LJ Is For Whining

[kiya]

So I do it here.


I am becoming increasingly suspicious that I need psychiatric medication. At least until I get over this hump of problematic stuff. Because I am just not managing this situation well, and it's not improving. I have been getting steadily worse since February, with a pretty dramatic downturn two weeks ago when I stopped sleeping.

If I miss a single day of the B vitamins, I start having panic attacks. Or something, I don't know if they qualify as panic attacks in whatever technical sense panic attacks are defined in. I get depressed; things start to overwhelm me. The overall emotional context is something like, "I'm in a deep dark hole. And it's so high up and the walls are unstable and it's all going to come down on my head and bury me alive, and I can't risk moving or touching anything for fear of setting it all off . . . ." When I'm on the vitamins, it is, instead, "I'm in a deep dark hole. Well, that fucking sucks, now, doesn't it?"

As scales of improvement go, that is both gigantic and laughable.

Of course, to get psychiatric medication, I need a counsellor and eventually a referral to a psychiatrist or someone else who's qualified to do the medication. I note here, tangentially, that the concept of psychiatric medication terrifies me irrationally: taking the B vitamins to control the depression and its spinoffs is correcting a deficiency or a glitch, and I can handle that in my head. I don't know how the antidepressant stuff works, the side-effects of getting one that doesn't work with my biology are frightening, and I don't know how it works. Did I mention I don't know how it works? Black magic. Black magic in my thinking is not comforting.

Some of the side effects are things that I'm looking for counselling to help fix too, so the possibility of getting one of the sets that causes, say, sexual dysfunction is not terribly encouraging since a fair chunk of my SAN damage at the moment is due to psychological crap around sexual dysfunction.

But anyway, back to the counsellor thing. I need one. I need to deal with childhood damage stuff. I need to deal with the lasting effects of the assault. I would like to know if that one chunk of what's wrong with me qualifies as PTSD, just so I know what it is. I could probably use some relationship counselling help too right about now, which means I definitely need to make a poly-friendly counsellor a priority. (I suspect I will not deal with the possibility of a multiplicity-friendly counsellor at all by simple expedient of being as much singlet as plural and not bringing it up. Yes, it's chickening out on activism. No, I don't have that many spoons.) So a poly-friendly counsellor, ideally one who's good with helping someone deal with sexual violence issues and can handle someone with serious neurochemical fuckeduppery. And is T-accessible, because I still don't drive.

Which means that I need to call strangers, possibly more than one of them, interview them to see if I'm likely to be able to develop a working relationship with them (I have never had a counsellor that I could trust, but I was also never choosing them or trying to work on things rather than being sent out for repairs by someone in authority). And I need to have a functional capacity to make a scheduling commitment and get out of the house to it on a regular basis, on my own, when I am currently not confident of being able to do anything other than sit in the corner with a blankie most days.

I also need to learn how to drive, which is something that has been stressing and embarassing me for about ten years now. I don't like the prospect, doing it frightens me, but I've been picking up some of the kinesthetic skills I need from observing my reactions to being a passenger and cultivating the situational awareness, so I'm at least not as bad off as I used to be. I am no longer hitting the same panic-level sensory overload at the prospect, which may mean that I'm capable of picking up the skills at this point rather than freaking out and refusing to contemplate touching the thing again for quite some time when unable to make the car turn on when being asked to perform for an audience.

I need to get back on the horse and start back to college. Part of this is because I actually want to now (when I was seventeen, college was more of a because-it's-expected thing), so I'll have better odds. Part is getting Dad off my case about it. Of course, because I've been out of full-time school since 1997 and out of school entirely since summer of 2000, this has its own exciting hoop-jumping. While I really like some of BU's stuff, including the possibility of speaking to the Ifa priest there as something of a seeker, I've had enough people warn me about the school experience there that it's sliding down. Also, keshwyn pointed me at a pretty good returning-to-school program at Tufts that may be swingable, and which allows for part-time students. (I suspect that part-timeness is going to be necessary for my sanity.) Also, BU's adult education program sucks slugs through a straw, as far as I can tell.

I was already planning to go to NSCC or some other community college for a bit to start getting myself back in the swing of things; the Tufts program requires some recent coursework, so that works out all right. Of course, this means getting the paperwork and stuff they need for that to be sorted out, with things like transcript requests and so on. I'm planning on taking a non-credit course on small business stuff, which actually reduces my stress level, as otherwise I'd have to have a paragraph or two about, "AUGH! I want to start a small business and I have no idea how to do it and where to start learning!" I can just say, "A solution is possible" and stress about getting a proof that I graduated high school down the street and wonder if I can go back to school this time without suffering the sort of catastrophic breakdown that I did last time. (Though it occurs to me that I am not getting migraine from this stress level, which means that it differs in some ways from the sort of stress I was in in 1997 when I was booted from Wellesley for being too fucking crazy to associate with proper high-class types. Or however one wants to put that.)

