Spontaneous ∂erivation

It’s been a while. Lots of time elapsed between this and the previous appointment. That was a really stupid thing to do.

Anyways.

When I was much younger, during that stretch of time I usually refer to as my hilariously abusive childhood, a favorite aunt of mine died because a paramedic had been a little bit overenthusiastic with some kind of heart medicine. Kind of awful. I didn’t grieve, even though I already knew by then what death meant.

Fast forward to some years ago, during some of the initial excitement when my parents were stalking me and knew where I lived, and the death threats, and all that, a friend of mine died in a whitewater rafting accident. It was rather awful. I didn’t grieve. Isn’t that awful all by itself?

And in the intervening years spent on the run and then finally spent here, there have been a large number of deaths of authors and actors and people whose work I very much appreciated and touched me, and I didn’t grieve.

This weekend Kage Baker died. And I am grieving. And I don’t really know what to do next. I’ve spoken to several people, apparently not knowing what to do next is sort of normal, or something.

I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be grieving, because I didn’t know her, not like friends know her. But I loved her books, and as much as Pratchett or Gaiman or Rowling, they were an escape hatch during some pretty awful times. For whatever reason, her death hit me hard. (And then there was all the other excitement over the weekend, which didn’t help.)

So anyways, it’s probably a good thing that I now have mental space to feel this kind of stuff that I haven’t been able to feel before. Like grief.

Grief sucks, man. I’d say it’s like being sad, but it’s not totally that. It kind of feels like falling. I’d almost say it was a little bit like some of my PTSD episodes, except that I know it isn’t. I’m not really sure what the hell it is.

What is going to happen to me when the rest of the authors-whose-works-got-me-through-hell die? Worse, what’s going to happen to me when my actual friends now die? Hell, I don’t even know now what’s going to happen if I ever hear word that my parents are dead. There was a time when I knew, very certainly, that I wouldn’t feel very much, if anything; and now perhaps that’s all up in the air.

What else is going to happen? What else is there? For instance, am I going to feel actual love, real actual love, instead of some kind of pale imitation of attraction? I’ve read Shakespeare, man. I know that sucks too, and what little I’ve managed to feel in life so far is still painful.

I knew where I was 20 years ago. It wasn’t pleasant, and it definitely didn’t have a good future, and it was frankly a psychotic existence, but it didn’t have this grief or love or whatever other horrible thing there is to be felt here. I have no idea how to deal with any of it, and a large part of my general social fear now, online or offline, is that I’m going to end up hurting people even more than I already have.

I don’t know how the hell the rest of you live here.

What really worries me is that isn’t even a slightly facetious statement.

So the sessions are going to pick up again. Gods know where it’s all going to go. I feel so awful, and sometimes I wish the PTSD would come back. Although knowing how my years usually go, it most likely will in a few months. I’ve only known respite in spring, and now I don’t even have that.

Session the 13th with the bartender did not happen. Oncall got the better of me, not because things happened, but because my insomnia means that a night of no sleeping pill is a night of no sleep. I have to get that fixed somehow, but I suspect it’ll fix itself as we move farther away from the holidays. So I very reluctantly canceled the appointment, a slippery slope that has gotten me in trouble before.

However, I did have a session with the candy man—my psychiatrist. Psychiatrists prescribe the medication—hence I call mine the candy man—whereas psychologists are the ones you talk to (bartenders).

Currently, things are generally looking up, and the medications I’m currently on seem to be working: one to smooth out the bipolar disorder I have¹, and one for the anxiety I can never quite diagnose myself with, because my senses are always cranked to 11 with my PTSD. This is true even when my PTSD is technically not “active.”

He commented that no amount of medication could have stopped the PTSD onslaught of the holidays. And that’s very true. This is why PTSD treatment is a combination of medication and talk. He told me to keep seeing the bartender regularly, because every year I forget what happens during the holidays, and thus every year I walk into the holidays unprepared, and walk off emotional cliffs and suchlike.

This year, my bartender can help me prepare for the times that we know are hard (especially since he remembers previous sessions, which impresses me to no end).

So the dense schedule of bartender meetings continues, maybe getting slightly less dense, but I can’t see going below two sessions a month. I resolve not to cancel these meetings, no matter what, for the rest of the year. If I have an oncall night before an appointment, I’m going to try my hardest to not be silly and switch ahead of time with another member of my team.

