Some people have noticed that both my site and my Live Journal are not their usual, colourful selves and these people are wondering why. I hadn’t intended to make this post today, but enough people have asked that I figured it should go up as soon as possible.

Let me start out by reassuring anyone thinking it: this has nothing to do with depression. I am not depressed. (Today, anyway.)

When I was diagnosed with bipolar I, the only two people who were surprised by it was me and my step-mother who doesn’t know me very well and who still doesn’t think I’m bipolar. The truth of the matter is, I am probably one of the most bipolar people ever to be born on this Earth and looking back, it’s very obvious that I’ve been bipolar my whole life, not just in mood, but in mannerism.

My ex, Chris, used to say that the thing he loved the most about me was my passion and the thing he hated the most about me…was my passion. About a year ago on Facebook, I did some quiz meme and the last question said something like, “Say something random about yourself” and I wrote, “When I love something, I really really love it. When I hate something, I really really hate it”. Chris replied to that saying it was probably the most true statement he’s ever read on a quiz.

And that’s the thing. There is very little grey area to my life. Things are either black or white, negative or positive. I either love something or I hate something, there is no “like”. A day is either good or bad, there is no in-between. A place is either awesome or awful. Ideas are either genius or stupid. And sometimes, people are too.

When I find a food I like, I eat that food every day until I never want to see that food again and chances are, I’ll never eat it again. When I find a new band, they’re the greatest thing I’ve ever heard and I have to find/buy everything they’ve ever put out. If I hear a song I like, it’s the greatest song I’ve ever heard. (And if I hear one that I don’t like, it’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard.) When I get interested in a subject, I have to learn everything I can about it. I become both obsessed and dismissive easily. I’m afraid of both success and failure because I can’t see that there’s anything in between. Prior to medication, I was either happy or sad, there was no middle ground.

While I actually like some of these traits, I’m not sure it’s healthy to be as polarized as I am on pretty much everything. Blake and I got talking about things the other night and we decided that I need to start letting in a little more grey. Even he & I aren’t totally sure what that means (especially me), except that it’s time to change my way of thinking and being, because how I operate now isn’t serving me as well as it once did.

What Blake and I were talking about specifically is how I never finish anything and why. I finish paintings, so I consider myself more successful as an artist than I do a writer because even though I write every day, nothing of substance has ever been published (I don’t count the Marketing Magazine articles as real publishing even though others might). And the reason nothing of substance has ever been published is because I never finish those projects and I never finish those projects because I fear both success and failure.

The piece of writing I’m working on now – or at least what I was working on – is a really solid idea and could very easily (we think) be published in any number of ways. Where the grey comes in is that I need to stop worrying about what comes after I finish. I need to learn how to worry about that later and just finish. And I realize I’m going completely against my own new philosophy by writing this next part, but after it’s finished, I need to not worry about success or failure because my ideas of both are actually kind of warped. I worry about success because of expectation. If I finish this and it gets published and people like it (and I consider publishing it at all successful)  and talk about it, then people will expect me to write and publish something else and I don’t want that pressure. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s failure. Failure is that it gets published (or it doesn’t and I’m rejected repeatedly), people don’t like it, people criticize it and I want to crawl under a rock. Where’s the grey area there? Because I totally don’t see it. I see the grey area prior to finishing, that I shouldn’t worry about everything I just wrote and should just finish it, but I don’t see the grey in what comes next. Do you?

Plus there’s the fact that I don’t see the point in finishing a piece of writing if no one’s ever going to see it.

Another example of me not seeing the grey is yesterday. Yesterday I did a bunch of things that were positive and I was having a great day and then the dogs got loose and I had to chase them all the way to hell and back. In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t leave my house very often and in telling Blake about the dog incident, I said, “I’m so scarred I may not leave the house for like, two months,” and that’s where he pointed out that I wasn’t seeing the grey. I left the house because  a shitty incident happened, the shitty incident didn’t happen because I left the house.

Now I’m not promising overnight changes here or anything. Like I said, I’m not even totally sure what “seeing the grey” even means because as it stands now, I don’t really see it, so it’s going to take me a while to adopt this new life philosophy but I plan on working on it just to see what happens. No doubt there will be remnants of my bipolar-ness that I won’t want to remove because I like those aspects of myself and hey, a leopard can’t change its spots, but I’m going to try, with Blake’s help and maybe yours too, to figure this shit out and try living a different life to see where that leads me. Who knows? This could be the key to everything or it could be another dead end, but I feel that it’s worth trying.

So that’s what “Shades of Grey” is in reference to. I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.

Today’s Oprah was a rerun that I’d never seen before, about moms who drive while under the influence of alcohol with kids in the car, more specifically, the 2009 Taconic State Parkway crash where Diane Schuler (36), under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, drove the wrong way on the parkway for 1.7 miles before crashing and killing herself and 7 other people, including her own daughter and three of her nieces. Her husband disputes the toxicology report, believing the accident was caused by a medical issue of some sort and has hired a private investigation firm to clear his wife’s name, but it doesn’t appear as though he’ll be successful.

The show also told the story of another woman from New York who drove drunk with seven 11-year-old girls in the car. She lost control of the car, rolling it several times, critically injuring two of the girls and killing another (the other girls came out of it with minor injuries).

Oprah’s point was that apparently in the US, women driving drunk has risen 30% since 1998, although she offered no real reason as to why.

One of the guests was a woman who was celebrating her two year sobriety after hiding her alcoholism from her husband for well over a year.

The whole episode had my mind spinning as alcoholism is something I’m very sensitive to having grown up with alcoholics and then somehow befriending a few in my adult life. I’ve known and do know the kind that hides it, the kind that tries to hide it and fails and the kind that just doesn’t give a fuck.

