I want to be like everyone else. Or at least, I want to be the way I THINK everyone else is.

I want to be someone that other people want to be around.

I want people to be excited at the prospect of meeting me, of spending time with me.

I want to be invited, included.

I was okay right up through college. I had great friends in high school, we did everything together. College was a little trickier for me, but I got invited places, friends wanted to hang out with me.

I didn’t realize I had a problem until I hit my mid-20s and went to work at an office for the first time.

Everyone was nice to me, always, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, ever invited me out to lunch. Or for after work drinks.

Sure, they would chat with me in the elevator or at my desk occasionally, everyone knew about my pregnancies, about buying my first house.

But no one asked me to go on lunchtime walks or hit the mall after work for new shoes.

It bugged me, a lot. I tried to reach out, make the first move myself.

I invited a coworker from another department to lunch. We sat, we ate, we talked. *I* talked. A LOT. As usual.

It was the only time we had lunch together, ever.

After that, I just went down to the break room, found an empty seat, and watched Young and the Restless with everyone else. And tried not to talk. Keyword there being TRIED.

I couldn’t be quiet as a child, either. Every parent-teacher conference, every report card said the same thing. Good student, very bright, advanced reader, but can’t be quiet. Can’t stop talking.

Driving somewhere, my parents up front, me in the back, my sister asleep. Trying, TRYING with every fiber of my being not to talk. To just be quiet with my thoughts. Despite a sisyphean effort, I feel the words bubbling up. Must. Say. SOMETHING.

I have no idea why I am like this. Why it is almost impossible for me to be quiet. I can’t sit through a movie without talking, without making comments to Chris or Ryan or whomever is sitting next to me.

Last night, Nathan had a band concert. I sat next to my friend Patti, mother of Nathan’s friend Mike, whose husband Rick worked with Chris at EDS. Patti and I have always gotten along well, but she works as a nurse so we’ve only chatted briefly as I’ve dropped Nathan off at her house.

I could not stop whispering comments to her during the band concert. I knew I was doing it, I just could not stop.

And what started out as “hi, Elizabeth! How are you?!” turned into “okay, see you later” when the concert was over.

All I could think of on the drive home was why couldn’t I just shut up for 30 minutes?

What’s weird is, if I’m alone, I don’t talk to myself. I go to movies alone, restaurants alone, I sit here alone while Kaitlyn is playing in another room, and I don’t talk.

But put someone anywhere near me, and the words start coming. And coming, and coming. Wordy wordy words.

I think back to blog conferences and events. To the distinct lack of invitations to join anyone for dinner or go back to their room to hang out with a group. And I have to look at it from other people’s point of view – I do not shut up, I’m positive it annoys the crap out of people.

So, what do I do? I certainly don’t want companies to stop inviting me to their events because they think I’m some kind of freak. And I don’t want other bloggers to run the other way when they see me coming…because they think I’m some kind of freak.

I already take Venlafaxine for depression, anxiety, and panic disorder. Geez Louise could I BE more messed up? I can’t take a higher dose than I already do because when I tried, it made me jump out of my skin.

I’m afraid to tell my doctor that hey, I know you already are medicating me for anxiety, but I’m still anxious, HALP.

All I know is, I don’t want to be this way, if there’s anything that will help. I have many fine redeeming qualities, and I hate that they are overshadowed by my incessant blabbing. I think people would like me if I could just shut up long enough!

*sigh*. Sorry to be a bummer on a Friday, but I had to get this off my chest. Comments are open, feel free to throw your two cents at me.

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Sometime last month, around the same time I mustered the courage to call my doctor and say HELP, I’M LOST IN A BLACK FOG, GET ME OUT, I made a decision. All I had to do to convince myself that it was the right decision was think back to Christmas 2008, when I was an anxious, nervous ball of stress every single day. Christmas is always stressful for me anyway, so the last thing I need to do is make it harder for myself.

So I decided this year that after a certain point in December, I would allow myself to stop worrying about my blogs all the time.  I saw how I had been living more of an online life than a real life, and I saw everything I was missing. I decided that I was going to make my husband and kids the number one priority. I began choosing to close my laptop and actually LOOK at my kids when they talked to me, instead of listening halfway while continuing to type. I started actually watching TV with Chris instead of half-watching while continuing to type, then looking up every couple of minutes saying “wait a minute, what did that guy say?” and making Chris rewind, which drives him nuts.

I’m a lot happier this year, my friends. The combination of the Effexor plus turning off the panic switch in my mind has made such a huge difference in my life, I can hardly explain it. I feel like I’m HERE, like I’m really being a wife and mother.

I’m still feeling a little bit of stress, mostly related to the fact that I STILL didn’t get cards sent out before Christmas, or do the baking I had planned to do, or get any presents wrapped yet at all, but I don’t lay awake for hours every night composing lists of posts I have to write. I don’t jump out of bed in the morning in a panic about the state of my email inboxes (which is pretty major since it used to be a daily source of stress for me). I don’t feel overwhelmed, I feel…calm.  I just wanted to share that with all of you. Thanks for reading!

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Two weeks ago, I pulled myself out of the darkest place I had been in a long, long time, and called my doctor’s office for an appointment. I told first the nurse and then the doctor the same story-what I was feeling wasn’t my usual seasonal depression. I couldn’t sleep, or I slept too much. I was irritated by everything and everyone, all the time. And worst of all, for two weeks out of each of the previous three months, I had experienced PMS like nothing I had ever felt. I needed help.