1. Which I used to think of as “mild” up until the 500mg dosage, which is 100mg below the maximum dosage. Sigh. [↩]

Me, I’ll be just
Fine and dandy.
Lord, it’s like a hard candy, Christmas.
I’m barely gettin’ through tomorrow
But still I won’t let
sorrow bring me way down

    – “Hard Candy Christmas”

What I brought before my bartender, paraphrased:

“Before the 24th I was still alright. I mean, I was mellow. The anti-depressants were working really quite well, and then sometime during the 24th, or maybe late on the 23rd, they completely stopped working, and I started wanting to scream and cry constantly. I didn’t, because it would do no good. It just kept building up and up and going on and on, and it was literally as bad as if my father were actually there, even though I knew he wasn’t, and it was like this for about 72 hours straight, after which I went offcall and could pop a sleeping pill.¹ And now, sitting here talking to you on the 28th, I still feel like screaming constantly.”

No flashbacks, actually. But it was just about four tarp corners fully waving about in the gale, if one measures these things that way. Possibly a flashback would have been moderately less traumatic, mostly in that I wouldn’t remember it. Whereas right now I still recall that block of constant… well, not terror, or fear, exactly. “Mental anguish” is a term I always think of as melodramatic, but it fits here to a T. It was hell. On Saturday, maybe two hours before my oncall ended, I contemplated killing myself to get out of the situation faster.

Last week was the first time since I came to my new job that I had ever spent an entire Christmas Eve, Christmas, and half of Boxing Day oncall. When I’m oncall, with my pager, I take things pretty seriously. That means no drinking, no sleep medication, often no sleep (I have insomnia, maybe for not surprising reasons), and no engaging activities. Everything needs to be shallow, because I may be called upon to engage very deeply indeed at the drop of a hat, and I don’t context-switch well. As a result, if something happens when I’m oncall, I’m usually on the scene reliably and quickly enough to make sure good things don’t stop (and bad things stop happening), and willing to work hip-deep in tech and business issues for hours on end if need be.

But it was a quiet Christmas (as it usually is), so I had nothing distracting. Literally; couldn’t start anything up, either, because I have to be ready. And of course I was by myself, and all the shops and restaurants were closed on the little, quiet island.

I didn’t realize that I’d relied, before, on being able to get unconscious as quickly as possible during previous years. I’ve done 7×24 hours of oncall throughout my years, but never more than 24 hours at a go during any one Christmas week. Naturally having an oncall fall on those three days was just asking for trouble.

My bartender says that the lack of sleep is what probably made the mental anguish worse. I thought you just got sleepy and maybe hallucinated when you were sleep-deprived; he replied that’s only so if you went into sleep deprivation settled and calm. If you go into sleep deprivation at all unsettled, the tremors only get worse, until they’re earthquakes.

So! In the interest of not killing myself when the New Year arrives, we talked more seriously about figuring out new traditions to help displace the old ones that my father practically all tainted. Probably these traditions need to be “get out of the house and do something” traditions; like doing some shopping in a low-stress tiny traditional shopping area (which the island has got a lot of), or visiting museums and zoos and such. That’s the first take-away I have for this appointment.

We also talked about my close friend who was upset about me not right now being a good friend, which also didn’t help the emotional trainwreck of last week (wreckage still smoldering today). It would almost be funny, the idea of someone who knew that the holidays literally triggered you, being upset that you didn’t come to a holiday concert full of music that triggers you during this most triggery time of the year. Of course, I didn’t think it was funny, I just cried (and it made things much, much worse on the 25th).

The second take away is… I am… kind of scared of doing that. I’m scared of doing anything so crass as “taking care of myself,” partly because my parents taught me that I am not worthy of such measures. Doing anything for myself is sinful, the worst possible sin, and I was already a stupid, retarded, hateful, evil bitch-scum at the age of seven who was going to suffer in hell for eternity and deserved to die and didn’t deserve to be born and only makes other people’s lives bad and should be beaten, kicked, stabbed, cut, burned, strangled, worse… unless I did things for my father first and foremost. (That litany, by the way, is still how I think of myself if I’m not constantly recalling that it’s not true. It probably gets worse when I haven’t had sleep.)

The other part is that I am scared that I will “lose it,” Set Piece PTSD Style, in company.

