I was in such a fucking funk all last week… Seriously, I’m talking a funk of such massive proportions that I couldn’t even get excited when one of my closest friends from the UK said she was moving to the US… It literally took me all week to figure out what the fuck was going on with me and when I figured it out, I ended up losing my shit and calling my sister in tears. I was having a mid-life crisis… Yes, a belated one as I just turned 49, but a mid-life crisis nonetheless, and I had absolutely no fucking clue what to do or how to handle it.

This was also on a Friday, the day my mother comes to visit… I tried talking to her because, you know, she’s older than me, she’s been there, done that. I was hoping for words of wisdom, but she had nothing to offer and literally cut me off and began telling me how her sponge of a boyfriend had been annoying her that morning. I was pretty much emotionally and mentally exhausted by that point and sick of the both of them, so I calmly told her, “He’s a sponge, mom… I’ve been telling you he was a sponge since you moved him in when I was 12. Nothing has changed. He was a sponge then; he’s a sponge now. You need to give him something to do around the house because he doesn’t do anything.” I don’t think she liked it, but she didn’t get angry. I think she knew I was right…

There were a lot of things that kind of led up to my realizing I was having a mid-life crisis and the subsequent not giving a fuck what I said to anyone after the fact. This particular song was not a large part of it but it was part of a playlist I made entitled “Music To ‘Meh’ By” that I’d been listening to for days as I worked on my latest drawing, so I’m sure it didn’t help… Anyway… I had been reflecting on my life and exactly how fucked up it really was. My “father” (for lack of a better term) the pervert who I thankfully saw little of after he left when I was not quite 9. My mother, the neglectful one who forgot I existed, once in particular because she was playing Missile Command on the Atari 2600 and was almost at a million points. The verbally and emotionally abusive sponge she moved in when I was 12. The beatings she herself would give me on occasion after he moved in… Then, in a weird twist, she denied my desire to go to college so I could stay home, get dead end job after dead end job to help her support the perpetually under or unemployed sponge who had been abusive to us both for so many years. Hell, the last time she attempted to hit me, I was 26 years old! I told her go ahead and hit me, just as long as she knew that, if she did, I was going to hit her right the fuck back. That was the last time she even attempted it… The sponge, however, still thinks it’s okay to be verbally and emotionally abusive towards me at 49 even though I haven’t lived with them in well over 20 years. How fucked is that…

I had been doing a lot of reflecting on my life… Surprise, that’s me at 19 on the right in the top picture. I was skinny as fuck, but I was shaped like a Barbie doll, huh? The bottom one was me at 22, not much different… Sometimes I look at those and think, “What the fuck happened to that girl? The one that had ambitions, hopes, dreams… the one who had plans for a future?” I wish I could go back in time and smack her skinny ass around and show her, “This is what will happen if you don’t get the fuck away from your mom and the sponge. I don’t care how you do it, just fucking do it!!!” Now I’m old (well, I’m a bit beyond middle-aged). The Barbie figure is gone, the smooth skin is gone… The ta-tas that once stood up by themselves have fallen victim to the effects of gravity, aging and menopause, just like everything else. And my life in general… I just feel very unfulfilled. It’s nothing that any job is going to help. I’m only qualified to do dead end jobs, secretarial work and work as a nurse’s aid. And while I liked some of those jobs, they never made me feel fulfilled. It just wasn’t what I needed to do.

I thought it might help if I did a little reorganizing… I had two shelving units a friend was storing until I had place for them and I finally had them brought in. Of course that didn’t come without its problems… Problem number one was that they were being stored in a garage that, apparently, birds were getting into and I was finding bird shit splatter that I had to clean off the shelves. That was fun… Then came the other issue. It’s a bit hard to organize your things when your cat sees this as an opportunity to claim a new space for himself. Yes, Sebastian decided that organizing was apparently a waste of time and I should just surrender this shelving unit to him and make it a cat condo. He did something similar when I had to get a new microwave… I put the new one down where the old one had been and when I went to put whatever had been on top of the old one on the new one (mostly it’s my meds and whatnot), I found I couldn’t do it because Sebastian had sprawled out across the entire top of the new microwave… You know, I’ve lived with cats for 45 years of my life and I still have no fucking idea why they do this… As soon as you get any new household item, they need to go on or in it like you bought it for them. You don’t need storage space…

Then Haiku decided to get in on this action for some stupid reason… You can imagine how interesting that was. There were paws flailing at each other between the shelves, batting at one another… I let them have their fun for a little while before handing them both their eviction notices so I could do what I needed to do.