Instead of re-prescribing Wellbutrin and Lexapro, she prescribed Venlafaxine, a generic form of the antidepressant Effexor.  That way, I would only have to take one pill once a day instead of two in the morning and one in the afternoon.  She handed me a sample pack with seven 37.5 mg.  pills and seven 75 mg. pills, and wrote me a prescription for six months of the 75 mg. dose.

The next morning, I took the first 37.5 mg. dose, and the next day and the next. By that third day, I realized that I felt, well, GOOD. I felt happy, and for me to feel happy for no reason is rare. I felt like getting off the couch and tackling cleaning projects, like taking Kaitlyn shopping, like getting dinner on the table by the time Chris got home. I felt AMAZING on that 37.5 mg. dose.

Then I started the second week at the 75 mg. dose. The first day, I noticed I was tired, yawning a lot. I’ve had an inconsistent sleeping schedule for years, so it’s not unusual for me to be tired during the day. The next day, I was still tired. By the third day, I was tired AND I felt irritated.  I stopped wanting to get off the couch.  It was like the cloud came back, and there was nothing I could do.

Last night, we took Kaitlyn out to eat for her birthday, then stopped at Macy’s to buy Chris a pair of pants. I had what I thought was a $50 gift card sent to me for hosting a giveaway. Kaitlyn would not behave in the store, she was running behind racks of clothes and then jumping out and yelling  BOO! for some reason.  Near where Chris was looking at pants, a lady was putting security tags on a rack of leather coats, and each tag had an alarm that she apparently had to test to make sure it worked. So, over and over, I was hearing this high-pitched screeching.  Kaitlyn wasn’t behaving, high-pitched screeching, Ryan was whining because he had homework to finish which he should have done after school instead of waiting until after dinner, oh, and at dinner, I was trying to take pictures but Nathan kept making faces and it was pissing me off.

Then I got to the register with Chris’ pants and a package of white tube socks for Ryan, well within the $50 limit of the gift card. The lady rings everything up and I hear her say something about $14.22.  I thought she was telling me that’s how much was left on the gift card, so I just stood there, waiting for her to hand me back the card. She said it again, $14.22.  I said great, I can buy a little something for myself- wait a minute, what?

What she was saying was that I OWED $14.22.  And in a flash I realized what had happened. The giveaway sponsor had sent me two gift cards- a $50 one for me, and a $25 one for the giveaway winner. There was nothing written on the outside of either card to indicate which was which. When I went to mail the card to the winner, I just grabbed one without remembering to check the balance.

I sent the giveaway winner the $50 card.  Which meant that not only did I pay out of pocket to mail her the card (I stuck it in a little box and paid for package tracking so I could be sure it would get there, $20.00), but it cost me $14.00 for a package of freaking SOCKS (what is up with that, Macy’s?).  That was pretty much the last straw for me.

Out in the parking lot, I started griping about messing up the gift cards, and how we had just spent $56.00 on dinner out, and now there went another $14.00, and Chris had just been paid that morning and we hadn’t even paid bills yet, and I was just stuck in this emotional place I couldn’t get out of.  Chris gave me a hug, and then said “maybe you should go back to that 37.5 mg. dose of that medication, it was working a lot better for you”. And I LOST IT.  We got into a stupid fight right there in the car, right in front of the kids.

When we got home, Chris let the kids into the house while I sat in the car, then he came back out and we sat in the car to talk. He told me that I wasn’t seeing how I was acting, but that my moods were swinging all over the place and that it was affecting everyone. There was more talking, and long story short, this morning I called the doctor’s office and left her a message that 75 mg. of this medication is making me WORSE than I was before it, and that I needed some help. I’m waiting to hear back on what she wants me to do.

I just want to feel happy again. I liked who I was when I was happy.

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It started in October 2006 when Mimi from Mimi Writes had an idea based on her memories of 9/11. What if on one day, the entire blogosphere posted the same thing, a call for peace? She posted a few backgrounds of our Earth against a blue background and said, see if you can’t make something from this. Something that will remind your readers that it is possible for there to be Peace on Earth. To say she was on to something would be a vast understatement.

Her idea spread like, well, wildfire. It spread across the blogosphere into nearly every one of the United States as well as 38 countries. It seems that even if for only one day, what bloggers would really like to think about is the idea of world peace. And that includes me. At the end of this post you see the Peace Globe I made last year, using Photobucket. If you would like to make one too, here’s how to start:

Visit Mimi’s blog and grab one of the four blank templates. After saving it to your computer, use Paint or Photoshop or Picnik or Photobucket or whatever you prefer to decorate it however you’d like. Email it to mimiwrites2005@yahoo.com so she can add it to the Peace Globe Gallery. Visit the BlogBlast for Peace page and sign the Linky so others can visit you and see your Peace Globe.

What I learned from browsing through the Peace Globe Gallery is that no matter what state or country someone is from, peace truly is a universal wish, a need, a hope. Help spread Peace today.

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I’ve tried to deny it this year for some reason. I’ve tried to think that I can get through it on my own, thank you very much, no need to seek professional help or anything. But people, I can’t do it any more. It’s affecting my marriage, my relationship with my kids, and the very core of my mental health and well-being.

It’s time to call my doctor and get my annual Winter’s-A-Comin’ prescriptions for antidepressants.  PLURAL, I might add. It used to be that just one did the trick, lifted my mood out of black and ugly up into beigey-grey and tolerable.  But two years ago I told my doc that one wasn’t doing it anymore, so she added a second one.  Without them, I sink into a murky place of constantly feeling “sick”, feeling like everyone else is trying to hurt my feelings, feeling put-upon and underappreciated. I don’t like who I am when I get like this, and the people I love don’t either.

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