Hey, Miss J!

I suppose I could say I’ve been in a rotten mood all day now?

For the most part.

The day started off so nicely too… but today, I felt like my psychiatrist wasn’t really listening to me. She doesn’t try to rush me out of her office normally, but it felt like that today. So, I felt annoyed after my appointment. She also raised my mood stabilizer to the maximum dosage…

Now I’m on an antidepressant that’s a high dose, and a mood stabilizer at the highest dose used for therapy.

I felt even more agitated speaking with my case worker today.

I was angry on the drive to get my medication and the return drive back. Then, I kept falling asleep while speaking with my case worker. I think he was concerned.

I am too. I’m apparently turning into a half conscious wherever kind of girl, and that’s really not my style. At least I got a ride home from him though.

I went to watch “My 600LB Life” while cleaning my bedroom. That went fairly well, but now I have a pile of things that are meant for the office. I did half of my office cleaning today, stumbled onto my mom’s personnel file from the late 70s.

I’m actually… upset about what I read in there. All this time, one of my relatives tried to paint my mom as someone who did simplistic work and tried to make her sound incompetent. Mom never tried to correct that assessment. All of her paperwork from the 70s and 80s though… She kept getting commendations and promotions. She was allowed access to dispense civilian and military pay checks.

She was vice chair I think of a particular division that was primarily composed of women in her department.

She had so much reach and influence… and so much pressure.

… Now I’m grateful that I mentioned her occupation and degree in her obituary.

I hung on to some of the paperwork. Didn’t need all of it. But those certificates… One had her picture on it.

I feel like something precious was stolen away from me. I never thought to ask my mom about anything she did… because I didn’t want to upset her.

My grandparents were never braggadocios over what they did for a living, even though they were making a lot of money.

The one who is a braggart is that relative who spoke so poorly of my mother. She also told me that my grandparents and mom were lower middle class. That was ALSO a lie! I found their paystubs to prove that. And my maternal grandfather worked three jobs… I don’t know how often I have expressed how much I hate it when people lie to me… especially about important things like this.

Digging further down in my little milk crate, I found a fat manilla envelope dating back to 2000-2001. Turns out, it was something I’d written when I was just starting high school (I think?). It was 23 years ago… I wasn’t even 14 yet, I don’t think…

I’ve already had to unpack the necessity to rid myself of improper artwork and writings that I’ve made. As a writer, it is painful to destroy your own work, but the weight lifted off my conscience makes up for it.

However, this pack of paper was a two-part novel. A romance novel.

A sexually explicit romance novel. Graphically so. With liberal cursing too. I kept smacking myself in the forehead.

It’s not the first time I’ve rediscovered writings of a sexual nature either. There were some from when I was eight years old.

Now the big question would be: WHY WOULD A CHILD WRITE THAT?! Right??

So, I was sitting there reading that… I must admit, the dialogue left a bit to be desired, but it resembled what I wrote in 2008, 2010 and 2016. Things just grew more detailed as the years went on.

Now, 20+ years on, I cringe at the idea of a sexually detailed anything. I don’t do that in my writing at all now. You can always be entertaining as a writer when dealing with couples without it turning into a festival of fluid-swapping. Doing that required me to not be in the right mindset at all… then I would end up feeling disgusting afterwards.

But that was only in later years.

Into the shredder it went. I still have the document somewhere on a thumb drive. I’ll be deleting it as soon as I figure out where it is.

Now, I’m so grossed out with myself that I’ll postpone working on my assignment which is DUE TOMORROW. And get up earlier to do it. And just go to sleep. And try to dream of a world where my mind was never so corrupted. I told the case worker today that I felt disgusting sometimes because of my past.

~J. Lyst

If you think I’m exaggerating, I am not. That thing read through as if ‘author’ was writing from experience.