Spontaneous ∂erivation

ETA: A few minutes after I published this post, I’m starting to slide into the mellowness of Xanax. I am so, so relieved. A little bit. Once I get completely mellow I think I’ll sleep or maybe read Sherlock Holmes fanfiction pastiches.

Son of ETA: I am sorry I am so emo at times that I risk turning S∂ into an emo blog, if it isn’t already, scrawled by teens who believe so strongly that they are so totally isolated in their unique despair.

Several hours ago I experienced an intrusive memory in the kitchen.

For those of you who have read Part 1 of my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Fiction series on Tor.com, this was the equivalent of one small corner of the “tarp” coming loose in a light spring breeze.

Funnily enough, I no longer remember what the memory was.

But that doesn’t matter, apparently, because I had (and am still having) what is pretty much a panic attack (yes I have taken my Xanax. One pill; will be two shortly, I think) now, several hours later.

I am also so terrified of the kitchen and in particular every part of my own house outside of my bedroom that I dragged my work computer up here before the fear got very bad. Because I might get paged in the middle of the night, and I think I might not answer it if I left my computer downstairs, and that would be super-bad. Although I have been known to deal with high-severity issues during what is basically a three-tarp-corners-flying-in-the-wind episode, and do it well.

(All four corners would mean I’m in what I call a walking nightmare and what everybody else calls a full-blown disassociative PTSD episode, which I haven’t had for a very long time, I think—but I mostly know I’ve had those by hours-long gaping holes in my memory. The episode in the kitchen was under a minute—I checked the clocks.)

I think I’m technically at “two corners gone” right now, and the progression was so subtle that, while I thought I had completely recovered from that tiny spate in the kitchen, I really had not. Somewhat comparable to the second half of Part 3 of my PTSD in fiction series, where I talk about Josh’s little progression through the tarp-corners-blown-off in The West Wing’s “Nöel” episode.

Excuse me, it’s been half an hour since the first Xanax. Taking the second one now. If I need past three I will be sort of screwed; I refuse to overdose on anything.

Some people have referred to my description of every single day during December through January as “scary.” I actually don’t think of it as “scary.” I think of it as stressful. I realize other people may not have the same frame of reference I do. (And yes, I’m aware that I did say I was scared of downstairs right now, but mostly I’m scared that I’ll have another episode, and this time it’ll be one of the gaping-holes-of-memory ones.)

I will say that when I was very, very little, I wrote a story in anger, as children sometimes do. It involved blood seeping under the door of our apartment into the hallway, unregarded by the neighbors, while inside a monster killed its victims by inches. Later on I realized that such reactions were not very useful, because being angry all the time simply meant that I might miss the cues that meant my father had gone from playing with matches to trying to set my face on fire.

Someone once told me that I must have had great hope to see me through the dark days. NO I DID NOT. I just had animal survival. Hope was not part of it.

I feel slightly better now. I feel like I’m not going to scream or try to mentally clench myself into some alternate state, I don’t know what that would be, but I’ve felt like doing that for over an hour and didn’t realize it.

I wish I knew what the trigger had been. But sometimes triggers are just complicated and nuanced, and you’ll never figure out what the hell it was.

I don’t know when I’ll sleep. I want to hug something, but I don’t know what; I learned the uselessness of stuffed toy animals for real comfort when I was fairly young. I know also if anyone touched me right now I really would scream.

On the other hand, I feel a little bit less like wanting to stop breathing. (Not as abstract as suicide… just wanting to stop breathing, literally. Something like asthma.)

So for now I’m stuck in this limbo between… I have no idea. I know it’s between a rock and a hard place and the Xanax is helping only a little and by gods I will not take the third pill because that means I’ll have none left for 24 hours oh my gods oh my gods oh my gods.

Um. Anyways.

Aiya! appears a lot of times in Outlaws of the Marsh.

I am so, so exhausted from the constant fight-or-flight reaction now. I may just sleep because of that.

