Finding routines

So, it’s four days into the school year and I’ve already decided it is going to be seriously harder to write every day when I’m working.  Dammit!

August is a hard month, I’ve decided.  I think last year I thought it was just because I was in the middle of a new diagnosis, and a million meds, and tests, AND BUYING A HOUSE!

But that didn’t happen this year, and August still sucks.

I think it is the disruption of our routines.

August is the anniversary of T’s death, so it throws both Sir and me for an emotional loop.  It is the transition back to work for both Sub Brother and me which means a major change in our daily routines.  It is still summer, so light isn’t helping mania for me.  It is hot and I’m working under fluorescent lights again instead of natural sunlight, which causes me problems…

And… all my routines, and our routines as a family… go to complete shit.

I can’t handle my life without routines.

And Sir isn’t as able to enforce things because he’s struggling.  We don’t have any momentum because we’re all in a transition period.  And it just sucks.

I need routines back.  Soon.

I’m trying to get my classroom routines established, which, you know, is hard because… we’re only four days in.  Our normal schedule doesn’t even start until next Monday.  I don’t even know all the kids I will have in my second block until the end of this week.  AND we have district testing this week (Nice, district, really good timing!)

So I don’t have routines at work.  And then we don’t have our routines at home.  Our summer routines are gone.  And our school year routines aren’t up yet.  And I feel like everything is freefall and scrambling.

Tonight I went grocery shopping after work because we literally had no food in the house except three bottles of salad dressing, random hot dog condiments, and wilted spinach and parsley.  So I went shopping.  On a TUESDAY!  Tuesday is not shopping day!  This is madness!

We did laundry yesterday… ON A MONDAY!

And I’m having dreams of being condemned to imprisonment in a hole, which fills up with water because it’s raining, but they won’t let me leave the hole, so I decide to kill myself…

I’m not suicidal.

I just had a dream where that seemed the only way to escape a slow death by exposure or illness from living in a hole full of water and my own waste.

I woke up.  Went back to sleep.  And had a dream that my mom decided to move to a remote island for the rest of her life and never see me again.

Woke up.

Went back to sleep (I’m a slow learner).

Dreamed that my students were all adults and I didn’t know any of their names so I couldn’t correct them so they all ignored me and destroyed the classroom and my vice principal was marking me down on my evaluation for having no classroom control… and I kept telling her they were freaking adults and I didn’t know their names, and she said, “Well that’s your responsibility…”

I get along fine with my vice principal.  My mom has expressed no intention of moving anywhere… and fuck knows what the hole was about.  I actually climbed out of the hole because I decided it was stupid to stay in a hole full of water and germs and mud.  I went into my house, where my dad was sleeping (alive) and took a shower.  Then a cop showed up at the door and said I had to go back in the hole because I had committed some crime… but some other guy had been with me and committed a more serious crime, I’d been given a lighter sentence, so he was sent to jail, I had to live in a hole.

I thought that was unfair because the other guy got to be in jail and be dry and warm and sleep in a bed and get fed.  I had to stand in this hole in water to my neck and have no food or bathroom and just mud and germs and water.

I palmed a piece of sharp metal to cut my wrists when I went back into the hole.  I told the cop, very sincerely, that I was going to die in the hole, and he, very nicely, told me that he couldn’t do anything about that because it was the law.  So I had to go back into the hole.

I’m still disturbed by this dream.

I need a drug that stops dreams.

I need my fucking routines back!

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