Spontaneous ∂erivation

I’ve been thinking about it this morning. I got to sleep late but I slept really well (so well, in fact, that I missed my alarm… but I’m still too sick to go into the office, so I could start working from home immediately without the commute).

And my dream was… a strange dream. I would almost have called it a nightmare, one of those that involve my parents by proxy, but for some reason I took charge in the dream. While it was still kind of the material that fuels thriller movies, I felt… better. And assertive. And in charge. And man, did I lay the smackdown (verbally and, in the end, situationally) on my father’s proxy.

I’ve not had dreams like that before.

So I started thinking about why the bed wedge is possibly helping out with the dreams as well.

It probably comes back to lying flat on my back. When I lie down all the way, I admit the first thing that comes to mind is the night when my father strangled me. Fun, eh? It’s not PTSD, it’s just a very strong memory. It doesn’t intrude, it’s just… there. Okay, maybe it intrudes. Meh. Damn it, it’s probably a little tiny bit of PTSD. Goddamn it.

Anyways, such thoughts have become a normal routine for me, for years in fact. I think almost two decades of that by now.

But when I sleep on the bed wedge I don’t think about that, probably because my head and shoulders and back are elevated, so that if anything does happen, I’m more ready for it. Or something.

Or perhaps I just didn’t sleep that way before, so the act itself breaks some patterns.

I do definitely feel much more secure sleeping this way, outside of the whole memory-of-strangulation thing. It’s a little strange.

I’m also thinking about the first time I slept in a dorm room, and primary to the strangulation memory was the memory of my father pacing back and forth outside my bedroom, ready to break through and scream and possibly beat me about something. At any time. Any time.

It took a long time to break the pattern, mostly because after a while you realize it’s not going to happen because the dorm room isn’t home and the door is also closed (my father forced me to keep my door open; it’s probably why I tend to consider my bedroom the safest part of anywhere I live, because these days I can keep the door closed).

Anyhoo. Such are my thoughts on the bed wedge. Also it’s nice to sit up against (when it’s in its tall setting) when working from home in bed. I’m feeling better, but I’m not going to be stupid and try to push it too hard. I figure I’ll be ready to go into the office soon—maybe even tomorrow! Although I definitely have to pack a lunch for that day. My stomach will not be ready for greasy food for a while.

Jim C. Hines, who is awesome, has a blog post up about reporting rape, and how fucking hard it is to do so, and you have to go read it, because it is all true. Even if you’re someone relatively sympathetic who keeps jumping up and down on the victim’s feelings by saying, “You have to press charges! Sorry, I won’t be there or otherwise support you and will advise you against your will even though I don’t know anything! But you hafta!”

I also have a couple of long comments, I don’t know entirely why, semi-on-topic about violence against women (or whoever) and stalkers and the awfulness of court and how many things fall apart there, and you don’t get good results for rape trials most of the time, or even restraining order trials (the latter of which I’ve experienced; not the former, but I can somewhat imagine how much worse the former is, and it’s likely worse than what I can think of).

And yeah, I talk about changing identities. I know how to do it across a couple states even! And even that is horrible and painful, and automatically disqualified me from quite a high-paying government job where I could just code all day on really neat projects.¹

And I also reveal that I have not always blogged under this name. And to tell the truth, the electronic trail isn’t perfect, and the paper trail is less so, because the law requires you to put your name change in fucking papers. And you can’t change your SSN, so my parents could always commit fraud (and the federal government doesn’t allow SSN changes unless you can prove fraud has been committed).

Really, a lot of the law is not about protecting victims, but protecting the possibly guilty. Arguably it should be that way, but I wish it wasn’t quite so harsh on the people who did get hurt.

I was raised to be honest, even if it was in a household where all kinds of abuse was regular (and I was even beaten for lying even when I told the truth). And everything in the past years since I separated from my parents makes me feel worse. Like, I can only tell people so much truth, and so much of it is now basically lies, because I can’t tell people who I really was, all those years ago. And even now. Even now.