For instance, I thought about doing some genuinely unselfish activity, like serving in a soup kitchen, but during the holidays I can react badly (hah) to things. I tried hanging out in a Safeway for a little while earlier in the week, to see if I could put up with any kind of busy-busy people-filled environment, and… no. Not during this time of the year. Really not. I could stand it for less than an hour; if I hadn’t left, I actually would have been on the ground screaming. And I hadn’t even been interacting with people.

A friend of mine a while back thought I was very susceptible to psychosomatic disorders—I can sense stress from other people very well. And you know, I’m probably sensitive to stress in other people for some reason, like having grown up trying to predict if my father was going to beat my mother or not….

However, museums and aquariums during low-traffic days are probably OK. People are hanging about, but there’s a loooot of space and people aren’t rushing around. And it’s different. And. It probably… won’t be bad.

Gods, this all makes me want to scream. Okay. I’m gonna finish off this post and go hide for a while.

1. It is important in matters such as these that this is a singular noun. [↩]

(But there is Five for Heaven / Six for Hell, and that makes eleven….)

'Coconut Reika', © King Chung Huang

Today’s session was worth the last eleven copays for me. And actually probably worth whatever chunk of health plan my company bought. It’s not a great week for me right now, so this post will also be a little short.

Anyways, I talked to my bartender about… well, basically, everything in this post, which is actually a nice summary of what’s going on with me right now.

My bartender asked me if I ever took a little time in the day to breathe deeply and relax. And I told him I’d tried and failed.

But more than that: sitting around and doing nothing is something I am horribly afraid of. I think it may be second only to fear of my parents returning to kill me. I have to be reading something, or writing something, or programming, or coding, or documenting, or messing with Wordpress plugins, or even listening to really horrible old 70s music. It has to twiddle some thinking part of my brain. If I don’t have something, then the emptiness fills up with whatever the PTSD wants to fill it up with, and it’s generally not good.

For instance, there’s a 15-minute window in every day that I like to call hell, but other people call the shower. People can meditate in showers. My mind just works itself up into all kinds of horror instead. A bath is a bit better, because after I wash my hair I can listen to an audio book or something, and thus hell is reduced to a few minutes. Even outside of the holidays, that little window is still hell, all throughout the year.

And on the other end of the “everyday” spectrum is driving—which is a little bit funny, because Lord Peter Wimsey also uses driving as an outlet, subconscious or not, for whatever his PTSD likes to cook up when it has a chance. You still have to pay attention to the road, and especially with music, it’s a nice way to completely not think about things other than driving the car properly.¹ For me, for some reason, driving eliminates the window for PTSD to peek in, even if it’s really near.²³

My bartender at this point then pointed out what I haven’t been able to figure out for myself, gods know why: I’m scared of the emotions that come with the PTSD. Even after all these years. I suppose I take a tack similar to PTSD sufferers who try to stamp out all emotion: I just tried to distract myself constantly from it. I never wanted to accept even the fact that the feelings happened, much less the feelings themselves; and so, when the dam breaks, as it inevitably does every year, I’m not at all prepared for what happens.

So. We gonna work on the acceptance bit. I have to keep reminding myself that acceptance of the feelings does not mean that the feelings are right, or that I deserve them in penance for some hideous wrong in a previous life, or that they will always be there if I let them in….

Okay, it’s going to be a long haul. But there’s a direction! Thank all the gods, there’s a direction!

I was relatively happy after that. And my company and manager weren’t mad at me at all! (He hadn’t had coffee when I called him, is all.) And my team was awesome, as they usually are.

Of course, that was all too good to last.

Later in the afternoon, I happily chatted to a friend, and as various bysides in the conversation, he told me to not even consider coming over until some time after the New Year; and even then, you know, we’ll just go shopping or something, not actually visit. And though I hated it, I knew he was right. The only reason I started therapy is because I had a full flashback at his place during the holidays a few years ago, and it wasn’t one of the quiet ones.

Yeah.

And we could always say that it’s really because I have the pager through Christmas.

But you know, I already knew this. I didn’t even ask. He didn’t have to tell me. But I guess it’s best to get everything… clear.

Maybe next year. Or maybe never: I know that night broke an important part of our budding friendship that has never since healed. And the worst part is that this has happened multiple times to different friendships.⁴

I try not to have close friends anymore. It’s not fair to them.

