{NOTE: please ignore everything I say below about how outstanding my Wonderpup/Service Dog Cocoa Chanel is. After a cheeseburger/pizza/ baby carrot –filled evening, my lovely girl just now pulled a dish down from the top of the sofa back and wolfed a chocolate CHUNK cookie and would have ingested more if I hadn’t come back from the bathroom right then. Now, of course, I’m furious with myself for leaving it there since chocolate is poisonous to canine-americans, but it’s so much easier to yell at cocoa and order her to her crate… before anyone calls the ASPCA on me, I never allow this to happen and I so rarely raise my voice to my girls that they don't know what’s going on when I do. But if anyone is in the market for an energetic omnivorous Chihuahua/Mini Pincher/ Dachshund mix, please let me know… }

Just to provide an updated visual of myself and the dogs...

This is such a strange time. How strange is it, Theo? :) Well, all of you who have had parents die, parents with whom you didn’t have, well, let’s just say that things weren’t all Beaver Cleaver, or even Wally, at home. And, yes, Virginia, I am that old.

But today I feel blessed. Godiverse backed off a little with the Constant Carp/Crap that is generally my “life” and allowed me some fabulous Abundances and I could not be more grateful. I believe in Gratitude and in expressing it. It doesn’t increase the positive in my life, as it apparently does for Oprah and Sainted Others, but, shit, it can’t hurt, right?

 You see, I don’t remember my lovely childhood, from 2 to age 14. plus I’ve blocked out a huge portion of my adult life. Well, ever since my “mother” died in December, I’ve been getting flashes, flashbacks, whatever, of those adorable years. It’s just a blast, guys. Just a sheer freaking delight.

Okay, and to make everything even more fabulous, well, this is the deal… My meds doc has increased my bipolar meds and I’m doing better and better. I’m off Cymbalta now and slowly weaning off of Bupropion/Wellbutrin… Well, I have not been able to cry for many years now. Only at animal stuff and at tv movies where someone is exceptionally kind to someone else, for no reason, with no agenda. But even then, there were a few tears and that was pretty much it.

I never had any idea that the dry eyes and ocular infections and shit had anything to do with that drug. The attractive sweating and the lack of sex drive? Yes, that connection was extremely clear to me. Come to find out that the Not Crying thing was also a side effect. As my Jewish relatives used to say, Who knew? Right?

So, of course, now, I cry all the time. It’s extremely disconcerting, but it helps to remind myself that this is most likely a decade of pent-up sobbing that’s been itching to get out. The very annoying aspect of all this is that the freaking Wonderpups are not the least bit sensitive to my crying jags. Which is quite ironic considering that Ella alerts me to my panic attacks by jumping on my shins and I trained her to do this based on the time that I was in a shrink’s office and I was in major tears and she jumped on the guy’s shins to get him to stop upsetting me. That’s a lot of what training has been for me, reinforcing behaviors that my canine-americans do naturally.

But the thing is that my girls have not seen this level of emoting since probably that day with the therapist because it’s likely that I’ve been on Cymbalta since that time. Their indifference to my keening and moaning is, to say the least, discouraging, since they are my Service dogs and all that crap/carp.

Shit, I’ve forgotten what else I wanted to talk about. Fuck this getting old bullcrap. My formerly Steel Trap memory is now more of an Aluminum Sieve deal. But that’s a rant for another day.

Oh, I think I was going to share my pretty miraculous appointment this evening with an Actual Therapist who gives a crap/carp and who charges $40 an hour and will slide even further. She’s new in this field, but I’ve done a Michelin guide to shrinks over the decades and I’ve found that someone either has it or he/she doesn’t. A person has empathy and intuition and compassion or a person don’t. Professionals, and I use the term loosely, can have 25 year careers and still be major major major cold-hearted assholes.

Case in point, a few months ago, I went to see a “Bipolar Expert”. Well, this sheer delight of a woman… let me tell you instead. Okay, so I actually thought I had an appointment with her colleague but it was not a big deal to me to be seeing her instead. Well, it was a HUGE thing to her. It was like 7^th grade. She couldn’t get over the fact that I was on her schedule and she didn’t know who I was or who referred me. Could not get past it. So much, in fact, that she had to call her partner and chat and chat and chat about this disturbing development. While I was sitting there waiting for her.

