State of affairs 1-27-13

Okay. Where to start.

I'm feeling a little too restless to describe everything that has happened since my last update so I'll talk about one thing. The biggest thing. The thing that is eating away at me and bringing me to the edge of nervous breakdown. My newly-diagnosed autoimmune disorder.

It started about a year ago. One day, out of the blue, my hands went numb. It started as a sharp pain in my elbows that traveled down to my fingers and gradually my fingers went numb for over four hours. So I went to the doctor. I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel and given medication.
Three months later I went into the doctor's office because I had been getting a rash every day for over a month. The rash wasn't triggered by anything. I would begin to itch and once I started scratching I would break out in small red welts all over my body. It was such a sudden appearance of this symptom that I got worried. Unexplainable rashes mean a newly developed allergy... or an autoimmune disorder. But my doctor just told me it was a condition that people "sometimes develop" when they're allergic to something in the air and their skin starts to break out. She told me to take allergy medication every day. Okay.

About four or five months later the symptoms of (what I believed to be) two unrelated issues were not relenting. I didn't want to go back to that doctor because I felt like she had sort of written me off. So I went to a different primary care physician who actually listened to me and all of my problems. He sent me to a neurologist to get nerve testing done to "make sure" that I was actually dealing with carpal tunnel.
So at the neurologist I spent two ours getting shocked and poked with needles in various spots of my arms (and my legs because he said my feet weren't reacting as they should either). The results were that I didn't have carpal tunnel. My nerves weren't operating properly but it wasn't consistent with carpal tunnel. I'd had whiplash when I was about ten and have had back problems ever since then so he thought I might have a slipped disk or something causing neuropathy (where the nerves are being pressed and therefore loose feeling). So I went to get an MRI on my upper and lower back.

The results were that while I had "bumps" on four of my spinal disks, they weren't bad enough to cause the nerve damage he saw. So he sent me to get a full work-up and also suggested that I might have fibromyalgia.
That was in October. So I did that and I also made an appointment with a rheumatologist. I had  looked up the symptoms of fibromyalgia and they all seemed to fit with problems I had (which I've had for so long I had just stopped complaining about). I went back to my primary care physician a couple of weeks after the blood work and he told me that my ANA tests had come back positive. "That is highly suspicious of lupus" were his exact words. Then he sent me to get a full ANA panel.

So needless to say I went home that day a little shaken. I hadn't even considered the possibility of lupus (I had sort-of thought about it when I was trying to figure out what was causing my rash but I'm a hypochondriac) so this was a slap in the face. All I could do was wait for my appointment with a rheumatologist which wasn't until January seventh (over two months of just waiting). I was scared but deep down I never really believed I had it. I know people with lupus- people who were bedridden and couldn't work and had to take chemotherapy- I wasn't that sick.

My appointment comes around and all I could get from the rheumatologist was "we need to do more blood work" when it came to the possibility. She diagnosed me with fibromyalgia (which at that point was the last thing on my mind) and "unspecified autoimmune disorder" and made a follow up for two weeks later. So that was it. I definitely had an autoimmune disorder but she was hesitant to diagnose me without more information. I should have been grateful but I was more annoyed than anything. I had already been waiting for months. I'd had so many tests and so much blood taken out of me and the worrying was beginning to wear me down. That week I actually had a nervous breakdown at work and started having a panic attack. The same night I went into anaphylactic shock from my dermographism (that rash- at least I had a name for that now). I wanted a diagnosis. I needed to know. I thought that at least knowing would put me at some sort of peace.

I was wrong.

Last Monday I got my diagnosis. It isn't lupus. It's systemic scleroderma. I don't fully understand the disease. I know that instead of flare-ups like lupus the disease just progresses at an unpredictable rate. You never know at what point the symptoms will start to appear. I already have some of them (numb hands/feet, acid reflux, dry/rough patches of skin, dry mouth/eyes, shortness of breath, joint pain) but most of the serious symptoms haven't developed in my yet. They could develop when I'm eighty or they could develop next week. That's the problem with autoimmune disorders. Doctors don't fully understand them yet so it leaves the patients to get caught off guard.

