No Place To Hide...

I'm finding myself overloaded. No one to take the load from me, they have too heavy a burden themselves. No one to tell me where to put it, they don't understand it to know what to do with it. No one to give me any direction whatsoever. There is someone who I know would give her everything to help, but as I said, she has too heavy a burden herself.

So what effect is this having on me?

I'm scatterbrained. My Adult ADD is kicking it up into hyperdrive. I can't focus. I find myself pacing the house trying to get my brain to work, which reminds me of a child with autism pacing the house because he can't think of anything better to do. I have things that I get really excited about, and when I get my brain able to focus on them, my brain goes into hyperdrive on them. But then when my brain is distracted from them, it can't grab hold of anything else coherent. So I turn to netflix and Xbox 360 to give my brain a chance to unwind and decompress…

Problem is…that kind of downtime is detrimental to a father of two teenagers who have autism, a full time student on academic probation, a former business partner in the midst of an ugly contract dispute, a full time caregiver to two young adults who have autism who are not my children, and an owner of two small businesses.

…and that only compounds my scatterbrained-ness. Add the pressures of the above lifestyle to my brain wanting to detach, and you have a person longing to get away for some serious decompression. My brain just doesn't wanna do it anymore. My brain is craving a few days to just get away from everything that troubles me and relax in the woods. But I can't have that. I need to bust my ass right now to get to the other side of this trench…and while I'm here, my brain is making the challenge even more difficult.

Fun times, for sure. We'll see how long I can keep up with myself here.

Lost

I'm feeling overwhelmed and confused.

I can't exactly explain it. But then, that's why I write blogs. They are an attempt to sort through my baggage, after all, so what better place to figure out what might be bugging me than here.

I made a visit to a mental health facility in Central Ohio today. My intent was to seek treatment for Adult ADD that has been self medicated by caffiene for 12 years now. I also wanted to see if there was anything else going on, as I feel like I may be suffering from anxiety and depression issues that have gone unresolved.

So I go to the clinic. It's a free service that is designed to ensure the community has access to mental healthcare. Wow, what a fun place to be (sarcasm). I won't talk about what I saw, because that's someone elses privacy, but since the facility also offers drug counceling it's a pretty safe bet that some of those in the waiting room had some severe problems they were trying to address. It just makes me worry about the segment of the population that ISN'T seeking treatment, and how bad things might be for them.

So I'm waiting, and waiting, and waiting...then my name gets called and I go back to speak to someone about why I'm there. They do a 20-30 minute questionaire, then send me back out to the waiting room to await a 2 hour assessment. But by 1:00 I knew I couldn't stay for it, so I left and told them I'd be back the next week.

This seems like a bad system. It seems really difficult to get treatment through this system. If those who need treatment but can't afford it themselves have to go through a ton of hoops to be treated, then no wonder the rate of poor people who are mentally handicapped is so high! It was very frustrating. Think of all those who have gone as far as I did today, then left and never came back?!

So I'm frustrated about that. But I'm also frustrated by other things. Laura's in pain in her abdomen. We suspected kidney stones, which she was diagnosed as having, but they determined that her pain was not caused by kidney stones. She's feeling worse and worse, and her spirits are dipping down as it takes longer and longer to get answers.

Meanwhile, my own puppy-dog like need for approval kicks in when I see her in a bad mood due to her pain. My head knows she's in pain and doesn't feel well. My brain tries to tell me lies, like that she's closing herself off to me and that she's mad at me. I know these things aren't the case, but the worry is so real that it's getting me pretty down. My worries go as far as making me feel that there's a division between the two of us, and all because she's not been open and receptive to my demands for affection.

This tells me that I've got other issues to settle with regard to my own mental health. I know logically that her seeming distance is indicative of her pain level and not indicative of how she feels about me. But I also am going crazy and on the verge of locking myself in a dark room while playing emo goth music like I did as a teen when I was down, and my brain is screaming for her to come and comfort me. I know I can't have that right now, so my head panicks and worries that she's drifting away from me.

It's an endless cycle.

Then there's work. CLMastering.com is off to a slow, albiet profitable, start. The studio, meanwhile, is a money pit that causes me stress. I get stressed at times at my job as a PDP provider, as it can easily be a place where one minute things are fine and the next minute all hell has broken loose.

The prospect of working 30+ hours each week while going to school and trying to run two small businesses seems daunting enough. Factor in me trying to control my frustration when dealing with an unruly teen who has autism, and upcoming obligations of my time from a business deal I am trying to get out of, and you can see that things aren't all that pretty on fantasy island right now.

So maybe that's why I feel lost. Admittedly I've taken on quite a lot, and perhaps I've taken on too much. But at 32 and being broke with two special needs teens to look after, I don't feel that I have any other option. I have a lot to do to get where I want to go.

 Celest asked me recently to take her to see mountains.

 As soon as I can sweetheart. As soon as I can.