Just Me

Some time ago, when I was training to work at a program for my job, I was talking with a coworker at the end of our shift. As she was busy doing end-of-shift stuff, I asked her if I was going to see her tomorrow. She shook her head then said, “This is my Friday.” The day was not exactly a Friday but it was for her. Tomorrow, on a weekday, would technically be a “Saturday” for her. When that happened, I thought, That’s interesting! Changing your days based on your job schedule. Talk about living outside of the box! With my kind of job, it is never a 9-5 job for us. Plus, some of us aren’t working in an office all day. Some of us are out on the field – going from one location to another. And some of us work anywhere from one to 13-hour shifts. Some longer. (I have seen some shifts that last 48 hours!) So I guess that it would follow that, for many of us, we would not work the standard Monday-Friday workweeks that most people work with their jobs. I know some p...

Today, I came across a news headline that gave me pause: Scientists have found a way to change memory in mice and now they wonder if they can do the same for humans. After I saw that headline, I thought: I don’t want any of my memories to be changed! When I was a drunk, I used to joke that I had some brain cells that I wanted to destroy. Or that I wanted to forget certain memories that were haunting me. But these days, I would rather hold on to my memories, as bad as some of them are. But, later, when I was chatting with one of my siblings, a new thought struck: Is it possible for recovering alcoholics to remember everything about what their life was like during their drinking days? Is it possible for them to forget some of the most horrible things they did when they were drunk? I was wondering this because, in that conversation, my sibling was talking about how a former drunk had told her that he blacked out and forgot about the things he ha...

Recently, I celebrated being alcohol-free for 6 months. What is interesting is that the date – April 12th – was my dad’s heavenly birthday. He would have been 71. Also interesting is that it was alcohol that killed my father. He had a terrible drinking habit and it got out of hand during his last days. He was binge drinking a lot and on that night that he died, he had been drinking several beers until he ended up having what was probably his sixth and final heart attack. He had recently had heart surgery and while he was warned to cut back on alcohol, he didn’t listen. And in the end, his drinking is what killed him. That fact was not lost on me when I was in the hospital a little over 6 months ago and I was recovering from alcohol-induced pancreatitis. I was forced to take a good hard look at just how badly my desire to destroy myself had gotten. Up until then, I had lost my passion for life, and my desire to live. But when I was in that hospital, I made one decision: I want to live. ...

In my last blog post, I was talking about how I was going to apply for a job as an assistant to people with disabilities. The place I was going to apply for this job called such a person a “direct support professional,” or DSP for short. I applied for the job and was eventually hired. After some time spent training, I was able to actually do that kind of work. Since this was my first “real” job after years of odd jobs babysitting, petsitting, cleaning offices and houses and as a working writer who worked from home, I have since learned all of the real-world rules about having a real job and being a part of the working world. And despite being profoundly deaf (and without a hearing aid – my last hearing aid caused my ear to become infected and I was pretty much against getting a new one), I was still able to work this job. And that was great. Then my anxiety and panic attacks started up again – and this time, more frequently than they have in the past – but I have been figuring out ways...

A lot of people have often told me that I shouldn’t take my nocturnal dreams so seriously. “They’re just dreams,” they say. Or there’s the scientific explanation about why we have dreams or some other out-there theory. But I do pay attention to the dreams that I have. My dreams have inspired my writing for years. I have often gotten ideas for stories because of my dreams, or I’ll have a “dream story” and write the story exactly as I dreamed it. (Though there are times I’ll need to add details or something else to make the story work.) My dreams have also included lost loved ones, and often, when I have shared such dreams, sometimes someone says that maybe it was really a visitation by this person. Shortly after her death, my mom was in my dreams a lot. There was even one dream I had where she had a dog with her – a dog I never knew but who my cousin told me had belonged to both of my parents. My dad, grandmother, grandfather and another cousin have also been in my drea...