’d sent pictures of his new place.  Beautiful pictures, with lots of green which he knew I liked.  On facebook one day I saw he’d posted more and I “liked” them.  A few hours later I checked my phone, which was dead.  I plugged it in and discovered he’d texted me those pictures too.  I told him I saw them on Facebook and they’re awesome and all that.

Reading his reply is when I knew I was fucking doomed.  Fortunately, because it was SO unexpected, I took a screenshot and sent it to relevant friends and family with a big “WTF do I make of this?”

It said: “I decided to post these on FB today after not getting any reply, but I hope you enjoyed the pics I took for you”

and then “Was thinking of you”

My whole body flushed warm.  I was like goddamn it brain, goddamn it hormones, stop!  But it was too late.  There was no way to avoid the affection I felt reading those messages.

I did my best to keep my cool.  To act like I hadn’t been affected by those words.  Nope, nothing happening here…nothing at all.

But that was a lie.  I could not explain that in the context of FWB.  Not even in the context of friends, really.  That, sirs, is what you call an outlier.  An outlier could be noise.  It could be nothing.  Only further observation would tell.  But one thing was for certain: he had my attention.

Part of me hated this.  Part of me was shouting a whole stream of profanities.  This is the part of me that saw the ball, nudged from its cozy nest on a ledge.  A ledge where I was safe and our longstanding friendship and physical relationship were as they should be.  Static.  Stable.  No fucking emotions involved.  I saw the ball teeter over the edge and as much as I willed it to stop, using all possible powers of telekinesis I could muster, it landed with a soft plop on the dirt below and, following the laws of gravity rather than those of my brain (much to my dismay) began its descent.

The slope wasn’t steep, and I shoveled dirt and roadblocks and threw things at it to just STOP moving.  Nothing worked.  It continued rolling, albeit slowly and I just watched in frustrated anticipation.

Anticipation, because I was seriously fucking stuck.  Stuck because I knew how this process would go and that there was a real chance of getting rejected hard here.  The truth is, I didn’t really think the odds in my favor.  I thought maaaaaaybe there’s a 50-50 chance that he’s into me as something more than FWB.  This dude is pretty high maintenance as far as men go, and I am decidedly not.  On the other hand, we are fucking compatible as shit.  As I have ever been with anyone.  And I knew it was going to hurt REAL bad to lose that.  And I knew if he wasn’t on the same page as me, the only thing TO do was to lose it.

There were other things.  I struggled to make sense of it, so I’d go back and take screen shots of what I deemed “curious” texts to attempt to assess them with a clear mind.  There were some other things that had me turn into a stupid blushing schoolgirl kind of mess and I loved and hated it at the same time.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately now) those screen shots were lost when I bought a new phone, so I can’t recount them here.

Friends and family who knew about the situation all had different points of view.  One friend said I shouldn’t stay so guarded because he’ll think you’re rejecting him.  Another one said he just wants sex.  Another one said he’s just trying to relive the intense experience we had years ago.  I didn’t know what the fuck to think, but I knew that I’d see him soon, and then I’d know.

See, my summer plans are in Washington too.  I’m staying with my aunt up here, about 2 hours away from where he lives.  That is incidental, and had planned it long before developments with this guy began.  I was planning to drive almost 2000 miles over 5 days to escape the desert heat misery and go somewhere green and beautiful where I could relax and work some on my dissertation.

He must have asked me 8 times if I’d stop at his place on the way to my aunt’s house.  Each time I said no.  Why?  Well, number one, I was trying to get up here and get settled as quickly as possible.  Number two, I’d have been traveling for 4 days straight, so I’d look and feel like shit, which is not conducive to either sexy time or potentially emotionally volatile situations.  I mean, come on.  I hadn’t seen this guy in two years, and we hadn’t hooked up in 4 years, AND the whole dynamic had changed so I had no the fuck idea what to expect.

