#journalventing

This is going to be super short!

I was working on my homework today and was doing a little quiz in my reading about feeling depressed (we're learning about mood disorders).

The quiz said to write if you agree or disagree with each statement. I scored a six out of eleven (6/11). Even a few short months ago, I would have agreed to ALL of these!

Slow progress is STILL progress, my friends!

I am currently on day ten of whatever illness I've contracted. This is the best I've felt in those ten days, at least physically speaking.

I've taken off more days from work during this illness than I have all year because I really needed the rest, which is good that I'm learning to disconnect. I'm a little irritated now that I am starting to feel a little better though.

When I woke up today, my husband rolled over and told me that the dog had peed on the edge of her potty tray, so a lot of it got on the floor. I asked if he cleaned it up and he said he hadn't because he didn't feel well. That bothered me. He's actually had a really good ten days, which lined up well because I was really sick, so when he told me that he hadn't cleaned up the pee off the bathroom floor. I got mad. In my head, I just kept saying, "sometimes being a wife is a thankless job". [I'm going to be circling back to this]

I cleaned up the bathroom in a little tiff because I still don't feel well and I'm annoyed that he let it sit all night instead of cleaning it up. When it sits that long, you can't really tell where the pee is, so you have to clean the whole floor. So, here I am, sick, cleaning the bathroom floor because he didn't do it because he didn't feel well. How is that fair?

He got up shortly after I was done cleaning and we hashed it out a bit. To his credit, I was being really rude, and he was staying calm and reasonable. Have you heard of those Reddit threads, AITJ? If you haven't, it stands for 'Am I the Jerk'. I was the jerk here. Because he was doing well these last ten days, he offered to do everything I asked him to do. He said, "tell me what you need me to do, and I'll do it". He pointed out today that I never asked him to do anything. I think it's because I didn't trust or believe that he would. So, now I'm the jerk....again.

Circling back to the "thankless job" piece. After talking things out with my husband, realizing that I was being irrational and angry over my own shortcomings, I sat down to write it out. I am remembering growing up and hearing parents, specifically moms, saying that being a mom is a thankless job. When I remembered that, I started thinking that maybe that's why I don't get to be a mom. I've wanted to be one for as long as I can remember, but maybe I would just suck at it. So, fate found a way for me to not be one. I am happily married, but my spouse is chronically ill and if we had kids, he would not be able to be as involved as much as he'd like and I would still be the only one working, plus I'd be having to pick up all the slack of, essentially, being a single parent when he's too ill to be able to help.

So, now I feel like crap because I am the jerk, I would probably be a horrible mom, and I've still got the tail end of this sickness to deal with. On top of everything else, I don't even want to go into right now because a lot of it is just rehashing things that I've already talked about like, needing to move, but not being able to move.

Nothing is different, but everything is a lot harder for some reason. I really want to go back to therapy, but I'm nervous about starting over with a new therapist since I am unable to see my old one. My schedule is changing at work, which I don't think will be too bad, but I will miss working with an entire peer group of people that I get along with and I'm going to miss my team. It's a little nerve-wracking not knowing how some of these people are, so I'll have to tread cautiously at first. I'm not sure how much "me" they'll be okay with.

I'm also struggling with homework. For some reason. It's not overly hard, it's quite a bit of reading, but it's taking me longer than it should to get through the reading because I can't stop myself from taking the scrupulous notes. Even though I'm in my fourth week of this class and I've proven to myself that I don't need to take these notes, every time I come across something. Even remotely important looking, I find myself taking notes. So, homework that should take me an hour or two, I would say three at the very most, is taking me eight to fifteen hours. In the previous three weeks combined I have spent over forty hours on homework.

Because of that, I have not had any free time in the last three weeks which is completely stressing me out. I am not giving myself any time to detox, relax, read, I haven't even been walking my dogs. I just can't handle anything else being on my plate right now, even stuff I enjoy.

In other news: My father-in-law connected me with a financial advisor that specializes in helping people get approved for mortgages. She's given me an impossible task and I'm not sure how I'm going to achieve it, but according to her, if I can't accomplish this Herculean task, I definitely will not get approved for a mortgage. If I don't get approved for a mortgage, I will have to keep renting and if my rent goes up again, which it will because it's rent, I won't be able to afford it anymore.

The last thing that's been bothering me lately is that I've been told I was graded as successful in my overall performance at work this year. Again. Ever since I moved into leadership I can't seem to get past mediocre. My leadership keeps telling me that successful means successful and I shouldn't feel bad about that, but in my head that's not good enough. I feel like I do my job really well so the fact that I'm only successful really sucks. It means the one thing I think I'm really good at, I'm really just mediocre.