The NSCC class I intend to take this summer is an online course, and thus does not involve the whole "I melt down when contemplating leaving the house on my own" problem. There are also some classes in the area of my potential future major that appear to be online courses, which is a possibility for later that will probably help. Making a transition from that to going to classes in person is intimidating to me, but I hope can become manageable if I manage to approach sanity as anything other than a suddenly flaring comet.

I have currently set aside the possibility of trying to get a part-time job in the State House, for all that I'd love to do it, on the basic principle that I should not attempt to commit to working outside the house until I can leave the house without feeling like I'm about to burst into tears. Inflicting additional crazy on local government = not a good idea. So this is only a minor thing, a "I wish I weren't such a fuckup" type stress rather than one of the things that's trying to fall on my head.

The state of the house is driving me insane. There is very little I can do about it (though I should get off my ass and work on my long-neglected painting work), because a lot depends on teinedreugan organising contractors and us finding a clear weekend to get people over to demolish the basement. This does not mean that the unfinished repairs that are currently weighing over me are not driving me spare. We have the basement wall to blow up and replace, with all the mildew to clear out there. We have the fucking hole in the bathroom ceiling, though teinedreugan is intending to fix that this weekend. We have the busted lamp in the bathroom, which will presumably be dealt with when we get someone in to deal with the wiring SNAFU that is our three fuse boxes. There's the paint job in the hallway that I need to finish. Plus there's the generalised cleaning and such that I need to work on so that we can consider showing the house if we're serious about moving, and which is holding us back from the possibility just as much as the failure to have the damn basement dealt with is.

The writing is actually not currently a source of stress, perhaps because I am not at the moment trying to do any. I'm waiting for more comments on The Devil's Due before I start an editing pass, though I've got a few things that I know for sure need tweaking. I should probably pick up The Otter and St. Jude and work on it a bit while I'm waiting; I suspect I can actually handle it, but I'm afraid to take on the sense of obligation to work on it again, because any form of failure at that level is at the moment deeply crippling. I'm not making much progress on my other writing obligations, but that's okay by me. We'll take it slow.

I think I've run out of obvious medical and external shit; I've been trying to avoid the personal stuff because it terrifies me. But I should at least vent some of it.

I haven't been sleeping well. The beginning of this severe downturn corresponds to a period of the better part of a week where I was functionally not sleeping at all; this has been improving since the middle of last week, and significantly improving since this weekendish, but is still not good.

I do not currently have any partnership relationships I consider functional. In the case of oneironaut, there is no actual systemic problem other than the fact that we are both having years that we'd like a do-over on, are therefore both in need of emotional support, and attempting to ask for it (or, for that matter, provide it) is likely to lead to the destruction of furniture from the explosion that results from the overload than anything useful. I feel vaguely guilty about not being able to support gtst, but I am attempting to live in reality on this one and thus keep things to a level I'm able to provide, such as making obscene jokes at lstone's expense.

In the case of teinedreugan, what we have is the accumulated detritus of a number of things, primary among them my depression. This is actually feeling significantly better than it was a few days ago (when I melted down behind lock), because we've been talking about some of this stuff and thus reaffirming some deeply neglected connections. He has been (since I melted down and thus made him aware of some of the extent of the difficulties I'm having) very supportive and generous with his time and energy, which has kept me from breaking down in tears at random several times. However, we still have a bunch of cruft to clear out, much of it in the area of my sexual glitches. Dealing with this will probably be extremely stressful for both of us, and it would probably be best if I had counselling support for some of it so I can try to address the portions of it that are consequences of the assault. I am very much feeling in a state that I am a failure as a partner to him, and while he has never suggested that I'm deficient, that doesn't stop me from having a guilt complex the size of a medium-sized arcology, complete with well-preserved mental swamp environments.

In the case of brooksmoses . . . there is a great deal I cannot say, because I cannot discuss the state of that relationship without either breaking down in tears or becoming extremely angry. I cannot predict which result I will get, either. Situation is currently on pause-and-degenerate-steadily-into-disgusting-gobbets-of-rotten-goo until I have permission to shout. (And when I do shout, the content will be inappropriate to comment on here.) Shustal. There are occasional moments when it's possible for me to fake the feeling that it's actually possible for it to work well enough that it does not cause active, significant pain for a little while, and then the snap-back to normality leaves welts.