I really must sound like I should be committed at times. But that would make it much, much, much worse. I have dreams where my parents are trying to commit me, and actually succeed.

Argh.

Okay, I feel a lot better now, actually. I may sleep or I may try to find more cat stories in the Kindle store to read, IDK.

I started trawling through my college past, looking for moments like this one. And… yes, there are moments of wandering through some beautiful, often fanciful, halls and campus and libraries. Driving to farther off places than the small patch of island not covered by trees. A little main street full of cheap restaurants for students. Bookstores, how I loved the bookstores, which were huge and full of strange nooks and crannies. And the used bookstore. And a little restaurant I loved.

They were beautiful moments. Well, perhaps only to someone who had spent much of her life until then locked up in a small, cockroach-ridden apartment.

But over all that, the years I remember as being the best, overlaying the good memories was the constant fear. I already knew I wasn’t completely safe—the betrayal by a friend just after I got my information suppressed by the college, and even moved secretly to a high-security dorm building…. the constant stalking by my parents, which surfaced even after escape by the harassment of friends and professors… never knowing if when you walked at night you might run into your parents.

You are never secure in your first new identity, I find. Nor your second. You have to go down a ways, move around a bit, and suchlike. It’s hard, when you grew up thinking that honesty and truth would automatically give you immunity—you know, bad things don’t happen to good people. But it had been happening anyways, all the time I was growing up. I just was in denial.

I looked for good bits in my previous life (lives?) and found them… packaged in the fear. Always the fear. I never realized how thick it was, how almost every memory contains it, with rare sparks of freedom when I didn’t think about the fear at all. Really, really rare.

I’m trying to stay in the present at the moment. I’m not sure if I managed to bring on a small episode of PTSD on myself. I feel like I’m getting dragged into the past—I have pushed away the memories for now, tantalizing as they are, because I was not as alone then (and then everyone I knew was gone… graduate students are never constant for the long term; I was the very last to leave, and only because I got forced out of my job with the University when the delayed economic storm hit it).

And, my gods, I can’t push away the feelings. I can never quite remember my PTSD episodes. It’s like how I don’t remember how badly I react to holidays, even though that’s obviously been happening for years now. I vaguely remember a friend years ago saying that this kind of thing probably was…. whether it is or isn’t is kind of moot right now, because whatever it is, it’s here.

I am trying not to cry right now, and all that, and I’m trying to sleep, because I have meetings in the morning (um… okay… later this morning) and I need to be able to operate. Needing to get into gear should help, although sleep deprivation won’t. I’ve had really awful dreams all weekend, so I’ve been afraid to sleep, which isn’t helping.

So now I’m going to have my Kindle read the Agony Booth’s Star Trek V recap in its pleasantly monotone, often indiscriminate, voice. The Delta Sleep System is just freaking me out right now, for reasons I cannot ascertain, except that it might resemble the subtle acoustics of either computer labs or my dorm room when the wind blew across the flat, flat plains.

Trying not to freak, trying not to freak, trying not to freak… ARGH.

I’ll be okay, it’s just that I can’t find the ropes to tie the goddamned corner of the fucking tarp down right now. Eventually I will. All the raining sucks in the meantime.

Ah, found another sparkly no-fear moment: watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen in the fancy lecture hall with comfy seats. We didn’t get that place in CS 101. After that, everything tended to be in that room or the one next to it… comfy. Better than a theater. So lovely. And the stair sequence dropped my jaw. And all my friends and their acquaintances watching with. We did some group hacking to, ah, get the movie showing, but then it was amazing.

Then I walked home in fear.

Sigh. I feel a bit tired right now, and the blogging has helped quite a bit. I will sleep now to the really not at all dulcet tones of my Kindle.¹

The half-tab of Ambien is having its effect now. I just hope I don’t have bad dreams. I want some frakking dreamless sleep, and I can’t do the thingy, you know, dream control.