And all this of course goes double for love.

Anyways! We have a new direction, and now I totally have an excuse to entitle myself “Ice Queen” or something, except that if I am an Ice Queen, it’s more like an Ice Cream Queen. Actually… no… I am a Dessert Queen. Yes. All kinds of dessert, but especially the ones a la mode, and no sand.

1. I don’t drive at very high speeds, because it’s inconsiderate to kill other people with your car, but Lord Peter probably drives very fast in the stories because then you really can’t think about anything else. [↩]
2. That’s why I go shopping when I start to feel really hemmed in; it’s not the shopping, it’s the driving to the places to shop, and sometimes I don’t even go in, but just drive about. [↩]
3. I think, actually, I’m also able to drive well even if I’m in the middle of a flashback. The only two times I’ve had full flashbacks I was out by myself, but I definitely woke up in one piece in my own bed the next day, and the car was still clean and without a scratch, sitting quite neatly into the garage space. And parked rather more neatly than I usually do, even. It’s weird, y’all. [↩]
4. Twice. And yes, the same number of times I’ve had full flashbacks. [↩]

I didn’t blog the last session with my bartender, and the next one comes up in less than 10 minutes.

To put it shortly:

- losing my mind
- distraction techniques not working
- father poisoned every single holiday tradition/sign/etc, whatever you think of, he poisoned it

Bartender suggested I try to figure out new holiday traditions for myself. Let’s just say, it’s not working real well right now.

And now work is possibly upset that, of all the times of the year, I’m seeing my bartender right now. But he’s booked—there’s no other time.

I’ve sacrificed my sanity for four years for the company. For once surely someone can cover a few hours of a shift. Surely.

I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think I needed it.

Argh argh argh

Just using the poem for the number, for that’s how many sessions I’ve gone through with the guy I still think of as my “new” psychologist. (The last one was three years, stagnating for two and a half of them.). It’s not been that many months, and December is going to push the mental health budget out a lot. It already has.

In previous years I’ve tried to simply stamp through the holidays with as little help as possible. Those of you who’ve been reading along know why the holidays are so bad for me—everything, from Thanksgiving on, triggers at best bad memories, and at almost worst, deeply emotional flashbacks. I haven’t suffered the absolute worst, a full flashback, for only just four years. That’s not very long, especially compared to “never” for the general population.

Actually, let me digress briefly to describe what a full flashback is like for me, since ’tis the season for me to apparently teeter at the edge of sanity. This is what it’s like: it’s not realistic, it’s not at all like an actual replay of past events. Instead, it’s like reality has been replaced by the horrible plasticity of a nightmare, and your perception and logic is about as good as it is in dreams, which is to say, not very. And you remember the time about as completely as you might remember a nightmare, which is also not very. Really, “waking nightmare” is, to me, a better term than “flashback.”

Getting back on topic, vaguely….

My new bartender is a good one. He sussed out the horror of the holidays for me, and gave one of the symptoms an actual name: anxiety.

I don’t think of my general state as one of anxiety. Other people may think so, and they’re probably right; for me, this is just normal. Even when I feel empty, apparently I still feel anxious, and I can’t tell because anxious is a ground state to me. It’s why the Xanax isn’t effective: not because it doesn’t have an effect, because it most definitely does, but because one’s supposed to take it upon noticing one is anxious, and as I can’t tell, I never know when to take it. Usually by the time I’m, oh, gibbering madly on Twitter, it’s a bit late.

This is also normal for someone with PTSD, chronic or not. You end up with a state of continuous awareness, your subconscious always keeping your guard up, consuming precious and not easily renewable energy and resources, like sanity. And that state, for me, translates as a constant level of anxiety.

To me, the oddest thing is that even though I’m constantly anxious (or so it seems), I’m still affected by it. Okay, that sounds trite, but I kind of expected that I would have gotten used to it, like one gets used to a smell and doesn’t smell it anymore, but apparently it does not work that way for emotions, or psychology, or whatever. I guess the fact that I can’t recognize if I’m gibbering madly or not should have been a big clue, but I kept missing it for some reason.

