Depression Stinks

My intuition has been knocking at my door, trying to alert me to something in my life for quite a while now.

I believe in the significance of #dreams, those nighttime glimpses into what our psyche is too distracted to tell us during waking hours.

Off and on, for about the past 30 years, I have made a practice out of recalling and recording my dreams. Sometimes I don't know what to make of them, and they are about as helpful as trying to read hieroglyphics about my life. At other times, they seem to be like road signs pointing the way, indicating at least a partial nudge in one direction or another. A few of them are like movie reels, stories spinning themselves like a tapestry as it unravels, and even I am amazed at where they take me ... sometimes to far-off lands, in a Technicolor maze of invention, with totally unrecognizable characters. And I just have to record them because it is so unbelievable that they could have sprung from my own imagination.

Lately my dreams have an ongoing theme that barely changes, and I have no idea what my subconscious is trying to tell me; but I do know that it's working overtime, and there must be some reason.

Mainly I dream of everything associated with air travel, and on a frequent basis. Last night I dreamed that distant family from Alabama was driving me to the airport to fly out with my daughter, and I hadn't even purchased our tickets yet! I was scrambling, afraid I would not have enough money. I dug $600 out of my purse, and yet I knew I needed about $600 more to buy my daughter's ticket. I was frustrated and didn't know what I was going to do, as I knew I needed to return by the next day for work. I considered in my mind who would have enough money that I could borrow, or where we would stay until I got paid or came up with the funds.

For the past few years, my airport dreams have had me running and rushing through a long, often unending terminal. Sometimes it is crowded, and sometimes eerily unpopulated. Sometimes I board the flight, but there are problems, and it doesn't get off the ground. Another time I was either lost or late trying to make my flight before it left, or a ticket agent wouldn't let me through. But there are always barriers to my actually flying somewhere from my destination.

Are my dreams trying to tell me that I need to escape my presently unhappy relationship or living situation? Or are they just my brain's way of dealing with my everyday life stressors? I wish I knew, because they plague me so much. I can see having these types of dreams if I were a frequent flyer, but I've barely flown in these past few years since I gave birth to my daughter.

Today I'm swimming in a sea of frustration. You name it, it seems to have happened.

Read through this post about my day, and let me show you how one anxious moment can spiral into the day from hell.

I woke late because I smacked my alarm one too many times.

Then, I had to call our daycare provider and let her know I was going to be late.

I realized that my keys were not on the hook where I remembered leaving them; then, I spent 15 minutes searching in vain ... after having to wake my husband TWICE to ask him if he'd moved them, he suddenly was alert enough to realize he had them in his pants pocket ...

So much wasted time ...

GREAT ...

Meanwhile, he transferred me 40 bucks for gas and driving in to the city for my 11 a.m. appointment—which I was already sure I was going to miss, thanks to the disastrous morning events—THEN, I couldn't find my one and only debit card anywhere.

All of that searching ... I had to AGAIN call the daycare lady, because I was a half hour later than the half hour later for which I had ALREADY called her before.

The ONE saving grace today was that it was the rarest day in a long time with my preschool daughter ... By some stroke of luck, she woke with a smile and even insisted on getting herself dressed without so much as a hiccup. On any other day, it's a constant struggle of wills that leaves me bloodless and ready to cry.

After I dropped her at care, I pulled over and did a quick check, and by then it was clear my debit card was really nowhere to be found. I texted my husband, rushed home to borrow his card, transferred the $40 back to his card, and fueled up my car, which was already indicating “low fuel.” By then, it was time for me to already be at my appointment ... and where was I?! About 30-40 minutes behind as traffic goes, and ready to bash my head into the steering wheel to rid myself of the horrifying feeling of failure and my hopeless self-esteem.

So what does any woman do in this situation to make herself feel better? That's right! Go get a Starbucks latte! I went for the Smoked Butterscotch, denying any knowledge of the calories contained within, on a quest to make myself feel even 10 percent better.

While waiting, I called the person whom I was to meet, and there was no option to leave a voicemail. I sent an email and felt so disgusted with myself. You see, I'm a Veteran, and I needed so badly to get to this appointment, where I was to begin my disability filing. I was further disgusted that I took time off for this and STILL could not seem to get my shit together enough to show up.

In the end, as it always does ... things worked out ... well, at least in their own way. I never heard back about rescheduling the appointment, nor got a reply back from the guy whom I was to see. I can't blame him.

I headed to work since the appointment opportunity was ruined, telling myself I could deal with this chaos better once I was there and had had time to de-stress and assess my situation. Well, that was AFTER I locked my car and house keys in the trunk of my car in the Metro garage ... Then, that night, upon returning to my car, I luckily met up with a Good Samaritan who took pity on me, climbed into the backseat of my car, and tried to help me access my keys from there. When that was clearly a fruitless task, he offered me a ride. It was at that point that I graciously accepted, and then stowed away my rolling bag complete with laptop, important paperwork and day planners in his trunk.

An hour later, after my kind daycare lady had driven myself and my daughter to the local McDonald's to wait for my husband to give us a ride home and deal with this car fiasco ... I got a Facebook message from the kind stranger, letting me know he had my laptop, and where I could pick it up.

Murphy's Law was at work, for sure. If something could go wrong, it would, and it did, and it had, at least for this day which interestingly enough was the day before Friday the 13th. Only mine came early.

Eventually, my husband found the spare key for the car, which unbeknownst to me, he'd hidden away for a rainy day emergency. We picked up my laptop ... no harm, no foul, and I was incredibly grateful to the Universe for not costing me my job. Days later, we finally found my debit card, in the same black hole where we'd first found my car keys, in one of my husband's pockets.

The next day I worked from home and sighed with the ease that comes from knowing how much worse things really can get, and hoped that that day wouldn't come again ... at least not for a very, very long time.