kiya

about the Kemetic religious community that makes me want to die quietly in my sleep.

Or possibly never post anywhere again.

It would be really nice if, now that I'm having my actual health taken seriously and thus have a lot of medical bills, my health insurance company would actually fucking pay them.

I mean, there was one that was - for one of the diagnostic tests - rejected outright with a "Since this didn't matter to your eventual diagnosis, fuck you". (My doctor was actively offended by that, and had a lovely political rant before noticing that this might be inappropriate doctor-patient relationship. I like my doctor.)

This new bill is less bad, being merely, "So, our negotiations with your health care provider means that we only accept being billed for about a fifth of your care. By the way? Your deductible? About a fifth."

This feels so ... iconic right now. And I feel very "Oh, I'm so sorry that my actually finally getting appropriate care means that I might theoretically have a relationship with you other than captive cash cow" about it. (I mean, yes, a $120 bill is less than the initial $550 bill, but the gap between the two just vanished, none of that money was paid to anyone. It's just the don't-have-insurance tax.)

I'm so tired. I'm not sinking into the horrible depression I've had the last eighteen hours or so because I've had a Boston playlist going for a bit, and that's bouyant for me. I'm just, too much of everything is health insurance. And there's no way to think about health insurance or things resembling it without existential horror.

Don't have one yet. Must get those pictures of the herb garden/landwight shrine done.

I am a massive burnout case right now. Attempting to control the downturn with lots of omega-3s and the usual accomplishing-of-things, which is made hard by the damned exhaustion. I missed my new moon ritual level of just can't cope; I should probably shower and do that after dark, a few days late, but I know it'll help if I can actually get it done.

I did get the rest of the plants whispercricket and teinedreugan and I dug up from the yard of the stray SCAdian last weekend into the ground, at least, so I won't be sort of anxious about how well they're doing sitting in buckets. The comfrey (which we got into the ground immediately) has recovered, but has also tipped over; I'm not sure what to make of that. It seems happy all fallen over? The periwinkle seems not the worse for wear. The quince looked a bit shaky, but we'll see how it handles it now that it has dirt around its root. The lilacs were in between on the 'coping with being in buckets' front; I wound up digging up some of the giant weeds along the fence and putting lilacs in the resulting holes. I'm hot and sweaty but have gotten some needful stuff done (also straightened up the south-side grape arbor, which was trying to fall over again).

... arawen is here semi-unexpectedly and now he wants to accomplish things. Heh.

I found myself thinking of that argument on rasfc a while back (was it really a few months ago? I'm not sure), the whole what is identity and not, and the claim that changes to the body don't change the sense of identity, unlike changes to the mental process.

I spent this weekend far more dependent on my cane than is normal for me even when I am using it. (Usually I need it for a day or two and then I'm more or less okay. This weekend I needed it to climb up the steep slopes of curb cuts.)

And one of the things that drove me completely bats about that dependency, about the limitation of the pain, was this steady persistent awareness that this is not me. And I don't have the identity I had as a child, when I could do nothing, be nothing, that did not run, but damnit, I can walk. That hurt, sometimes, more than the pain.

My mother tells me that my brother could never have riding lessons like I did as a child because his hip went weird on him too easily. And muses about her need for a hip replacement.

Who am I, in the bone?

Was poking around the web staring at diagnostic criteria for depression and poked at a trivial self-test thing (these things are useless, but I thought I'd give it a poke).

The damn thing needs to be copyedited without mercy. It popped up "Severe Depression" as a diagnosis. I pop up "Written By A Fucking Illiterate" as a diagnosis.

I'm all depression, all the time lately. Trust me, I'm even more boring in my own head.

(The Beck's inventory I came across pegs me at 'Moderate'. Unfortunately, my answers to approximately everything were between numbers, and I don't know which way the rounding error goes. Same basic test as the illiterate one, slightly different wordings.)

So I noticed that my previous post was utterly incoherent and did not include that the bluegrass cover was of Pink Floyd's "Goodbye Blue Sky" despite my being sure I typed it, but that is probably about par for the course for that evening.