I realize that blogging about this may lead to some smartass or private investigator or friends of my parents (yes, they have born-again Christian friends, ye gods) or whoever to find out who I am, because I can’t obscure the trail completely.

But I’ve been not myself for so long that it seems pointless to try to hide (much), and if a final stand happens, let it happen, because it’s been over 30 years now, and I can’t take it anymore. I’m not completely stupid, but then again, I sort of am right now.

And anyways, the people I’ve been don’t live here anymore. That hurts the most. Who am I, really? At the moment, I’m the person who started this blog 2.5 years ago. I am only that old. I plan to get older for the rest of my life, even if it eventually kills me.

Buuut at least I don’t have tantrums!²

Yrs,
S∂

P.S. scrapers and sploggers: there is fucking nothing here you can use for ads, so don’t even fucking try.

1. Although that would probably all get funneled into weapons anyways, so… yeah. [↩]
2. RAAAEEEGGG!!!1!!1!! [↩]

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…. [↩]

Recently in the news there has been general hue and cry at the fact that the police or FBI or what have you did not take parental warnings seriously for a couple of nutters who ended up (a) blowing up his undies, but potentially harming a plane full of people, and (b) shooting in front of the Pentagon and getting killed, wounding two police officers, and could have killed them.

Why didn’t the police or FBI take these parents seriously and arrest their children?

This is because most calls to the police or FBI about children are from insane, controlling parents who want their children put into a “safe” place, e.g. locked up in prison so they can be visited, and often when said kids are over 18 years old. Or even older. Or put into jail and owing bond to their parents for that extra guilt trip. Either way, to these parents, it’s about getting the ultimate control and shame over their sons and daughters.

My parents made many calls to the police while I was in college, even though the most exciting thing I ever did was study in the basement and forget to call them at our “special time” every single night, claiming everything from me being a missing person to me needing to be put under “observation” because I was crazy and had separated from them. If I had ever accepted a car from them during that time when I was trying to reconcile with them, they would have called the police and have them arrest me for stealing the car.

In case you think that the police surely would know better than to listen to my parents because of records of my father’s physical abuse, think again: most abuse never goes reported. Because then your abuser would kill you, because you can’t keep abusers without bond unless, well, they commit murder.

What a fucking mess.

Anyways, the next time you get upset that the police didn’t lock up someone because they were warned by the parents… that’s why.

And yes, these nutter parents have made warning the police or FBI at all for something legitimate pretty useless. Be angry at them, perhaps. Not that this will make the world better, but at least you won’t be mad at the wrong cause.

Interesting. The Gift of Fear is now a Kindle exclusive book. I don’t mind that, seeing as a Kindle book can be read on multiple platforms (PC, Mac, iPhone, the Kindle readers of course, and who knows what else, though at this point perhaps never a Nook or Sony Reader). And the paper version has been available for quite some time, and has been for a while. I have one under the bed, for specific kinds of emotional emergencies, like intense, paralyzing paranoia.

I strongly recommend this book, not exactly because it covers coping with the after-effects of abuse in particular, as much as explaining why fear should not be… ah… feared or shameful. Abject fear can be a killer’s greatest weapon against you, not to mention a long-term abuser’s; but you can also use fear to your advantage, letting it be a warning but not freezing you when you most urgently need to act.

And yes, it’s a horrible fact that this book has this large of an audience, this large of a sucking need in the world, but it’s neither a hoax nor an over-dramatization, and it’s definitely not one of those get-rich-quick schemes that only wants to take advantage of the fearful. I’m saying this bit because people who’ve never been in these situations tend to scoff at the book, which I suppose is the privilege of people who’ve never had to be afraid for their lives.

As for the Kindle-exclusive strategy: this kind of strategy may not work for other authors, but it will likely work to de Becker’s advantage, because he’s a top-tier author and this is a rather famous book in a lot of circles, and thus his platform and audience and marketing is more or less already there—which is not necessarily the case for others. And as mentioned previously, a Kindle book can be read on multiple platforms now, so the audience is certainly not limited to those who only have Kindle readers.

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’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.

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. [↩]