Now, on a day-to-day basis, I may seem to pretty well have my shit together, to the outside observer ... but I know what kind of crap I'm dealing with inside. As regular readers of this space may recall, I even took the step to try to medicate my way into a better mind-set earlier in the year, an experiment which was an abysmal failure (all of the meds that I tried being worse than the symptoms of my anxiety/depression).
For most people, dealing with the mail, with the phone, with the fax, are automatic, robot-like functions. For me they are hideous trials of screaming sub-texts thinly veiling vicious personal attacks. At home I miss a lot of mail, since The Wife has taken to sorting through it (and throwing 90% of it out unopened) as if she can't specifically identify a piece of mail by its outside, it's gone (we've had more credit card screw-ups that way!). As irritatting as this might be, it does serve a purpose as far as at least getting SOME of the mail attended to. I have no such system in place with the business mail.
Add to this the post-911 situation (I can no longer send boxes from the Hancock Building's post office as I'd been long used to) changing my "routes", and my school schedule leaving me nearly zero "free time" to deal with stuff like this, and I was only picking up the mail about once every six weeks. Which then went into a big box. And sat there.
Anyway, the Eschaton checking account was down to a few hundred bucks (and I'm never sure what's in there due to the "minimums" charged by the credit card processing folks ... something I'm going to have to make a decision on dumping or not soon) so I figured I'd better dive into the mail box and ferret out the checks. YES ... as a clear testimony to my incapacity for dealing with the mail, even the payments were in there unopened!
So, to wrap up this pointless bit of self-loathing, I got the past 8 months worth of checks pulled out, sorted through the rest (including, of course, assorted collection letters for ridiculously small amounts of monies owed various entities), and made nice neat piles to go through "eventually" (I have a similar box from May which has not reached "eventually" as yet).
I just wish I could get past this depression/anxiety thing that freezes me up around the mundane functions of the world. Unfortunately, I don't think they've made a pill yet that keeps me from feeling that every god-damned credit card statement is some sort of blitzkrieg strike at my worth as a human being!
This world sucks big time.