My grampa Wes was an alcoholic. He wasn’t technically my grampa, but in my life, he took the place of one. He lived on a farm next door to my grama, where I lived when I was a little kid and where I visited almost every weekend , every PA day, the Xmas holidays and every March Break for the bulk of my childhood. Since she was busy running her store most of the time I either spent my days with my great grama who lived upstairs or at Wes’ house playing with the animals.

The only person it was a secret to that Wes was an alcoholic was me. For the most part I grew up thinking he was just really really fun. I mean, he let me take new kittens and puppies by the box full to my grama’s with me to play with for the day, or let me spend the day in the barn playing with the bunnies or the baby chicks. Or sometimes we’d go to town or go to the corner store, buy junk food and watch “wrasslin’” for the afternoon. It wouldn’t be until I was about 10 or 11 that I understood what an alcoholic was or that he was one.

Oh I knew he drank, but I never thought drinking was a problem. I just thought it was something that adults did, although to be perfectly honest I wasn’t really sure why.

I can’t remember for sure if I was 11 or 12, but Saturday in the summer, Wes and I went to the Stouffville Sales Barns where he purchased a few flats of chicks. (On Saturdays you could go there and farmers would buy and sell animals. You still can.) He put them in the back of his pick-up truck and on our way out of town, he stopped in at what my grama called “the In & Out Store”, which was her name for the liquor store and bought…y’know, to this day I’m not even sure what he drank. Probably whiskey or rye, because I recall it being amber-coloured. Anyway, in Ontario there’s the LCBO, which is the liquor store and The Beer Store, both government run and the only place you can buy alcohol. Wes was a regular at the liquor store and I’d even been with him when he was refused service, so that means I was definitely with him on more than one occasion where he was already drunk when he walked through their doors because that’s why they refuse service (although I didn’t know that at the time). And yes, we had to drive to get there.

Anyway, on this Saturday he bought 3 or 4 flats of chicks and as I said, he put them in the back of his pickup truck, he stopped off at the liquor store and then we went back to his house. When we got there, Wes’ friend George, who was an enabler to the highest degree and who often got Wes drunk and would take advantage of him monetarily, was waiting for us. I went to the barn to play with the bunnies, the chicks were left in the back of the truck, which was parked in the shade of the house, and the men went inside to start drinking.

By the time I came back from the barn, George had left (I didn’t like him, he was smarmy) and Wes was at the kitchen table drinking. When I came inside, I sat on one of the kitchen chairs and we talked about stuff while he got progressively drunker. After he was well plastered, he decided that he’d better get the chicks into the barn, so he stood up and promptly fell damn near flat on his face. I laughed, I was a kid and thought it was funny. I helped him up and helped him get outside where he fell AGAIN, this time right into the lilac bush. And that’s where he stayed because after I tried to help him back up several times and we laughed at his behaviour, he passed out cold and I couldn’t wake him up. I even kicked him as hard as I could right in the ass and he just gave me shit for it, rolled over and stayed passed out.

By now it was the afternoon and the truck was no longer in the shade. I was scared. I was scared that Wes was sick or something and I was scared that the chicks were going to die in the back of the truck and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t lift a flat of chicks by myself and get them in the barn. It would take me forever to take a few at a time and carry them to the coop. (We’re talking like, easily 1000 chicks here.)

In a panic, I called my grama at her store and explained the situation. It was almost closing time for her anyway, so she locked up early and headed over to Wes’ house, which was maybe a 4 minute walk. Together we each took an end of one of the flats of chicks and one by one we took them into the barn where I released them where they were supposed to go and got them water. I remember not knowing what kind of food they should eat so I didn’t feed them, but so many of them were so overheated that I would have to pick them up, splash water on them and put their beaks into the water dish where they’d finally drink. I remember having to go find more water dishes because there were so many chicks and they were all so dehydrated that they were trampling all over each other and making everyone’s water dirty.

Once the chicks were looked after, my grama told me to show her where Wes was, so I brought her over to the lilac bush and she kicked him. I told her I’d tried that. Wes kinda stirred a bit and looked up and my grama said something to him about the chicks being put away, called him a “stupid ass” and then said she was leaving him there. Then we went home where alcoholism was finally explained to me. I’d known what drunk adults were like, but I never knew it could be a problem.

Looking back at my childhood with Wes, I can’t help but think of how truly fucked up it was. My grama would routinely let me get in the truck with him to go up to the store even though he had clearly been drinking. He used to drive up to the store (about a 3 minute drive) not on the road, but on the shoulder and I learned later that the reason he did this was because it was only illegal to drive on the road if you were drunk. I don’t know if that was true at the time or not, but it’s certainly not true now, as my alcoholic neighbour has explained to me several times (more on that in a bit). Everyone knew Wes was drunk a good portion of the time, but they let me hang out with him anyway. I don’t know why that is. (And really, I guess that part doesn’t matter, it never did me any harm except that one scary day with the chicks. The driving part I really question though.)

Wes’ wife, Maggie, was an alcoholic too, but I don’t ever recall her driving and she died when I was about 10 or 11. I don’t know if it was related to her drinking or not, but I’m fairly certain Wes’ death was. Wes died when I was in grade 8, right before my birthday, of a stroke. From what I recall being told, they don’t know if he had a stroke and fell down the stairs or if he fell down the stairs and had a stroke, but his son Mikey found him there, assumed he was drunk and started giving him shit while trying to get him up. Wes being Wes, I’m pretty certain that whatever the case may be, he probably wasn’t sober when the stroke occurred. He was alive when the ambulance came and they took him to a hospital in Toronto. I wasn’t allowed to go see him because my mom didn’t want me remembering him “like that” (I guess he was pretty messed up) but he died a few days later.