It's been a while. Thought I'd pop in with a little update!

I won't go too much into work because I don't want folks to be able to guess where I work. That being said, work has been a little tough lately, like it has been at a lot of places, we've been impacted by the recession. Hiring freezes, layoffs, being short-staffed, the whole bit. I recently even had to reapply to keep my job. It was stressful. I like my job, and this is the best company I've ever worked for. On top of all that, this job is the only reason I can keep going to school because they are paying for it. I mentioned my anxiety a bit in the past, but not in every post, which is saying a lot, I feel because I'm anxious almost all the time. I did interview practice with a third-party company that was made available to us during the time of layoffs, met with my mentor, and prepped as best I could for questions I thought might be asked. I did well in my interview, better than almost any other interview I've had, so I'm happy to report I'm staying employed! Yay!

School is still going great! I'm in my second math class and it's actually pretty neat. We're learning how to do equations in Google Sheets/Excel, which I thought was interesting. It's practical learning that I can apply to my current, and any future, jobs that I may have. I am also learning that the work I've done in Excel so far is barely scratching the surface, so I'm excited to learn more. Still holding steady at a 4.0 too, by the way! Woot woot!

I have never been officially diagnosed with rosacea, but my face (especially my nose) is red ALL the time, and my mom has been diagnosed with rosacea, so we've always assumed that's what it was. I used to try to cover it with make-up, but that is worse. I gave up on coverup a long time ago and try new things now and again, but it never goes away. That is not why I am bringing this up though! A few months ago, one eye started being really red almost constantly. I thought it might be allergies, so I tried allergy medicine and allergy eye drops to no avail. It was also starting to hurt. Finally, after about a month/month-and-a-half, I went to the optometrist. She informed me that I have rosacea ON/IN my eye! Honestly, I almost cried. I almost cried because I knew this was one more thing that would be forever. There is treatment, but no cure. If I didn't want to be in pain, I was going to have to work at it and I knew even then that there was no guarantee. She told me the treatment, scheduled a checkup in four weeks, and sent me on my way with a promise to call if it got worse. If you read my blog, you know everything else that is on my plate, and I was having a bad day. It was too much. I have eye wipes, eyelid spray, and eye drops. I have to do the wipes and the spray twice a day and the eye drops four times a day. I've been doing that, and it's helped. Again, not gone, but better. Until a few days ago. Three nights ago, I couldn't sleep because my eye hurt so badly. No matter what I did, nothing helped. It was red and swollen and it hurt every time I closed my eyes, even if it was just to blink. After a sleepless night, I called the doctor. She told me to keep doing the wipes and the spray, to up the eye drops to every two hours while I am awake, and to add eye gel. It's annoying, but it's helped. I was able to sleep, but it still hurts to blink sometimes. My appointment is in a few days now. Hopefully, nothing else is going on.

Lastly, I know I've written about my dogs before, but it's been a while. When you have a dog, you become part of a community. I realize this the more I go to dog parks. Even at the pet store, you get people who are rude about your dog, even if the dog isn't doing anything. However, today at the dog park, my girl was running and playing like normal and then she tripped and started crying. I don't mean the sad pitiful crying, but loud, high-pitched, I-think-I'm-dying type of crying. I was close by [obviously] and immediately rushed over to her. She didn't even stop crying when I picked her up and she was favoring her leg. EVERY SINGLE DOG OWNER RAN over to see if my dog was okay. They watched as I carefully, followed by not-so-carefully, felt her leg for injury. Once my pup realized it didn't hurt anymore, she ran off to play. Everyone there asked if she was okay or if I needed help and distracted her by petting her while I was checking her leg. When she ran off again, they all said how glad they were that she wasn't hurt. Y'all...I hadn't met a SINGLE person there before. At that moment though, they became my people. It was so comforting, and it reminded me why I drive a smidge further to this dog park than going to one a little closer to home.

Hello again all,

I've just wrapped up a rough week at work and was trying to decide if I would post about it. I feel like I need to for a lot of reasons, so here it goes.

As anyone not living under a rock has noticed, the recession is coming. I am lucky enough to work for a wonderful company. We've been negatively impacted by the oncoming recession like a lot of people and a lot of companies. About eight months ago, to try to avoid layoffs, my company instituted a hiring freeze. We hear nothing about anything else for those eight months besides, "there is no hiring in sight at this time," sort of messages.

Then, suddenly, the leadership team was informed that all these months of working short-staffed hasn't been enough, and [almost] every department is doing layoffs. We were shocked, to say the least. Through the next several days our front-line folks were informed of the layoffs and those who were being laid off were informed. Our supervisors are being reduced as well, but they have the opportunity to re-apply and re-interview for their jobs and the front-line employees were just given notice.

