A Surprisingly Sane Blog

You know what I got for Christmas? A GPS. I’m a terrible driver, really; I shouldn’t be allowed on the roads with my foot on an accelerator in this city. In Tucson, I was a great driver. Probably because the elements of windy roads and surprise on-ramps cease to exist. But anyway, after two years of begging for a GPS to help curb the tears of frustration while I’m heading south instead of north on the freeway and the pissed-off, frantic phone calls to James demanding that he helps me figure out where the hell I am in relation to the town square from his desk at work, he finally broke down and bought me a Garmin Nüvi.

My brother-in-law named her Svetlana. Svetlana’s kind of bitch when she says in her irritated tone, “Recalculating,” at every traffic light or so because I seem to lack the ability to follow directions, but thanks to her I’ve quickly found my way to a winery, my doctor’s appointment, Trader Joe’s, and just about everywhere else I go.

If I ever get a job, I have a feeling Svetlana will be an integral part of my daily traffic routine for at least a few weeks. And as a side note, it’s very nice to have someone to blame other than myself if I miss a turn, “Svetlana! You bitch! I thought you said LEFT!”

Current Mood: Cool

I always struggle with New Year’s Resolutions. Not because I believe there is nothing in my life that needs improvement, but because I always want to think in terms of positive resolutions instead of the stereotypical “I will not let people’s stupidity get to me any longer” sort that generally cross my mind at first thought.

I swear, I’m not half as much of a negative bitch in real life as my blog seems to promise. This spot is my dumping ground. You hear the worst of my frustrated fleeting thoughts right here, condensed into paragraphs of angry meditation and despair, but in my daily life I promise I’m usually smiling and looking for the positive. Like the whole resolutions business. And I don’t want them to be the cliche “I’m going to lose ten pounds,” or “I’m going to take up yoga at 6 a.m. every morning.” There’s nothing wrong with those- they’re great, in fact, but I’ve made those kinds of resolutions nearly every year of my life, and I usually manage to fall short and feel like a failure. Why? Because in many cases, those are unreasonable goals for the time and place in which they fall in my life. There’s no point in getting up at 5 a.m. to get to the gym for the ass-crack dawn yoga class. It’s not happening. I go to bed much to late and would prefer spending those morning hours with my family. It’s just not a reasonable goal.

In many ways, 2011 was both great and horrible. Did you know I nearly slapped James with divorce papers on two different occasions? Yup. And it wasn’t a mere threat, it was real. It wasn’t because I didn’t love him or because I wanted our marriage to end, it was because I couldn’t see living life and raising a family together with our priorities stuck on two very different pages. He learned a lot, re-prioritized, and realized that he was missing the best things in life because of an addiction to something rather peripheral and adolescent. I realized that my priorities were far out of whack as well. I’d spent so much time immersing myself in shit so utterly unimportant that I’d forgotten that I moved to Seattle for personal growth not just for the sake of myself, but for my husband and girls.

We learned a lot, and we have slowly removed the extraneous commitments and unhealthy constants that have just somehow pretty much become our lives since we’ve moved. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a much healthier relationship and life in general. And for me, it has become the key to positive mental health.

How much of our mental illnesses are circumstantial versus chemical? How do we tell the difference? For me, bipolar triggers were never really much of an issue until my postpartum depression took over three years ago. When that happened, I just plummeted into the perfect picture of mental “unhealth”. I’ve always struggled, but so many of the triggers were pieces of my life that I was aware of and failed to fix. Fear, being settled into routine, not understanding how to set boundaries; all of those accounted for poor mental health triggers.

Much of that is in my control. I get that now.

This year, resolutions for 2012 are far simpler for me to commit to because I am finally understand and implementing the whole “live life to the fullest” aspect. I have been far too selfless and focused on ensuring everyone else’s happiness to the point where I was creating my own misery and making life harder for others. It’s impossible to please a freaking martyr, intentional or otherwise. I’ve never pulled the “poor me” mopey bullshit that I’m far too accustomed to dealing with, but I have certainly allowed everyone else’s problems and issues become my own.

For 2012, I am focusing on my own goals. They’re simple. To finish school. To get a job. To backpack the Washington Peninsula and the Grand Canyon. To pull out my rock climbing gear and start using it again. To take care of my girls to the best of my ability. And most importantly, to work on my marriage so that there are no more threats of divorce.

Those are all finally doable goals. I’m excited to see them through.

Current Mood: Cool

While I am NOT at this time (did you hear that, all you advertisers who keep sending me space requests with $$ attached?) accepting advertisements on my website, I decided to take part in this other thingie for the month:

You’re asking why. Why I am not accepting money in exchange for advertisement space, huh. It’s every blogger’s dream, right? To get paid to blog?

Well, I don’t know for sure, really. But I do know one thing: At this point in time, I feel wrong accepting money in exchange for for exploiting my mental health issues. Surprisingly Sane is my therapy blog. I turned to it over three years ago when something when horribly array in my head after the birth of my second daughter. No one understood. Nearly all my “friends” fled. I didn’t know what was going on, only that I couldn’t make the pain stop, and that I had no one left to talk to. Writing has been immensely comforting to me over the years, allowing me the chance to define on the computer screen what I can’t seem to understand when it’s jumbled up in my twisted psyche.

