Long time no write (Warning: utterly depressing)

I’ve been having personal-Internet-use withdrawal symptoms lately.  In an effort to cut back on household expenses, we did away with our cable and Internet service.  My morning routine has changed drastically, and I haven’t been able to maintain any of my usual online practices.  It’s been especially frustrating as the whole experience has created an urgent need within me to write and vent, something I certainly cannot do from my office computer.

It looks like our cost-cutting efforts, though beneficial to our bottom line, aren’t going to achieve the main objective that I had: staying in our present home.  We currently have a serious cash-flow problem; more is going out than is coming in.  Mathematically, that’s an unequal equation.  Financially, that’s a recipe for disaster.  In our times of poverty, we backslid to such a point that we just cannot recover from while maintaining the status quo.  I have never been so devastated by a decision I’ve had to make as I am facing selling my house.  Everything about moving here was an achievement, and I pictured myself staying at this address until the girls graduated from college.

Needless to say, I have seen an sharp increase in my anxiety levels.  My sleep has been seriously disturbed, ranging from bouts of insomnia (not the kind that keep you from falling asleep at bedtime, but the kind that awakens you constantly during the night), to nightmares that would make Wes Craven cringe.  I actually go to bed very early, partly out of boredom, but suffer from extremely poor quality sleep.  As has been the case in the past, my body seems to take the brunt of any psychological issues I’m having.  I can’t get over a nasty cold I’ve been fostering for two weeks, and my stomach takes every opportunity to put me through the five symptoms featured in the recent Pepto Bismol commercials.  What fun.

On top of it all, despite my constant brainstorming to delay or render the sale of our home unnecessary, I am having to face the inevitable, which carries a slew of new distasteful tasks with it.  For instance, our house needs to be perfectly clean to be able to list it with a Realtor — if we want to show and sell it at least.  We need to prepare for all of the things that accompany a move: packing, transferring services, getting the new place move-in ready.  There’s more, of course, but I find it absurdly depressing to put it all into words. For a compulsive list-maker, it’s rare to find one to-do list that I can’t put down on paper.

In fact, I find my entire mood sinking fast as I even write this.  I need to clean and do laundry, as my Saturdays seem to be designated for, and try to approach this move the same way I do every distasteful chore.  It just has to be done, and putting it off would only make things worse.  The only good thing to have come from this trauma so far is that I have apparently lost three pounds.  If it continues to make me physically (and emotionally) ill, I may even meet my weight loss goal.  I guess every black, suffocating, noxious cloud has a silver lining.