Adventures in Cali

 Sooo I decided that for a long-awaited update, it would be appropriate to tell you the tale of my summer vacation to California.

[Note: the text below is slightly smaller because I pre-wrote it in Word and copying does something weird so I'm sorry on behalf of Word.]

We (Raechelle, my dad, and I) boarded a plane via Virgin Airlines at 5 am (FML) and, being Virgin virgins, it was extremely different from any other airline we had flown with before, in a good way. We were in first class, naturally (it was ~$50 to upgrade from “main cabin” aka coach at the gate as opposed to ~$300 online. Always upgrade at the gate. They also do free bag checks.), which was absolutely lovely, though the purple “mood lighting” made me feel like I was in a strip club. Not that I know what that’s like. Anyway, the only downside to Virgin 1^st class is the fact that with the enormous amount of leg room, you can’t stow your personal item under the seat in front of you. So they had to be put up in the cabinet for both takeoff and landing, which was totally lame. The stewardesses were extremely nice, and tried really hard to convince me to take part in their hospitality, however I was not hungry in the least and I had already gotten a water bottle previously so I was totally satisfied. I loved their sarcasm in the little safety instructions (“for the 0.0001% of you who have never used a seatbelt before…”) and it was a very comfortable ride.

We landed in San Francisco, picked up a rental car (white Ford Taurus: keyless ignition, actually a spaceship not a car) and drove to San Jose where we checked in at the Fairmont hotel. Raechelle, out of supposed “curiosity” wanted to find out how much it would cost to upgrade our room from two double beds to a suite, and the guy at the counter said there weren’t any available for that night (there were four goddamn weddings one of which was an extravagant and colorful Indian wedding) but he said he could upgrade us for the next day. For $50. So instead of paying $300 for a suite, we ended up, in total, paying about $150. Talk about a freakin’ deal. We spent that day doing almost literally nothing.

The next two days were pretty average. We hung out with some of my dad’s friends from high school. The suite had a king bed and a really comfortable couch. There were about a million little tiny details which made it not up to expected suite-perfection, such as the clogged shower drain and the broken hairdryer, but, being the humble peasants we are, decided not to say anything because, hey, we got a suite. At the Fairmont. For $50.

On Tuesday we checked out of the hotel and headed to Walnut Creek where my aunt and uncle live and spent the night there. My aunt has a sister who has two kids who practically live at my aunt & uncle’s house, and one is kind of a pain in the ass. He has autism, which explains most of it, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s a pain in the ass. In the middle of movies, he likes to turn to everybody and repeat the plot of the story. As someone who likes to watch movies, that can be really obnoxious when I’m trying to internalize everything else. The plot is not supposed to be glaringly obvious, but you are supposed to know what’s going on, and when you do, it kind of ruins most of it by making you aware of the fact that that is the plot. I slept on an air mattress in the corner of one of the two living rooms. At about 6 am that kid walked in and sat on the couch next to me. I didn’t say anything because that was one of the weirdest things I have probably ever experienced while half-asleep. He didn’t do or say anything, he just sat there. I couldn’t see him, so I assume he wasn’t looking at me, so that made it a little bit better, but it still made me really uncomfortable. After a while, my aunt came in and made him leave because it was weird as hell that he was just sitting there while I was sleeping, so I slept for a couple more hours.

I woke up on Wednesday abnormally angry. I ate a banana to get food in my stomach to take my medication (which I don’t believe I have explained on this blog quite yet but don’t you worry all will be well) and stormed off to my parents’ temporary room to sleep longer. Hours later, they woke me up and told me we were leaving, coming as a surprise to me because I felt like I had only been sleeping for like 20 minutes. Apparently it had been four hours and it was noon and they were not happy that I didn’t socialize that entire day. We left for my godparents’ house.

My godmother is Spanish, and very motherly and also very talkative. My godfather is the most American-looking-and-sounding guy I know, and is a hell of a lot like my dad, which is not surprising seeing as he was pretty much my dad’s mentor and big brother growing up. They live in a huge villa in Rocklin, and I it was a nice change of pace to actually have a room to myself. On the 4^th, my godmother had her three daughters and two grandchildren over all freakin’ day on a day when I coincidentally felt like I needed some time to myself. I periodically switched between reading in my room to going downstairs and being “social”, but that really wasn’t enough, even though my parents got mad at me and said, “I don’t want you to do the same thing you did last time,” but I really was trying my best. There were just too many people, or maybe there were a few people who happened to be loud and overwhelming (however friendly). Either way, I was uncomfortable the whole day.

We stayed in that house for (what was supposed to be) the rest of our trip, which was until Saturday. Again, nothing eventful really happened. There was shopping and stuff that isn’t really fun for a story. However, while we were on the road to the San Francisco airport, Raechelle got a text from my uncle that informed us that a plane crashed on the runway at SFO and was on fire. The entire airport was closed. We could not get home.