I am not going to pretend I could have done what the upper leadership team did, I am sure it was very difficult to make these decisions. There are a few people that I wanted to speak up for because, in my mind, it makes sense to lay off people who are low performers and/or are close to retirement age. That's not what happened, unfortunately. We are losing a lot of good people and it's nothing short of tragic.

I won't dwell on that more though. I was extremely upset for a few days, but there is nothing I can do about it. I let myself be sad for a couple days and then I picked myself up and started helping those who were impacted as much as I could. I will continue to do so until their last day.

I also said this was an update.

School is still going well. I still have my 4.0 GPA, which is still incredible! I was never good at school growing up, but I seem to be doing really well (so far). Hopefully I can continue this for a long time.

My husband had a couple weeks where he was in pretty good health, he even spoke of, and then started looking, for a part-time job! I was excited, not only to have my husband back but to get our finances back into good standing. Unfortunately, that's never in the cards for us. At least that's how it feels. He's been incredibly fatigued these last several days and he's been doing almost nothing but sleeping. I feel so badly for him because I know he hates it. It took me a long time to get to this point, but I feel bad for myself as well. I am not getting the help I need any time soon and that sucks.

Since my last post, a lot has happened so it's coming in two parts! Part one was basically one weekend, so part two will be the rest.

First, I'd like to share that I am still doing well in school! Well enough to be invited to join the NSLS program for leadership success! I'm very excited to start and my director at work says it will be beneficial when I try to move up. I just started my math classes though, so I feel like my 4.0 GPA is going away soon (lol).

We also learned we have an inheritance coming. I had a hard time coming to terms with this because the person who died is someone I've never met. Although she was my husband's paternal grandmother, he wasn't close to her either. She did leave a substantial amount of money to my father-in-law to distribute how he saw fit, so he's going to give us money to help us with our down payment on a house next year. Don't get me wrong, part of me was overjoyed that we were finally catching a break. On the other hand, catching a break because someone died seems like a messed-up reason to be happy. Made me miss therapy again. I wish I could talk to my old therapist about it. I came to terms with it though. I am still trying not to be too excited in case it doesn't end up happening. My stepmother-in-law is a bit of a harpy (that's a long story I won't go into here).

Update on the move. As previously mentioned, it didn't happen this year. It now takes an entire paycheck to pay rent, so finances are way tighter than they were before, but the move is for sure happening next year, we just don't know where. Thanks to the inheritance, we'll have a little more freedom and hopefully a little more buying power. My credit score is still a little low, but not pathetic anymore, so that's something. There is about a 98% chance we'll be moving to another state again. Hopefully, one that is not quite so hot (lol).

Give or take a handful of days, my husband has been doing well. He's talking about looking for part-time work when we move next year (fingers crossed!). He's talking about selling his excess music equipment so we can finally set up the music equipment he's keeping which will FINALLY allow us to clean up our living room! This year, I am hoping we'll slowly, but surely get rid of some stuff to make it easier to move.

I keep saying I will get better about posting and then I don't. I apologize to anyone who reads. I've been thinking about posting pretty constantly, feeling like I need to and then I don't. Sometimes it feels like complaining, even if I'm just talking about what's been going on in my life. This one will be long and in two parts since I am catching up on things that have happened since my last post. I do write this primarily for myself, so I won't fault anyone who skips this one.

Something that happened recently was going on a mini vacation. We were supposed to be spending an entire long weekend with our best friends who live in Southern California. I thought it was going to be great like every visit has been in the past. It's always been extremely busy, but fun. I was wrong. There were times we were having fun, sure, but overall, this trip made me never want to go visit them again. The more I think about it, the surer I am that we probably won't go back, at least not any time soon.

I'll explain a bit. In the last three years, we have visited our friends several times, I believe it's been three or four times since they bought their house. The first time, we brought our dogs, and it was fine. The second time we went to visit, they had recently gotten a rescue dog themselves that was a little nervous around other dogs, so we found a puppy sitter and went without the dogs. We were worried about our dogs because we got them during COVID, so the longest they had been away from us was about 10 hours. The sitter took great care of them though and they had a great time with her (although they were definitely ready to come home when I went to pick them up! lol) Anyway, the second visit went fine, their dog loved us and he is super sweet and playful. So, this most recent time, we were told we could bring our dogs with us. We were going to be there from Friday until Tuesday morning. That's not what happened.