What I do know is that I'm going to build up collagen in my skin and my organs. My skin will get tighter and I'll get weird thick patches of skin. My organs will start to harden. My heart, my lungs, my kidney, my liver- my body will start to attack them and one by one they'll start to shut down. It could happen when I'm eighty or it could happen tomorrow. I'm in the earliest stages of the disease which means that I could have acute kidney failure at any given moment. Scleroderma is such a rare disease that only 2-3 million people in the world have it. Less than half of those have systemic scleroderma. 25 people out of every million get diagnosed each year. I guess I'm one check off of that statistic. There is no treatment for scleroderma. They can only treat the most serious symptoms as they appear. Like other autoimmune diseases... it's just a waiting game.

But beyond all of this the thing that bothers me most is this: Doctors recommend that women not get pregnant in the first three years of their diagnosis because that is when the disease progresses the fastest. Technically I'm not in that stage yet. I don't officially have scleroderma because the more serious symptoms haven't set in yet. They're going to- there's a 100% chance they're going to- but we don't know when. So I have to wait for my "official" diagnosis and then another three years before I have children.
So that could be four years from now or it could be never.

I thought a diagnosis would make me feel better. But autoimmune disorders are full of waiting and not knowing. I have never had much patience for these things. My anxiety has been through the roof. I feel like I have been fighting my entire life. Depression, Anxiety disorder, eating disorders... my whole life my brain has been fighting me and just when I feel like I'm starting to win my body starts to fight me. I'm not really a pessimistic person (or an optimistic one for that matter) but all I can think is "what is the point of me if all I'm going to do is fight?". Is that my purpose? To spend my whole life fighting myself?

I never wanted to be a burden. I watched my brother and my sister (still) drain my mother emotionally and monetarily and I never wanted to do that. I wanted to be the good one who took care of her. But I'm going to be a burden on her. I'm going to be a burden on her and on my husband who never even had a chance to enjoy this. And there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I think that's the worst, the guilt. I hate being weak. I hate asking for help. But my body isn't going to let me be strong. My body is going to destroy itself. It could be forty years from now or it could be next month. All I can do is wait.