Alas, my plan failed because my aunt needed me to arrive a day later.  I gave in and asked him if I could stay at his place.  He said yes, of course.  Not only that, he also took the next day off of work.  I tried to tell myself, if nothing else, at least I’m going to have great sex!  And I was genuinely excited about that.  But more looming was this cloud of uncertainty, and next to it was the cloud of loss.  I knew I had to go into a situation where I was vulnerable and let whatever was going to happen happen.  I also knew that if he wasn’t into me, that I couldn’t go back to being FWB.  It had changed, I had changed, we had changed, and there was no going back.  Only going forward, even if it meant without him as a part of my life.

When I finally arrived at his place, nothing could have prepared me for it.  Not any of my singing, meditation, deep breathing, exercise, self-talk, or anything else I had tried to get my head right for this trip.  I saw him with different eyes than I’d ever seen him before.  I saw him as someone who had seen me entirely, in our years as friends together, and in my deepest confessions on this blog at my absolute worst place in my life.  I saw him as handsome, strikingly so, and couldn’t even bear to look at him for fear he’d see just exactly how much I’d lost my grip.  I saw his home, his land, as an extension of his deepest values and as a reflection of his character and person.  I saw all of this and thought, I’m so fucking doomed.

I tried to eliminate those thoughts, because I knew they’d take me down a dark path.  I instead tried to absorb the peace, serenity, and beauty of the land before me and appreciate where I was.  This was all a futile exercise, but I just kept at it.  I remember, after staring in awe out the window, asking what sucked about living there.  He said, well, it makes dating really hard.  I averted my eyes and walked into another room so he couldn’t see my expression.  I suppose I knew at that point everything I needed to know.  But I had to stay there for 24 hours so I needed to remain optimistic if I was going to survive it.

I did my best to stay open and accepting of whatever each moment brought.  But by the time I left, I felt I’d been punched in the gut.  At the time, I felt like I knew it was over.  I felt like when I saw him the following week (we had plans), it would be the last time, so I’d better enjoy it.

I finally arrived to my aunt’s house, and got straight to work bringing my focus back to where it should be: on me.  I walked in nature, sat at the beach, and busted ass at the gym.  I kicked ass so hard at the gym that one guy stopped me in the middle of my workout to tell me how impressed he was with my workout.  “You’re so disciplined,” he said.  I said thank you, instead of explaining that I’m just an anxious person and this is my coping mechanism.  Whatever, it worked.

Yesterday evening, I felt even-keel enough to send him a text to find out when he wanted me to come by.  See, I’m supposed to be at his house right now.  We’re supposed to have a reunion with friends who are flying up, the same mutual friends that led to our interactions in the first place.

Hours went by.  I looked at my aunt and I said, you know, I think he’s on a date.

Around 10pm the following dialogue took place:

Him: Dude. Let me tell it to you straight.  I’ve just met a lady, and it has to be plutonic[sic] between us now.  I wasn’t expecting this but, Fuck, there it is.

[My face goes white, and my breath has been punched out of my gut.  I sit down.  Okay okay okay okay…]

Having said that, you are of course welcome whenever you want to come by!

[Are you fucking shitting me right now?]

My life is whack right now.

Me: [I have alarming clarity of thought in this moment.  I think, what do I need to know?  I think, how can I handle this with dignity and honor?] Okay.  That’s fine, and I hope it works out for you.  In the interest of being straight I got the impression before I got here that you were into me.  I’d like to know, was I making that shit up, were you bored or lonely, or what?

[I am shaking with anger and adrenaline.  The pain hasn’t hit yet.]

Him: You are a super special person to me- don’t get that wrong

[oh no you did NOT just say that]

No dude… I just got blind sided.  I…I don’t know.  I think I could marry this girl & I just met her.  Fuck.  I’m sorry for being confusing.

[THERE’S the pain. ow ow ow ow ow ow]

Me: Okay.  I hope the best for you but I’m out.  I can’t go backwards.  Best of luck.  Don’t contact me.

Him: Dude!  I don’t even know what is happening to me right now.  I literally feel retarded.

