Tag: Mental Health

  • Happy, Yet Not Secure

    The other day, I was trying to explain to my wife how I feel most days, which is happy but completely insecure. And this, is a vast improvement over the last couple of years.

    The insecurity is not whole heartedly an emotional insecurity. It’s a financial and general safety insecurity. When I have written about our financial situation, I have always tried to be as honest as possible without betraying any personal information – and the honest assessment of our financial situation is that we are in debt. The debt (credit cards, car loans, and student loans) is manageable, but also just large enough to delay us from making sound investments in our future. Though we have made progress, it does feel like this debt will never be overcome, and because of that, the feeling of a disaster being around the corner is always with me. A disaster that will ruin us, or set us back for years. This is the feeling of insecurity that I have daily.

    But I can honestly say that this is the happiest I have been in a very long time. It’s been a little over five years since my mom’s passing, but it still feels recent. It’s difficult losing your mother, and I did have an especially close relationship with mine, and with her gone, everything felt sad. No matter what I did, or my wife did, or the kid did, there was the tinge of sadness always right at the edge of everything. It’s taken awhile, but the joy has started to return, and it’s fully based in an appreciation of the love that is around me. For that, I am grateful that I do have friends and a family to share with.

    Yet, I am left with this dualism in my life; there is so much love and joy, but also I can’t shake the feeling that I have sand underneath my feet. At best I can say that these feelings exist in a balance; nether one is stronger than the other. And the truth is that I often have to force myself to appreciate the joy and love that is around me.

    I believe that being happy is a choice. But security? Do I have to earn that?

  • A Project Manager for My Family

    I know we are on the second week of the new year, but is it too early to feel overwhelmed with everything that me and my family want to accomplish in 2024?

    Yes, it is too early to feel overwhelmed in this new year. I would say the start of February is an acceptable time to feel overwhelmed with 2024.

    “Overwhelmed” might be me overreacting a tad.

    There is a lot we need to do, and starting around November, I said that we’d tackle it at the start of the year…

    Yeah…

    I mean, I gotta finish sound damping our bedroom wall, patch some holes, paint the living room, find a new dentist for the kid, make summer travel plans, get new glasses… honestly, I could go on forever. Oh! I gotta find a new storage space for us that’s closer to the apartment and less expensive.

    And then I started thinking that I should use a project management software, or platform, to help me organize everything. Help me find a faster way to work, use my time better, follow up on tasks. That would help, right?

    I did some searching, and I found out two things. One, if you are looking to project manage your family, you could use any PM platform and even use Google Calendar and Tasks. And two, there aren’t many people who do this with their family.

    I actually found that rather odd.

    I would have thought more apps would be out there to help you organize all the tasks and goals a family has. Our little family has so many balls up in the air with playdates and birthday parties, school events, and teacher conferences… Then then there is the stuff I also mentioned above. Seems like there is a goldmine waiting to be explored and exploited by making people feel like their families are disorganized, and that the PM app is what will solve all their problems.

    The trick is that you have to follow through on completing the tasks. You know, if you don’t at work, you get fired. In a family, you just get made fun of because you disappointed everyone, but you get to hold on to your job.

    Huh?

    Still – I need help organizing all of this stuff.

  • ODDS and ENDS: My Nose, My Teams, and My Goodness

    (Out you pixies go!)

    So, something has happened to my nose of late. My right nostril is completely clogged up, and won’t budge. I don’t feel sick, so I don’t think it’s a cold, but I am totally congested. I went out and bought a couple of different nasal sprays, which do work like magic and open things up, but a few hours later, everything closes up again. I thought it was the heat being on in the building and the really dry air. I turned the shower on and steamed up the bathroom, and that seemed to work, yet again it only gave temporary relief. This is very disconcerting, as I feel out of breath all the time; like I am slowly being suffocated. There’s no punchline here as I think I am slowly dying.

    Since Maddison got injured, Tottenham has been playing awful. They lost three in a row, and then had a glimmer of a match when the eeked out a draw in Man City. But yesterday, Hotspur lost again, and I have this awful feeling that the season is slipping away. I’m trying not to be dramatic as there is a lot of football left to be played in the season, but I don’t think I am alone when I say that I really need Spurs to finish in the top four and get back in the Champions League. Now the Dallas Cowboys seem to be doing better. They finally beat a team with a winning record! And Sunday, they will play the Eagles in Dallas, and we’ll see how good the Cowboys really are. It’s a good sports weekend.

