Sooo last night was awesome. A night out with my girlfriends was EXACTLY what I needed. We went to Lisa’s AMAZING restorative yoga class at YogaLife Queen Anne (if you’re local, I highly recommend it — it’s a very easy, meditative yoga that makes you super relaxed), and even though I’d only planned on meeting two of my girlfriends there, it just so happened that two other of my girlfriends were at the same class. We all went to dinner together afterward, and it was just fantastic to be out of my head, to be honest with my friends about what was going on in my life, and to just get some sanity back.

This afternoon my friend Gillian and I went to see Jennifer’s Body, which was not nearly as good as I’d hoped. I mean, it wasn’t terrible, but I just thought it would be way funnier and more interesting. It just kind of fell flat. Oh, and this is what my face looked like this morning:

And this is what it looked like after makeup:

Not so bad, eh? But by mid-afternoon the peeling had started, and it’s hard to cover it up with makeup when your skin is peeling off your face. It’s fairly obvious. Plus, as a part of the peel, they load your face with Retin-A, so I’ve been breaking out like crazy, just whiteheads everywhere. This is all to be expected — it’s a part of the skin-clearing process — but I definitely don’t look pretty right now. My skin is ANGRY SKIN. Luckily my girlfriends don’t really care whether or not I look hot.

After the movie, I met up with my friend Alicia to watch her boyfriend and our other guy friend play Australian rules football, aka “footy.” They play for the Seattle Grizzlies, which are apparently a really good team. They definitely kicked ass today. I don’t quite understand the rules — sometimes they kick the ball, sometimes they punch it, sometimes they throw it, sometimes they just swat at it — but there don’t seem to be any rules at all about tackles. They wear zero padding, and they’ll just grab each other’s arms from behind, or swat at each other’s faces and hands, or just slam into each other from the side. Stuff that would probably be a technical foul in basketball, and definitely illegal in American football, is a-okay in footy. It’s hectic to watch, but it also clearly requires a great deal of athletic skill. These guys’ legs are crazy buff. It was very cool getting to watch the game — except it was freezing outside and I didn’t really dress warm enough.

Then I went to meet up with some other girlfriends for some quality girl talk, and finally headed home. I took a shower and washed off my makeup, and of course a ton of my skin came off from the washing. They had given me a special lotion that I’m supposed to use to “calm” the “irritated” areas, but OH MY GOD when I put this stuff on it HURT. Like, it was the first time in all of this that I’d actually felt INTENSE PAIN. My face felt like it was on FIRE. I was fanning myself and cursing the aesthetician for performing this procedure without prescribing me pain meds (like she even could have), but it lasted about 60 seconds and then it was fine again. I am never putting on that lotion again. I was fine until I put on the damn lotion. IT DOES NOT PUT THE LOTION ON ITS SKIN.

Ha ha ha ha ha! This is what my face looks like right now. I got the Vi Peel today. It was actually a really simple procedure. It took about 10 minutes. It didn’t hurt very much at all. They first put a light coat of the peel on, and it contains a numbing agent. So, by the time they put the whole thing on, your skin doesn’t feel much of it. It feels hot and it burns a little bit, but it’s by no means any sort of intense pain. It was easier than I’d expected, to be honest. I have to put some other cream on my skin tonight which I guess will actually cause my skin to start peeling off by tomorrow or Sunday. The lady said that if I didn’t want it to peel much, I could just put a little bit of the cream on and then rinse it off, but if I wanted the full-blown peel effect, I should leave the cream on overnight. She recommended I do the latter, and that’s what I plan to do. I mean, if I’m spending that much money on this shit, I may as well get the maximum benefit, even if it’s worse in the short term. She said she thought the peel would be really helpful for my acne scarring and discoloration. (Although right now I’m way more discolored than I was before I went in there!) So I’m hopeful about the results, and I’ll keep you guys posted.

I’m heading out to do a restorative yoga class with my girlfriends, despite the fact that I look like a science fiction creature right now. I figure by the time the yoga class gets started, everyone’s faces will be a little flushed and I won’t look that out of place. Plus, as I mentioned, I’ve been really really stuck in my head lately, and I don’t want to spend another night like that. My mind terrifies me. I need to be out and about and with my friends. It’s Rosh Hashana tonight, and a friend invited me to the kibbutz in Ravenna for Rosh Hashana dinner. I feel like I should go, and I really like my guy friend who invited me, but I don’t really know any of the other people. Something tells me I just need to be with my close girlfriends right now. I think God will understand.