If you've read any of my previous posts, you know my husband is sickly. On the Friday we were supposed to leave, he wasn't feeling well until about 4pm. It takes us about six hours to drive to our friend's house, so I texted them saying we were finally about to load the car and go and they told us not to because they do not have lights in their backyard and were worried about the meet and greet with the dogs in the dark. Total bummer, but understandable. So, we leave first thing in the morning on Saturday. We get there without any trouble, the dogs get along great, and we're all happy. We decided to go to a baseball game, which was SO fun! My dogs were crated at our friend's house because they go in the crate at our house when we're not home. They did have a massive change though. My dogs are trained to go to the bathroom on trays in my house because I work nights and my husband is sickly, it was easier. So, I go to put the trays by the backdoor and our friends say they don't want them to go potty in the house. Since, apart from walks, they had only gone potty "in the house" (on the trays), I wasn't sure about it, but it was their house, so I put the trays outside the sliding glass doors hoping the dogs would understand to ask to go outside to go potty. (Side note: The dogs did great! They had only one accident in the house each and my husband and I cleaned it up right away, so no harm no foul. at least that's what we thought.)

Sunday rolls around, and we go to Disneyland and California Adventure for the day. When we are there, we start talking about possibly going home the next day instead of Tuesday morning. This is where the next issue happened. We were there all day long, so I was worried about my dogs being in the crate all day and they were going to take their dog for a walk to get out energy and go potty and all that. They said they were going to get their dog real quick and walk him right away so I could let my dogs in the backyard to just run around to burn off energy and go potty out back. When we got to their house, they went to grab their dog and he freaked out and peed (we didn't know this) so, they stopped getting him ready for a walk so they could clean up really quick. My husband was the last one through the door and saw their dog in a harness and leash, so he left the door open because they said they want to go right away. However, their dog did not have the leash clipped to the harness, so he booked it out the door. We offered to help corral their dog so we could get the leash on, but our friends were so angry at us for leaving the door open that they told us to leave them alone. So, we went back inside, got our puppies taken care of, and finished cleaning up their dog's pee off the floor and everything. We also stayed up in case they changed their mind and wanted out help. They never did. We all went to bed feeling awful. My husband and I felt guilty for misunderstanding and leaving the door open, upsetting our friends and our friends went to bed angry that we'd let their dog outside.

The next day started fine, we all decided to go to a mall nearby because one of our friends wanted a specific shirt that was on sale. I ended up getting new shoes as well. We got special donuts on the way and stopped by a special sandwich shop for one of our friends. While we were there, my husband started to not feel well. I was getting progressively more concerned and mentioned we may need to leave tomorrow morning (Tuesday morning) like we'd originally planned. Our friends told us that wasn't an option because they had things to do. At this point, it was after 3pm. Had we realized they were not going to allow us to follow the original plan of leaving Tuesday morning if we needed to, we'd have left that morning without going out for so long. Maybe had breakfast with them and then left for home. Our friends also informed me that they expected me to crate my dogs, lock them in the room we were using, or put them outside in the 110+ degree heat because they couldn't "watch" all three dogs.

As soon as we got back to their house, I let the dogs out of the crate, took them outside, gave them lots of water, and immediately started packing as quickly as I could while my husband slept on their couch. I was packing a little haphazardly so my dogs wouldn't be outside too long (I didn't want them crated or locked in a room since they were about to spend six hours in the car after already being in the crate from 10am until almost 4pm). I was packing stuff in our room for maybe five minutes and when I came out, my dogs were already back in the house because our friends had let their dog out and when he came in, so did my dogs. I was extremely irritated because they made all these stipulations about where my dogs were allowed to be while I was packing and then interfered. So, I moved my dogs into my room so they could be with me while I packed. That didn't last long either because they wanted to play and I needed to hurry, so, even though it made me feel terrible, I crated them again. They whined/cried while I packed our stuff and then the car.

When I was done, I noticed the gas in the car was low. With my husband being as sick as he was, I was contemplating getting gas and returning for him. While I was trying to decide if I would take the dogs with me, when I did that, one of our friends offered to go with me to find the cheapest gas. I figured it'd go faster with his guidance since he knew the area, so I agreed and left my dogs in the crate at their house. As soon as that was done, I got my dogs and my husband in the car, said a quick goodbye, and left.

I have never been so happy to leave. It was the strangest visit we'd ever had with them. I've never felt so unwelcome while being with them. This wasn't even the end.

When we were an hour and forty-five minutes away, they called us saying we'd left the canister of dog food we'd brought at their house. I was frustrated with myself but told them to donate it or throw it out because we were too far away to come back, and we still had five hours to go in the car. They offered to drive to where we were to bring it to us. I was livid! I wanted to yell at them because they had just kicked us out stating they had too much going on to allow us to stay and rushed me to pack up and leave. I turned them down politely, and they offered more than once, too. I told them it would prolong our drive and we already left much later than we should have.

