I am turning into a megabitch at the moment.

I’ve worked for the past month with only one full day off.

I am exhausted. I am cranky.

I hate the people that I work with as they are slowly driving me insane because they are precisely the type of people who I would not choose to associate myself with.  For a start, though I am the supervisor they do not see me with any real authority and treat most things I say as a joke. They also do not have the capacity to accept more than one direction at any one time or ignore directions completely. They ask stupid, inane questions that really they already know they answer to and generally just waste my time. Also, quite a few of them smoke so they use that an excuse to stop every hour and disappear off for 10-15 minutes.

I know we get paid by the hour, but STOP WASTING MY TIME.

It is funny, theoretically I should be all for dawdling if I get paid by the hour. But when I work, I work hard. I just want to get the job done. Possibly this train of thought has been drummed into me when I started folding folders for my dad since I was 15 and the seemingly never ending pile had to be conquered. And now with my supervisory role and doing a lot of the technical work, I am the first to start and the last to finish. I told Mohammed when he came back for a couple of jobs this year “I hate being you”.

Surprisingly, what all this has proved is a testament to the new drugs I am currently taking. My psychiatrist put me on 300mg of Aurorix a day and I am alert for work. Even though I moan and bitch constantly, I am there to do the job without fail. Some days I get little sleep, I actually manage to survive in stark contrast to last year where I would just faint on my feet. My psychologist is very upbeat with all the progress I have made recently and we’re scaling back on duration between visits.

So yes, I am cranky and generally hate everyone right now. But I am starting to live again. I could reflect more on this statement, but every time I have done with people I end up in tears. Which is funny. I used to rarely cry before. Now I do it almost at a drop of a hat. But now that uni exams are over and more workers are available I can cut back on a few shifts… in approximately 2 weeks. <insert rant on having to do the monthly club jobs on top of our insane schedule here> Then I can see if I can reboot my life again, go out with old friends and make some new ones.

I have now also found a quality that any future partner of mine must have. He must be numerate, and know how to count. Otherwise I am going to bash them over the head with a barcode scanner.

Much love and no sleep!

Tahmoh is no longer appearing at Supernova!!!!!!!

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

I have been so flat out at work that I had not bought a ticket yet, but now I do not think I shall even go.

Despite our very busy stocktake season, I had the morning scheduled off so I could pay homage. Sadly, this was not meant to be.

*sniffles*

sigh

I think this means I will be watching more BSG to make up for it.

My brother thinks I am a total loser because I want to go the the Supernova conference in order to meet Tahmoh Penikett from Dollhouse. <3

Granted, he is probably correct. However, I am entitled to be a fangirl.

This however, will be the first time I actively seek getting an autograph and meeting a star. Sure I have gone to concerts (oh the tragedy when Mandy Moore did NOT perform at Rumba in 2001 due to fears after 9/11) and even was in the audience for the first season of Australian Idol (wow, I am a dork) but this time, I want to go out on a limb.

However, the conference is charging an insane amount of money ($400AUD) if you want the “Whedonverse” package which allows you one autograph only, one photo and the right to sit in a VIP section during their Q&A time. And if I just want to see Tahmoh?An autograph? $30. Photograph? $40.

I would willfully wait in hours at a queue to get an autograph. I would also write a forlorn fan letter and send it to some third party in the vain hope that it gets read. But what I struggle with is that really, I am just a poor student. I mainly live off the largesse of Centerlink (yay for the Government) and well, a ticket to the conference plus an autograph and photo is pretty much what I get in a week.

Seriously, only someone who is working (and without a mortgage) could really afford it. Though I would (wo)manfully cough up a weeks earnings (or lack thereof) to meet my beloved Tahmoh, I could not possibly dream of scrapping together $400 to meet the cast of Dollhouse (I mean come on, I decided I could not afford to pay $80 to see Russell Peters perform stand up comedy live).

This makes me kind of sad. I know that in todays world, you do not get something for nothing. Their time is valuable and someone has gotta cough up. And like the Howard Federal Government pushed in the last two decades, end user pays. However, the amount is more than nominal, and the legion of high schoolers and university students that make up most of the fan base suffer.

Ultimately, the money probably goes to sponsoring the stars to come out to Australia in the first place (which is not cheap because we are so far away) and also acts as a filter so that people who go merely for the sake of autographs to sell them on eBay are stopped in their tracks. And in reality, when I finally do get to meet them, I will probably be so starstruck that I have forgotten my name let alone what I paid to get there. Just that now, the reality check that everything costs money saddens and frightens me.

I shall persevere in my pursuit to be a fangirl. Because if I had One Week to live I would do it in a heartbeat.

It’s been 2 months since I’ve been clean from drugs. I indulge in a few glasses of Coca-Cola every now and then, but I have stayed away from most addictive substances. Especially with one of the topics in the Traffic Offenders Program being how most drugs kill off your brain and liver cells, it’s made me keen to stay clean.

However, despite how happy I am to be off the drugs, that initial euphoria is wearing off.

I still have problems with depression. It hasn’t gone away. The drugs watered down everything to a constant mild misery but now I get the full throttle. Horribly, it comes as a total surprise with radical mood shifts that I am prone to. I can work through it, but it’s a battle that I have to keep fighting.

Sometimes I feel that it is unfair. That somehow I deserve better than this. I have WORKED for my mental health and happiness. But there is nought I can do but keep working at it. This is my fight – and that failure is unacceptable.

I have thought a lot about what I deserve. My psychologist and I have been studying lifetraps – she even had me take the Young Schema test (which I thought some of it was a total crock because it was phrased ambiguously and/or moronicly) – and we have taken a good look at some of my relationships with people, with my family and trying to see how it got me to where I am.