Rosh Hashana is the Jewish new year. I feel like I could use a fresh start right about now. I think I’m emotionally more on the Jewish calendar than the U.S. calendar. Early fall is usually a rough time for me. Everything feels like it’s winding down and collapsing. Then things pick up a little bit by October, after Yom Kippur. I just need to hang in there and make sure I’m reaching out to my friends and staying the fuck out of my own head. Last night was pretty rough. Nothing bad happened at all; I just got home from work early and then didn’t go back out again to do anything. So I ended up spending like eight hours all alone before I went to bed. That’s simply not an option for me. I cannot spend that much time alone. After four or five hours it just gets really, really scary in my head. Scary enough that I’m going out in public with my face looking like this rather than risk getting to that emotional place again. It’s so strange to me that my own mind betrays me like that. It just needs to be constantly engaged or it turns on me so fast, and I completely lose control of what it’s doing or what it’s thinking. But I’m pleased with myself that I’m remembering to reach out and make choices that are healthy for me.

Stay tuned for new pics of my face tomorrow! It’ll probably look worse!

I wish I had something fascinating and interesting for you guys. Everything that’s going on in my life is non-bloggable, because the people and things it involves don’t want to be on my blog, not even anonymously, and I have to respect that. It makes me crazy, though, because blogging really helps keep me sane. Writing these things out — sometimes coming to huge realizations as I do so — and then accepting feedback and support from total strangers is incredibly therapeutic and helpful for me. It’s hard to have things going on, things that are weighing on me, and not be able to use this as a forum to discuss them. It’s such an important outlet for me. It has a marked impact on my psychological health when I can’t talk about shit on here. Weird, right?

But life has been fairly methodical lately, and I suppose that’s a good thing, although it doesn’t always seem that way. I’m someone who needs to be constantly on my toes, ultra-busy with life, otherwise I get stuck in my head, and that’s a very bad place for me. Like I’ve mentioned many times before, life is stagnant right now. I need a goal — something I’m working toward. This happened around this time last year, too, and so I decided to sign up for the Arizona half-marathon. It was my new project. That really helped back then, but I can’t get motivated to do it again this year. Last year, I thought it would be fun to prove that I could do something like that — it was exciting and new. This year it just feels like too much work. I need a project, y’all. I’m open to suggestions.

Tomorrow I’m getting a Vi Peel, which is a facial peel that’s supposed to remove acne scarring. I’ve heard it’s relatively painless, and I’ve been wanting to do it for awhile, and now the place where I used to get my facials is offering it at around 2/3 of its regular price, so I decided to go for it. I’m a little nervous, because I’ve heard my skin is going to basically peel off in the days following (duh, that’s why they call it a peel, I guess), and I’ve heard horror stories on the Internet about skin getting patchy afterward. But I have a bunch of acne scarring on my cheeks and forehead that I’ve always wanted to get rid of, and everyone I’ve actually talked to in person about — ie not some random review on the Internet — has spoke favorably of the procedure, said it didn’t hurt, and liked the results. I’m mostly just nervous about the peeling, and not for the obvious reasons: If my damned face is peeling off, I’ll pretty much want to stay hidden in my apartment. I won’t be going into the office or doing much interaction with the outside world. That’s when I can get really dark and depressed — when I spend too much time alone. So I guess what I need to do is just talk about it — tell my friends what’s going on, and maybe make plans to do dinners in dark restaurants every night. Just make sure that people know where I am and what’s going on. I actually feel better about it just having written this. :)

I’ll let you guys know how it goes tomorrow, and maybe we’ll even get photos of my face peeling off (ewwwww!).

Busy day at the office today! I’ve temporarily taken over as the managing editor of RealNetworks’ women’s entertainment property, LillyLikes.com. It’s exciting to have a new opportunity, but it’s also more work on my plate. Luckily, we’re going to get to share and reuse content from Zelda Lily (the similarity in the names is pure coincidence), so I’ll get to work with the women I hired and whom I love, and hopefully help create more opportunities for them. And I’m still looking at other opportunities within the company that I’m pretty excited about.