After about another hour, I got a text message from the female half of our couple friends to just me apologizing for her behavior while we were there. She said other people made her feel bad about her house with how it was decorated, and stuff, and other people made her feel bad about her dog saying he wasn't well trained. I told her that what other people say doesn't matter, all that matters is that she likes her house the way it is. As for her dog, he's a young rescue and does very well considering how short a time they've had him for. He's a sweet dog. Then I told her that since my husband and I have only said good things about her house and her dog, it's not fair to treat us like we were the ones making them feel bad. I also informed her I wouldn't be bringing my dogs back there anymore because we followed all of their rules, they set out for us, even though it was against our dogs' routine, and they did really well! But it still wasn't enough for them.

Maybe I am being dramatic? I even waited over a week to write about this because I thought I would calm down, but that trip altered our friendship in a way that I don't think things can go back to the way it was. They are acting like everything is all good, but my husband and I are very cautious now. :(

I had a really strong burst of negative feelings toward my husband the other day. I almost came on right away to type about it, but that kind of venting would have been counterproductive. Sometimes you need to take a step back and breathe, even before anonymous journal venting.

If you've read my previous entries, you'll see that my husband and I have a great relationship. We have a strong foundation of friendship, otherwise, we wouldn't have made it through the first two years of his illness. Because he and I have a good relationship, I didn't want to come on here to vent it out because then that puts negative connotations on our relationship. Regardless of whether he knows about what I am saying (he doesn't know about this blog, so he'd never know), the fact that I would say such things about him behind his back would say much more about me than it ever could about him.

That all being said...it's really hard to feel like a wife sometimes. I'm sure husbands of chronically ill spouses get that feeling too. My husband had a couple weeks in a row of really good health, I believe I mentioned that in a previous entry, but he relapsed when we overdid it on a trip we risked taking and he's been on this flare-up ever since. It's frustrating for him, so it makes him extremely cranky. That's not what got to me the other day though.

The other day, I was out and about running errands, I hadn't been gone long (I try not to leave him alone too long, especially when he's not doing well), but it had been maybe an hour and a half or so. I was already annoyed because one of the dogs had peed on the floor and he didn't clean it up, he left it for me to get. There was also a bug trapped under a cup in the kitchen (my husband doesn't do bugs) and I needed to go out and run errands. Most of the time it doesn't bother me, but the other day it got under my skin. See, he doesn't help with any of those things even when he is well. Since this was a light flare-up (some nausea and fatigue), I had asked him to help me out with little stuff he could handle. He hadn't. When I ask him to help me do something I get responses like, "I'm doing the best I can" or "I just really haven't been doing well". Don't get me wrong. He's NOT faking it...he REALLY isn't well. However, emotions don't function on reason.

So, anyway, already irritated because as soon as I got up I had to clean up pee off the floor, get rid of the bug, run my errands, and when I got back...he said he wasn't feeling well and needed water.

Yup...that's what made me lose my mind. Water.

He said, "I'm not doing well...I need water." I said, "That would probably help, you should get water." Then I realized...he was expecting me to get him the water. I shamed him a bit as I got him water and added in the powdered electrolytes. He gave me the "I'm doing the best I can" line and I just fumed. He hadn't done anything that day. He hasn't showered in over a week, he's not helping with the dogs, he won't kill a bug, he has been leaving garbage everywhere, and there are a lot of other things going on right now too. I just allowed myself to be mad. I was mad and, for a very brief time, I hated him.

People may think I am awful saying that, but relationships are hard. Marriage is hard. Dealing with an illness is hard. Dealing with a spouse with an illness is hard. Having to deal with all this, the financial and emotional strain it comes with on top of normal life stuff is really freaking difficult. Part of why I keep this blog is to help me and, if someone in my situation sees this and it helps them feel okay about hating their spouse sometimes, then I'm really glad I am doing this.

We're all only human and we're doing the best we can. Some days are harder than others. Some people go through their lives with very little turbulence while others aren't so lucky. Some have it worse than me, sure, but it doesn't make the situation suck less.

It's okay to be pissed about the situation. I broke down again the other day because I know I can't have kids. My future is stagnated. All I can do is hope that things get easier. Hope that he gets a little better and can start working again at least part-time. Hope that I can get a promotion in the next year or so to stabilize our finances. Hope that we can continue to tread water until things just start to suck less. I don't hope for happiness anymore. That sounds dramatic but at this point...I'd be happy to be content. To stop having days I hate my husband because he asked me for a glass of water.