1. Really, guys. This is NOT going to take over audiobooks soon. It’s got a serious problem with enunciation, and gods help you if your characters are not named “Bob” or… well, Bob. It’s that bad. It murders Leonard and Picard quite badly, I didn’t think you could even do 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. [↩]

Multiple someones, actually, over email.

I think I’m only to address this once, and then point to this blog post thereafter. This subject, naturally, triggers me, because answering it requires me to comb through what triggers me, the relationship of the triggers to each other, and synthesize all that into analysis.

Going on….

The media and much of fiction portray something really wrong about triggers: the ideas that triggers are concrete, discrete, reliable, few, consistent over multiple individuals, and unchanging.

First, addressing “concrete” triggers: some triggers are more clear-cut than others. Gunshots, vehicles backfiring, fireworks, etc., are all concrete: you definitely know when they’ve happened. So too are sirens, music—indeed, anything sensual, from sight to hearing to smell, that’s closely tied to the trauma. However, the majority of “triggers” are not concrete—emotions are ultimately the base of any trigger, and emotional state is a complex thing involving many factors, much of it personal.

Second, “discrete” triggers: again, the idea that a trigger is a split-second kind of thing, determined by some event, item, or person that serves as a switch. No, triggers can be much more drawn-out than that; again, this is due to the fact that emotional state is complex and nuanced. A lot of subtle things can build up, slowly altering your emotional state, and thus what actually triggered you is nothing you can definitively point at.

Concrete/discrete versus non-concrete/continuous is shown very deftly in The West Wing’s “Nöel” episode, where Josh’s triggers fall into both categories: music, and the more complicated, less well-defined identification with the pilot who committed suicide, respectively. I strongly suggest watching this episode, even if you don’t feel like reading anything else covered by the PTSD in Fiction series on Tor.com. Here is the Amazon Video-on-Demand link to “Nöel”; you can watch the episode online for $1.99 (one-time payment).

Third, triggers aren’t always reliable. Some very strong triggers can be quite reliable even outside of context—again, how “strong” a trigger is highly depends on the trauma and the individual’s psychology—but more subtle triggers often have a lesser rate of “success.” And since most triggers are subtle in nature, whether they actually manifest strongly depends on environment and context. And the reliability of a trigger may not always make “sense.”

A personal example: I read some of the Terry Pratchett books and part of the Harry Potter series during my long tenure of abuse as a way to temporarily escape it. You think they’d be a trigger for me now, but they aren’t, not even the same books I read during the abuse. However, the various hand crafts that I also used as a mental escape back then do trigger me now. Why is this so? Only the gods know why.

Fourth, triggers aren’t “few.” The most subtle and numerous ones you may never be able to pick out, because that would be like trying to pick out sub-atomic particles: outside of some really destructive smashing with atomic colliders and much analysis later, you aren’t going to find them. Concrete, discrete triggers are indeed few; but they are far outnumbered by their subtler brethren.

Fifth, there is no universal lexicon for triggers. “What can be a trigger?” Anything can be a trigger. It’s never the case that everything, or even close to everything, is a trigger for a person; but just that anything you can think of can be a trigger. Triggers can be broadly generic; triggers can be incredibly specific; and everything between. Triggers can be concrete, or they may be very diffuse; triggers can come from shopping for pet goldfish or simply brushing up against hundreds of holiday-stressed people. Like individual psychology, and like dreams, triggers are affected by culture, the individual experience, and the individual themselves.

Sixth, triggers aren’t unchanging over the course of an individual. Some triggers may fade away; and new triggers for the original trauma can be created, even if you never directly experience the trauma again. It’s the worst part about triggers: they’re easy to add to by accident. Triggers are, after all, just associations, and all you need to do is to start associating new stimuli with the old feelings. For instance, carrying on any single type of distraction for too long can lead to your brain subconsciously associating the distraction with the trauma. And voila: what you used to do as a distraction becomes instead another trigger.