So, a second appointment in the week with the candy man—er, psychiatrist—was also useful, because now I’m getting this like more constant anti-anxiety medicine. It’s gentle—it has to be, because I’m sensitive to new medication, possibly because I already have to take a very high dose of one already¹—so it’ll take a while to take effect. If it does. But the plus is that I can take it regularly, rather than on a touch-and-go basis.

This has been an uncommonly productive week, mentally. Sort of. In some respects. The, ah, nervous breakdown today, somewhat less so.

No wonder I didn’t know what to do. No wonder that, as the holidays arrive at fever pitch, nothing seems to work. The anxiety in the background is doing this to me, or at least it’s not helping, and I can’t see it. This knowledge feels like a breakthrough, and even if there’s no direct strategy apart from medication and talk right now, I know what it is. Or part of it. Or something.

1. For the bipolar. It’s not severe… okay, it’s kind of severe but not near as bad as it can get for some people. It really doesn’t help the PTSD when it gets out of hand, as you can imagine. Multiple bartenders and the candy man theorize that it probably runs on my father’s side, but who knows for sure? All the medical records are gone, I couldn’t access them now anyways even if they did exist, and the entire paternal side of the family is dead save for my father. Wars do that. [↩]

So I saw my bartender¹ again, and he’s pretty awesome, he remembers stuff. Sessions go a lot smoother than they’ve ever done for me elsewhere, but then again, he does have a background in the type of trauma I have, or something.

Anyways, we talked about work, and the holidays, and how things have been tough going of late. Until the very last moment when I couldn’t deny it anymore, I didn’t think that Thanksgiving would hit me this hard. At the moment, outside of work, life feels empty, as if nothing matters anymore.

It’s strange, actually; I’ve felt depressed, I’ve felt frightened, I’ve felt manic, I’ve felt frightened, but empty is somewhat novel.

I don’t know what the guy does that’s different from the other people who’ve been my bartender in the past; as far as I can tell, we just talk about stuff. He asks questions, of course, they all do, and his questions don’t seem all that different from the ones others have asked in the past. Perhaps it’s just that he seems to take an interest in my current, relatively uneventful adult life, extrapolating from events now to influences in the past, as opposed to dragging me back to the drama of my childhood again and again until I “discover the true meaning” or I reach the ideal endpoint of extinction.²

(I actually suspect that when I was with less experienced psychologists, they were simply fascinated by everything that happened in my childhood. It’s like a nigh-infinite barrel of monkeys, and entertained them so. On my dime, of course.)

I think my current bartender does his best to let me live in the present and just be aware of connections to the past that drive some of my thinking, and how to adapt that sort of thing, which I think is a kind of cognitive therapy or something, but he never said as much to me, so maybe it’s something else. I don’t know. All I know is, this is pretty cool for something that still tears me up inside.

Anyways! So.

I realized as I talked about work and how I felt, that part of what makes the holidays so awful to me is not merely that they bring back memories of the past, or that they bring back feelings of the past, or that my parents are still effective boogeymen to me. These things are indeed awful. I mean, the immersive flashbacks, which I call waking nightmares (with different levels of lucidity during such)… those are bad, but I can surf those kind of things a little bit by reminding myself that it’s in the past, that these sensations, while real, are not reflective of present events. This kind of effort is like trying to drive while you’re drunk, in the various degrees of drunkenness that are available—you can adjust, but after a certain blood alcohol level, you really can’t, and in the end, even if you don’t end up in an accident, you’re still drunk.

But the most awful part is that my fear crystallizes when I feel that my parents are far more likely to try to get at me. They would save such a thing for a special occasion….

You know. Like holidays. Birthdays. High-profile holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Starting the New Year. Starting the Chinese New Year. Stuff like that.

I actually wasn’t aware that my subconscious ran in that direction. It makes a horrible kind of sense, and one that I’ve never consciously thought about… or if I had once, it was years ago, when I actually was on a hot run (and trust me, a lot of days and experiences flow together during those times).

So what do we do about it?

I haven’t the foggiest. Although knowing that it exists so I can remind myself that it’s irrational is probably a good first step.

Though, like any fugitive, I know that it’s not completely irrational….

Anyways, I’m going to make TONS of APPLESAUCE. I have 3 lbs of Winesap apples, and 6 lbs of McIntosh, because I am a crazy person who has a new Apple Peeler Corer Slicer.