My studies are going by the wayside. I'm behind on the middle_egyptian classwork, though I do have glyph flashcards. I did finish Behind Closed Eyes. But I am not capable of maintaining the Feri work I'm trying to do at the moment, which is causing me tremendous stress. (I know that if I don't get the trance work done I'm going to feel catastrophically behind and have a meltdown, which is a fair part of why I'm going to try to get to queenofhalves's place tomorrow. That will be a major expenditure of spoons, but I know not getting it done in the long run will take me deep into the red on silverware.)

I am not entirely certain how much my state of sanity or lack thereof comes across to people I'm spending time with. (Tonight, arawen said, "Stay sane." I think I was closer to laughter then; right now the phrase makes my nose filll up with that horrible chlorinated feeling of half-present tears.) I apparently fake it incredibly well, even to people who know me well; I don't think even teinedreugan knew how bad it is in my head before I posted the meltdown. And I find it tremendously difficult to talk to people about it without going detached and cracking jokes about it, because otherwise I'll start sobbing and screaming and that really derails a fucking conversation, you know? Also, highly developed junior high school survival instincts: never let them see the belly or the limp, because people are hyenas. The hardest thing to put down is a shield you no longer need and all like that there.

Everyone who's asked me how I am today has gotten the answer, "Clinging to sanity with orange-tinted fingernails." I'm trying, in a lot of ways, to distract myself so I don't explode; making fun of my nitroglycerin resemblance is one way I'm using to do that.

I forgot to take my vitamins the other day. The vitamin thing is a routine I established a long time ago, to the point that it is pretty much automatic, something that I don't need to think about or actively remember. The fact that I forgot them was a shock to me, a sign of how messed up I am. (And the level of insanity that resulted was spectacular.) And I don't think that that shock translates well to anyone out of my head, who doesn't know the natural progression of routines, how hard it is to establish them, how much it takes to break them. Well, I suspect it'll translate to some people, actually, but that's less rhetorically impressive.

Sometime this past week, weekend, somewhere, I went upstairs to get ready for bed; when I stepped out of the bathroom, teinedreugan was there. I tend to startle easily, but I usually recover moderately well; as it was, I yelp-screamed, then stood there, transfixed by the shock of it, and shook for a long time. I want to say five minutes. Then I burst into tears.

Which is about how things are going these days.


I have a horrible horrible suspicion that I've forgotten a factor or two. Ah well; they'll surface again soon enough. :/

Comments

[mindways]

*hugs*

There are many things swarming around in my head that I want to say, much of it advice-type-stuff, which isn't always what's needed, though I'll include it anyway just in case it helps. (If not, do ignore it.)

But aside from all of that: *hugs*, and well-wishes, and let-me-know-if-I-can-helps, and more *hugs* and grounding and care.

*caringhugs*

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Thought #1: When I learned to drive, I had an easier time of it because I'd played driving video games. It pre-conditioned a lot of basic reflexes like "when I turn this wheel left, my view goes left" and stuff. (In fact, it was a bit eerie.) It's nowhere near as immersive, of course; no idea if that's a plus or a minus.

Thought #2: If a cathedral is missing a stone in one of its arches (or heck, even an entire arch), and that makes the whole structure shakier, filling that small but structurally important gap with a stone of more modern cut does not diminish the magnificence of the stained glass windows, the nave, the structure as a whole, etc.

Thought #3: Among those folks I know who've gone on antidepressant meds...generally, for those meds they tried but didn't stick with:

a. More often than not, they didn't stick with a med because it wasn't terribly effective for them, not because of the side effects;
b. When there were side-effects, they were not the whole gamut of what was listed on the label;
c. When the side-effects were a real problem, they were generally able to tell that relatively quickly and move on to try a different med.

Thought #4: Sometimes, the sobbing and screaming is more important than the conversation. Even at Game Night, I suspect that most people would be discomfited only because they'd want to help, but wouldn't know if there was anything they could do to help, and would want to express that support, but not want to intrude.

Thought #5: Yes, you hide it fairly well - had I not already known something of your state of mind, last night I would have thought that you seemed quiet, and...objective? Not the right word, but 'withdrawn' is even less right. Like you were holding yourself a bit apart, but still watching and interacting despite that distance? (Still not quite right, but closer.) Anyhow, I'd have been able to tell that things were likely not ideal, but would have not come anywhere near realizing the extent of what you're going through.

Thought #5a: I am very glad you talk about what's going on within your head in your journal.

*hugs*