And the Deadline Drifts By

I did the passive aggressive thing about my high school reunion. I "forgot" to send in my check and RSVP.

Reality? I hated those people for years (in some cases seven, depending on where we were in middle school) and I'm not spending $100 (and that doesn't include the cost of booze) to go socialize with them 10 years after the fact. I'll go down the day after to spend the day with Sadie so I can actually, you know, see her for the first time in five years.

I was going to go, just so I could see Sadie, and then I was like, "These people didn't like me and I really didn't like them. Why bother?" In fact, we didn't like each other so much it lead to the first nervous breakdown. Not pretty. Why would I want to see people who gave me a nervous breakdown? I wouldn't.

People think I'm exaggerating about the whole breakdown thing. I'm not. I did. I wasn't hospitalized for it, but my mother told me after the second one (or maybe the third) that she and my dad were going to hospitalize me if I didn't pull my shit together. My response to her was, "Try it and I will run away from home and you will never, ever see me again." I had gotten into a horrific argument with my sister about something so negligible that I can't even remember what it was but I was consumed with rage and I really wanted to kill her. I was also driving at the time and considered (for about a tenth of a second) driving my car into a tree just so she would shut up. And the sad fact? She wasn't even talking. She was just sitting in the car, trying not to cry or maybe crying - I can't remember - while I screamed at her. The shrink I ended up having to see said I really wanted me to stop talking. No? Really? You charged my insurance company $150 for that hour or whatever it was just so you could tell me that? Lady, even I knew that one after I calmed down.

I hated therapy. I just wanted the medication and I wanted everyone to leave me alone and not talk me to death about being depressed. I was sad and I was quite possibly demented about being sad - end of discussion. The drugs helped. The drugs were, in fact, miraculous and I would highly recommend them to anyone. Until Omar met me, he scoffed at antidepressants. Thought they were cooked up doctors to trick people into stop being mopey. Then he saw me not take them for awhile and quickly reversed that decision.

I went off them for good after college. My life was in a much better place. I self-medicated in college, taking them when I was feeling low and not taking them when I was feeling better. I hated them. I took them from steadily from junior or senior in high school until junior year in college. Periodically, I dosed myself senior year and for a little while after college, but I stopped once I moved out of parents' house. I didn't like the way they made me feel any more and they about killed my sex drive. Murdered it. Took it out back, beat the shit of it, and left it to die. I definitely hated that.

I haven't taken an anti-depressant in years. I don't feel depressed anymore. But I have these moments, sometimes, these total moments of manicness. I feel inexplicably weepy. I remember shortly after moving in with Omar I washed his white t-shirts with something and dyed them all pink, which I had never done in my LIFE because my mother was very good about teaching me how to do laundry. I called him at work and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed into the phone about sorry I was. Even now sometimes something so minute sets me off that I get this panicky feeling in my chest that makes my skin tight and my eyes water. So maybe I was never really cured and I'll be susceptible to depression again sometime in my life. But for now, those moments come and pass and I talk myself out of them. I tell myself that I just have a short temper and am not a complete rage maniac like I used to be. And most of the time it's true. It takes a lot for me to lose my temper (although not, clearly, my patience because I seem to lose that at the drop of a hat). So on those few occasions when I do let it fly, I tell myself it's an aberration.

But the point is, thinking about high school brings me back to all that ugliness when I was sick and unhappy and so very, very sad. I can't imagine why I even THOUGHT that I would want to socialize with those people when they helped push me off of a very scary cliff all those years ago. I do miss certain people and not all of it was awful. But most of it was and I don't want to be back there again.

So I didn't send in my RSVP. I let my ambivalance make my decision for me. So instead of going North to Hell the day after Thanksgiving, I'll be hanging out at home with my husband after work, cuddling on the floor since our new couch is eight to ten weeks away from delivery, and probably watching a Bond movie or Office Space. And that will be just fine with me.