Yes, I realize that most of what I write is angry or bitchy or droning on and on about my miserable life. Don’t be fooled. There are plenty of wonderful things that happen in my daily life, and you’d probably be surprised to hear that most of the time, I’m on the upper end of the “neutral” mode toward happy. Not ecstatic, but I have a smile on my face. Meaning, I’m not just some miserable bitch of of human who blogs about herself simply because she thinks incredibly highly of herself (as one hater told me recently). That doesn’t even make sense. You know why I write about myself? Because when I discovered my pathetic little blog had readers, I MADE IT PRIVATE. And then I opened it back up again when people came forward asking me to open it back up because they felt they could relate and that gave them comfort. I was naive about the world of blogging when I started my blog. I didn’t realize anyone was ever going to find it. Yeah, stupid, I know, but the fact it, it’s true.

So now, this other “thingie.” I feel like a sell out for participating in a blog game, but I think this could or might be sort of fun. And for those of you who wonder if I do anything other than complain about how unfair my awful life it, I think this would be helpful in answering that.

It’s 30 days of blogging, each with a prompt. You’re gonna learn more happy shit about me than you ever wanted to know.

Current Mood: Alarmed

Don’t hate me for this:

I am clearly quite a “liberal” individual, and because of that I also believe in this:

Yup. That means I can certainly accept political differences with the utmost respect and without blaming or pointing fingers. There is nothing more irritating to me than a political extremist who cannot see past the black and white to get to the gray area on any issue. And by that, I mean extremists on BOTH ends of the spectrum.

Just sayin’.

Current Mood: Mischievous

I designed and drew up my first theme of Surprisingly Sane at the beginning of my insanity, right around the time April was born. We used to own a website design business- James’ idea. He was miserably bored at his software engineering position at a huge corporation (whose name which I won’t disclose) and needed something to fulfill his manic mind (yes, I do think he has a lesser form of bipolar… always have, even before I was diagnosed… and if you knew him really well, you’d see it, too…). I hated owning that business because while there were a few awesome clients, the rest were flakes with no concept of “Um, please STOP changing your mind and waiting six months to tell me.” Annoying. Additionally, I became weary of designing the page and waiting for months before James could sit his ass down to implement it. He was going through a busy, flaky, stressful time of his life, and his inability to stay on the ball and not procrastinate ended up with clients calling me demanding their damn site and their money back… understandable, but my hands were tied because I didn’t have the ability to play co-partner’s role. But more than that, I came out looking like the asshole who wasn’t doing her job, which I felt was painful to my integrity.

(Sorry, James, that has always bothered me to no end, and I was gonna say, “Last time I ever do business with you,” but we’ve been doing business together for 11 years in one way or another, and I must say, we rock at it now!)

Now, my old theme for Surprisingly Sane, as well as the name, appeared during that time. I was starting to lose my mind when I designed it, and a running joke between James and I was the idea of being “Surprisingly Sane.” I had another blog called “Life on the Less Beaten Path” that I had been blogging in for quite awhile, but it dawned on me that a blog named after our running joke might be perfect for me.

The flowers came from me just messing around with a new tool technique I learned in Illustrator. I pieced them together and ended up with those brightly colored- almost garish- vines of slightly chaotic flow, and I thought, “Ha ha… those kind of describe me in a lot of ways.” I LOVE bright colors (did you know my favorite color is turquoise?), contrary to what many might imagine, and my house is full of bright walls and decor. I played with using those designs on a web page, and it dawned on me that it felt very “me” and very comfortable and I liked the idea of starting a blog with that theme. Insert “A Surprisingly Sane Blog.”

When we moved to Seattle, we closed our LLC, and I haven’t designed a website since. And in the meantime, I switched from a PC to a Mac and never bought the Adobe Suites version for my new computer- too expensive. The last almost-3-years since I gave birth to April have been such a crazy mental disaster and adventure during which I’ve thought numerous times that I should 1) close my blog entirely, 2) redesign my page on a regular basis, 3) rip my hair out and laugh and scream and cry about the fact that I have admitted to the cyber-world just how messed up I am from time to time.

I’ve done neither of those. And instead, I’ve decided that keeping my blog going is not only in my own best interest, but helpful to the hundreds of new moms and mental health disorder survivors who have sent me emails and taken the time to write me comments. And the fact that my blog has recently been named one of the top 25 blogs on mental health has made me realize that it is, indeed, worth keeping around.

So I decided that instead of re-blocking comments or doing away with Surprisingly Sane altogether, I would just make a physical appearance change to keep things fresh and interesting for myself. My flowers theme served me well for three years, but I was just ready for a change.

Regarding this particular theme: I like it a lot- it’s so pretty with the turquoise, and I love the contrasting orange-ish yellow sidebar. It’s a little quieter than I’m used to, and I miss the bright colors. It doesn’t actually feel like “me” on the inside, but it’s hard to re-design one that does without the proper tools to do it. One of these days I’m going to bit the bullet and purchase the necessary software programs… but in the meantime, I’m going to get to know this theme and make it a part of how I view my blog personality.

Current Mood: Cool