My great grama on my grampa’s side was an alcoholic as well, which probably sounds remote to most of you reading this, but keep in mind that my mother had me when she was 15 and as such, I grew up with two of my great gramas. I didn’t learn that my Grama Crittenden was an alcoholic until I was a teenager though because we didn’t really go see her very often but usually when we did, she was drunk. I never really thought anything of it though, because we only really ever saw her at family reunions and at a Crittenden family reunion usually the only people who are actually sober are the kids and sometimes even that’s not the case. I don’t know if my great grama’s partner, Frank, was an alcoholic too, but it seems pretty likely and for sure her late husband was. They don’t know if he drank because he was depressed or if he was depressed because he drank, but either way, he committed suicide by taking a shotgun to his head. My Grama Crittenden lived to be 86, I believe, and died of old age. (Although I think that’s relative; who’s to say how long she might have lived if she wasn’t an alcoholic?)

My step-dad IS an alcoholic. He wasn’t one when I was growing up, it was a gradual thing that happened over time because he was depressed, hated his life and couldn’t find any other way to cope. It started out innocently enough, just a beer here or there, then it became one small drink after work to “unwind”, until finally it became, “no, I can’t drive you to your friends house, I’ve been drinking” (by 7pm) or “no, I can’t pick you up from the party, I’ve had too much to drink”. My step-dad started by only buying a mickey once a week, then a 26er and now from what I understand, he buys the big bottle. I guess the plus side to this is that at least he doesn’t drive? Or at least he didn’t drive after a few drinks as of 6 years ago when I stopped speaking to him, I can’t say for certain if that’s still the case now.

My ex’s father who I used to live with was also an alcoholic and the last I heard, he still was, although he did remain sober for a few years a few years ago when he was driving truck for a living. He was, like my step-dad, a high-functioning alcoholic in that he held down a job, the same job he’d had for 20 years, and didn’t drive drunk, but their family was overburdened by financial trouble, the root of which seemed to be a lot of get rich quick schemes and a lot of beer. Darrell also tended to be a very violent, mean drunk whose behaviour heavily contributed to his wife’s mental breakdown and subsequent diagnosis of schizophrenia (not that he CAUSED the schizophrenia, that’s not possible, but his actions served as the catalyst for it surfacing). When she moved out and was in and out of the hospital because of her illness, Darrell took on boarders to help pay the bills who he would get drunk and harass, both physically and mentally. Then his wife moved back in and he started harassing her more and more until she ended up in the hospital again and her family wouldn’t allow her to go back to him. Then his mentally unstable (yet brilliant) sister, Donna, moved in with her boyfriend and he physically and emotionally harassed both of them too, all while drunk.

It is because of these people (and a few more I won’t tell you about because this is already getting really long) that I rarely drink. I went through a phase in my teens where I drank all the time, mostly because I could (I was unsupervised and had all these adults willing to buy it for me, plus there was one restaurant in town that would serve me if I was with my Aunt) and right after Madison was born, because I’d just turned 19 (legal drinking age here) I went to the bar a whole lot (but didn’t often get drunk, mostly because I couldn’t afford to). And of course when I was working for Scratching Post there was a lot of drinking as well, but I’ve never kept alcohol in my home. At least not on purpose. Sometimes people come over and bring alcohol with them and then leave whatever’s left here, so that’s sometimes in the very highest cupboard above the stove, but more often than not, I’ve dumped it out after people have left unless there’s a lot left in the bottle. There’s one Mike’s Hard Lemonade in my fridge right now that’s been there since at least September, if not before that and it’ll probably stay there until the summer. I get drunk maybe twice a year and I only drink to get drunk because I see no other reason to.

I realize this isn’t necessarily the definition of an alcoholic, but I believe that if you drink every single day and you’re unhappy the days you don’t have alcohol, then you are one. My “alcoholic scale” doesn’t count people who have a glass of wine with dinner or even a beer or maybe even two after work and really, my “scale” isn’t so much a scale at all, but the fact that, having grown up around so many different types of alcohol abusers, I know one when I see one and I’ve seen plenty. And y’know what else? In my experience, the people who get the most offended if you use the word “alcoholic” in reference to them almost always are one. If they aren’t one, they want to know why you think so and are concerned that you feel that way. If they get angry, it’s because they know it’s true and now they know you know it’s true too.

I don’t drink or keep alcohol in my home not because I’m holier than thou and don’t think people should drink, I do it because I know I’m predisposed to having a problem with it due to both nature and nurture and man, I have enough problems.

I said up there somewhere that my neighbour told me that driving on the side of the road wouldn’t save you from a DUI now as it may have when Wes was doing it and the reason he knows this is because of how he got his first DUI. Apparently he was walking home from either a bar or a party, I believe in the winter, and because it was cold and he was so drunk he just wanted to sleep, he got in his car and put the key in the ignition and turned the car on to turn on the heat. Then once the car was warm, he turned it off and fell asleep. He woke up to “tap tap tap” on the driver’s side window and it was a cop. The cop told him to get out of the car and made him do a sobriety test which he obviously failed and because he had the key in the ignition, he was charged with…not DUI, but something in the same vein where the car’s not actually moving but you were close enough that it was a chargeable offense. So if he could be charged with that, without the car even being on or being driven, then my grampa Wes couldn’t get away with driving drunk on the shoulder like he did when I was a kid.

Wayne, my neighbour, told Blake and I repeatedly that if we were ever in a situation like that and a cop tapped on your window, to get out of the car and throw your keys as far as you can because then, according to him, you can’t be charged with anything.

I doubt very much that either Blake or I would ever be in that situation, but every time Wayne’s told us the story, I’ve always thought about Wes driving down the shoulder of the road to avoid a DUI. And then while watching Oprah today, I thought about every alcoholic I’ve ever known and just how lucky I really was that Wes didn’t accidentally kill me and that I didn’t grow up to be one too.

Like I said, I’ve got enough problems.

So Monday was my birthday and in honour of that, we at Buttercup decided that I should do an article about what it was like to be raised by a teen mom. I have mixed feelings on this assignment. One, because I’ve already painted my mother in a negative light on Buttercup (which I think she was very upset about) and two, because my childhood really wasn’t sunshine and roses and it’s going to be difficult to bring many positives to this article.