State of affairs 9-3-12

Wow.
Okay.
I really don't even know where to start. This weekend has been such an  insane mass of emotions that I that I haven't even bothered to sit down and sort through them. I'm now less than six weeks away from my wedding and while the marriage part doesn't make me the least bit nervous, the wedding itself is totally stressing me out.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.
What I wanted to talk about was friends. Particularly, best friends. Specifically, people who were once your best friends and are now not even remotely part of your life.
Throughout high school I had three best friends. The same three best friends for the entirety of highschool, with a rotating cast of characters as our extended friendship circle. This continued through my first two years of college. These were the people who were there for me when I went through some of my hardest experiences. My first heart break, the everyday stress of school, even the death of my father. Depending on where I was in my life sometimes I would be closer to one friend than the other. In short, these three people pretty much were my entire life from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty. It's to the point that I have only a handful of memories from that time period that don't contain all three of them, much less at least one of them.
A little under three years ago I got engaged. I got engaged to the boy I had dated all through high school. The boy these friends knew. I stopped wanted to "go out". I'm not a very social person. I don't like crowds or staying up late or many of the things that normal twenty year olds are wont to do. The only reason I had been doing those things was because my relationship was in shambles and I had to do those things in order to not sit at home and be depressed. So once I was engaged I didn't want to do those things anymore. The problem was, that was really the only thing that those friends ever did. At first they always invited me. And I hated doing it, but I always said no. Then, they only invited me sometimes. I sensed that they were starting to resent me and so I talked to one of them- the one that I considered my best friend. The person who I had once been able to tell anything to. The person who I went with to get my first tattoo who had a matching one on her own hip. I told her that it wasn't that I didn't want to see them. It was that I didn't want to go to clubs and get drunk. She understood. She said that the only reason that was what they did was because of work schedules. She said she felt bad because she knew that I didn't like doing that stuff so they didn't always tell me because they knew I wouldn't want to go. I told her that anytime they did anything earlier than ten at night to tell me, because I would go. They were still my best friends and I still wanted to spend time with them.
Gradually, we stop texting and talking as much. Now they don't ever bother to invite me out. Then they start doing other stuff, like going to dinner or seeing movies, and don't bother to invite me to those either.
I talked to one friend about it, because I felt like she would be the only one who wouldn't get defensive and who would understand where I was coming from. Thankfully, she did. I had become really angry in that time frame and felt like they had just completely cut me out of their lives. Any time I did see them it felt awkward and forced because they were still best friends and I was suddenly an interloper. But this one friend, the one who I trusted to come to with my problems, assured me that this wasn't intentional. Everybody was just growing apart. She felt it to, but it wasn't just specifically me.
I didn't want to grow apart. These people had been such a big part of my life for so long that growing apart from them meant growing apart from all of those memories. I tried. I invited them to Vegas and paid for the hotel rooms. I made plans for us to spend New Years Eve together. I spent two full years trying and none of it made any difference. Once, when we all went to dinner, that friend that had once been my best friend (and who I had told would be my maid of honor when I first got engaged) got really drunk. She alluded to the fact that I thought I was better than them because I was engaged and I spent all my time at home. Which wasn't true but it's not like you can reason with a plastered person.
So that was the end of 2011. After New Years failed to change anything about the state of the friendship, I finally decided to give up. Except for that one friend who I had talked about it all with. Because she had started to feel the same way. She was in a stable relationship and ready to become an adult and it was driving a wedge between her and the other two.
So we got closer. When I decided in March of this year to get married I had to make a decision about my bridal party. Obviously those two people who had cut me out of their lives and didn't seem to give a shit about me didn't need to be in my bridal party. I needed people who were in my life to be in my bridal party. So, the one friend who I was still close to was part of my wedding but the other two weren't.
So all of that happened. Since then, there have been a few failed attempts for all of us to hang out. I felt awkward. I had never directly addressed the issue with them despite it having gone on for two and a half years, so I couldn't really explain to them why I hadn't invited them to be part of my wedding. But I did invite them to my shower and planned to invite them to the wedding. After all, they had been such a huge part of my life for so long. I understood that we had grown apart.
Fast forward to the weekend of my bridal shower. Three days ago. One of these friends  (not the one that had once been my best friend) decides to post the lyrics to Brand New's "Mixtape" on facebook and tag me with the caption "I'm calling you out, bro". The lyrics are I know that you're a sucker for anything acoustic but when I say let's keep in touch I really mean I wish that you'd grow up. This is the first song for your mixtape and it's short just like your temper. Somewhat golden like the afternoons we used to spend before you got too cool. 
Brand New was particularly important to all of us. In fact, Brand New was the band that had originally started the friendship between me and this friend. So, needless to say, I was pissed. I untagged myself in the picture, deleted her as a friend, and messaged her. Basically I said I was done. I had spent three years trying to chase after a friendship and I was tired of it. She could deal with whatever made up issues she had with me anyway she wanted to.
She responds that she had no issues with me. She had nothing with me. No friendship, no effort. Also... that I was blind to the whole situation.
There are a lot of things that I could have said. I could have said that this had been going on for three years and now all of a sudden it's an issue with her... yet somehow I was the blind one? I could have said that telling me to grow up by tagging me in a song on facebook was the exact definition of irony. I could have said that she was right. There was no effort because I had given up on the friendship over a year ago. But the whole thing made me realize something.
I didn't care.
I'm the type of person that always needs to have the last word. I need to win a fight. I don't know if its a self esteem issue or what, but I've always needed to be the one to have the last word. I didn't in this occasion. I just deleted the message and moved on with my life. The only thing that upset me about it was that by acting like a dick she had tainted all that time we had been friends. Now, instead of looking back on that time with happy memories I'll just see this asshole that I was friends with for so long.
Saturday night, the night before my bridal shower, the other friend- the one who had been my best friend- texts me. Keep in mind that the two of them are still incredibly close. And they're still close with the friend that is in my bridal party. She texts me to ask me if she should go to the shower (she had originally planned to go) which, you know, I get. Things would be awkward now. But then, she adds that she has some of the same concerns as the other friend. But she doesn't want it to seem like she's choosing sides.
But the sides have been chosen. The sides were chosen three years ago. And the fact that they want to chose one of the most important weekends of my life to deal with this proves how selfish and out of touch they are. So I tell her to do whatever she wants. I'm not going to deal with it. And I cry myself to sleep.

Now I've gotten about a day to get perspective on it but I don't really feel any different. I'll always miss the friendship that had gotten me through so many tough times, but there is zero emotion left in me to mourn it. I've literally spent three years crying and being upset about it. So now that all-of-a-sudden they give a shit I'm supposed to bow down to them? No. I'm moving on with my life. I'm moving on with the people that give a shit about me not just themselves. I'm starting the rest of my life with the boy I love with three amazing bridesmaids and amazing friends.

I'm done with the friendship. Done with all of it.