Me: I can’t be your friend through this.  Sorry.  Take care.

Him: Sad.  I’m sorry I hurt you.  Fuck.

Me: Just stop

And that friends, is how you break a heart.

Workshop, Days 2 and 3

Day 2 was slightly better than Day 1, but started out like shit.  Linda and I woke up, and she told me I didn’t need to go downstairs to meet with Thor since I wasn’t involved in the data analysis.  Fine with me.  I knew the tasks I had to do with the workshop materials were relatively simple.  Time consuming, but simple.

This was clearly an error, however, because I got down stairs about 30 minutes after 10a and Thor was fucking pissed.  He gave me this whole big to-do about being on time.  I blinked, and said, that’s fine.  I was actually surprised at how well I kept my composure at this verbal attack so early in the morning, but clearly after the day before, my bullshit threshold had increased and I was unfazed.  Of course, I didn’t need his help *at all* to work on the materials, and it was really just annoying to be there because their conversation interrupted my train of thought.

Somewhere in there, Linda started saying that she wasn’t feeling well.  She had some kind of scab on her leg that looked to me like an ingrown hair.  Suddenly, she was convinced that she had a staph infection.  At one point, she said she was absolutely positive about it.  Although I was highly doubtful, she said she’d had it twice before so she knew 100% that it was.  Then, she started feeling sick and was convinced she had the flu.  She was freaking out.  Then, she was freaking out and saying she was going to fly home.  Then *I* was freaking out that my genius plan was all for nothing.  See, I knew my spanish was weak, so I reconciled all of the work and prep I did for the class with the fact that I would have Linda teach it in Spanish.  Therefore, I did not have to teach in Spanish, which would have been very stressful given my level of fluency.  Now, I had done all the work, and was looking at also having to teach the class.  In Spanish.  Dear god.

By the end of Day 2, Linda decided she was going straight to bed.  Moreover, she would be staying in bed all day the next day.  I would be teaching the class.  Still, having her stay in bed while I did the work was still a net gain over listening to her have a freaking panic attack and complaining all the time about how much Mexico sucked and she hated being there.  I was ready to stab myself in the eye with a fork at one point.

The morning of Day 3, I grabbed a notebook and began writing down key words.  It’s kind of difficult to anticipate all of the words you will need in an advanced statistics course being taught to graduate students and professors, but I did my best.  I was dizzy and shaking from fear.  I already have a tremendous fear of speaking, but add the stress of teaching in another language (in which you are decidedly NOT fluent) to other grads and faculty, and I was just doomed.  I spent the morning trying not to throw up.  I kept thinking of words last minute.  I assigned Thor the role of answering questions, because I just couldn’t envision myself being able to compute questions on the spot with all of my anxiety at peak levels.

I stood in front of the class, trembling.  My voice shook as I introduced myself and then the topic.  I got a question, which I had to direct to Thor because my mind was completely blank.

Then…something fucking magical happened.

The whole culmination of my preparation of materials and understanding the material and teaching experience and writing down key words had apparently percolated sufficiently and suddenly, I was teaching the course in Spanish.  With almost no help from Thor.  I felt like Forest Gump in that scene where he realizes he could run fast as shit.  That was me.  The chick version of Forest Gump and instead of running, I was teaching in Spanish.

I saw the change reflected in the attendees too.  Suddenly, they were looking at me with big round eyes and big smiles on their faces.  Marisa was in the back of the room, *beaming* at me.  We were all thinking the same thing.

This fucking gringa can speak Spanish.

Workshop, Day 1

We arrived in Hermosillo earlier than I had anticipated.  The sun was still out when we pulled into the parking lot.  The hotel’s glimmering glass doors parted, granting us entry to the marble-floored reception.  A spiral staircase wound up through the center of the room, and a sparkling pool waited outside.  We dropped off our things, and immediately changed into bathing suits.  Linda and I ordered pina coladas, which were brought to us poolside.  I swam laps, reveling in the cool water and letting the tension from the road dissipate.  I hit the treadmill for another 45 minutes, watching the sun’s reflection fade against a desert hill across from the hotel, and then got ready for dinner.