1. Psychologist. Whatever. [↩]
2. There is no true meaning in abuse. PTSD is not “gotten over” by merely thinking about it, and brute-force extinction therapy is not always successful. Yeah, life is not like 99% of novels out there. [↩]

Session the seventh with my psychologist.

I got to say hi to my psychiatrist during the wait. He’s not just a great psychiatrist, by the way, but also hot.¹ Sadly, my life is not a romance novel, and that would be a really bad relationship to start up anyways.

So… I actually did not talk to my psychologist about the thing I thought I should talk to him about, because right now I’m going slightly crazy with the holidays approaching. It’ll get worse. I try to ignore what day it is but somehow I subconsiously remember that it’s almost time for the hell weeks in which my father used every single holiday stress excuse to beat, control, and dominate the crap out of me and my mother.

So. We talked about that. He poked a bit with “why did he act that way, do you think?” (My psychiatrist remembered that my father didn’t need alcohol in his system to be an abusive monster.)

And actually, I don’t know why he did all that. I mean, obtrusively it was because my mother and I never celebrated the holidays correctly, and this disappointed him into senseless rage. He wanted Martha Stewart perfect holidays, which are even more impossible when your family came here directly from Vietnam and thus have no American holiday tradition knowledge. At all.

I think he got all his ideas from television. Like, several contradicting lines of ideas. It was impossible to meet his standards, in large part because he never let you know what they were until he was slamming your head against the wall for doing something wrong. Also, he kept changing the rules—I can only imply this because he’d run the door over your toes because you didn’t do X, and then the next day he’d cut your hand because you did do X.

My psychologist and I figured it was completely irrational chaos, “almost psychotic,” he said.

Every holiday tradition, my father poisoned. It’s so horrible that I can barely do anything during the holidays except, when I can, knock myself out with something, or find some series (fantasy, SF, mystery, anything long and immersive and with at least a little humor and upbeat endings) and read hell for leather.

(Before my Kindle, or frankly Amazon Prime shipping, these times were incredibly bad. You think my local bookstore’s hours are horrible? They really hit the skids during the high shopping season. Like, gods forfend if people buy things from them. And if I finished whatever on Christmas Eve….

I must sound like a worthless little whiner to people who look down their noses at fast shipping, the Internet, or ebooks. Hmmm. How much do I care. Not very much.)

Anyways, we talked about some ways to possibly overcome the bad memories this holiday, but books seem the only reliable answer, as my only IRL social friend is not going to be here for the holidays. Well, that and connecting to other people….

… except that I am very shy and tend not to trust people. Part of that is because during the time when I was on the immediate run from my parents, well, it was just so strange that they kept finding me during those years…

… and it was a friend (another one, now an ex-friend) who was feeding them information about me. It’s even more complicated than that: he was the first guy who creepily sexually hit on me. When I was 17. I didn’t know that it was wrong at the time, and he implied it was all my fault because I kept sitting in sexy positions. (ETA: no, I didn’t know that they were sexy positions, and I wasn’t trying to seduce him. I didn’t even know of sex in any way but in terms of my father raping my mother. Not at all romantic or sexy.)

Actually, I found out that two friends were helping my parents stalk me. One of them was at my University department’s office, so she fed them all the forwarding information.

Yeah.

And then it got worse.

So. Um. It’s hard for me to start relationships.

I really don’t look forwards to the holidays at all. And other than that… I got nothin’.

1. When he’s not wearing his crazy plaid blazer jacket. Ye gods. [↩]

An aside: spiffy new iPhone app; Wordpress 2 appears to rock over the first Wordpress app by quite a bit. My first post in this brave new world….

Okay, I need to settle myself more into bed afore posting.

(teethbrushing, so many pills that are not little at all, pjs…)

Okay. So the sixth session, or however many it’s been, was apparently about the upcoming holidays—always a bad tine of year for me—and that my parents, from what little Christianity they had, taught me that, first and foremost, God hates.

For instance, watching tv shows about animals in the wild, comprised of stories that typically do not end well, my mother would end with the morale: “God must hate the [species of the starring animals] because horrible things happened to them.” I wonder now if that was a comment on the lives that she and I lead under the thumbs of my abusive father.

My father had a different riff on the theme that God hates righteously: women suffered under men, therefore God hated women, and really, women aren’t better than intelligent (but retarded) livestock, to abuse, beat, and fuck as men like. It’s a good bargain for the man if the woman looks pretty or excels in school (but as long as it’s not too much).