    The year is almost over. I think I might need to start putting my “Best Of…” lists together.

  • I Finished “Breakfast of Champions”

    When I first read Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday” I think I was nineteen or twenty. I was eating up just about everything the guy wrote. I remember loving the book so much that I tried to push it off on just about anyone who would listen. My best friend latched on to the book just like I did, and we still will state that “BoC” is our favorite Vonnegut novel.

    I read the book only once, or, at least I have no memory of reading it a second time. I say this because I recently re-read “BoC”, as I am going through all the books that I feel influenced me to want to become a writer. What I remember about the book is that it played with structure, and storytelling. I remember Vonnegut putting himself in his own book, and I thought that was such an interesting choice as I felt that part of the reason for the book was Kurt dealing with his own mental issues and his anxiety over having these issues, just like his mother had.

    Having just reread the book, I had totally forgotten have much the novel deals with racism. I mean, I remembered that some of the characters said some racist shit, but when I was reading the book again, I see that Vonnegut was full force attacking the image of Heartland Midwestern good honest Americans, by saying that these people were just as racist and bigoted as the people in “down south.” It felt like a contempt, a deep contempt for the people that Vonnegut grew up with in Indiana, and America on a whole. There were some things that were very dated from the early 70’s, but Vonnegut’s take on embedded racism, still felt very current. The novel is a dark satire, and at some points felt very nihilistic, yet Kurt’s writing still was hilarious and fast paced.

    And then I started to wonder why I had forgotten about all of the racism? Why had that not resonated, and stuck with me? I know that I am getting older, and the last time I read the book was 25 years ago, so I’m not surprised that I don’t remember all the details. But, if you asked me a month ago what “BoC” was a bout, I would have told you mental health, and I would have been very confident in that answer. I don’t think I would have actively tried to forget that the book was about racism, yet I did forget about it.

    There really isn’t an answer here, just an observation on myself. Just a reading machine who is trying to be a thinking machine.

  • Wise or Just Really, Really Cynical

    I always thought of myself as a very wise man. I think the wisest I have ever been was when I was between the age of 17 to 19. Just ask my parents. Sadly, it’s been downhill since then.

    Being that I am 45, an outsider might look at me, or really just my age, and ask, “What wisdom have you learned in all of your years?”

    And the only true bit of wisdom that I have, which I can pass on, is that if, on a weekend, you are going to cross the George Washington Bridge back into Manhattan, then you got to do it before 4pm. You can take that to the bank. Rock solid advice that I gained through experience, and has yet to let me down.

    But wisdom can lead to cynicism.

    And I say all of this because of a drug commercial that I saw on tv early this morning, you know with the morning news shows that try to cheer you up. In the commercial, a middle-aged woman, and due to the gray hair, I would say that they are implying that she is closer to 60 than 50, is working at a grocery store. She has a condition of unintentional body movements due to mental health. Luckily, there is a drug for that now.

    Even though I have watched this commercial without giving it much thought, for what seems like a month, something dawned on me today; This ad is implying that a late middle-aged woman, who is a stocker at a local grocery store, is somehow earning enough money from this job to afford health insurance, either through her company or the market place, and the insurance is the type that will cover the cost of this drug. And she is doing all of this while, and I know this to be true because she is using this drug, she is dealing with mental health issues.

    I said all of this to my wife, while following up by asking her, “Am I reading too much into this, or is my cynicism justified?”

    Just so you know, the drugs name is AUSTEDO, and 60 pills will cost you, with a coupon at CVS, $6,810. Without the coupon, it’s $10,706.94. AND just so you also know, the parent company that makes AUSTEDO is Teva Pharmaceuticals, which has been sued for price fixing, and for over prescribing opioids. They have settled a bunch of law suits for hundreds of millions of dollars. They don’t have a stellar track record of late.

    My cynicism is the evidence of my wisdom. Though, I can admit, it does lead me to have a pessimistic view of the world. But, it could be worse. I could be in the marketing department of Teva, trying to push an overpriced, bankrupt educing drug on the world.