Maybe It's Not My Fault

It’s no secret that I’m not doing well. I’ve barely written anything in the past few weeks. I gave up on meditating some time ago. I’ve been having daily- sometimes twice daily- meltdowns that seem to start earlier and earlier in the day. Usually I can at least get through working out before I start crying. Not so, lately. In terms of actual logistics, I have managed to cope with a lot. I actually managed to attend opening night of Matt’s opera production. I navigated the busy post-show lobby, saying hello to members of the cast and the production team. (I wore my black men’s pants, black silky blouse, logger boots, and some round blue glass stud earrings.) Pictures were taken and posted on Facebook, and I wasn’t completely horrified by my own image.

The morning after opening night, we had to move out of the Hobbit House apartment and into an Air BnB. We had to pack everything- including all the stuff we’d ordered on Amazon- into bags and suitcases and store them downstairs in our hotel’s little office until we could check into our Air BnB at 3pm. This left us with a good 4 hours to kill. We went to a coffee shop/brunch place and stayed as long as we could before they asked for the table back. Then we went to the train station to find me some food because, oh wait- I didn’t mention it was Sunday and supermarkets along with almost everything else were all closed. So finding food with caloric information on it was no small feat. I ended up with a chocolate milk from a convenience store in the train station that had enough calories to cover me for breakfast.

At long last, it was time to pick up our bags and catch a cab to our new apartment. We met the housekeeper on her way out at five minutes before 3. Once inside, I was ecstatic with the place- it was like a luxury hotel with a huge kitchen and living room. We’d be there for 3 days before we had to head back to the airport to fly home. Despite this vast improvement in our living circumstances, I was a mess. I sobbed and sobbed, freaking out about packing again, only leaving the apartment to go to the gym (luckily, Matt had found a place in walking distance to our gym). In the midst of this breakdown, I missed an opportunity to have coffee with Matt and his friend whom I had yet to visit with— and really wanted to. I just couldn’t do it, and I felt as frustrated as ever.

We finally managed to get all our stuff into the two suitcases, leaving behind our kettle, kitchen scale, fluffy towels, and blanket. We weren’t sure the suitcases were both underweight, but we could still re-arrange at the airport hotel, where they did, in fact, have a luggage scale. We lugged our luggage onto the train and into our next accommodations: the Sheraton at the Frankfurt airport. Not only is it attached to the airport, but there’s a supermarket right inside the terminal, so food was no problem. Finally, we reached the morning of our flight and spent much of the day on a layover in the Dublin airport. The final flight to Boston was fairly miserable, as I subsisted on Mars bars, popcorn, and Coke Zero. I managed, though, with only a little extra anxiety medication and my Marie Kondo audiobooks.

Once we were home and unpacked, we expected my mood to greatly improve. We’d been blaming my decline on the stress of the trip: getting colds before we left, packing, traveling, jet-lag, speaking German, and just generally feeling out of my element. But my symptoms have not improved. I’ve only ventured out to a cafe once, and that was with Matt doing the driving and the ordering. Otherwise, it’s been sobbing before exercise, sobbing after exercise, and then sobbing on and off for the rest of the day.

With things staying so bad, Matt finally had the brilliant idea to question my most recent medication change. I’d gone up on Latuda a couple of weeks before the trip, and hadn’t noticed any change at the time. But what with getting sick and prepping for the trip, any changes might have gotten lost in the shuffle— and then lost in the travel, the jet-lag, the sense of displacement in Germany. What we had blamed on Germany might actually be a medication failure. I felt a glimmer of hope: maybe I wasn’t on a downward trajectory for the rest of my life. Maybe I was just having a negative reaction to the medication change. I went back down on my Latuda dose last night, and pray that things will start to improve. I’ve been blaming myself this whole time, desperately trying to get my routine on track. I read a book about how to change your habits, and I tried to analyze my behavior, searching for some fatal flaw in what I’ve been doing. Yesterday was the first time it occurred to me that maybe this just wasn’t my fault. That when I wanted to do something but just couldn’t, maybe it wasn’t something I was doing wrong. Matt kept telling me it wasn’t my fault, but I just thought he was being kind. Maybe, hopefully, he was actually right.