So today it's raining on Baked Potato Island - the wind is whipping through masts and rigging, the docks and boats creaking, the static hiss of water against the cabin top - my music of the day.
Normally I try to have a theme I want to at least semi-focus on - I don't always manage to get as in depth as I would like, but it's been a while since I wrote regularly and I'm trying to find my voice again. Today - I don't have a single focus, it's been kind of a crazy week.
But if you can forgive my rambling, I will give you an update from Baked Potato Island.
I struggle with a severe type of monopolar depression. I'm either fine or I am in the abyss - the slip is fast and I don't have a compensating manic phase. I've been depressed since early childhood, I take medication for it and as long as it keeps working I can mostly function. Mostly.
Every time I go into the abyss it has a different flavour - each time is markedly different than the one before. I can find no comfort in familiarity because the view is never the same. Sometimes I wish I could show other people what it is like - there is a beauty in it, a terrible beauty like the raging sea - but it runs in stops and eternities, flexible and inflexible, structured and dissolved in a way that slips from my grasp when I try to show it in the light. It is my drug, my lover, my dark twin. Sometimes I don't know whether I am me, or it is.
I lost my job last Sunday. Now, I love what I do, and I'm pretty good at it honestly - I bake and cook. I don't always communicate well, particularly when I am having one of my down cycles. My mum calls them "one of your spells" - we are technically southern but I grew up and was largely educated in European schools, hence my spelling preferences. My partner is also Australian and I have liberally stolen from her vocabulary over the years.
I told you I was random today. :P
Anyway. I had been struggling with the abyss and because of my hours and the fact that the kitchen was in the basement - I didn't see much of anyone I worked with at all. In fact, being out in the marina I wasn't seeing anyone at all other than Best Friend and the occasional retail clerk when I needed a soda.
I like solitude and when I am well it can be very productive - when I am going down it's BAD. As in maybe I could just slip out into the water and they would find me in the morning bad. I am also prone to paranoia in these drops.
My boss and I never really clicked. Having been fired previously for being depressed I don't tell people. That may be a bad choice, but in my experience it is the wise one if you want to work. But I knew I was spiraling down and I still didn't tell her. Eventually our inability to communicate cost me my job.
On the plus side since I have insurance I got my meds checked and things are getting better. But I'm still out of work and that sucks. One of the main reasons it sucks is because it leaves me a LOT of time to do things like read DK and HuffPo. Well, read isn't really the right word, more like scan and constantly refresh. And poke fundies and anti-semites in the religion section. This is not healthy behaviour for me and I know it, so there is room for improvement.
So - yeah. Got fired. Spending too much time reading about politics. Just polished off Have A Nice Doomsday and The Yiddish Policeman's Union which while very good books - not helping. There is the shooting in Tucson, and I lived in Arizona for a decade and have family and friends there. There is the weather turning grey and wet and water being pushed into places gravity simply shouldn't allow in my opinion.
Then yesterday I helped save a man from drowning.
He is a legal liveaboard, a very quiet older man, but I have seen him around the marina and say hello. He got off his boat, slipped on the wet dock and went into the drink. Just like that.
That it was in the middle of the day and not after dark largely saved his life. It took me some time to register the repetitive call was not a territorial dispute between gulls or sea lions at a distance. I wasn't alone in that - the other man who came running from his boat barely heard him as well.
I popped out and saw him hanging onto the pylon ring at the end of his dock for dear life in his bright rain coat. I called out I was coming, grabbed my boat ladder and started the run to the other dock - shirtsleeves, kippah soaking up water in my cockpit, shoes untied. The other rescuer made it to him as I was rounding the corner and called 911 while I kept on chugging, trying to avoid going in as well. We pulled him out of the water onto the dock, then covered him with a dry cushion from his boat as the ambulance crew came down the ramp. He was scared, but conscious and alert and we left the professionals to their job.
I don't want to be congratulated or thanked, I just did what I would hope someone would do for me in the same situation. Basic good people stuff, automatic in my personal nature. But there is always a part of my brain that wants to understand how it felt, to grok the experience. Would I have kept calling after 30 minutes in the cold water? Would I have kept holding fast? Would someone have rescued me?
Those thoughts always shake me. I have no plans to go swimming any time soon - no worries.
I have not found out his condition or anything since - I plan to check with the harbour office Monday to see if he is ok - he has not been back to his boat.
I saw an orthopedist just after that actually about my foot - and we are going for the non-surgical option first. I have plantar fasciitis, but the real problem is that the muscle is inflamed and ripping because my Achilles tendon shrunk up. So I have exercises to do and a sleep brace on order with the local medical supply shop.
It makes me feel old. I'm 41 physically, about 12 most of the time mentally and look 28-35 when people take to guessing that don't know me. I've got some genetic benefits, that's all I can say - I did plenty of drinking and smoking and eating crap and occasionally still do all three. Not generally at once though, too tiring - and I need my grandpa nap, depression makes you tired. But tired or not, I do get a little frustrated with the growing list of things I have to strap on, put in or otherwise attach to myself to sleep now. I wear a CPAP for sleep apnea. I wear a mouth guard for grinding. Now it's a flex boot to hold my foot at a right angle. This is not sexy, people. I don't need to be sexy - but sometimes you need a bright spot. :P
I have all this mixing up in my head, making connections and leaps and considering and just plain thinking too much - and sometimes I get scared. I wonder what happened to the country I grew up outside but called home. I wonder why my parents fervently believe the TP BS when they are on military pension and SS and Medicare along with dad's VA access. I wonder if I can get a full time job again in the US ever again. I wonder how much it will hurt to leave the country I was born in and never come back.
So that's what's cooking on Baked Potato Island - my brain on rain.
Cheers!