BLAH

I sit here with a blank page before me. I have determined to produce six posts a week for this blog so that I might have a portfolio on my writing. But I am numb and it's too hot outside. Some people think I am merely full of excuses, but I know better now. It will still make me feel terribly guilty that people feel that way, but I'm fortunate to have a husband who understands.

I've always had trouble sleeping. Pretty much life long insomnia, but it never became an issue until my early 30s when I took on a job that was close to Los Angeles but not close enough. Consequently, I had a 75 mile commute from Claremont, CA to Adelanto, CA. I didn't mind really. I love driving and listening to music as I drive, and it was right around the time iPods hit. So, I had my own radio for the years that I worked there. But I needed to show up around 6AM which means I had to leave at 4:45 to get there on time. I was going against traffic, so it was an honest 75 miles.

Around that time, the insomnia became a very important issue. I didn't have much of a social life, so going to bed early on work nights was fine, but I couldn't fall asleep. I would lie in bed and toss and turn and get more angry with myself as the night went on. It wasn't because I just had a problem sleeping, I was used to that, but my body fell into a particular rhythm. I was using sleeping aids like Benadryl-laced Tylenol PM, but once I started to drift off, my body would jolt awake and my heart would race. My mind would be flooded with images from every single thing that had made me cringe about in my life; every mistake I'd made; every person I had wronged.

But then I'd start to drift off again. BAM! My body would once again jolt awake and this time my heart would be beating faster. This would continue throughout the night until it was 4:30AM.

Fortunately, I really liked that job and I was energized when I got there and never felt the weight of my lack of sleep until I got home and had dinner. One evening though, I was tiredly making dinner and sliced the tip of my finger off requiring a run to the emergency room. It was a disturbing experience, but the only thing I got out of it was the physician's assistant who stitched me back up suggested I might have anxiety issues. The insurance for my job hadn't even kicked in yet, but as soon as it did, I found an internist and made an appointment.

It was the first time I had been clearly diagnosed with a mental illness. In this case it was Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD. I was put on a micro dose of clonazepam, and despite my dosage increasing over the last 20 years, the drug has been a reliable companion in my life. I had a psychiatrist once describe it as a beneficial addiction.

The reason I write about it today is that since then I've been diagnosed with two other mental illnesses, and I suspect next time I see my psychiatrist, he will diagnose me with a combined-type ADHD and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which hasn't made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) yet.

Let's mesh these two ideas together with a third. I worked in a design capacity for 25 years, but the positions I held and the design work I was doing never required a portfolio because I could just point a prospective employer to a corporate website to see my work. While I can still do that with a large bulk of my work, I have designed other things from products to packaging to websites.

I've been trying to get all this into a simple 3 minute video (I'm pretty good at that as well), but I just can't bring myself to do it. It's the same feeling I had at my last job that was so toxic that when my alarm went off in the morning I would lie there in bed seemingly frozen but screaming in my brain that I needed to get up and move. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I couldn't.

All of this, again, makes me feel incredibly guilty, and I know that's because of the constant anxiety. It doesn't help knowing that. But look! I wrote a post that covered three topics I've been meaning to address: my writing portfolio, my mental health, and my inability to put together my design portfolio, which I swear I will get to soon.