A is for Anglerfish

​This week, I lied to my regular weekly therapist of many many years. I told her I had a migraine from the weather changing and couldn't come in Saturday morning. She said OK, Feel better. 

This week, I lied to my regular weekly grief therapist of a couple of months. I told her I had a migraine from the weather changing and couldn't meet up with her on Zoom Monday morning. She said Feel better and to let her know if I wanted to meet up another day this week. I didn't and I haven't.

This week, I am tired of dealing with "IT", my grief. Of wearing it on the outside, of having it in my face like the bright light on the tip of the anglerfish's modified dorsal fin meant to attract prey to within gulping distance of its enormous mouth. Only the females have them, apparently. It's called the esca and contains bioluminescent bacteria that glow.

Bet you weren't expecting to learn THAT here. That's the trouble with me. I live and breathe natural history... zoology... anthropology. And I consider myself a storyteller. And pathological educator. I dated a guy briefly who said I didn't always have to be right. "I'm not trying to be right, I'm trying to be accurate, factual. And if that requires correcting your misinformation, then so be it." I also have to enhance people's knowledge about things. I'm nothing like Cliff at the end of the Cheers bar. Well, maybe I am. But people have come to depend on me for my wealth of knowledge. Kellie send me photos of things she and her friends find on the beach that they've never seen before. Kathy depends on me to ID birds in her backyard and elsewhere. My big brother asks me the full gamut of trivia when he could more readily and quickly get an answer from Google. But I'm more fun, he says. 

Fun. I used to make people laugh. Often. I still do, on the rare occasions I speaks to someone other than my son. My new primary care physician doesn't seem to know what to do with me when I'm funny. He's laughing now, tho. I always had my former PCP of 40 years in stitches. He loved seeing my name on his schedule for the day. He took such good care of me. He retired just before Covid hit. Before I had my own series of health crises. Before my mom died. Before I had to take medical leave because there is no room in a ridiculously stressful and toxic work environment for people to not be able to operate at 110% perfection and efficiency. 

I don't know who I am now. I’ve lost: 

1. My health (including various phases of impaired mobility, talking, eating, seeing) and having to solve it on my own after almost a fear of no one really caring and not being able to see specialists for many months
2. My mom
3. Potentially my son with his "minor" overdose which he survived with "only" a seizure
4. My older brother's childhood friend who was still close to us and always like a brother to me after he went missing and was found dead by suicide a few months later
5. Living alone in my own place and now sharing a house with two other people
6. My ability to work and do my job in the face of an unreasonable workload, expectations and rudeness by clients without any repercussions. 

I was running on fumes after returning to work two weeks after my mom's death. I could barely walk and banned from driving until my wonky vision was better. It was like being at Disneyland in the old days where there were tickets for each ride, graded alphabetically by popularity. (See The Original A-E Ticketing System and The A-B-C's of Disneyland Tickets.) We all want days where we can cruise through, like being on the King Arthur Carousel or in Sleeping Beauty's Castle. Those were A-ticket attractions, priced at $0.10 each. Most days in the office, the best staff can hope for is C-ticket rides, like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Grieving and working at my stressful job felt like someone swapped all my graduated tickets for a stack of E's, shoving me repeatedly into a Matterhorn bobsled for one of the wildest rides in the park. Occasionally, I'd get a break on the Haunted Mansion but that's still fraught with surprises. I just wanted to sit on the curb and watch the parade. 

There was no space to be "off" at work. I forgot major things I'd never forgotten in 10 years. I had trouble concentrating. I cried in my office all the time. I started to doubt my judgement calls after one or more clients rudely chastised me via email, copying nearly everyone upstairs in the organization even when I was acting on a good idea or something I was supposed to do. Just doing my job was never good enough. I'd put up with this disrespect for 10 years. Returning to work after my mom's death and bullying from my now estranged siblings, I had nothing extra to use to deal with these outbursts and criticisms. They eroded what little of my confidence was left. Instead of supporting me, HR told me to get my shit together before it became a performance issue. So I left. 

I've been on medical leave since March. Most of the old heath issues are resolved but there are new ones. None of the new antidepressants are helping with the grief. I've been completely swallowed up by the total system collapse of every aspect of my life. I've disappeared. I'm totally lost. The only people I talk to are my therapists, counselors, doctors, and my son. I don't go outside unless I have to and usually only then to get in my car to go to a different inside place. 

I need good analogies to make sense of things. Maybe the Disneyland comparison isn't the best. It's all I've got right now. I'm on fumes, always. No one is pushing me now, tho. When I run out of fumes and have to pull over, I won't walk to the next exit. I know I'm just going to sit in my car, waiting. Praying another big truck doesn't swerve over and bash me off the side of the road... again. I'm a lady anglerfish whose light has gone out. Bobbing in the dark where no one can see me.