I wrote 268 words the other day, getting back to work and trying to pick up the threads of that and make progress. So I've started part 4 of the thing. Figured out the next bit, too, just need to write it down. Feeling a bit better about things; it's good to actually write. I need to figure out how to rewrite the early bits to get the cultural stuff in that I sorted out ages ago thanks to ritaxis.

I've been doing planning for the garden. Which is amusing, given how much snow/slush/sludge there is out there, but best to know what I'm doing well ahead of time. I'm planning on building two frames to start out with; we'll see if I can manage to maintain that properly and then see where to go in later years. Asked nex0s for some help on figuring out what local pests there are; need to go to UMass and see if they have the pamphlets she thought they ought.

Other miscellaneous stuff has included discussing reconstruction and crazed druids with arawen, miscellaneous states of emotional breakdown (I am tired of this, but seem to be getting better), persistent wrestling with depression, thinking about theology that I'm not actually getting written down, and playing Warcraft (hit 70 on Samh yesterday, along with honored with both Scryers and Lower City). I think I am slightly ill, but not enough that it's anything other than a distraction, another reason to sleep, and intermittent abdominal pain.

Depression may be breaking; I'm having impulses to do things. Though if I'm not careful it'll all fall apart in a morass of 'Augh, too much' and I'll fall down into the goddamn pit again.

103 words. Just now. Fat lot of good that does anyone; I don't even know if they're the right words. Piffle.

Lennon's sick. (teinedreugan, this is your first-order reminder to call the vet.)

I'm not doing so hot myself. Stupid damn guts.


It's hard not to be consumed with pointlessness, distracted by anything other than what I ought to be doing. Those impulses of self-immolation surface again, licking at the inside of my skin; I could be doing better. I should be doing better.

My fault, my failings; burn, burn, burn.

Helpless-hopeless-useless.

Burn.


[ Editorial note: Bonfire's being polite enough to share front. We let him write. Part of the consumption of pointlessness was getting him a user icon, anyway. ]

[ Song output oddly ironic. ]

[ Stormy addendum: Rar! Let me *snarlteeth* post this damned entry. Maintenance. *manyteeth* ]

[ Addendum addendum: fuckitgoingtobed. Game over, try again later. ]

It's my responsibility to look after my own happiness. I can't have my happiness depend on the presence of specific other people and be healthy; nor can it depend on specific other things that are outside my control.

Other people can make it easier for me to be happy -- content, I think is the word I want; happiness is not neutral for me. Or can improve the quality of what "content" means. Or can provide me with other routes to other things through their presence in my life (riffing off the "I want you in my life as a partner because I like who you make it possible for me to be" notion).

The problem comes that I'm not all that consistently good at seeking or finding contentment or happiness on my own, for reasons that are not in my control.

This is the first serious emotional downturn I've had since I started supplementing my vitamins; it feels different in quality from others I can remember, but I'm not sure if that's related to where it fell in my hormone cycle. (And I don't remember depressions very well for comparison purposes; the stuff that my memories hang off doesn't really exist consistently in a dip.) I'm not even getting my seasonal-affective stuff since the vitamins -- I'm not doing fourteen to sixteen hour sleeps by preference. The current depression has me up to ten or eleven sleeps before I get frustrated and just get up. Big difference the pills make there.

But when I'm up, it's hard for me to get my hands on something and do it. And I know that if I can go and get something done, odds are pretty good that that will shift my moods significantly. But things slip between my fingers -- the working on the database for my current massive multidimensional Tetris issue went off into a marvelling at a recipe that requires a half cup of whole cloves. I need to get the laundry I did two days ago out of the dryer.

Knowing that it would help doesn't actually make it easier to do it; it just reinforces my damagedness at being incapable. Thus the depression perpetuates. Getting bizarre spasms in my internal lower abdominal muscles gives me the freaking weird-outs to go with.

Gonna go get the damn laundry now. And maybe paint the wall some more if I don't crack my head on the ceiling lamp again. And see if that helps . . . or if it slips out of my hands again. (Sifting sand through my fingers . . . looking for some trace of you. . .)