Sometimes, when I’m in a funk, just changing my environment helps immensely. Sometimes I organize, sometimes I move knickknacks, sometimes I rearrange furniture. It may not sound like a big deal, but often times that small change can really change your outlook on things and get you out of a funk. That’s what I was hoping for in this case. So I took an entire day and, after cleaning all the bird shit splatters off certain areas off both the shelving units and having a germaphobe moment, I went to work organizing the things I had to organize. It was no small feat… I kept getting interrupted by messages, phone calls (mostly from Morticia) and the animals who were all annoyingly curious as to what I was putting in the drawers or up on the shelves. Especially the dogs… Everything had to be sniffed thoroughly before being placed anywhere.

And here’s the end result (minus what’s in the drawers and on the other shelf on the right). As you can see… I had a fuck ton of canvas. My sister has been doing this thing at Christmas for years where it’s like she just stopped putting thought into my gifts altogether. So for years I’ve been getting the same gifts: a pack of canvases, a small set of paints and a pack of new brushes. The only thing that changes is the size of the canvas, how many are in each pack, what types of paints she gets me (lately it’s been watercolors for some reason when I paint with acrylics) and the types of brushes in the packs. But literally it’s the same gift… And I don’t paint, or draw, as much as I used to because I’m just not inspired (thanks, antidepressants). I needed somewhere to store all these canvas packs and this was the perfect place. Plus I have a shelf for sketchbooks and watercolor paper (which I bought for the paint) and the drawers are filled with the other art supplies like pencils, pens, the small paint sets, brushes… The bottom drawer has coloring books, the ones people buy as a means of relaxation, the adult coloring books. Yes, sometimes I just like to color because it really is relaxing… Anyway, the bottom shelf I decided to use as a makeshift meditation alter. I just kind of threw it together haphazardly, to be honest. I’m not happy with it at all… I just think I could have done a better job. And something seems to be missing from it. Plus I don’t feel it’s big enough. It’s cramped into this tiny little closed in space. I think it really needs to be in a larger, more open area. And it needs a cloth or something. I don’t know… That part I’m not happy with at all… Still, when it was all said and done, I felt a sense of accomplishment because I finally took care of something I’d been neglecting and everything looked so much better. But did I feel fulfilled? Nope… I don’t know that I thought I would, actually. I think I was just hoping to lift the funk.

And so here I sit… still feeling unfulfilled, still not knowing why I suddenly felt like everything in my life was wrong and I had to change every single aspect of it. And still not knowing how to fix what I’m feeling…

It’s funny… They have a fucking hotline for people in all sorts of crisis. Thinking of killing yourself? In an abusive relationship? Are you a teenager having a tough time with the ‘rents because, as DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince once said “Parents Just Don’t Understand“? Are you a gambler, alcoholic, drug abuser and don’t know how to stop? Are you attracted to the same sex and don’t know how to tell your family? Hey, they’ve got a hotline for it all! Okay, I don’t know about that last one, but they probably do. But going through a mid-life crisis? Fuck you, you don’t need a hotline even though it’s called a crisis… right? That’s what therapy is for! Yup, that’s what all that expansive therapy is for and, if you’re having a crisis and can’t talk to your therapist for another week, too bad for you, then. I should start my own hotline…

Honestly, I don’t know what to do… I’m not even sure why this is happening now. Normally people go through their mid-life crisis around 40. So either I’m a late bloomer, I’m going to live to be 100… or I was having this issue a lot longer than I thought and was just ignoring it. Now I can’t ignore it anymore. It’s out there, lurking about… And I don’t know how to make it go away or fix it.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see the me I am today. And sometimes I can see the young woman I once was and wonder what in the blue fuck happened to her. Granted, the Snapchat filter did smooth my skin, but I honestly don’t have many wrinkles. It’s just that my skin doesn’t velvety like this. I certainly have a lot less wrinkles and gray hair than other people my own age. Sometimes I see other people at 49 and wonder how much chlorine is in their gene pool because they look more like 149… I still look like me; I just look like a slightly older version of me… without cool eye makeup like this… Okay, I know you’re all wondering, “What the fuck, Jackie?! You hate showing yourself!” Well, aside from the fact that it was relevant to today’s topic of rant… I just really like this Snapchat picture because I like the eye makeup. It’s so retro!

Whatever comes of this mid-life crisis, the only thing I have to do is not lose sight of myself and who I am. That’s the thing I have to keep focused on. I may need to change certain aspects of my life, but I still need to remember who I am and never lose sight of her. Right…?

Oh, I have no fucking idea… I don’t know what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling… My therapist is going to love me at our next session… Sometimes I think I frustrate him. He’s often told me I’m intelligent. I don’t know if that’s a compliment or a complaint. I think it’s both… I think it makes his job more difficult, that’s certain. The more intelligent the person, the more difficult it is to manipulate their mind into correct thinking. Maybe that’s why he sighs a lot… I’m sure he’ll be doing that more often the next time I meet with him. That’s alright; I rather enjoy being frustrating…