Naturally this lead to quite a twisted holiday atmosphere at my childhood home. Other things also lead there, such as the gift giving. My gods,¹ the gift giving.

See, My parents tried to “make up” for outrageous behavior on their parts by giving me gifts, while not actually stopping outrageous behavior. I went along and pretended that receiving the entire X library manuals totally outweighed getting threatened with physical violence in my own dorm room. In the end, it became a facade so that my father would keep thinking that all I wanted was goodies.

That made it much, much easier to get away. On the other hand, this betrayal did fuel their attempts to kill me² later, so I guess it washes out.

I’m not into gifts. Gift certificates, sure. Not gifts.

I forget what the point of this meeting was, but that’s what we talked about. This session is a bit different from previous ones, in that these are topics I’ve only recently had emotional space to think about, rather than brooding over for years.

Some days are good, some are very bad. But I am cooking again, and making lunches, and I may be crazy enough to start taking pictures of my lunches every day. I’m not so far gone as to start making panda-faced rice balls, but it would be a nice reminder of how functional I can be, god damn it, even with this hand life has dealt me.

I want to cry. I think I will in a minute.

G’night. I’ll be better in the morning. I do think it’s fun to cut up fruit. And I gotta replace some BPA food containers and glasses; anything I let hot stuff into. Anything that holds cold stuff for short periods of time, okay. Definitely need to find an automatic steamer (I need a timer and hands off because multi-tasking is hard without clumsy me and accidents). Keeping the foot food processor (I don’t fix warm stuff in it). I love an excuse for righteous shopping.

See? Now if my mood just doesn’t flip flop I really will be okay.

Oh bipolarism. I just can’t seem to quit you. For God apparently hates me.

1. I’m not Christian. And I’m not here for you to try to convert; I will out and out ban you from this post if you do. That’s really rude behavior. [↩]
2. Knife, gun, slow death killing. Not “my parents will so kill me” killing. [↩]

A couple sessions ago, my psychologist gave me a little homework: use my living room more often.

This may sound strange to you, but my mind tends to think that my bedroom is the only room where one can truly feel safe, or at least, moderately safe. When you live in a dorm or with your parents and your room door is sometimes the only barrier between you and a father who wants to beat you, this is probably true.

When you live in purposely elevated house with two stories, with heavy front doors that are always locked, there is actually quite a large barrier to your (ever getting older) parents trying to invade and kill you, and holing up paranoid in the bedroom with all your stuff might be called under-utilization of the living space.

As you can imagine, staying downstairs is difficult for me. If I ever forget to keep stay in the damn living room directly in my consciousness, sooner or later I find that my subconscious has tucked me in at 7:30pm. I don’t have cable, so there’s not much that can zone me out into staying downstairs, and I stopped being interested in cooking or eating much some months ago.

Ah, but I do use the internets a lot… and switched to a laptop a few years ago, when I was in omfg run! mode (or at least, more so). Naturally, it migrated to the bedroom along with my DVD collection. I do a lot of stuff on it, like write and blog and suchlike, and it’s sadly the center of my life.

So I took my laptop to the living room, along with various cables and an external hard drive that would make it really, really inconvenient to drag back upstairs. (If I ever get the right converter, maybe I can connect it up to the TV, and then with Hulu, I’d basically have less annoying cable.¹) With my laptop anchored downstairs, and the fact that my subconsciousness has never managed to evolve thumbs, it would require my conscious mind to dismantle and drag the laptop back upstairs… and my consciousness chooses not to do so.

It’s been moderately successful. I say moderate because nowadays I find myself trying to do everything on my iPhone (which really cannot stay downstairs, because it’s also my pager, and I’m not about to sleep in the living room). Fortunately, Steve Jobs doesn’t believe in old-fashioned keyboards, which means the iPhone will never get an external keyboard without jailbreaking it. And while I have learned enough iPhone typing skillz during my commute to type 1000-word posts with just my thumbs, and the copy-paste feature from app to app has made it more convenient to include links, it’s all still really annoying.

Dear Steve Jobs, please continue disbelieving in external keyboards for iPhones. Love, S∂.

1. Yes, even if Hulu starts charging. [↩]