Here They Come Again

Every year on the day before Thanksgiving I begin to feel as though I'm coming undone. And every year I wonder why. Most years it's taken until the second week in January for me to put it together, that it's the holidays and that it's practically hardwired into my person to "BELIEVE" and be let down, but this year I actually woke up and knew right away - shit, here it comes again. While this early realization and awareness may mean I could be getting "better" it doesn't make it feel less real.

I awoke every hour on the hour last night to my new cat sitting on my head, mewing for reassurance, and next to my daughter, who sleeps as though she's a practicing Olympic gymnast, her flying elbow jabbing the insecure kitty in the face. We're all sleeping in my bed these past few days because we still don't have a working furnace, thus we live in two and a half rooms of our house while the freak-to-Seattle-snow swirls about outside. And all I could think was, "jeez, no wonder people drink."

And then, "maybe if I just smoked pot..." After that it was, "If I could just dig my car out and make it to the bus station, I'd head for Tennessee or Kentucky, change my name to Pearl and become a waitress at a truck stop." And finally, knowing that I could never get away with any of it, I come to the big one, "My gravestone will read simply, "'She Endured.'"

My question to myself today is, why can't I just let myself be? Why can't I just clean the house and read a book and knit a scarf like the rest of my neighborhood? I just feel like I've got so much work to do before I can even begin to catch up on being normal - so I don't know where to start to get it together at all.

So this is what I've come up with for this morning - ten things to be grateful for:

Sasha, sobriety, warmth, Diva, coffee, income, friends...come on Nanc...health, my computer...books. Antidepressants, when they work.

That's eleven. I'm going back to bed.