I had a talk with a friend the other day about how I feel stagnant right now. “We all go through periods like that,” she said. “But something will happen, something external will change, and you’ll feel like you’re moving forward again.” And it was good to think about it like that. When I feel stagnant like this, I tend to think it’s all my fault — I’m not doing something right, I should be doing something more, and I can’t figure out what, and my wheels are just spinning in the mud, so I deem the situation hopeless and get really upset about it. I feel like nothing will ever change for the rest of my life and there’s nothing I can do about it. But her comment helped me to realize that maybe I don’t have to do anything. I mean, as my father loves to say, “90% of success is just showing up.” Obviously I need to continue putting one foot in front of the other and actively pursue opportunities and change, but it’s not all up to me. The world changes. People change, things shift, gaps are created that need to be filled. The universe does this without any help on my part. And the universe will ensure that I am exactly where I need to be, doing exactly what I need to be doing. It’s not all on my shoulders. In fact, very little of it is on my shoulders. All I have to do is show up, the rest will work itself out.

Yesterday was a very boring day. I pretty much slept the entire day, which is what I always think I want to do, but which never turns out to be the best thing for me. I ended up not sleeping much last night, and it didn’t help that my cat Max chose last night to be a total lovebug. By which I mean he sat right on my chest and purred as loudly as possible for the entirety of the night, swatting at my face if I dared stop petting him. And don’t think you can do something as simple as just put Max away in another room — he literally throws himself at the door over and over again until you let him back in. He will do it non-stop for hours.

So whatever, I was hoping to have a not-so-boring day today, since I woke up feeling depressed and lethargic and anxious about having done nothing yesterday. I called one of my girlfriends to see what she was up to, and she was basically mid-crisis. We’ll call her “B” for the sake of her privacy. B is — like me — on psychiatric medication, because — like me — she descends rapidly into fucking insanity without it. But while I have the privilege of fancy health insurance and a father who works in medicine and can always make a phone call when I’m in pinch, B is completely dependent on the state for her health care. She goes through doctors at the county hospital. She’s been trying to get her psych meds refilled for WEEKS now. The psychiatrist told her she first had to see a primary care physician, who had a waiting list of six months, so she got on the waiting list, called the psychiatrist back, and has been basically begging them to give her a refill for awhile now. They have not returned her calls. So last night she was completely out of her meds. She called me this morning — she hadn’t slept all night, she sounded absolutely wrecked, she was just a total mess. And I know from experience how quickly I can lose all contact with reality when I go off these meds cold turkey. But I’ve always made that ill-advised choice myself, not because I didn’t have the meds available. I was furious at her doctor for putting her in this position — it’s absurdly irresponsible.

B doesn’t have a car, so I picked her up and we headed over to Harborview, the county hospital, where I informed her that we were going to make giant pains in the ass of ourselves until she got her meds. This is an approach I find to be effective in these types of situations. We arrived at the county ER around 4pm, and they were relatively quick in admitting her, and then she met with a financial counselor who agreed to waive all fees for her for the next six months, so that was awesome. By around 4:30, they let us into the ward to meet with a doctor. Note that by “ward” I am referring to the psychiatric ward of a county hospital. This is not a pleasant place to be. To their credit, the nurses and doctors were all fantastic and very pleasant, but there was a patient in the room down the hall who INCESSANTLY screamed to herself and at the hospital staff. Mostly it was variations of “I WILL FUCK THAT BITCH UP” and “I’M GONNA FUCK YOU UP!” but occasionally it got interesting, like, she screamed the word “basketball” for awhile, and then played Marco Polo with herself. I recorded parts of it on my iPhone, and it was funny at the time, but on a re-listen, it’s just too desperate and genuinely painful to put on here. There was just such depth to her sadness, and you hear it in her screams. So much pain. B and I both felt toxic being on that ward. Oh, and did I mention they wanted to take away B’s shoelaces? When she was just there to get a med refill? But luckily the head nurse was like, “No, I don’t think we have to worry about her hanging herself in here.” (This conversation was going on while B and I were laughing and playing logic puzzles on my iPhone — that’s how close to suicide we appeared: “IF I CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET THIS GOLF BALL OUT OF THIS PIPE USING ONLY A WATER BOTTLE AND A TENNIS RACKET I SWEAR TO GOD I’M GONNA FUCKING HANG MYSELF!”)

