Dining and sleeping and numbness

Todays' song is Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. And the lyrics for today are:

Now I got that feeling once again.
I can't explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

When I first moved into my house it would be kind to say the place was a shit hole. It smelled. Reeked really. So badly in fact that I swear you could almost see the blue haze in the air from the stench. The smell was from the dog urine (at least I pray to god it was dog urine and not people urine) from the previous owners dog which thoroughly soaked the carpet in the master bedroom and the family room. And it probably soaked the carpet in the living room and dining room judging by the stains on the hardwood floor in those rooms, but that carpet was ripped out before I moved in (although the carpet could be seen in the photos of my house online when I was looking at listings).

The cabinets in my kitchen were sticky inside and out. The floors were filthy and there were mouse droppings every where (yes, even in the kitchen). My mother worked really hard to clean the kitchen out so that it was sanitary and usable and ready for the appliances that were going to be delivered in a couple days. My dad and I worked on pulling the carpets up and getting them out of the house and to the dump.

The first night in my new house, the one I moved into after the torturous 18 month breakup with Ms. Ex, I had to sleep in my dining room because of the urine soaked carpet in my master bedroom. In fact I didn't sleep in my master bedroom until five months after I moved into my house because of the damage to the floors. But that first night my parents were in my guest room on an air mattress and I was in my dining room on an air mattress. Not the most auspicious start to a new chapter in life that's for sure.

I was sort of numb for the first few weeks or maybe even months after I moved into my house. I don't think I'd say I was comfortably numb, but numb indeed. The end of my relationship with Ms. Ex still didn't feel quite real and I felt completely lost and while I don't think I wanted to get back together with her because even then I knew that the end of our relationship was for the best, I think I still wanted her to come crawling back begging for me to take her back, to forgive her, saying she'd seen the error of her ways.

I threw myself into making this house I'd bought first inhabitable and second my home. And for a while the numbness and the projects kept the deep depression at bay. But that only lasted so long. Actually I think it lasted just short of four months. I believe the depression really started the day that Ms. Ex told me she'd started seeing someone new. She chose to do this six days before Christmas after they'd already been seeing each other for over a month. Ms. Ex has great timing, no?

Somehow I managed to get through the holidays okay and even the first couple weeks of January. Then I did something stupid. I took a week of vacation and stayed home to work on house projects. Alone. By myself. Without people. This is NOT the best thing to do when your mental state is extremely fragile and you're feeling down and alone already. This is when the numbness completely wore off and I was finally able to get in touch with my inner pain. And there was a lot of pain. A LOT of pain.

But now it's nearly a year later. And I've had quite a long stretch of time off, not nine days straight like last January, but enough, and I haven't had all that much interaction with people one on one. And you know what? I'm fine. I've spent a lot of time over the last three days repainting my living room and dining room. Lots of uninterrupted time by myself and its all good. I'm perfectly okay. I don't have the urge to burst into tears every other second. I don't feel like I'm in this black hole with no way out. I don't feel the terrible pain of depression. The physical pain which makes you feel as though you're carrying 100 pound weights on your shoulders. Instead my only pain is from the soreness in my arms from all the painting and my neck which is all out of whack and desperately needs someone to rub it.

And my dining room, the room where I spent the first night in my house, doesn't even look like the same room now. I still have a ways to go (like painting all the trim, and ripping out and replacing the *horrible* fireplace mantel), but it's on the right track now, just like me. I love my formerly disgusting and smelly house. I love my home. And I love myself, something that I don't think I could have honestly said a year ago. It's amazing how much can change in a year. I wonder where I'll be this time next year?