Full Psycho; or, Weekends With Crazy

People, this past weekend was seriously intense.

For starters, I think I finally learned firsthand about the Clomid Crazies. All week, I'd been feeling so cheerful and optimistic and pumped about getting back into writing and taking pleasure in crafting stories again. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I was overwhelmed with anxiety. Friday morning, I finished a book I really, really liked by a relatively new author and was filled with this strange mixture of self-loathing shame and reckless ambition. I careened between hating myself for even thinking I should write when I would never compare to this author and spurring myself on to write more and more frequently because her book was such an inspiration.

I even e-mailed the author to let her know how in awe I am of her talent and (as her bio mentioned she is also a doctoral student as well as a writer) to ask her for some time-management tips. (And she wrote back the loveliest, kindest, and most helpful e-mail the next day, so now I adore/hate her even more!)

And from there, my mental state just fell off a cliff. For the rest of the day, I was either sitting on the kitchen floor sobbing about my lack of talent, my idiotic self-sabotage of my writing career, and my total worthlessness as a human being or I was running around the apartment, pulling out old manuscripts and books on writing and frantically e-mailing everyone I ever knew who could help me with my career (i.e., "Hi editor at prominent publishing house who offered to take a look at my book two years ago when we chatted at an industry event. Remember me? No? Wanna read my book anyway? I'm finally ready to stop being a chicken-shit and send it to you!")

My emotions were utterly out of my control. Lawyer Guy and I had plans for dinner and a movie that night, but as I spent most of dinner fighting tears, he begged that we just go home afterward. I could not understand why I was feeling and acting this way when only a few days before I'd been suffused with a calm and steady sort of ambition and a willingness to take each step as it came.

Then I remembered: Clomid. I was bumped up to 150 mg this cycle. I had no anxiety on it before, but this utterly manic and uncontrolled behavior is so not like me, I have to believe it stems from the drug (the anxiety is all too familiar, unfortunately). Once I realized that, my panic subsided a bit. I no longer felt like I was a victim of my emotions, and things have been better since.

I'm still writing and still feeling hopeful about my writing (when I'm not feeling worthless, as I mentioned before, but I think that's the inevitable pendulum for any sort of artistic endeavor). My long-term critique partner and I had a phone chat on Saturday and agreed that we're both fully rededicated to the quest for publication. I've worked out a writing/academic research schedule that will take me to the end of the summer, at which point I'm hopeful I'll have both a dissertation prospectus ready for approval and some quality manuscripts I feel excited about shopping around. I wonder if I have any talent and if my work will ever live up to the books that exist in my head. But writing is the hardest and most miserable thing I have ever loved to do, so I don't have much of a choice. I can either half-heartedly write, not succeed, and always wonder what I could have done or go all out and fail spectacularly and, if I'm lucky, improve a little with each year and each book.

The rest of the weekend was calmer, if still emotionally strained. I wrote and finally finished my grading from last semester. LG and I had dinner at our friends' place where I drank just a little too much for the sake of my head at Sunday morning's 7 am monitoring appointment in Manhattan. I had a hot date with Wandy, who revealed some promising developments but nothing definitive yet, and then yesterday afternoon I went to a NYC-area blogger meet-up at the home of the hilarious Jay of The Two Week Wait. I got to meet Jay and The Infertility Doula and Lady Pumpkin along with another area blogger (who's an actual real-life friend of mine, so she and I don't read each other's blogs). All of the women were funny and lovely and we had a great brunch and a chat about all this crazy place we find ourselves in. I hope we can meet again!

So now I'm back to the familiar patience of cycling. The IUI will likely be this week, with more waiting to follow. But despite my emotional eruption on Friday, I've been feeling more calm about IUI#3 than any of the previous. It helps that I've got such thrilling and engrossing things to think about these days: I spent all my waiting time at the clinic yesterday working through a thorny plotting problem in one of the books I'm mentally figuring out right now. I hope I can spend the two-week wait similarly occupied, and that if this cycle ends in a failure like the others, I can cheer myself up with the thought of an extra month of writing time nine months in the future.

Wasting My Time in the Bagel Line; or, More Messages From My Subconscious

On Monday, after much dithering, I mailed Clueless Preggo the book and card I had decided to send her to explain why I haven't been a very involved friend since she announced her pregnancy just about a month ago. It felt good. I love scratching another item off my to-do list, and I was glad to get these feelings off my chest and unburden myself to her. I didn't write the note expecting any particular response nor did I even want one. Or so I told myself.

Early this morning I had another one of my patented "Hello Sloper, Allow Me to Tell You How You Really Feel" dream messages from my subconscious. Such a pesky subconscious I have, never letting me hang out happily in denial.

I dreamed I was at Clueless's birthday party (which she didn't celebrate this year thanks to the pregnancy). We were on a rooftop balcony, her friends and family and I, but the only people I recognized in the crowd were her and her husband. She was pregnant, of course, and we were talking and the whole time I was wondering if she'd received my letter and what she thought of it and why she hadn't said anything about it and if I should bring it up. As she was called over to blow out her candles, I sheepishly asked if she'd gotten my note. "Oh, yeah," she said in an off-handed manner and walked away.

Later, she and her husband were giving me a ride home, and when we stopped at a red light, she got out to go stand in the median of the road for some reason (dream logic, remember). Alone in the car with me, her husband told me that Clueless didn't mean to hide her pregnancy for so long, but that she forgot that it would be a sensitive subject for me that needed to be dealt with delicately. Then I woke up.

It was about 5:30 am, and I lay there with that icky discomfort that follows an unpleasant dream, a mix of anxiety and frustration and restlessness. I realized that she either received my note yesterday or will have it delivered today. And I wondered what she will think and what she will do, if anything. And I didn't like wondering. I realized that I am incredibly angry with her, and for an incredibly unfair reason. I realized that she doesn't deserve to be pregnant when I'm not. That she hasn't earned this pregnancy the way I have (and, yes, this flies in the face of everything I've written previously about how we don't "earn" babies, but it was that kind of morning) through sadness and suffering and horrible, horrible waiting. I've been in this bagel line for sixteen G.D. months and she just cut right to the front. And now they're making her bagel and slathering it with cream cheese and piling on the tomatoes and I'm standing here eating my own fingernails I'm so hungry.

At that point, I realized I was crazy. Hungry and crazy. And then I did something very stupid.

You see, Clueless is an infrequent Facebook user and hasn't posted a single thing about her pregnancy, despite being 5-6 months along. On the one hand, I'm grateful to her for that, grateful to avoid the gut punch of logging in and tracking her progress week by week. And yet, knowing that she was going to learn the gender back in May and knowing the only way to find out the gender was to ask her and knowing that I did not want to ask her anything at all about being pregnant--well, all I can say is that being both incredibly nosy and incredibly passive-aggressive and avoidant makes life difficult for me.

But lying awake in the morning light, I suddenly remembered: baby registries! Surely she is registered by now, especially now that she knows the gender. And I can look it up and find out what she's having and never have to talk to her about it at all! Brilliant, right?

Wrong. But I did it anyway. I registry-stalked my friend at 6 am. I found out they are investing in primarily gray and red items--car seat, high chair, bibs and bath toys. But there, toward the bottom of the registry, were a little pink hat, a little pink onesie, and a lavender romper.

She's having a girl.

This doesn't make me feel good.

I am officially a crappy friend.