We met up with our group, and it was practically my first interaction with Spanish.  I kept quiet for the most part, and tried to follow along, pretty unsuccessfully.  I was familiar with this process, since it had happened in Chile a few years back.  I would simply suck at conversation for a short period of time until I got my bearings.  Fortunately, I’d been sitting in on Skype conference calls in Spanish for the past couple of months, so my comprehension had gone from almost nothing up to about 75%.  Really, the biggest issue was if people asked me a question.  Passively listening, no one could tell that I was delayed in understanding.  But when addressed directly, there was the delay, and the added anxiety of having to generate a response, so I was really just a hot mess in those situations.

We had a flight first thing in the morning to head over to Mexico City in the morning for our first four-day workshop.  The flight felt longer than I had expected, but I had a book with me.  We were picked up from the airport by “Marisa”, our contact in Iztapalapa.  Again, I was pretty quiet.  I still didn’t have my Spanish-speaking hat on yet.  Marisa looked a little nervous, so my advisor quickly reassured her that Linda would be teaching the class.  It made me feel useless, but I took a deep breath and gave myself permission to acclimate.  So I wouldn’t dazzle them at first.  Just wait.

The drive to the hotel was…startling.  For a while, it reminded me of my trip to Chile a few years ago.  There were tons of similarities, even at the airport.  Then, the city started to turn.  On a busy main road I saw a young woman dressed provocatively on the sidewalk.  It didn’t really hit me until we had passed 4, 5, maybe 6 women–within a city block.  Prostitutes!  Out in the open, just waiting.  Shit just got real.

We also got some other bad news.  The original plan was great.  We’d start the workshop at 4pm each day, M-Th.  That meant that the laboratory portion that Linda and I were responsible for would go from 6-7p.  In other words, we’d have all day to trip around, and I could get work done on my summer class that started two days after our return from Mexico.  Now, we found out that there was some problem with the scheduling…Not only would our schedule be changed, but it wouldn’t even be a regular schedule.  Now, we started at 12p on Monday and Thursday, and 2pm on Tuesday and Wednesday.  On top of that, our hotel was almost an hour away from the university, and my advisor wanted to attend talks in the morning.  In summary, our days were completely fucked.

We finally arrived at our hotel, and instructed not to leave under any circumstances by ourselves.  Hmm…

Once I got my hotel key, I was pleasantly surprised to walk in to a beautiful, spacious hotel room, with a flat screen TV and DVD player, where we could watch the first season of Game of Thrones, and large, private bathroom with an ample supply of travel sundries.  I was surprised because the website for this hotel was, let’s just say, sparse.  I was not looking forward to the stay there until I got to the room.  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Come morning, however, it was a different story.  My advisor…we’ll call him Thor…was in a terrible mood.  From the first minute, he was pissed off.  Pissed off that we weren’t down stairs earlier, pissed off about the food, pissed off about the service, the chairs, the room.  All of it.

In fairness, the breakfast was pretty awful and I saw his point about the chairs.  They were seriously made for really small people.  And Thor, let’s just say, is decidedly NOT a small person.  It pretty much sealed the deal when the waiter came back and told us we had to pay for our shitty food, even though we were told it was included.

We were supposed to arrive at the University early to be at some opening ceremony for the International Conference that was going on at the time, and Thor was so pissed off, he said fuck the ceremony, we’re packing our shit and going to a different hotel.  Linda and I looked at each other sideways, thinking the same thing: This is going to be a long day.

We had “30” minutes to pack everything and be back downstairs.  But really, it was only like 15 before Thor called up to the room and barked that we needed to get downstairs in 3 minutes. Clothes and toiletries were thrown haphazardly back into bags. Luggage in tow, made our way back to the lobby.  We were driven to the University, and ended up leaving our luggage in the car, which I don’t even do where I *live*, let alone in Mexico.