One of the biggest breakthroughs that I have made in the last year was realising that every failure that I’ve had has not necessarily been my fault. A common theme in my life is the string of broken relationships that have fallen by the wayside which I usually blamed myself for. I blamed myself that I didn’t try hard enough to please these people, and that it was my fault for driving them away even though I didn’t know where what why and when it happened. That no matter how hard I tried to resolve the situation it just made it worse and that I am merely like a cancer, growing and destroying everything in its path.

So revelation struck – it wasn’t necessarily my fault, and that in some cases, I deserved to be treated better, and not to blame myself for every failed relationship in my life.

Let me tell you a story.

I had a friend I hung out with on a regular basis. I would call them every so often. We’d hang out, have long conversations on the phone. I would always be happy to talk to them. And then one day, they wouldn’t pick up. And I would call them trying to see how they were. I would leave messages. I would get increasingly more worried about them. They would never call me back. They would not respond to any attempt I made to contact them. And in the end, I was alone.

This story is a story that has happened more than once in my life. I would often be left wondering why, what had I done that was such a terrible thing? Why? I missed them so very much. There’s usually nothing in common with each of these relationships except me. Am I the common factor? That I keep driving people away?

It gave me an incessant feeling of abandonment. That I don’t really believe that people will stick around for me. That in the end, I will always be left alone. And that it was all my fault. And sure a couple years later down the track, when we run into each other in a pub, we’ll pretend that it never happened. But it will always sit in the back of my mind, that I am the one who destroyed our friendships and that they’ll leave me all over again.

But it’s not always my fault. And I deserve better than that.

I recently made up with once of these people, and we’re closer now than ever. And on the weekend we had that talk – why it happened. In many ways I had avoided that talk, because I was so grateful that we had resumed our friendship – I didn’t want to know if it was my fault. However in the end it was because they made a choice, that it really wasn’t anything I did to sabotage the friendship. That I hadn’t done anything to hurt them per se. Just that their perceptions of some situations made it difficult for them to proceed.

That’s not to say it didn’t fucking hurt, but that it made it clearer, why it happened.

All my experiences with people have made me somewhat cynical. I will never forget the day when a girl told me to stop eclipsing her misery with my depression because it kept going on and really I had to get over it.

I didn’t deserve that.

Since then I have been really careful to not truly share my misery with anyone. I’ve had a guy break a date with me because I told them that I had depression as an illness – and he didn’t want someone with baggage (!).

And in my own blog I have been dishonest. I keep in mind that people really just want to read happy things – that no one is truly interested in my misery. I avoid writing despite the therapeutic feeling it gave me because seriously, did I want to bore my small audience with my feelings? I had been taught the lesson that no one cares about my feelings unless they are a mental health professional paid to care.

But I deserve better than that.

Sitting in my bedroom with a toy koala whose constancy has never failed me throughout the years, I reflect that I need to say this. That I need to tell some people about what I deserve, and that I believe that I deserve better than what I’ve got. That I have cried over them. That I have thought of them. And that I no longer want to believe that ultimately I will be left alone.

I don’t believe that friendships will last forever. But I do believe that I have made every effort. It’s difficult to say this. I have tried very hard to not show people what I feel to the point that I was denying myself that I needed other people because no one was really interested.

In the past two years, I have been standing at the biggest crossroads of my life, trying to see how I can move forward whilst avoiding all the traps that caught me in the past. It is a daily struggle. Somedays it feels like I’m not winning, that I’m just a failure and that I should end it all right now with the sticky feeling of blood draining out of my veins. I won’t censor what I’m feeling anymore, because what I’m feeling is valid. I say this not to eclipse or invalidate anyone else, but for the sheer fact that this is the reality of my life. And so you know that if others peoples feelings matter, then mine should too.

Because I deserve it.

It’s 2:30am on the second last day of term. I’m so stressed out I can’t sleep.

In total overachiever eagerness I decided that it would be a brilliant idea to actually make the garments that I’m theoretically making. It’s due in 2 weeks, but I require the machines at TAFE. I was hoping to have it all done by today so I could use the machines but because I had to rebuild some of the blocks (base size pattern) from scratch it’s taken me longer than I expected. Not to mention that inconsistent sizing has required more work as I’ve had to build in graded measurements into the final patterns.

I’ve had to work as well which has reduced amount of time I have to do work at home and working made me so tired that I couldn’t stay awake to do it. I figured out there is no way I can actually get my patterns done for tomorrow and get enough sleep so I can work tomorrow. My brain is just one confused hub. On the bright side, I’m now a dab hand at Adobe Illustrator and have conclusively decided that I hate fashion rendering.

But on deeper reflection, I feel good that I’m able to do the overworked student again and that it’s a dramatic difference from what I was feeling not even three months ago. I’m thankful to be ordinary again.

Even my psychologist thinks I’ve made great strides. I’m no longer going to attend DBT because she thinks a lot of the material would not be as relevant as I’ve worked hard sorting some of it out over the summer. I’m continuing with weekly sessions which is good to have someone to talk to and attack the underlying issues.

In other news, I have been attending the Traffic Offenders Program under advisement of my solicitor for the car accident I had last September. I vaguely feel like a criminal when I go as there are strict attendance requirements which involve being unable to enter past 10 minutes after start and roll call at the beginning and at the end. There are only 3 women out of 40 people and the first lecture was on an Introduction to Prison and Parole. The information presented is somewhat interesting but mostly it’s designed to get people to avoid driving irresponsibly (but somehow it manages to guilt me into believing that I should almost never drive). However what I do like about it is that I’ve seen lots of different styles of speakers. Having left University for the contemplative work room atmosphere at TAFE, having a succession of different characters make presentations is novel.

Oh well, back to work. Looking forward to Easter so I can spend some quality time watching BSG.