Unreal

Today was my last day working at the house.  Tomorrow the realtor will take pictures, post her sign and send the listing out over the realty networks.  This was supposed to happen last Thursday but we had extremely heavy rain (and the biggest hail I've ever seen) and my basement was wet for the 2nd time ever.  That was a fun incident; I had all this extra time planned to be ready for her and instead I had to run out and buy rags and a shop vac and then frantically suck up the puddle.  So we delayed a little so I could finish up.  Today I did things like mop the basement floor, mow, vacuum one last time (for now), and clean kitchen surfaces solely to make them shine.  (Scrubbing Bubbles Kitchen cleaning foam is AWESOME).  So it's as ready as it will be.

I intended to take a few minutes to sit in my old bedroom and be sad.  Then I didn't really feel that because I am avoiding feelings and my high dose Seroquel makes me feel pretty flat, a side effect I forgot.  But mostly what I felt today was that the whole thing wasn't real.  Empty it just doesn't look like the place I lived for so much of my life.  It feels like somewhere I've been asked to clean, not like my home.  I don't really feel like I have one of those right now, just a place to stay which I'm grateful for but which is not ideal.

Then I realized so much of my life doesn't feel real.  The years since my bipolar began affecting my ability to function and moved on to the now simply do not seem like they really were part of my life.  I can't believe now that I once knew and did what I did as a therapist.  My camp counselor years feel like a story I once read.  Grad school feels like a dream.  Even most of college has a hazy quality.

I know that this partly because of my depression and the grieving process.  I know a lot of it is my med change.  Compared to December I am on a lot more medication between adding Neurontin and drastically increasing Seroquel.  But some of it because in the last 20 years almost everything I thought I knew and understood about my life has been turned inside out.  If you'd told me 15 years ago that I would have had to stop working after a rough career, that I'd own a house and sell it to live with my mother, that I would spend months not wanting to live, that the dreams I had about having my own family would never come true, that even my so-called best friend wouldn't be in my life anymore, I would have laughed.  But all that and more is true.

So much has happened in so little time.  I think I needed to understand this to start this grieving they keep saying I must face.  I hope.  Right now honestly the part I'm saddest about is that I miss my own things.  I miss my mattress like I can't explain.  I miss the stupidest things like sitting on my couch to watch DVDs instead of this not-so-comfortable bed.  I miss closing my bedroom door (not that I ever did at home but here I want to so I miss it because I can't do it and still let my cats get their food and litter). 

And my mom says I may be here until November.  That's bad in that I don't have clothes for that weather and getting to them in the storage unit would be incredibly hard.  It's also bad because it is so long.  So very, very long.

Anyway, I'm going to try to watch a DVD and knit for a while.  I miss knitting too; it's not the same here because I don't have space for it.

Yet it took less than a month to make everything seem like it never happened.