Night and Day, Interrupted

Since October, I've been working on the night shift (11-6, sometimes 7), and have had to figure out how to cope. Worse, I've had more family members move in, and not all of them understand the meaning of the word "quiet". Plus, even when I did get to sleep, those nights off became a bitch, too. Sure, I'd catch up on sleep, watch TV, and do some chores, but then I had to figure out how to fill the remaining five or six hours a night. That in itself became a problem.


No one tells you when you accept a job on the graveyard shift that you risk a crippling depression. You have little exposure to sunlight, and when you do, you're even more sensitive to it, mostly because you're no longer used to that. So, you find yourself slowly shutting in. You don't see any natural light, and you slowly lose Vitamin D, which aids in, among other things, bone density, and your overall mood. You lose contact with a lot of your friends and family, owing to the new set of hours. Things seem to move on without you. Then you feel even worse.


Plus, the only person who was helpful was three counties away, "T". He used to work this very shift, and he had some suggestions: Get plenty of sleep. Take vitamin supplements. Get sunlight whenever you can. Watch funny stuff on TV on your nights off, to alleviate the boredom and the depression. Fill your time. Some of this helped; some didn't. 


I'm now supposed to go to the local non-profit mental health clinic, after a recent outburst. I began to express intense rage at my own family (don't get me wrong; some of them have it coming---get a job, assholes, or else shutdafucup), and I checked myself into the hospital. I missed a couple of nights at work, one of them at the behest of my boss, who only heard, "Police...ambulance...hospital..." whenever she called to speak to me when I called out. I was in hysterics, incoherent. 


Then I was sitting in the ER, with a perky blonde nurse staring at me. She sat in pastel scrubs, legs daintily crossed, utterly bored. I stared back, slumping in my favorite oversized sweat shirt, nose running, slightly offended that Nurse Barbie was the one who drew the short straw. Hell, in "Girl, Interrupted", Winona Ryder got Whoopi Goldberg to watch her! Where was my Whoopi? 


The EMT told me that there was TV in my ER room (a recent addition to the local hospital, to trick patients into not realizing how long they'd been there---I ended up there over six and a half hours, myself), so I grabbed the remote...which didn't have batteries. I consigned myself to manually turning it on, but because there was no panel on the TV, it was stuck on the last channel, VH1. The show was "40 Funniest Fails", with a low-rent comic and a puppet commenting on YouTube clips that I had already seen on "Tosh.0". No matter: It beat the staring contest with Nurse Barbie.


Eventually, the counselor on duty came in, told me a shit load of stuff I already knew, but then added an extra-- If I came in again anytime soon, and I hadn't gone to the local non-profit mental health clinic, I'd be remanded to 72 hours observation. Great. So, my options were a) don't go crazy again, or b) don't come here if I did. Or else. The non-profit held no appeal to me, as my parents both go, strictly for pills that keep them numb. Not happier, not calmer, just numb. 


But the counselor also mentioned "boundaries". As in "you need to learn to set some boundaries". She felt that, because I allowed nearly 3/4 of my family to come and live with me, that I had poorly defined boundaries. No shit, lady. The only thing keeping me from swallowing a handful of pills at present is that I give myself little goals: my oldest son is 17, and will be 18 in August. My younger son will be 18 in 2015. That leaves me and my daughter, who won't be 18 until 2020. My sister, who moved in in September, has two young children, and has no financial support from their father whatsoever. My parents are elderly, and rely on Social Security. So, they all rely on me. Pesky boundaries.


I have other little goals, little "treats", like trips to visit "T", or whenever I get my income tax refund, or seeing those little red Netflix envelopes. Freebies. I was never much of a drinker, or a drugger; my "big foray" into drug use was marijuana in my early twenties. It put me straight to sleep, so I don't get the whole munchies or horny angle. However, all of these little "treats" make me feel like a rat in a maze. "Go, little rat, find the cheese!" Only there's almost never enough cheese to make the trip through the maze worth it.


Maybe it will change one day. I can hope, can't I?