About a half-hour later, the doctor came in. She was very nice. B was only asking for one or two pills, just until she could get a hold of her psychiatrist, but the doctor was like, “That’s silly, I’m going to write you a prescription for a month. It’s much easier to do that right now than to worry about having you come back here for a month-long stay.” Which is SO FUCKING TRUE. Like, the hospital knows B’s history — she’s been on that ward before as a patient. But she’s been on these meds for two years now and has been a totally healthy, happy, normal person. WHY ON EARTH WOULD HER PSYCHIATRIST NOT GIVE HER A REFILL??? It’s mind-blowing to me, the impossible hoops she was supposed to jump through for these pills. Our hospital doctor was very understanding and wrote her a prescription.

But here’s the next part: B needs to get her meds from the hospital. If she takes the scrip somewhere else, she has to pay for it all out-of-pocket. So we wait — ON THE PSYCH WARD — for the pharmacy to send the meds up, because on Sunday the normal pharmacy is closed and now there is only one pharmacist on duty. After an hour of waiting — amidst this woman’s screams of “Sir? SIR? SIIIIIIIIIIRRRRR???? I will FUCK YOU UP!” (I have it all on tape, I swear) — we still didn’t have our meds, so they let us be discharged so we could wait for them in the normal ER waiting area. By 7:30 we were tired of waiting, so we went to meet up with another friend and then came back at 8:45, when they finally had the meds that had been called in at 5:45. Oh, and did I mention that, by that time of night, we had to clear a metal detector to go into the waiting room?

I’m glad my friend can access health care even without health insurance. I’m glad we were able to work within the system to get her those pills she needed. I’m grateful that the hospital waived all fees for her — which she was really nervous about having to pay. These are all aspects of the system that work. I wish it could have happened faster — and we got expedited service because we were psych ER patients. B tells me she waited in that room for 7 hours just a day after having back surgery to try to get pain meds, crying and in excruciating pain, and she was never seen. She finally went home and cried herself to sleep, she tells me.

I don’t understand exactly where the hiccups are in the system, but that waiting room just reeked of desperation. Sad, desperate lives without options. Everyone who worked there was very kind and willing to help, it’s just SO SLOW to get patients seen. Where is the problem? Are there not enough doctors? Are there not enough beds? Where is the bottleneck here and how do we fix it?

And why couldn’t B’s psychiatrist have just given her enough of her meds until she could get in to see this primary care doctor? Why on earth would you risk doing that to a patient, when you know full well what happens to her when she doesn’t take those meds? B’s a smart and competent girl, and she has a strong support system, and so she understood how to go to the ER and get what she needed. But think of the countless patients out there that would be so discouraged by the situation that they just never would have gone back to their doctors and never would have gotten back on their meds, and then a couple weeks later they’re the one being rolled in on a gurney screaming and crying about Marco Polo. Very, very frustrating.

In the end, though, B got her pills, and I had most DEFINITELY not spent the day being bored. If nothing else, this was a very good reminder of where I could be 10 years down the road if I don’t stay on top of my mental health shit — going to my therapist, taking my meds as prescribed, etc. It was a wake-up call that I needed, as I’d been planning in my head already how I was going to taper myself of the Seroquel, because I HATE how tired it makes me. How I don’t even start my day until noon usually, and then I’m tired again by 4. And because I think it’s giving me diabetes. But after seeing all this, what I think I’m going to do instead is talk it over with my doctor and hear what he has to say. Because that is what a normal person would do.

Just checking in so everyone knows I’m alive. My schedule on Thursday and Friday was basically the following: work, work, work, tan, work, work out, work, work, work. My schedule today was the following: Wake up, nap, nap, wake up, nap, nap, dinner with girlfriends, watch movies. Obviously my body needed rest, although I’m afraid I’ll be up all night tonight. Oh well. I’ll watch more movies. :)

My big weekend activity so far has been dyeing my hair extensions black. I had this old pair of clip-in hair extensions that matched my old, brown color, so I thought I could never use them again now that my hair is black. And I didn’t want to make the investment in new ones. But my beloved Stephen reminded me in Idaho that, since they were real human hair, I could dye them to match. So that’s what I did, and now I’m very excited to have hair extensions back. I’ve had fusion hair extensions and clip-in hair extensions, and I MUCH prefer clip-in. That way when I want long hair I can have it, and when I just want easy, short hair I can have that too. Plus fusion extensions pretty much fuck up your hair for a year afterward and hurt SO BAD when you have them taken out.

Anyway. That’s all I have to say for today. I’m going to watch movies now and then sleep until 2 pm tomorrow.