However, this is my assignment and truth be told, the concept was my idea, so here we go.

I was born March 1st, 1979 to my 15 year old mother and my 17 or 18 year old father. My mother’s birthday is at the end of August, meaning that she was actually 14 when she got pregnant and in 1979 that “simply didn’t happen” and when it did, parents forced their girls to abort or sent them away to have the baby and then give it up for adoption. In 1979 my mother was a pariah, they even made her write her high school exams in another room from everyone else, fearing that her visibly pregnant belly would be a bad influence on other students.

I’ve asked both of my parents numerous times how I came to be and while I’ve gotten mixed answers, what it all really seems to boil down to is the fact that neither one of them were given any kind of sexual education either at school or by their parents. At one point my mother told me not to believe my friends when they said you couldn’t get pregnant your first time, which has lead me to believe that perhaps she DID get pregnant her first time, but really, my conception remains largely a mystery.

What’s not a mystery is the years that followed. After I was born, my parents lived together in an apartment above my grandpa’s carpet store and my dad worked as his apprentice, learning the carpet trade. My mother stayed home with me. Around the time I was a little over 1 year old, my parents split up, my mom claiming that my dad had more interest in growing and selling pot than he ever had in me, which, knowing him now is a believable scenario. That’s when my mom and I moved in with her parents and my great grandma, who lived next door, looked after me when my mom went back to high school. I would see my dad again once when I was 3, but never again until I sought him out when I was 13.

During this time, I’m assuming things were okay or at least no one’s ever told me otherwise. What I do remember though, was when I was 3 years old, I was sitting on the floor in my grandmother’s living room watching TV when my mother called down to me from her bedroom saying that she had a present for me. So I went up to her room where she was doing homework and she said to come closer, which I did, and then she spanked me. This is one of my very first memories of my mother and I’ve asked her since why she did that and she said it was a “preventative measure”. She figured because I was quiet I must have been doing something bad and if I wasn’t I was about to so that’s why she spanked me. Nice parenting there, ma.

I know, because I’ve seen the pictures, that not every moment was horrible during my early childhood. I know my mother took me with her to the CNE which is a big fair held in Toronto in the summer and I know she took me with her to friends’ cottages and that there were always a lot of other teenagers around me as a child. And in the pictures I seem happy.

But something else I remember is house parties. I remember my mom and I going to Toronto because she was dating a guy named Cooper and I remember being put to bed early in a strange house and listening, in the dark, to the partying happening downstairs. I remember waking up early and the house being so trashed that when I walked down the hallway to the bathroom, ketchup packets from McDonald’s stuck to my feet and beer bottles full of cigarette butts were everywhere. I don’t remember anyone ever checking on me during these parties. Nice parenting again, ma.

Things didn’t really get bad though, until my mom married my step-dad when I was 5. I think she partially married him so I’d have a dad and when things turned sour between him and her, she took it out on me. In short, my mother became abusive and would remain abusive until I was taken away from her by the Children’s Aid in grade 7 and again in grade 9. She denies to this day that she ever abused me, but whether she can admit it or not, she did and I have the scars, both physical and mental, to prove it. Oh and a Children’s Aid file thicker than the Toronto phone book. When I was 15 I was legally emancipated from her so I could be on student welfare and live on my own as an adult while still attending high school.

But I don’t think I really blame her for that. I’m not mad at her for that. I used to be, I spent a lot of my life hating her for not being the mother I felt I deserved, that I felt every child deserves and our relationship since I was about 11 has always been strained and while things are good right now, I still feel like I have to walk on eggshells around her or World War III is going to break out.

It wasn’t until I had my own daughter though, that I understood the gravity of my mother’s situation. My mother hit me because she was a child herself and was never allowed to develop other methods of coping. In 1979 there were next to zero resources for teen mothers, the parenting course at high school that I took before having my daughter didn’t exist when my mom was having me and my mother had to put up with a lot of shit, namely her loss of childhood and a constant barrage of judgment and name-calling that it’s no wonder that she took out her frustrations on me, the reason for all of that.

What I’m saying is that I don’t forgive her for what she did to me and how she raised me and I never will because it fucked me up for life, but I don’t hare her for it because I’ve done my best to put myself in her shoes and I understand.

I was technically a teen mom myself, getting pregnant at 18 and having my daughter at 19, although my pregnancy was not an accident. But in 1997/1998 there were TONS of resources for teen moms. I had a group run out of the region’s health department bringing me healthy foods every week, like fresh produce, whole wheat bread, chocolate milk and cheese. I had a public health nurse come once a month to go over what was happening inside my body with me and tell me how my baby was growing. I had a church group that ran what was called a “community kitchen” for teen moms teaching the other girls and I how to cook healthy meals, which we made in large batches so everyone got to bring home left-overs, both a fresh dish and something to put in the freezer. An extension of this church group made sure I had gifts and a turkey every Xmas and a ham and an Easter basket for my daughter every Easter. When I threw my daughter’s father out of our apartment for good (long story, which will no doubt be another article) and had to go on welfare to support myself because I was only eligible for a minimum wage job that wouldn’t even cover my daycare expenses, they gave me a daycare subsidy that allowed me to go to a local community college (which they also paid for) so I could do upgrading to my education in order to get into college. When I did get into college, my government subsidized 80% of my daycare costs and gave me student loans that covered tuition AND living expenses. When it came time to put my custody and support arrangement in writing with the courts, my government paid for my lawyer to help me get it done.

Support like this didn’t exist for my mother and because of that, it’s no wonder that she and I have had completely different parenting experiences with completely different outcomes. The only support my mother got was outdated advice from her mother and my great grandmother and the “wisdom” of her teenage friends. I know my mother was on welfare when I was very young and she was still in high school (how weird is it that I was AT my mother’s high school graduation?) and I’m sure there was a social worker involved during that time, but because of how my childhood was, I can’t imagine that social worker was very helpful.