Now, my wondergirls are pretty freaking good about not going potty inside anywhere that isn’t our apartment. Here, they have wee wee pads, but they get it that it is only here that they have this option. Well, interestingly, Cocoa (she’s chocolate-colored”) Chanel immediately went across the room close to where this bitch was talking and peed on her rug. I was astounded and mortified but of course I realized later that my sweetheart “knew” that this was not a decent person and was letting me know. She’d never done this before but she somehow knew that I was dealing with a Major League Asswipe and found a way to alert me. Too bad I didn’t pick up on the signal and bolt out of there.

Well, so, Asswipe says to me, Do you know about Borderline Personality Disorder? Shit, man, do I know about this crap/carp? Give me a fucking break. This was a common and discouraging and demeaning aspect to my life before I was finally diagnosed as Bipolar, not to mention that life is not All or Nothing despite what Major major major Willfully Ignorant Dickheads think. So it’s very possible that I’m Bipolar and also have Borderline behavior due to my Idyllic childhood about which I am delightedly learning more and more since my “mother’s” death.

There was no treatment for Borderline back in the day. Now there is DBT and blah blah blah. So I would be given that diagnosis by lazy shrinks who couldn’t be bothered to talk to me further and written off and dismissed and treated as hopeless and worthless. Sounds just terrific, doesn’t it? So let’s just say that I have a teeny tiny problem with being faced with that diagnosis.

But Douchebag kept telling me that she wasn’t diagnosing me as she kept Diagnosing me. No wonder Cocoa peed on her rug, right? I told her how upsetting I found that Dx and that I wanted her to stop talking about it. Her Asswipe response? “You brought it up.” Pure Junior High, along with the chatting and emotional laziness and just plain cruel mean girl shit.

So she tells me that she has NEVER EVER EVER encountered a Bipolar person who behaves the way that I had. NEVER EVER EVER!!! Are you freaking fucking kidding me????

Well, I had NEVER EVER EVER run into such an insensitive and mean and spiteful “therapist”. Of course I had but please forgive me a tiny bit of hyperbole here because this was at an extremely high level of Asshole-ishness. Very high level, man. And this whole time, Cruella Deville – a Big version of her anyway with her sweater pinned with a safety pin to fit over her protruding belly – is telling me that she is NOT DIAGNOSING ME. now I have no judgment about Large people, believe me. I’ve lost another 10 pounds over the past year, but I’m in the Zaftig category and know all about food and eating challenges.

The thing is that when someone is basically telling you that you are Fucked and that person clearly has ISSUES that are a tad visible to the not so naked eyes, well, it’s a major Pot and Kettle and more situation.

I left there feeling shell-shocked and devastated and like a giant piece of shit. In time I got in touch with my Anger, of course, but when I walked out of her office, I was a figment of the person I was when I walked in.

And I had had several similar encounters over the several months of finally having money on the horizon and finally being able to see someone decent, not even necessarily needing a Sliding Scale person at this point. The level of meanness and ignorance and just plain not kindness that I ran into was pretty freaking horrifying.

So today? To get to spend an hour with a lovely, pretty, hugely empathic and compassionate person who really got it that I had been without an affordable therapist, without ANY THERAPIST, for years and that my “mother” had passed on to Hades and that I was having flashbacks and crying all the time now and just needed to talk and talk and talk for several weeks before addressing my Issues???? I can’t even express the feelings of relief and joy and also huge grief at having been without this level of kindness, actually without any level of kindness, for so many years, which has not been helped by the fact that I am Agoraphobic and rarely get/got out into the World, such as it is.

So of course I walked the Wonderpups down the street and proceeded to eat Mass Quantities of cheeseburger and pizza and beer and everything that the girls and I could get a hold of. Needless to say, my Canine-Americans couldn’t have loved me more. I have rarely been so popular with them.

Now I am emotionally exhausted and cried out, for now. We will see what tomorrow will bring, how many tears and flashbacks and whatever… it’s still today and Cocoa is under the throw on the couch, between my legs, no, not in a sick way, and Ella Fitzgerald is fast asleep beside me and I feel satiated on so many levels.

So thank you, Godiverse, for all of the abundance today, for all of these blessings. And for the knowledge and feeling of safety in the world that comes from knowing that I can vent and vent and vent and cry if I want to again next Friday night at 7 PM. This is especially fortuitous for someone who keeps Vampire hours in order to avoid People and Life, both of which she finds pretty freaking Overrated.

But for tomorrow, onward and upward, right?