Lots in My Head

I have to get all this out otherwise I won't be able to get any sleep.

I have been sick with a very bad cold this whole week -- maybe that is causing my depression, maybe not. But it really sucks to be sick. I'm feeling like I have made a bad decision by choosing to work at the hospital. There is so much to learn and pick up on as you go that it is really overwhelming me. I feel very stressed and like I'm in survival mode every time I'm there. Literally in survival mode. It's stressing me out big time. It's not just IV's -- it's juggling the outpatient pharmacy tasks as well; it's restocking the machines on every floor of every department and in every operating room; it's remembering to check on various things periodically; it's all the exceptions to specific rules and protocols. I don't know how I'll ever master this. I just feel like a deer caught in the headlights all the time, and I don't like it.

My dad has become very hard to deal with lately. I know he is stressed out about his business; that is absolutely no reason to be as difficult as he has been. He is very disagreeable and he takes it out on my mom, which I am not okay with. This morning she was giving him a ride to the train station so he could go to a conference; apparently, she made a wrong turn, and he got very angry and grabbed her arm. That is NOT okay. She is furious with him and I can't blame her. He has no business doing that-- not when she has stood by him 99% of the time. Not when she held down the fort and kept the family together in out darkest time while he was a professor staying late working at the university or attending conferences with his students. He owes his success to the fact that she put her life on hold for him during the 90s. He has no business -- NONE WHATSOEVER -- being a total **** to her. He has always been like this to an extent. In the early aughts on a vacation, we got in a big fight. I said something that, admittedly, I shouldn't have said. But then, he lost his temper completely and throttled me. My mom did not call child services or the police or whoever one calls in those situations, because she did not want it to tear our family apart. She took me to stay with my grandma for the remainder of the vacation. I remember feeling very resentful that this whole incident was completely shoved under the rug. I told her this several years later, and I told her the reason I felt that way was because it completely invalidated what had happened to me. I mean, come on... my dad just ****ing throttled me. I just remember that one minute we're yelling at each other, the next minute his hands are around my throat and he's shaking me vigorously.

A lot of that happened to me in my adolescent and teenage years -- I guess these days, it would be called gaslighting. Some of it was probably due to my parents' lack of knowledge and poor understanding of the situation, some of it was my mom trying not to make things worse for the sake of our family. Either way, I am still mad about it because I feel like completely valid issues I experienced or noticed within our family were just automatically chalked up to my mental illness. Basically, it was all in my head or all because I had mental health issues. Sweeping all the **** under the rug has pissed me off for awhile now. Because, frankly, my dad IS a difficult person. Depression DOES take a long time to recover from, if that's even a correct term for it. Often you don't fully recover, you just learn to manage it and ride the waves and troughs.

One of the worst things is, I don't have any desire to eat right now. I mean, that is the point of me taking Zepbound, obviously; but how to do I handle all these feelings??? I suppose getting them out on here is a decent start, because it's about the only place I can share them. I just know I have to work tomorrow and Sunday, I'm still not feeling 100%, my dad is an asshole, and although I side with my mom predominantly, I still resent her for how she handled a lot of things when I was growing up. Because the fact is, she never set any boundaries with him. Ever. Again, he is a full-grown adult and should know better, and he should have better self-control than he does (or any self-control, for that matter). But my mom also needed to advocate for herself, for me, etc. She's never been good at confrontation. It's too late now.

I should go to bed. I wish things could just be simple.