Despite at all though, I love my mother and I appreciate the things she had to give up in order to have me. from what I’ve been told, abortion or adoption were never even considerations and I thank my mother on this, my birthday week, for giving me the life I have. It’s been a bumpy ride, no doubt, but I’m grateful nonetheless.

It’s 5am and I’m awake. I went to bed at about 12:30am but woke up about half an hour ago because Lucky was whining to be let out and when I tried to go back to sleep, it was a no go because there’s too much on my mind, namely agoraphobia.

Yesterday or the day before, Blake had a troll on his Cubeless blog and the troll said, “Grab yourself a job instead of claiming agoraphobia of convenience which seems to kick in every time you have to go shopping, but lifts when there’s an art show or a concert you absolutely have to attend because you’re ‘creative’.” And that wasn’t the first time in the last couple of weeks where people questioned my agoraphobia. At a forum I frequent, there’s a thread in a secret forum called “Reasons to feel good” and when our Gogol Bordello tickets came, I posted the picture of me holding them up to the cam in that thread and a couple of people said “wait, don’t you have agoraphobia?”

And that’s the thing. Agoraphobia isn’t a cut & dry thing. It’s different for each person. In my case, I can’t go anywhere by myself and there are certain places, like grocery stores, that I avoid because they give me anxiety to the point of panic attacks whether Blake’s with me or not. And in the case of the grocery store, yes, Blake does the groceries and it’s not so much because I can’t (well, since I haven’t done it so long and have next to zero concept of money anymore it would cause a problem anyway) but it’s simply a case of, “why make it a family outing when Blake can just go in, get what we need and come home”? Since I can’t go by myself, and I don’t have a car even if I could, that’s the way things have to be and the way things are. In case I wasn’t clear, when it comes to groceries, why take 4 people to the store, which over-complicates things, when Blake can just go in, get what we need, not go over budget, not impulse buy, and be home in half the time it would take us if all 4 of us went. Plus, if all 4 of us went, there’s a very good chance that I would have a panic attack and would require medication (Ativan) to first get there and some more to actually stay there.

As for art shows, well, that’s actually a laughable thing. I’ve only ever been to one art show in my life and it was Touched By Fire, which is put on by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. If anyone’s going to understand my idiosyncrasies at such an event, it’s going to be those people, or at least that was my logic behind going. Being in the city (Toronto) makes me very very nervous and the night of that art show, I must have taken at least 4 Ativans. But the thing was, I was totally fine at the show and I actually questioned this after the fact the next time I saw my shrink. I wanted to know how come I was totally fine at that show, yet I can’t go to Wal*Mart or even the art supply stores by myself and she said that it’s because at an art show, I have a defined role, I’m an artist, and therefore there’s guidelines as to how to act which are comfortable to me because I can easily play that role for that is what I am. I mean, I wasn’t totally fine at the show, when Gayle Cutler wanted me to do a commission, Blake had to navigate the business end of things because that’s not a role I’m comfortable with. While he did that, I hid in the bathroom. Literally.

And as far as concerts, well gee, the last concert I went to was either System of a Down or Metallica, I can’t remember and both of those shows were at least 7 or 8 years ago. With Metallica, I almost didn’t go because I had a meltdown half an hour before we had to leave. I ended up going to the show in my pajamas after Blake spent 45 minutes talking me into going. With Gogol Bordello, they are my favourite band right now and there are certain experiences where I know I’d have regrets if I didn’t go and this show is one of them because Gogol Bordello doesn’t come to Toronto very often. As I said when I posted the picture of the tickets, I have roughly 2 months to psych myself into going. A normal person wouldn’t have to do that. And even when I do go, I’m going to have to be chowing down clonazepam (klonopin) and Ativan like there’s no tomorrow. I won’t be in the pit. I’ll probably be way at the back, away from people. I’ll also be with Blake and our two best friends so I’ll have like, a circle of protection, which helps. Going to this show is not going to be an easy thing for me at all and actually another aspect of this endeavor is that when I posted the pictures of the concert tickets on that forum that I frequent, one of the members there, whom I’ve known for many years and who lives in Toronto, asked me if I wanted to get a drink and meet up before the show, to which I replied “hellz no” because that is completely outside of my comfort zone, especially when going to the show is going to be hard enough as it is. I am already losing sleep over this show because I don’t know what to wear – and it’s 2 months away.

I don’t know what to wear because where I’m at right now as far as weight loss is that I don’t fit into my “normal” clothes just yet and my “fat clothes” are now too big. Chances are, I’m going to have to buy something to wear to the show and since we’re not particularly made of money that stresses me out.

And as far as meeting this person I know from the forum I frequent well, the thing is, I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to meet people from the internet anymore with very few exceptions and the reason for that is because…I’ve met roughly 200 people from the internet in the last 12 years and during the last several encounters, I’ve realized that people sometimes don’t want to meet me to actually meet me, they want to judge me to see whether I’m the same in person as I am online (which I am) but more than that, they want to be able to tell people that they met me because it gives them cool points or something in our respective circles. I’m a notch on a belt and I’m not cool with that.

The fact of the matter is, I have agoraphobia. It’s not a phobia of convenience as Blake’s troll implied, it just presents itself in a certain way where I can go certain places and do certain things, but quite often those things take a lot of planning, a trip to my shrink, psychiatric medications and a lot of preparation.

I left the house the first week of January to see Avatar. I was supposed to go to a baby shower in Toronto at the end of January but I couldn’t deal with going to a place with a bunch of people I didn’t know so I didn’t go. Seeing Avatar in January was the only time I left my house that month. In the first week of February I went to my doctor to get a new prescription and in the second week of February, I went to my shrink appointment. In the middle of February, I went with Blake to the grocery store for about 5 minutes. And that’s it. I left the house 3 times in February. Now it’s March. I went to the doctor’s tonight to get a pap smear and chances are, that’ll be my only outing for the month of March. A normal person wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact places and the amount of times they left the house in any given month, but I can because it’s such a rare occurrence and since they are such rare occurrences, I mark these outings down on my calendar. Again, a normal person wouldn’t do that.