There was no time to argue, though, because Thor was on a rampage.  The poor student who picked us up was frantically trying to text Marisa to let her know about the hotel situation.  Then, we got to the site of the International Conference, and Thor’s face quickly morphed into an expression of clear dissatisfaction.

Stairs.  He couldn’t take stairs.

Now, it would be true to say that Thor was acting a bit like a primadonna that morning.  A Diva, even, as Linda had succinctly put it.  But the stairs were another issue entirely.  Thor is grossly overweight, and that’s even after losing enough weight to constitute an entire human being.  He can’t walk for long, and stairs are just out of the question.

We made it up those stairs exactly one time. After seeing what constituted this so called big conference, it now deserves quotation marks.  An “international conference”, where the first talk was seriously an argument for the divination of Hugo Chavez.  Seriously.  Thor, a staunch libertarian, left the room after 5 minutes.  I went outside myself after about 45 minutes of feeling like it was a complete waste of time, frustrated that I’d be spending my mornings attending this BS conference rather than working on my class.

A sliver of hope.  Thor told me that under no circumstances would he be attending this event after that day.  Thank god.

We had a short break before our workshop started, so we walked to a street just outside the university.  It was a small, narrow street, clogged with traffic and cyclists, and vendors selling cheap trinkets and pirated DVDs.  The “restaurant” was decidedly sketch.  I couldn’t understand the conversation.  I felt meek and ignorant.  Patience, I reminded myself.  Just keep trying.

Much to my dissatisfaction, I discovered that the current plan at the moment was to stay at Marisa’s house.  Now, just taking stock of everything, I quickly realized how awful that would be.  We were in a poor ass town, at a poor ass university.  Marisa was a professor at this poor ass university, which means she probably didn’t make shit, income-wise.  Which meant we would probably end up sleeping on couches and sharing a bathroom with Thor.  I was fucking livid but I did my best to keep my cool.  Still, the day’s stresses were becoming unbearable.

Soon, it was time for the workshop to start.  I had to use the restroom and discovered that there were absolutely no toilet seats, whatsoever, and you’d be lucky to have toilet paper.  Inevitably, I had left my portable toilet supplies at the hotel.  Big mistake.  Drip dry it was.

Fortunately, on the way back to the room, the conference organizer stopped me in the hall and told me that he’d found us another hotel.  Honestly, I only understood “other hotel”, so I thanked him and brought the news back to Thor and Linda.

Thor talked for over two hours, gouging into our laboratory session.  I was frantically making final revisions on the laboratory materials.  Linda didn’t offer to help, or even seem to think about whether the materials were ready.  Over the past week, though, I had learned that involving her was actually more work than doing it myself because she is technologically illiterate.  At times, it was maddening because there was SO. MUCH. TO. DO.  And she was virtually useless in that regard.  That was aggravating on its own, but it became even worse later.  Hold that thought.

We were brought over to the computer lab about 5 minutes before it was supposed to start, which is never a good thing.  The computers didn’t have the program we needed to run the statistics software.  Moreover, downloading it was going to take, for some stupid reason, 35 freaking minutes.  Linda had *no* idea what was going on.  Somehow, she also didn’t seem to notice how fucking unprofessional and retarded we looked.  We were 40 minutes into our hour-long slot and literally zero had happened.  I broke out into a sweat.

I was not about to have my professional reputation sullied by incompetence, so I stood up and told Thor that we were changing the format of today’s class, and then told Linda that we needed to introduce the program with the User Interface document I had created.  This document provided step by step instructions, with screen shots, for everything we would be doing in the program and more.

I was frustrated.  If I had spoken better Spanish, this snafu would have been minimized considerably.  I could have easily worked around it and minimized the effect on students.  Instead, we looked like freaking dodo birds.

