Seven weeks since I broke my arm and things have been fairly bad. It wasn’t just the constant pain and the disability. It wasn’t just the house falling down around my ears or the amped up stress at work. .It wasn’t any one more thing or even one more thing on top of that. It was that the one more things just kept on coming, keep on coming and I lost the ability to handle it all.
I live alone.
I have a family that can and will help but at huge emotional cost. (To the point that, after a neighbor helped me up off the concrete I put my arm with three broken bones into a sling made of my shoulder strap purse and drove myself to the emergency room rather than ask for the exhausting help that they could and do give.)
Even broken and in pain, I cannot just take off of work, because I am my sole support and who knows what may happen next that I may not have a choice but to take off of work for.
Beside feeling absolutely awful, I’ve come to look even worse. Balding as I am, I’ve spent years imperfecting a ridiculous updo that takes the volume of my waist long hair from the back, pulls it over the top of my head to the front and covers up a lot of seethrough spots. It’s not exactly fashionable or flattering, but it’s better to have people think you have terrible taste in hairstyles than to have them look at you with pity because you’re balding. Of course, it’s impossible to do an updo, even one not so elaborately engineered as mine, with just one hand. So for the past seven weeks I’ve been having to wear a bandana over my hair. Not a sporty bandana thing with bangs hanging out the front and the length hanging down my back, but a cover it all, absolutely everything up, because I can’t wash or even brush my hair myself.
I’ve stopped going out except as absolutely necessary for work and medical appointments. And, twice a week, I go to the hair place to pull off the bandana, get my hair washed, pulled back, braided and pinned up, before putting the bandana back on.
I work at a catholic school. I wear my hair completely covered up by a bandana. People, adult type people with no brains at all, call me Sister Mack several times a day. It isn’t half so funny as they think it is. It’s freaking devastating. I’ve lost any semblance of humour on the subject. I’ve had moments where I’ve had to put on a grimace that can be mistaken for a smile and turn away because the incident has just triggered another attack of the weeps.
Oh, yes. The damned weeps. The hair stuff is not the only trigger. I don’t even know what the trigger is half the time, but I get the weeps all the time.
Actually, I started this entry to say that I was feeling better, was thinking maybe time and physical therapy are helping me to recover and get through the first time in my life when I’ve actually admitted to myself that, yes, this maybe is what depression feels like.
Except, I started talking about the hair and I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the computer screen and now I’ve got the weeps again.
I think I’ll let myself off the hook of trying to turn this entry around.
I’ll just close up for now, get myself under control again, and write a better one
later.
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