Last spring, when I took a walk down the Trans-Canada Trail by my house to take pictures, that was the first time in about 6 & a half years that I went anywhere by myself. Last spring I tested my agoraphobic limits with mixed success. When I went to one of the local restaurants to have breakfast all by myself, I was so freaked out by the situation that I didn’t leave the house for a month. Last spring & summer, Lucky and I checked the mail and mailed things in the middle of the night and that was a huge deal. All of these things can easily be searched on this blog under “agoraphobia” for those who are interested.

My agoraphobia is compounded during the fall and winter by Seasonal Affective Disorder. I simply do not leave the house unless I absolutely have to during this time. In the spring & summer, that’s when I go back at it with the immersion therapy, although truth be told, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve mostly given up on that because at this point I have zero motivation for trying to get better. I live in a shitty little town with nothing in it and nowhere to go and I have no car. I don’t think I can get better here. I’m not sure where I could get better exactly, but here ain’t it.

And that’s the thing, which I don’t know if it’s part of the phobia or what, but 95% of the time I’m okay with not leaving the house. I stopped fantasizing about a different life a long time ago.

Also, part of agoraphobia is that quite often, as is the case with me, the person has a hard time letting people in to their homes. It’s not just about leaving one’s home. Having people in my house is a very hard thing for me to do. At Xmas time the neighbours offered to watch my dogs for me so we didn’t have to bring them up North with us, but i couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have people in my home when I wasn’t there. And even when I am here, if people are going to come over, we all make a mad dash for the cleaning supplies because I don’t want people judging me by our home, which isn’t exactly the nicest home to begin with. A babysitter being here so Blake and I can go out? Unheard of. My kids have only been babysat in our home by our friends Alex & Ronny and my mother. When the neighbours watch the kids, the kids go over there. Hiring a babysitter, like a teenager or whatever, simply wouldn’t happen.

I think my agoraphobia started in two ways: 1) I’m pretty sure that whenever I left the house when we lived above my grandma’s furniture store, she came into the apartment and snooped. That made me so mental that I stopped leaving the house so she couldn’t do that and that’s why I can’t have people in my house when I’m not there now. 2) When Blake moved in and had to give back his car, he took over mine and it was just easier for him to get groceries on the way home from work than for me to go do it after he came home and I have access to a car. Since we lived in the middle of nowhere, there was nowhere for me to go, especially without a car. And this lasted years until it became habit and then became phobia.

But long long long before that there were signs that this was just part of my natural state. When I was 15 and living with my boyfriend at the time’s parents, I rarely left the house then too. I would go to check the mail which meant walking about 20 feet from the house and I would do so in my pajamas at 2:30am. Sometimes I’d go to my Aunt’s house in town, which was about a 15 minute walk, but again, I’d only do it at night and most of the time in my pajamas.

I know when I absolutely have to, I can leave the house, kick ass and take names. When Zulu got hit by the car, I didn’t even think about it, I got in the car with the cop who stopped to help, with Zulu in the back seat and I dealt with the vet by myself and went back home with the cop while Blake was on his way to the vet’s to take care of the rest. When it was just Madison and I in our apartment in Uxbridge, I only had a bar fridge and I’d load Madison up in her stroller and we’d do groceries every day. When I was in college, I dealt with Madison going to daycare and drove myself to Toronto every single day because in all of the above scenarios, what choice did I have?

If Blake died tomorrow, I’m fairly confident that we’d all be okay and that I could get shit done. (Don’t get me wrong, Blake dying would suck, but life does go on, bills still have to be paid, kids still have to be driven to school.)

As things stand though, as I said, there’s little motivation for me to get better. There’s nothing in the outside world for me except these rare situations like an art show, a movie or a concert and I do all of the above extremely seldom.

As I said in the beginning, agoraphobia is not a cut & dry thing. It affects everyone differently. Yes, there are similarities in every agoraphobic patient, but they all have to be treated on a case-by-case basis. I’ve just explained how my case presents itself and it is my hope that I won’t have to do it again.

Oh procrastination, definitely my best skill. Right now I’m supposed to be writing an article on what it was like being raised by a teen mom for Buttercup but instead I’m sitting here listening to music and contemplating a full day of Dragon Age Origins.

The last few days have been phenomenal for me. First, on Sunday my country won gold for hockey and the game was unbelievable, one of the greatest games I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I told Blake at the beginning of the Olympics that if Canada’s men took gold, he wouldn’t be able to stop me from ordering myself a Team Canada jersey, which I’ve always wanted. So, minutes after Sidney Crosby scored the final goal in overtime that gave Canada the win, I whipped out my credit card and ordered my Team Canada jersey. I wanted a medium, which is the same size as my Leafs jersey, but Blake wanted to be able to wear it too so I got a large.

Then on Monday, it was my birthday, which was pretty low-key. Blake got me Y the Last Man books 6, 7 and 8, so I spent the day reading those and eating half of a McCain’s chocolate cake. (I also did a show that afternoon, which is available in the archives, although it’s nothing spectacular.) My mom sent me a card in the mail with a $25 gift card to Michael’s (an art supply store) and on his way home, Blake asked me what I wanted for my birthday dinner, but I felt too sick to eat anything (I’m just getting over a stomach flu) so I told him I’d take a raincheque on that for another night. And that was pretty much my whole birthday.

But then YESTERDAY was like, an extension of my birthday where many good things happened. It started off not so good, as I was awoken by my dogs freaking out because someone was knocking at the door. I tried to ignore them but they kept freaking out so I got up and by the time I did, whoever was knocking was gone and there was a DHL post-it on the door saying that they’d try again tomorrow (today) to make their delivery. Since DHL is an international shipping company, I knew the package they were delivering was contraband from Cuba that our friend Drew had sent to us when he was on vacation there since he couldn’t send Cuban stuff to his home in MI. I signed the post-it saying that they could leave the package at the door and stuck it back on the door and put one of the large magnets we have on our door so it wouldn’t blow away.