It’s things like that which make PTSD the… fun… that it is.

In summary: if you’re going to write about characters with psychological disorders, you have to dive deep into their own psychology. Hard work, but you needed to do this when you planned to write character-driven fiction anyways, so….

Last post before the New Year (at least, by Pacific Standard).

I have no good resolutions other than to keep on trucking.

And to make sure I have more time to admire the president’s abs¹ review more SF&F and write more about Sherlock Holmes.

And, apparently, listen to more Beatles. For some reason, they anchor me to the present, even though they made it over 50 years ago.

And also finish trying to perfect a serial reboot. I’m not sure the original readers (the few of them) will like what I did, but you know, the writing did help ease the pain.

And, to my cherished beloved²

and to all of you, a happy New Year.

1. Love him or hate him, I think we can all agree that Bush’s abs are probably not like his. [↩]
2. And you can buy a Kindle worldwide now! Awesome! [↩]

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

Starting the 5th of December, this is how my days have run:

7:00am
Wake up from dreams wherein I still live with my parents, and I never had my current life away from them. As you may imagine, these are not good dreams.

7:00am — 8:00am
Try to get another hour of sleep due to exhaustion from the night before. Fail or repeat with similar never-escaped dreams.

8:00am
Feel the same dread and anxiety as I did from X years ago, like I never left my parents and their home of hilariously horrible abuse.

8:00am — 9:30am
Attempt to get ready for the day, but not even bento or shower meditation makes the constant background dread/anxiety go away.

9:30am — 9:30pm
Go through my day in much the same way. Dread never leaves but doesn’t get worse unless I run into another holiday reminder, of which for some reason there’s multiple around every corner. Dread never quite graduates to adrenaline-rush stage, just teeters me there for hours.

9:30pm
Dread pushes me over the adrenaline-rush stage, but I am actually too exhausted to do anything about it, and there is also nothing to act against, so what the hell? Good thing I’m at home now, where I can barricade myself in the bedroom and quietly break down.

9:30pm — 10:00pm
Try hard not to break down so that I know I am stronger than what’s trying to happen to me and/or stronger than my parents, depending on how much my subconscious is managing to stay in the present. Get ready for bed.

10:00pm — 2:30am
Either I have insomnia or nightmares from which I wake up constantly, still having never escaped my parents.

2:30am
Take knockout cocktail of Ambien + Xanax, which is really not a good thing to do, but it lets me have a dreamless sleep (?) for a while.

2:30am — 3:05am
Finally fall asleep.

3:05am — 7:00am
Have dreamless sleep for probably 80% of the time, then have dreams where I never escaped my parents.

7-fucking-o’clock ay em
Repeat. Ad mid-January.

These are not fun days. These are not exciting days. These are the days when you want to take the world in your hands and do SOMETHING, but you end up so exhausted from commute, work, and most of all the PTSD-related dread symptoms, such that you can’t think far enough to, like, follow lists of steps, much less be creative.

Although occasionally, early in the cycle, I have managed to reach escape velocity from this spiral; much of the time I don’t. The weariness just builds up day to day.

And that has been years of my life. Many years with the direct threat actually present, and a few years with the threat chasing me, and a very few years with the threat mostly (but who knows) gone. The bartender pointed out in the most recent session I need to blog about that I’ve really only had a few Christmases without my parents in the background, it happening only once a year, and thank fucking glad for that. So it’s not unexpected or bad/weak/disgusting/worthless of me to still have trouble during this most wonderful time of the year.

Boring fear: it is the fucking worst kind.

I’m not always very consistent with tagging my PTSD and related posts, so I wrote a page compiling them, finally. It took a while to make the decision (like, weeks) because it’s rather an ugly part of my life, and I keep wondering if having it up on the top bar will make me less likely to recover or something, but then again I forget to look at it a lot of the time.

And some of the articles so compiled are informative for others, particularly “Post-Traumatic Disorder in Fiction.”

So there it is.