Ouch!

The afternoons are becoming the time when I feel the most awake. I’m practically nonfunctional before 1:00 p.m. I’m also super sensitive, and I’m over reactive to stressful or scary input. I’m not sleeping very soundly, and I’ve been having weird dreams that are waking me up intermittently through the night. My circulation is constantly irregular – at one moment, my upper body will be too hot, but my feet will be freezing. Then at another moment, most of my body will be comfortable, but my hands will be cold. It’s difficult to be anything but irritable.

My ability to focus is limited even when I am awake. I’m having trouble writing – even though I know it will be beneficial for my mental state. Everything seems to happen in a blur, so it’s difficult to focus on any one topic for long enough to create a concise paragraph. I can read short magazine type articles, but not books. I can’t seem to focus long enough to understand the text. My eyes seem to burn when I use them for very long, so I close them often to rest, and then I get sleepy. I know these are all side effects of the new medications, but it’s a challenge to feel anything but frustration.

I’m distracted by two stressors: finding a sub to cover for me at school, and the pit bull that seems to be a resident at the home that is directly next door to us. The sub issue is difficult to deal with because no one wants to commit at this stage of the school year. Full time teaching positions could open up for the better teachers (the ones I’d like to fill in for me), and so it looks like I’m going to have to sweat it out to get hold of someone good.

The pit bull issue is a beast of a different sort. Leave alone the fact that those types of dogs TERRIFY me. I’m not yet comfortable looking at a photograph of one of those types of dogs. But if that dog IS a resident, something I’m too scared to confirm, it’s a resident at the home of a large family day care! What is this world coming to? To me, it simply seems like an accident waiting to happen. It also seems like the universe is NOT going to cut me a break. To quote the lyrics of a Bananarama song from the 1980s, “… It’s a cruel, cruel summer.”