After that, my neighbours called and asked me to come over, so I did and we sat & chatted for a couple of hours. They gave me a birthday card with a scratch off ticket inside for my birthday and that was cool. Then I came back home and made myself eggs and watched the movie Private Benjamin, which I’d never seen before and now that I’ve seen it, I cannot for the life of me figure out how or why Goldie Hawn won an OSCAR for that role because she was as Goldie as she’s ever been in any other movie I’ve ever seen her in. It must have been a slow year that year.

While I watched the movie, I renewed a couple of domains I own and registered a new one (my youngest sister’s name), and then I put in my order with Vesey’s for the seeds for the veggie garden we’re going to have this year. Our house came with a veggie garden already “built” in the backyard that’s about 14 feet by maybe 6 or 7 feet and bordered by railway ties. I ordered Royal Burgundy Beans, which are a bush bean that is purple, but when you cook them, they turn green and for that reason, they’re a big hit with the kids. I also ordered napoli carrots, thunder cucumbers, simpson elite leaf lettuce, parade green onions, super sugar snap peas, fat & sassy green peppers, purple star peppers (that are sweet peppers that are PURPLE and look lovely in salads), bobcat tomatoes and sugary cherry tomatoes. Truth be told, I’m not sure the garden’s big enough for all of that stuff, but I’ve never had a veggie garden before so I’m kind of going by trial & error. Mostly I’m worried about the cucumbers because I think vines need a lot of room to grow, but I figure if I plant them along the top of the garden they can drape over the 3 feet of lawn between the garden and the house and we just won’t mow there or we’ll move the vines when we mow and then put them back. And as I do every year, the whole gardening experience will be documented on my site.

After I ordered the veggie seeds, the movie was over and I took a nap which I was rudely awakened from by the dogs freaking out again because my kids were talking to other kids in our driveway.

When I finally got out of bed, after the kids had come inside, there was an Amazon package sitting on my desk that Madison told me had been sitting against the front door when they came home. So I opened it and inside was all kinds of birthday presents from a friend, including Dragon Age Origins which I’ve been wanting to play since it was released.

After I opened the Amazon package, I sent a thank you to the person who sent all of it and after it was sent and my browser came back to my inbox, there was an e-mail from Vancouver 2010 telling me that my Team Canada jersey had shipped and that it should be here in a few days. Score!

Shortly after that, Blake called me on his way home and I asked him if I could have my belated birthday dinner and he said yes, so I asked him to bring me home an assorted sub from Mr. Sub, because I had full intentions of installing Dragon Age as soon as I got off the phone with him and a sub is an easy meal to eat at the computer. See? Always thinkin’ ahead.

Well, I got distracted by Madison, who had sprained her toe and required drugs because she was in pain. Her toe looked horrific, it was so purple it was almost black, but she could move it, so at least it wasn’t broken. She said she sprained it when she fell at recess. Soooooo I drugged her and she went to bed.

Then Blake came home and I began installing Dragon Age, which I played for about 5 hours and then I went to bed.

Annnnnnnnnd now you’re up to date with the past couple of days of my life. :o)

So here I sit, on my birthday, and instead of reading the comic books Blake got me, I’ve been up since about 4am thinking about Jenny McCarthy. Last week I read the Time magazine article, “The Autism Debate: Who’s Afraid of Jenny McCarthy?“, which spawned a lot of other articles, namely one at Bad Astrology called “Jenny McCarthy still thinks vaccines cause autism“. From that article, I started following links to other articles on Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine crusade and near the end of my link hopping, I found an old article that said Jenny McCarthy believed her son to be a “Crystal Child” and herself to be an “Indigo Mom”. I even found an article she herself wrote about this prior to her son being diagnosed as having autism (which he may or may not have had all along).

Anyway, this blog post is not about Jenny McCarthy or autism or whether or not vaccines are harmful. This blog post is about how I am medicated versus non-medicated and the crystal/indigo thing was the catalyst. Longtime readers will remember that about 6 or 7 years ago, I was convinced that I was an “indigo child” and had a deep belief in a lot of metaphysical things, such as psychics and reiki. And I wrote about these things. A lot. And now, looking back at all of that, it’s embarrassing because I was clearly manic during this period of my life, although I wouldn’t know what the word “manic” even meant until many many years later.

This weekend Blake and I talked at great length about me medicated versus non-medicated because really, I don’t see much of a difference. I no longer have “million dollar ideas” though, so there’s one difference, and I don’t get as obsessed about random things as I used to, but other than that, I couldn’t really tell you any other differences. But then Blake reminded me that there was a time for about 3 months where all I did was sit on the couch and cry and I don’t do that any more. I don’t have suicidal thoughts as often or as persistently as I did before. I’m more rational, logical. My thinking is clearer, I’m more focused.

Apparently what I’m going through right now is really common in psychiatric patients, where they’ve been medicated for a long time and they feel normal so they forget how bad things were before and that’s when they tend to go off their meds, thinking they don’t need them anymore. I’m not going to do that, but I can understand how this all works because while I can identify that I’ve had bipolar disorder my whole life and could chart my peaks and valleys on a piece of paper from about age 5 to present, I do forget what it feels like to be suicidally depressed and psychotically happy. I understand that I experienced these things, but I think it’s similar to how women forget the pain of childbirth or something. The memories are distant and dull and only make sense when someone else tells you how it used to be. It’s a very strange thing.

Sometimes I miss the old days, I have to admit. I think I was more fun when I was manic, definitely more interesting than I am now. The depression I’m glad to be rid of, though.