Moreover, Linda had been substantially less involved in the preparation for the course.  She simply hadn’t been available for a number of meetings for various reasons.  A few times, for work.  Other times, not so valiant reasons.  I don’t remember if I mentioned this in my last post, but began working on this workshop the Saturday after finals ended, and one week exactly before leaving to Mexico.  We met around 11 or so in the morning, and Linda was hung over as fuck.  We wasted the first hour talking about personal crap, before I turned the conversation to the workshop.  I asked her two questions: 1) how much work was she willing to do, and 2) how much time did she have.  She seemed interested in producing high quality work, so I told her my ideas about creating PowerPoints, the User Interface with screen shots, Annotated Outputs, and so on.  About another hour or so in, we realized the restaurant was closing and would have to change locations to a coffee shop.  I arrived at the coffee shop, and she called me to ask if I was there already.

…

Yeeeeesssss…why, I asked.  And she said, I feel like shit I just want to take a nap.  A lightening bolt of disgust/annoyance/anger struck, but I took a deep breath and closed my eyes to recenter.  I asked her what other time she had to work.  Of course, I already knew she didn’t have any other time, but I clearly had to remind her about that, and to indicate that under no circumstances would I do all of this on my own.  Little did I know at the time…

Finally, she came to the coffee shop.  What followed was 6 hours of fucking AGONY.  I set her to the task of taking screen shots of the whole process we’d be going through in class.  Meanwhile, I’d work on the PowerPoints.  What actually happened was I did not have even ONE 5 minute span where I was not interrupted to solve a problem.  By 9:30pm, my head was pounding, and we had gotten almost nothing done.  I didn’t even have all day to work on this, because grades were due two days later and I still had a MOUNTAIN of shit to grade.  Finally I decided I’d get more done on my own and ended the “meeting”.  I had resolved myself to the fact that I simply did not have time to sleep.  I went home, popped a Nuvigil, and redid everything for the workshop.  I finished around 9am, took a small break, and then started grading.

Meanwhile, I’m getting texts from Linda about her out of town trip, which had suddenly morphed into a spontaneous trip to Vegas.  She’s texting about stopping to go shopping and two free nights in Vegas and drinking.  Originally, it was just a one night deal, and she said she would have time to help Monday night.  Clearly, that wasn’t happening anymore.  Meanwhile I’m at home, in physical agony from exhaustion and frustration from grading shitty papers.  It was absolutely fucking maddening, but it was slightly less maddening than trying to get her to accomplish any work, so it felt like a net win.  And that’s just sad.

Anyway, back to Mexico.  The point of that whole digression is that I was having meetings with my advisor to get clarification about the topic and have the materials approved and to make sure I understood what was being taught.  Linda, on the other hand, got none of this, which meant that a good 30% of the work I did was neglected entirely.  Which also meant that Mexican students were getting a worse deal than they should have, in terms of education and the value-added of paying to attend our class.  She blew through conceptual stuff, background stuff, and anything extra.  She did a black-and-white, step by step of the program, and then said, yep, well that’s it!  I had to use everything I had to keep my poker face on, because she was making our class sound fucking pointless.  There was literally zero pedagogical skill going on there, even though she had sat in on and observed me teach the workshop in the US, where I did go over those very topics.

Finally, the agony ended, and we were driven to our new hotel.  It was in an even more sketch area, and was decidedly shittier than the original hotel.  The rooms weren’t as nice, and there was like NO privacy for bathroom related activities.  The shower opened right out into the room.  Thankfully there was a door for the toilet.  It was disappointing to say the least, but Thor was happy, so I put my fucking game face on and said it was fine.

We all met down in the restaurant, where I immediately ordered a fucking cocktail that was glorious and wonderful.  We ate dinner, and made a plan to meet in the morning, because Linda was analyzing some data and I needed to make revisions to the User Interface, which had now, through some unspoken agreement by everyone but me, completely fallen on my shoulders.  Linda didn’t even ASK if she should help or indicate that she thought she should.  We’d be meeting at 10am the next day, 4 hours before the workshop started.  Then there was talk of going out to eat afterword.  In other words, the day was shot.

Finally, we made our way back up to the hotel room and zonked the fuck out.