State of Affairs:5-5-2012

Holy shit. It's May fifth. Where did this semester go?
The good news is that I've actually kept up with all of my classes this semester and (if all goes according to plan) I'll have my associates degree by the end of the summer and my bachelor's degree by next summer. Just two years late, not so bad. I also might get a promotion to lead teacher at work. I feel mixed about it. I want the promotion because of the money, and the fact that I think I deserve it. I know that sounds completely self-absorbed. But here's the thing. I've been at my job for two years. I've only called in three times and one of those times was because I had to take my mother to the emergency room. I'm never late. I've never had a complaint from a parent or co-worker. Anything they ask me to do I do. I've been flexible, respectful, and I'm good at my job. Very rarely do I ever admit to being good at anything. In fact, before this job, the only thing I would ever admit to being good at was writing. (Now I wouldn't even necessarily admit to that...) But I am good at my job. I'm good at my job not because I'm better than anyone else, but because I care. Because I go into work and enjoy what I do and I love those kids and I love my coworkers and I want to make a good impression on my parents and my coworkers. I want people to know how much I care about my job because I really do love my job. Two years in and I still love it. That has to say something.
I've pretty much been flying under the radar of my boss the entire time I've worked there. I've even had her apologize for being a dick to me once (which she almost never does). So when I found out that the lead teacher whose spot I'm filling in for isn't coming back, I wasn't sure what the outcome of that was going to be. Last summer when my lead teacher left I didn't even consider the option that they would give it to me (even though I knew that I could have done the job, I was aware that they didn't really know what I was capable of and also I wasn't close to getting my degree). I thought that the initiative I showed while we didn't have a lead teacher (I did basically all of the lead teacher duties) went unnoticed. Now I'm thinking maybe they didn't. Now that I'm in the baby room my assistant director (who is pretty much the eyes and ears of the center) works with me a lot more. She never says anything about my work but the fact that she was the first one to suggest I get the lead teacher position makes me feel good. I completely respect my assistant director. She used to be the lead teacher in the infant room and I know that she cares a lot about that room. Her best friend at the center is the one who's spot I'm filling. My first spot of recognition I felt was when they moved me to the infant room and the Toddler one lead teacher argued with her about it and she said "the infant room is more important". It made me feel like they finally appreciated all the hard work I had been doing over the last two years.
So now my director hasn't actually said anything official, but at my evaluation she said "i wouldn't have a problem giving the position to you" which is basically the highest form of praise I'm ever going to get out of that woman. It's the most appreciated I've ever felt at my job. My toddler one lead teacher is upset because she wants me back in her room, but the infant room teachers are happy because they want me to stay. It feels really good. I hate to admit it, but I am one of those people who needs at least a minimal amount of recognition for my hard work. I had never stopped trying at my job despite the lack of this. It's not really a job where you can do the bare minimum, because there are kids involved (although, you'd be surprised at how many teachers at our center manage it), but I had pretty much given up on any kind of forward movement. Now that it's a possibility, I'm a little scared. It's a lot of responsibility. A lot of social interaction that I'm not looking forward to.  But I've got to jump into the world at some point, right?

Except from "The Straw People"

 

We went back into her house and started on our project. We waited until her parents went to sleep and went back to the shed. “I think I'm going to name him Eric,” she said.

“Why Eric?” I asked.

“I don't know. He just looks like an Eric.” She pushed open the door and the first thing we saw was that the bowl of water was empty but all of the chicken was still there. It hadn't been touched. And Eric was nowhere to be seen. Presley stepped into the shed and started to look around.

“Eric,” she whispered as though the dog already knew his name even though she had just thought of it. She overturned boxes and looked through bins like he could have somehow crawled inside one. All I did was turn to my right and I found him. He was curled up on the seat of her dad's riding lawnmower and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he had gotten up there.

“Presley,” I said. “He isn't breathing.”

Presley rushed over to him and put her hand on his back just to make sure. He wasn't. Eric was dead. She didn't say anything. I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't know what the appropriate level of emotion was for the situation. We hadn't known Eric long enough for him to make an impact on our lives. But he had lived a sad and unloved life and that was tragedy enough. I walked over to Presley and stood next to her.

She had her chin resting against her chest and tears were running down her face. “He just needed someone to care about him,” she said. “Just for one day he wanted to feel loved. Then he could die in peace.”

“Well, it's a good thing he chose you,” I said. Presley wiped her face.

