01 July 2009

She must be crazy.

That will be what you're forced to conclude. If you're not reading this on an RSS feeder, have a look over to the right, and you'll see that I did indeed decide to participate in this month's NaBloPoMo, with the July theme of "routine".

The rules state that you don't need to use the theme, it is just a suggestion. If I remember right, last time around I ignored it unless I was bereft of something to say. Since that seldom happens, I doubt I'd need to rely on the theme, but I think I'm going to try to give it a shot.

Routine, to me, means same old, same old. Get up. Get a shower. Get dressed. Go to work. Work 8-10 hours. Go home. Find some dinner. Go to sleep. Get up the next morning and do it again. Weekends are a slight alteration; get up. Find something to wear. Run errands. Do laundry. Clean the house. Go to the grocery store.

But for all that, routine is safe. Routine is stability.

When I had that awful sales job, there was no stability, no particular routine each day. I didn't get up much before 9, didn't schedule appointments before 11 unless I had to, and usually only left the house a few hours before DH was due home so it looked like I was doing something productive. When I would leave the house, I would go either to a Panera Bread or a book store, and I'd either surf the web or read a book that I couldn't afford to buy, because commissioned sales sucks.

Did I write about that at the time? No, I don't think I did. Not extensively. Partly because it was terrifying and upsetting to me that I wasn't doing so well at the job. I have never attempted anything else in my life that I was so spectacularly bad at doing! I'm smart, a quick study, and I expect of myself to be able to learn how to do something quickly, and get better at it as time goes on. Sales didn't work that way for me. It made me feel like even more of a failure to talk about it, which really helped the depression. (Sarcasm, people, sarcasm.)

It is only with more than a year's perspective on that time that I am now able to see that I was in worse shape than I thought I was, and that's saying something.

Thankfully, once my meds got to be, ahem, routine, and at the proper dosage, that evened out, and when I was able to flip the sales job the bird, things improved more. Earlier this year, I promised my doc that I would begin to scale back the dosage of my Wellbutrin XL. I have not yet done so. I have had several days where I've forgotten to take them - entirely unintentionally, I hasten to assure you - and I feel like I've been hit by a semi. I'm also much more irritated by small things, stupid shit will leave me tailspinning. So going off of the meds isn't the answer yet. Stepping down the dose isn't a bad idea, though; I just have yet to remember to do that when I take my daily prescriptions each day. I look at them in my hand and think, "allergy pill, yep, birth control pill, yep, Wellbutrin 1, yep, Wellbutrin 2, yep, 1-2-3-4, good, that's all of them." That is so much a part of my daily routine. It is only after I have actually swallowed the pills that I remember, damn, I wanted to try taking 300 mg instead of 450 to see what happens. Ooops.

Being an obsessive-compulsive (my manifestations, that is) means that patterns, routine, and order appeal to me. Color-coded, alphabetical, lined up straight, square edges, mapped, diagrammed, charted things are good. Disorderly, messy, unorganized and sloppy makes me twitchy. Add the fact that I'm a Capricorn (Caps tend to be organized) to my OCD, and you have a recipe for a routine fanatic.

1 comment:

Arin said...

Well behaved women rarely make history-my favourite quote too...strangely, I was trying to find out something more on it and stumbled upon your blog. Strangely enough, my name is Arindita Gogoi; people call me Arin.

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