We attempted to contact Virgin to check and see if there were possibly any planes that could be rerouted to San Jose or Oakland, but the line was busy for hours, probably because of all the other panicked ticketholders who were trying to get their money back and yell at all the staff because they were late for whatever they were late to because they couldn’t get their flight on time. So instead we called Expedia. The person on Expedia told us that they didn’t reroute the flights and that there weren’t any available flights that day. Because of this, I cried for a really long time. I was panicking. I wanted to get home and see my cats and use my real computer instead of a crappy laptop but I couldn’t and I had to wait another day. They tried to make us wait until Monday but that was a load of crap because Raechelle has a job and we only have so much money to spend on food and a hotel room, and the little toiletries and new underwear that we would inevitably have to buy because even if you pack an extra pair, you would need another one anyway to last you the rest of the time.

We stayed in San Jose in the Fairmont again, this time in a nicer suite that presumably cost the same amount – I didn’t ask – and I rewarded myself for my relative patience and good behavior by getting a hoodie. (Hi, I’m Kayleigh, and I’m addicted to hoodies.) I was still pretty freaking upset, but watching all the YouTube videos I had missed on my dad’s computer made it hurt a little bit less even though it took about five hours. Of course it didn’t feel like five hours, probably because of the hypnotizing glow of the screen. We got cookies and watched the new Evil Dead – fantastic movie by the way – and then I collapsed on a rollaway bed and slept.

And now I am in the San Jose airport with an hour to kill before boarding. I decided I would write an update to this thing.

~*~

I told you I would tell you about the medication, so I will.

I started seeing a therapist a little while ago and after a while she ended up telling me that I was more depressed than even I noticed I was. I didn’t know that people didn’t usually get more depressed than me, but apparently it’s rare to find someone like me who has had undetected severe depression and anxiety for eight years and has not been medicated. Depression is actually easier to hide than most people think, no matter how bad it is. Especially if someone has a mixture of depression and anxiety, because the anxiety will tell them that nobody wants to hear about your problems and you’ll just be a burden on them and you’ll make them sad and you don’t want more sadness around do you, so you hide it to spare the feelings of others. Which is really unfortunate, but it’s true of most depressed people.

So anyway, my therapist recommended me to a doctor who works a lot with mental disorders and who could prescribe me medication. So I did.

The thing about this doctor is she’s very holistic and tries everything before giving you meds. The first time I saw her and explained to her my history and my situation, she immediately told me that there are a lot of ways to relieve regular depression such as acupuncture, yoga, and exercise, but my depression was past that – I had already tried pretty much everything over eight goddamn years – she was absolutely ready to medicate me.

I started on a pretty low dose of Celexa: 10 mg as opposed to 30 mg which is the average dose for a person my size. That, however, caused me to sleepwalk more than I usually do (I don’t know if I’ve ever said it before, but I walk and talk in my sleep sometimes) and it made me tired during the day. After discovering that it made me tired during the day, I tried taking it at night one night as instructed. I fell asleep perfectly fine but woke up with more anxiety than I’ve ever had before, to the point of my abdomen hurting because of all the clenching that was happening. I felt really hypersensitive and paranoid and scared. So I stopped taking it at night.

Obviously that one wasn’t working for me, so the next one was Welbutrin. Apparently I am really sensitive to medication, so she prescribed a really really really low dose of this one, 75 mg as opposed to 300 mg. That one seemed to work, so we upped the dosage to 150 mg and switched to an extended release version of the one that I was taking. I am currently on that one, and so far it has worked somewhat, but I end up getting really self-conscious and depressed at around 4:30 pm and that’s really early. So at this point I think I’m going to have to take the fast-acting one twice a day to keep my mood up all day.

~*~

I should also tell you that I have completely cut my brother out of my life, and this is a pretty long story too so bear with me.

On May 5^th, the day before my dad’s birthday but the day on which we were celebrating his birthday, my dad took me, Raechelle, Tyler, and his friend Miles to see Iron Man 3. That went okay, but when we got home, Tyler asked me if I could use my Xbox controller.

That irked me a little bit, firstly because I’m really overprotective of my stuff, which is probably a byproduct of the PTSD because I want to have all my stuff and be in control of my stuff to make up for the stuff – in this case also people – that I lost. Secondly because I had bought him a controller for Christmas specifically so that he wouldn’t have to use mine anymore (it was a common occurrence that he would take mine). Thirdly because my dad was taking Raechelle and I to lunch and I wasn’t going to be home, which means that he would have to go into my room to get it, which is a huge invasion of my personal privacy, and also relates to reason #2. Anyway, he made up some kind of excuse and I just told him no. I didn’t want him to go into my room when I wasn’t there and I didn’t want him to take my stuff. He made a teenager-y sigh, rolled his eyes, said “fine”, and went inside. I turned to my dad and said, “if he goes into my room and takes it anyway, I am going to get violent.” He condoned this.

