Asking For Help

So, I don't usually write about "serious things" but lately I've been feeling really thankful for my friends. This week alone I have a friend who brought my packages into my apartment for me when I wasn't there, another friend who is hanging a chandelier for me and putting up with my not understanding tools or wiring or anything at all related to this light and my impulse to buy it, and another friend who is going to come over and sit in my apartment and wait for my groceries to be delivered because I'm not only too busy to grocery shop but I'm too busy to wait for groceries to arrive. And while my friends are truly amazing and deserve bunches of thanks a part of me is really proud of myself right now because I'm asking for help. Which is a new thing for me.

There's a long back story but basically my parents are a little (read: lots) nuts and kicked me out of the house when I was a teenager. I know it sounds hard to believe but I honestly was a great kid and hadn't done anything wrong. I've made a few attempts at a relationship with my mom but it's just never been worth all the ups and downs and headaches that come with it. I've always described it to people like, if that was a relationship with a friend or boyfriend everyone who loves me would be telling me to get out. And while some people have lovely families the one you end up with is really arbitrary and mine just happens to not be that awesome. I'm not going to let the fact that I'm related to someone mean I need to make myself stressed and upset over a relationship I get nothing beneficial from.

So, this relationship, or non-relationship, I have with my parents has sort of fucked me up. Not like extremely but enough that I have a major part of me that insists I must be able to care for myself in every aspect of my life. It doesn't really lend well to asking for help with anything. And it sort of sucks because I won't ask for help until I'm at my breaking point and by then it's too late to really matter.

This past year was really rough for me with a lot of friends leaving my life which left me feeling all those feelings I had with my parents again. I felt even more determined to do everything myself and a bigger refusal to let people into my life, because, in my mind, they all would leave anyways. And then, I was driving one day and I couldn't breathe. It was pouring rain, really hard even for here, and I couldn't pull over and I just felt like I couldn't make myself do the most natural of things and just take a breathe. When I finally did start breathing again I realized it was time to ask for help.

I know this is maybe a sort of taboo thing to reveal but I feel it's important to be open about this. I don't think making people feel bad for getting help does any good whereas being open may allow someone else to feel well and that would be awesome. So, I started seeing a therapist. Who was really bad at her job. So I stopped seeing her and started seeing someone else who is amazing and everything I thought I didn't want. I was not keen on seeing a male therapist because I thought I wouldn't be able to be as open as I would with a female doctor and I didn't want to see a psychiatrist because I'm not that cool with taking medicine for a cold so I didn't think I'd want to be taking something daily. But after some time and some of the medicine I was so opposed to once upon a time I started to feel better and realize how not normal I had been feeling before. I started relaxing and not feeling like any mistake I made would make people leave me and I stopped being so insane about schedules. And all of a sudden now, I'm able to ask for help. Which may seem like a small step but is huge for me. And luckily I have amazing friends willing to give me that help.

Happening in Threes

So, it's about nine billion degrees here lately.

Okay, that might be slightly dramatic. It's been in the nineties, which may mean nothing to those of you in other parts of the country but I'm in the Northwest! It's supposed to be a steady stream of seventy five degree days in the summer sprinkled with the occasional thunderstorm. Instead, I am dying.

Besides it being too hot to do anything but lay in front of a fan and eat popsicles I am also having the computer break down to end all computer break downs. I have a 13" Macbook Pro. A friend of mine discovered he had some extra student loan money and decided he wanted to use it to purchase a computer. I've been wanting a larger screen so for a moment everything in the universe aligned to get us each what we wanted. I would purchase a 15" Macbook Pro and sell him my 13" one. So, I bought the new laptop on Thursday.

Maybe it sounds silly but I didn't really see the need to tear into the new computer right away. I had the old one and knew that transferring everything might take a few hours. I planned to just do it the next evening.

Apparently the universe was just teasing me before because the next day my laptop started doing this wonderful thing where all it would show was a blue screen. I took it to Apple on Saturday and they replaced something. I picked it up Sunday and everything was better.

Wrong.

Now the computer would act like a computer but when I tried to Firewire all the info to the new laptop it wouldn't recognize it was connected. So, back to Apple on Monday to have them figure it out. Only, and I'm sort of proud of this but also a bit frightened, the Genius Bar guys were stumped. They have no idea what is wrong with it. So, it was checked into triage once again.

At this point I have a laptop that will connect to the internet but has pretty much no other information on it. No music, no photos, no documents. And I will be needing to make my fifth trip to Apple in less than one week to pick up the 13" laptop.

In more complaining news I messed up the muscles in my shoulder and was prescribed pain killers that basically make it impossible for me to do anything other than melt into a puddle which means I have opted not to take them so that I can go to work and drive and not lay in bed for a week. I'm supposed to take these things three times a day for ten days! It's insanity. Instead I am taking massive amounts of Advil.

If anyone has a kidney they want to donate to me let me know.