Dear Saffron;

I’m afraid sometimes/ you’ll play lonely games too,/ games you can’t win,/ because you’ll play against you”
                                                                                              – Dr. Seuss

This quote by Dr. Seuss fits perfectly with what I feel a lot of the time in regards to L. It’s hard watching her suffer. And most of the time she suffers in silence. She is very good at hiding what she really feels. A lot of the time I feel like I don’t know what’s going on in her head.

***
January 3, 2009

Happy New Year!

I was interrupted mid-post and so I will continue on…

Things are looking up. I did well on my LSAT. And L and I are on our way home from a 2 week holiday in Mexico with her parents. She is doing better, but still not great. All she talks about is how much she hates life and doesn’t want to be going back to school. I keep telling her that if she doesn’t feel like she can handle school that she should talk to her parents. They have already offered to take her out of school if she is so inclined. Then she just started whining about how life isn’t fair and if she was normal everything would be a hundred times better.

There is no reasoning with her.

Apparently this is normal.

I hate it.

Dear Saffron;

I find myself in another bad situation. L has gone home to stay with her family and see her own doctor. She has made arrangements to write her finals in January. I’m only mildly jealous. I, on the other hand, seem to have screwed myself over yet again. I haven’t finished my final assignment for one of the classes that I need to graduate. This is the class that suffered the most while L was still here and I was trying to help her with her depression. I’ve talked to the prof and basically I have told her all about my situation but… it isn’t looking very good for me. Why do I let this happen to me?

On the postive size, I have lost a bit of weight. Nothing really noticeable but I feel better about myself. Hopefully I can continue with that. Especially since I am going to Mexico with L for Christmas. Can’t wait!!

Back to me ranting about the badness in my life. I feel like I am going to have an panic attack. That’s why I’m writing. Whenever I feel a panic attack coming on, I start writing and it calms me… makes the anxiety go away. I think that’s one reason why I love writing so much. It’s weird. I didn’t think that I would ever be comfortable sharing online, but I love that fact that no one close knows that I have a blog.

I wrote the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) this morning. I think that I did pretty good one it. I answered all the questions. Some people that wrote this morning, apparently had trouble with judging the time. I wonder if I should be worried…

Well, I guess I should get to bed. Hopefully I will be able to sleep now. So tired.

Love, A

Dear Saffron;

Today is not a great day. L is slipping back into her depression and I don’t know how to handle it this time. Everything seems so much more difficult this time. Maybe it’s because I didn’t live with her last semester and now I notice how draining she is.
I want to help her, I really do. But L isn’t willing to help herself and that makes it even more difficult for me. How can I help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, but openly whines and complains about how bad her life is? Maybe I’m just not supposed to. I’m so confused…

L also hates Christmas. Anytime I say anything about Christmas, I get shot down. I am sick of it. I’ve told again and again that I don’t like her saying things like that, but she never gets it. I am a Christian. I go to church regularly and I am active in my church community. I celebrate Christmas mostly it is about Jesus’ birth. I love the story, the lights and decorations, I love the food and the music. And of course I love the presents. But for me, Christmas isn’t about the presents. It’s about my family and it’s about Jesus. L is half Jewish. But she doesn’t live in a kosher house or follow any of the rules. It’s only her religion when a test falls on a high holiday. That way she can use the religion excuse to not write it. Why should she be able to tell me when I can or can’t listen to Christmas music, or when I can say Merry Christmas? I am so angry over this.

I am also struggling to get my schoolwork done. L keeps annoying me and interrupts me non-stop. Bah! I have exams in 2 days, I don’t have time for this.

Oh, Saffron, I wish that L could/ would go back to being the girl she was when I first met her. Fun-loving and open.

Love, A

Dear Saffron:

I’m lost in the drama of someone else’s life.

I live with a good friend, lets call her L, who is depressed. By depressed I mean the ‘taking-meds-to-survive-never-happy’ kind. I know that a lot of people won’t agree with that description, but it describes what I live with to a T. To make things even tougher, L and I are both undergraduate students at university.

I’ve known L for 5 years. We met in first year. It took a couple of weeks of constant hanging out before she confided in me that she was depressed. I was wowed. I had never before known someone who was medically depressed and took drugs for it. This didn’t stop us from becoming best friends. BFFs. I hadn’t had a friend like L before. She was brutually honest about anything that I asked about: how had she been depressed; what meds she took; what it felt like to be depressed; had she tried to take her own life; anything I wanted to know and she would tell me. It was eye opening. And let’s face it, the sharing wasn’t a one way street. I came from a rural area, she came from a big city. She had tons of questions for me too. We bonded over being honest with each other… of course we had similar likes and dislikes and we were in a bunch of the same classes.

In second year, half-way through the first semester, L got sick and the university clinic doctor prescribed antibiotics for her. She ended up having to go home and withdrawing from her courses because the antibiotics caused her anti-depressants to stop working. She crashed. Hard. I didn’t let this end our friendship. I called everyday, I sent her cards; I did anything I could think of to let her know that I was still here, thinking about her.  Before she had left, L and I were as close as any sisters could be. Her going home didn’t really change that. When she finally returned to school, I was more than ready to pick up where we had left off. It was then that I learned that L wasn’t the same fun loving L that she had been. She was different: more quiet, less sure of herself. I adapted to the ‘new’ her. I didn’t care what she was like, I was just glad that she had come back to school. Third and fourth year were full of fun and friends. It was great.

This is our fifth year together, and I have to say it has been the hardest so far. L and I seem to be drifting apart. It isn’t that I don’t love her, my family practically adopted her, it’s that she takes advantage of the fact that I consider her family. L knows that I would do anything for her. It has gotten to the point where I just don’t want to be around her. Then I remember that she is my best friend and would always be there for me. Today the clinic doctor told L that she is dysfunctional and has no coping skills. And it is true, she can’t function by herself. And she really has no coping skills. It was just pointed out to me that I enable her destructive behavior of not getting herself help when she clearly needs it. I am apparently supposed to bust out the hard love routine. How do I tell someone that I consider to be a sister that I will only willing to help her if she is willing to get herself help? How do I look her in the eyes and say no?

I don’t think that I can.

But, her problems are taking over my life. My school work is slipping because I am so concentrated on what she is doing with her life. I am so overwhelmed with making sure that she has everything she needs to function, that I forget to look after myself. I just don’t know what to do. But I know that I have to something. I can’t continue on like this.

Anxiously waiting,
A