We got back from lunch and I didn’t particularly notice anything different when I went into my room. About half an hour later, Tyler poked his head into my room, smiled and said “hi”, threw the controller on the bed, paused just long enough to see the fiery rage in my eyes, said “bye” and then closed the door and ran away as fast as possible.

I screamed in anger and stormed upstairs to see him sort of hiding in the pantry. I stopped behind him, he turned around, and I slapped him in the face before telling – more like screaming – him off. My dad came in to intervene and I went back downstairs as soon as possible to get away from Tyler. About ten minutes later after I had cooled off a little, I came back upstairs mostly to see if he was gone but also to throw away something, and my dad told him to apologize. I dignifiedly said that an apology would do no good and the word “sorry” meant nothing to me as long as it was from him anymore.

I went back downstairs for a few hours, blissfully unaware of the passive-aggressive chaos that was happening above me, until Raechelle came in and informed me that Tyler had supposedly attempted suicide by overdose. I was so angry I started sobbing uncontrollably. Raechelle left and after a few minutes of screaming and crying into my pillow I went upstairs.

The flashing lights of the ambulance didn’t bother me; it was the firetruck that was a trigger. I saw them and was immediately reminded of when my house burned down, which brought back all the memories that I have fought so hard for all these years to repress. I collapsed on the floor in the fetal position and started crying again. Through an open window, I could hear my dad sobbing some words and some other voices that were unfamiliar to me. After everything had died down and after the emergency vehicles left, my dad and Raechelle came inside and we sat in the living room in silence, not really needing to say anything.

After what seemed like hours, I said, “You know what? I hate him.”

My dad told me not to say that. He wrote it off as sibling rivalry and said that he was still my brother. I told him he wasn’t anymore. I was not about to have any contact with him ever again after not only that day but literally a lifetime of torment from him which built up into a pure hatred. I hated him. I didn’t care what happened to him from that moment forward.

And I still hate him. I hate him and everything he’s done to me and my family. He has no place in my heart or in my mind or in my life. As of that day, I have not said one word to him. He has asked about me and said that he was sorry and wants a relationship with me again, but I told my dad to tell him that he has broken something he cannot repair. There is no fixing what he has done to me, and it’s completely fair that I never ever have anything to do with him ever again. He is manipulative and has admitted that he often lies to get what he wants. That’s why I said he “supposedly” attempted suicide. There really is no way of knowing when you know that he does awful things to gain sympathy.

That’s all! Ending on a happy note, right?

I Don't Care (Enough)

I'm back in therapy after a long time of not being in therapy. It's kinda refreshing, too, because my new therapist actually has a PhD as opposed to all the counselors that I had been seeing before whose job it was to sit and listen to me complain rather than actually determining that I had deeper problems than that and trying to find a way to fix them.

So according to my therapist, it's "quite obvious that [I'm] severely depressed, and have been for a long time." At first, I was kinda like, "No. You're kidding," but then I was relieved that somebody actually acknowledged it instead of telling me that I was just some kid who had gone through some tough shit in her life. That was a hell of a lot more obvious than the fact that I was (am) depressed.

What I particularly wanted to talk about was the primary factor of my depression, which is the fact that I just don't care at all about anything. This can be a good thing because I don't care about what people think of me, but that kinda leads into not caring about what I think of myself or of other things, and that leads to poor hygiene and laziness, which leads to bad grades and that, eventually, will completely dash all my hopes of getting into a good university, but because of all this, I won't care that I didn't get in, because who needs school anyway?

This may come as a surprise to you, but I am an introvert; I gain energy from being alone with my thoughts. My depression and not caring makes me psychologically drained all the time, which makes a couple things happen. First of all, I crave and eat a lot of carbs because carbs are energy and so my body feels like it needs a lot of them to gain the energy that I'm somehow not getting. Second, I'm by myself all the time because my brain has a different method of gaining energy, which is by making me stay in bed all day and stuff my face with grain and dairy products. This turns into a vicious circle of feeling bad about myself because I eat too much and never move or talk to people which makes me want to eat a lot and never move or talk to people. I live a very unhealthy lifestyle of internet - food - internet - sleep which is a bad habit that doesn't include three regular meals or social interaction by means of anything other than on a computer screen.