I dunno, as I said, it’s a strange thing. I don’t really know where I’m going with this post, nowhere I suppose, it’s just been what’s on my mind over the weekend and I wanted to throw it out there so I could stop thinking about it.

I was named after “Danny’s Song” by Anne Murray. My mom thought I was going to be a boy and was going to call me “Daniel” after the song, but I was a girl, so my middle name is Danielle instead. Here’s the song:

To this day, the song makes me bawl like a baby, thinking about my mom being 15, listening to it and daydreaming about her baby. It destroys me.

That’s why I prefer this version by Me First & the Gimme Gimmes:

Anyway, my birthday is in 6 days and you should totally buy me presents because I’m awesome. :oD

Yesterday while I was in bed wanting to die due to this stomach flu/codeine withdrawal combo I’ve got going, Blake took the kids to my mom’s boyfriend’s cottage for a day of skating on the lake. John (my mom’s boyfriend) was nice enough to send them home with pictures and here they are. :o)

My mom drinkin’ & skatin’.

My mom & Madison.

My mom & Wes.

Chris (John’s son), Wes & my mom.

Blake, Wes & my mom.

Madison & Wes haz a bucket.

Madison & Wes

Chris & Wes

…………..

Blake, Chris, John, my mom, Wes & Madison

THE END.

Super old cam pic from when I made hundreds of wax paper hearts for mobiles that I put up over our windows for Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day has always been one of my favourite holidays, even though these days I don’t do a whole lot for it. In past years, I’ve been known to do special creative projects for the holiday, such as the mobile pictured above, or I’ve sent out Valentines to my online friends, but as I’ve gotten older (and poorer and busier)  these things have fallen by the wayside. That’s okay though, because I know it won’t always be like this and I’ll be able to do more in future years. (Kind of like my attitude toward Halloween. I want to be one of those families that decorates their house and gives out awesome candy but alas, we don’t get any trick-or-treaters where we are and couldn’t afford to do it even if we did.)

Anyway, Blake & I aren’t doing anything special today, especially because he, Wes & I seem to have a particularly nasty stomach bug of some kind and our bathroom has practically had a revolving door all weekend.

Valentine’s Day means two things, however. It means that there’s only two weeks until my birthday and everyone should get me lots & lots of presents and it also means that there’s one month until Steak & Blowjob Day. Since my article on giving head is linked on the Steak & BJ Day website, it means that my site is currently getting twice the traffic it normally gets and by the time the actual holiday rolls around, my traffic will have tripled. That’s a whole lot of new people around here reading my crap! So hello new people! Welcome to Sunnyland! Glad to have ya. :o)

Another thing Valentine’s Day means, to me and some of my friends at least, is that it’s Love Your Vulva day, or V-Day for short, something that we’ve been celebrating all month over at Buttercup. Buttercup’s actually been pretty hoppin’ all month, you should pop over there and check it out. So far this month we’ve had articles on VDay.org, Katie’s sexually repressed upbringing, how chicks dig porn, Blake’s experiences growing up in a penis-centric world, an article on our featured site, Camwhores.com, an article on vulva art, phenomenal woman, Holly Hughes, who you’ve probably never heard of but probably should, and finally an article by Jade about some of the strangest vulva-centric products we’ve ever seen – with much more to come during the rest of the month! We’ve also added two new groups to the mix. S/he is a group about sexism and so far the conversations have been really interesting and enlightening and we also added a group for sports, which needs a better name than “Sports”, so if you have any ideas on that, we’d love to hear them! Along with the new groups, we’ve also redesigned the front page a little bit and we have plans to redesign it further for next month. Lots of changes thanks to the feedback we got from the Buttercup community at the end of January! Thanks readers!

So, things over at Buttercup are doing good. You should take a peek if you get the chance. :o)

I realize this month I’ve been fairly quiet as far as blog posts go and there are a million reasons for that, namely preparing for and celebrating Wes’ 7th birthday, but also I’ve been hard at work painting ACEOs for my Etsy shop since art is pretty much all I can do when I’m in the kind of pain I’ve been in for the past couple of weeks due to endometriosis issues. I plan on doing nothing but working on ACEOs until this batch is finished because so far, they’ve proven to be pretty popular items in my Etsy shop, having sold half of the first batch I put up 2 weeks ago with the other half getting plenty of views. This first batch that I put up was of gold & black and purple & gold cards and right now all that’s left is the gold ones. The ones I’m working on are more purple & gold ones, some green & gold ones and a whole bunch of red & gold ones. I’ll, of course, make a post when this batch is ready and up on Etsy. In the meantime, you should take a look at the gold & black ones I have up there currently as I think they turned out rather well and hey, these things are supposed to be collectible, so if you buy a gold & black one this month, there’s no reason you can’t buy a red & gold one next month! *cough*

As I’m reading the Etsy forums, I’m learning that ideally what you’re supposed to do is market to people outside of Etsy and bring them into your shop. For that reason, I spent yesterday afternoon designing Moo cards with my artwork on the front of them and my website addresses on the back to include a couple with Etsy orders. By including more than one, it means the buyer will probably keep one and potentially give the other one(s) to friends. I’m also working on getting the funds for another promotional item, which I’ll write more about after I have the money to order them and actually send them out to people. If all goes as planned though, they’re pretty cool – or at least I think so – plus they have sentimental value, which again, I’ll write more about when I actually have them in my possession. (I’m only 1 ACEO sale away from being able to order them!)

And I guess that’s all I really have to say at the moment. It’s been a busy month and it’s going to continue to be busy. My neighbour’s daughter, Ashley, is due to have her baby any day now, so since my neighbour (Judy) doesn’t have a camera, I’ve lent her mine and that’s why there haven’t been pictures of anything in my recent posts. Ashley was actually due like, 4 or 5 days ago, so she could literally pop any day now and I should get my camera back soon.

Okay, I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine’s Day! I’m off to watch the Olympics and work on these ACEOs.