“We need to give him a proper burial,” she said. So we did. We dug a hole behind her shed and buried Eric in it and she made a headstone with a permanent marker and a large rock we found. It read Eric ?-2003 he finally found love. I don't think her parents ever found out it was there. It's probably still there. Presley would periodically begin to cry over the next two weeks about Eric. She would ask me why I thought he didn't eat the chicken or why he felt the need to die on her dad's lawnmower. She told me that every time her dad mowed the lawn she felt nervous because now it had the curse of death on it and she really was scared that there would be a freak accident and her dad would die and wasn't that a terrible way to die? In a freak riding lawnmower accident?

State of affairs 3-16-2012

So I haven't updated here in a while. Probably because I've been too busy watching Supernatural and writing fanfiction. But other than that, life has been strange lately. I'm finally getting used to life in the baby room. I still miss my old class but I'm starting to bond with my new kids. I'm only taking twelve hours and they're online at Vista so class is massively easy. Other than that...

Before 2012 I had never met any celebrities, much less celebrities that I actually gave a shit about. And between January 28th and March 10th, I met five. Five celebrities that I actually give a shit about.
Evan Peters.
Ryan Buell.
Frank Turner.
Chris Pontius.
Johnny Knoville.
Let me share something with you:

 I MET FUCKING JOHNNY KNOXVILLE. LIKE SERIOUSLY WTF. My longest standing celebrity crush. Literally the one celebrity I would want to meet above all others. Because love and I decided to be spontaneous and drive to Austin to try and find him. It wasn't an ideal situation because he was being rushed and we didn't get to tell him how much he meant to us or show him our tattoos, but still. 

I don't know what this means. I want to think that it means things are headed in a good direction for me this year. Like maybe this is the year. I bought my camera and love and I are already on our way to filming more. I've written a script for a short and I'm working on a script for a feature that we could film this summer. To be completely honest my brain in sort of fried at this point. I'm trying not to over analyze everything (or anything) but it's hard. I just want some sort of direction.
I know that I'm meant to be a writer. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. But what I don't know is how to get there. What road should I take? I sort of just want to throw my hands up and say "fuck it" but I can't. It means too much.

I hope that this feeling I have isn't just blue balls from the universe. Because that would suck massively.

State of affairs 2-5-2012

Even though no one reads this blog, i like having the outlet.
I finished the found footage script (first draft anyway) and I like the way it turned out. I'm still not sure if it's actually "horror" but if it ends up being good enough to submit to festivals that's probably what genre I would submit it under. I'm buying a camera with my tax return and fully intend to force my friends to film on at least a bi-weekly basis so that I have footage to learn final cut. I should probably buy a book or something to teach myself.
For some reason I have this feeling of hope within me. I don't know what it is exactly. I don't know what caused it (it could be the first major exciting thing to happen in my life- actually meeting one of my celebrity crushes) but I'm enjoying it. It gives me inspiration. Instead of feeling frustrated with the lack of any headway I've managed to make in my life I feel hope that I'm eventually going to end up where I need to be. Truth be told, I always imagined that I'd have my shit together by the time I was 23. That's not going to happen. Although I think mentally I'm pretty much there. I've finally gotten to a place in my life where I know who I am and I'm happy with who that person is. I can honestly say I have confidence in myself as a person, which is not something I ever thought would happen. I think it might be the adderall, if I'm being completely honest. It's allowed me to be productive like I've never been before. It's strange, adderall has gotten kind of a street-drug rap because of all the recreational use, but it's helped me so much. It's allowed me to be the functional person that I've always known I could be. I still struggle with severe social anxiety, but that's something that a pill will never fix. The general anxiety (which occasionally pops up now and then) seems to have abated to a minor nuisance.
So here's to 2012 (we're already one month in-how did that happen?) and I'm looking forward to the year ahead.

Candace's favorite things : Film/ Directors/ Actors

all time favorite films

once again, i'll probably come back and elaborate on this later.

FILMS:
10. West Side Story
9. The Sound of Music
8. E.T.
7. SLC Punk!
6. Annie Hall
5. Ghost World
4. The Social Network
3. American History X
2. The Shining
1. Trainspotting

DIRECTORS:
1. Stanley Kubrick
2. Danny Boyle
3.Woody Allen
4. Edgar Wright
5. David Fincher

ACTORS: 
1. Steve Buscemi
2. Brad Renfro (RIP)
3. Andrew Garfield
4. John C. Reily
5. Emile Hirsch

ACTRESSES :
1. Tilda Swinton
2. Kate Winslet
3. Emma Stone
4. Jenna Malone
5. Jessica Chastain