Some days, however, my not-caring takes over so much that I reason with myself that there's no point in eating, so I don't. I might eat a couple of crackers or a banana for breakfast, but then I usually just won't eat until about 8 pm. The way I see it, there are two kinds of sadness: binge-eating sadness and starve-yourself sadness. I take part in both, irregularly, which has all kinds of problems attached to it, medically and psychologically.

Not caring about anything has made me almost feel good about myself, mostly because my internal reasoning is pretty much made up of, "yeah, you're ugly, but who cares? There's someone for everyone, even if that everyone happens to be a crazy, unfit bitch like you," which would make me sad if I cared about anything. Which I don't. It's a kind of self abuse that would make me really, really anxious and self-conscious if my depression wasn't so bad that I just didn't care.

I think the not-caring stemmed from my previous anxiety in a way. After I couldn't get into Sealth, I just decided that I didn't care anymore, which made me feel instinctively good, because in reality it all was just a dumb little thing that was making me worry too much for no real reason. Letting go of it felt good, so it became my coping mechanism. If something bad happened, I would just think to myself, "is this really so important that it's worth your time caring about it?" and my response would always be "no", just to feel that tiny, insignificant burden lifted which my brain told me was happiness. So it turned into the emotional equivalent of a drug, my brain using it whenever it felt like it needed to just to feel the high of not being anxious anymore, and it turned into an addiction. I would think to myself that I needed to eat breakfast, and it would say back to me, "are you really hungry enough to eat something today? Why should you care about it? You'll be fine," and I wouldn't eat breakfast. Then it would be things like, "I really should do my homework; I'm failing this class" and it would reply, "but it's sooooo booorrring. Play SWTOR instead! You need to level up your Sith Warrior!" which spiraled into things like "I should try getting dressed today..." and my brain replying, "but sweatshirts and yoga pants are so much more comfortable. Why should you care about how you look anyway?"

Not caring is also like a drug in the sense that I built up an immunity to it as it started to run my life. Not caring didn't make me happy anymore, it just made me lazy. There was this heavy feeling of negative apathy that was always around me and the carelessness started getting abusive, but it would counteract itself by not caring that it was abusing itself. It was a downward spiral. I had a serious lack of social interaction, which is self-explanatory, and I also had a poor diet because I didn't even care enough to boil a pot of pasta, which is about the simplest thing you can cook. The saddest part about all of this is the fact that it's still happening, and I only used past-tenses because it sounds cooler.

That's pretty much it for today. Sorry about the abruptness. I didn't care enough to write out an ending.

Fangirling

Guys, I have a problem. Now, this isn't your average crack-cocaine addiction we're dealing with here. I am addicted to the Internet.

You're probably thinking, "What the hell is she saying that for? This isn't news!" Well, it kind-of is, actually, because I don't even have time to blog. I've been taking up all my blogging time with...

Dun-dun-DUNNN

YouTube.

So much so, even, that I have considered making my own videos. I have actually tried on several occasions, which is not to say that my own self-doubt kept me from being successful. This calls for an embarrassing back-story.

Long, long ago, like four years ago, I decided I wanted to be internet-famous. I was already watching YouTube videos then, and it got me inspired, so I called upon my partner in crime, Darian, to help me. We thought of the BEST IDEA EVER and called it "The Christmas Show", because Overlord Christmas was my name, and is now hidden away deep inside me as my bitchy alter-ego. Anyway, we made stupid videos with Darian's Flip camera, put them on the internet and actually thought we were hilarious. We didn't understand why we weren't getting any views. Then we got our first comment on a video of me: "are u a boy or a girl".

People always say that you can get 1,000 positive comments saying how good you are, but you always get that one negative comment that can lower your self-esteem by 110% and make you never ever want to show your face to the world again. That is extremely true. In fact, that comment is still planted in my brain and makes me wish I had never gotten my hands on that stupid freaking camera in the first place. Needless to say, I deleted the entire account. None of those videos exist anymore.

Years later, like three years later, Darian and I were reminiscing about how horrible those videos were, and we decided to start making videos again. So we got together and had this whole plan and we made a video. It was actually pretty good this time, but a lot of things went wrong. I only had a crappy little laptop that could not handle the super HD-ness of my video camera, so I couldn't edit, and we could never see each other every week to put out videos. I edited it on my dad's computer anyway and uploaded it. It sat there for a few months, only getting 6 views in total and no subscribers, so I deleted that whole account again and tried to make a different one.

We got together about six months later and tried to do a different video. We couldn't get a good angle and decided it wasn't meant to be. We also couldn't think of a good name that wasn't taken, so we gave up.

As you can see, it's extremely difficult to create. You always are either not good enough or think you're not good enough, and both of those can have the same amount of weight. If anybody has any advice on this subject, it would be greatly appreciated.

That's about it. I probably could rant about Advanced Placement, but... meh.