One of the most difficult things I’ve ever done was choose to cut off my biological family. Though I’m still in contact with two siblings and briefly reconnected with a single cousin (who stopped responding and fell silent at some point last year–or maybe the year prior, I really don’t remember), I haven’t exchanged more than pleasantries with any one else in years (barring one moment of connection with an uncle I thought would be cooler about everything than he eventually was and my multiple attempts to extend a hand to my parents in the hope that they’d be able to grow enough for me to build some kind of relationship with them). Only a few still try to keep in contact and while I absolutely could do more to stay in contact with my wider family, that’s not really something I want. I cut them all off, not just my parents. I would tell pretty much anyone that my primary reason for doing so was because I didn’t want to come between my parents and their siblings, or drive any kind of wedge into the family at large, but those are things I’m currently discussing with my therapist as a result of how reflexively I say them and how they all center the well-being of my parents and family rather than admit the truth, which is that I can’t just ignore the fact that they all bore witness to the abuses of my childhood in some capacity and chose to do nothing. Regardless of the reason behind it, I still made the choice to potentially never speak to any of them ever again. I didn’t do it as directly as I did with my parents and I didn’t go as nuclear as I did with my brother, but none of them know where I live and I haven’t responded to any of their attempts to draw information out of me despite knowing exactly what all that would mean. I did, after all, set a rule in place for what it would take to reestablish contact with any of them, like I did with my parents and pretty much anyone I’ve ever cut contact with. And like my parents and most of the other people I’ve cut contact with, I knew from the outset that it was incredibly unlikely that my rule would ever be satisfied.
Continue readingMental Health
Weird Anxiety Spikes Are Still Less Trouble Than My Depression Was
Two months into my current dose of antidepressants and I’m pleased to say that my old misery/constant depression has stayed consistently gone. I’ve had my ups and downs during this period, my sleepless weeks that make the whole world seem darker, but it has been a weight off my shoulders to not have to fight myself every step of the way. Well, mostly. I’m still fighting myself occasionally, in ways that I was only sort of prepared for, and that by only one weirdly intense interaction with someone and the constant refrain of people complaining about weird increases in anxiety. Turns out, one of the side effects I’m experiencing is irregular but intense anxiety spikes. My brain will pick one specific thing and get incredibly bent out of shape about it no matter what that that thing is or what I tell myself. The first one was about a weird experience I had in a discord server and how I should have responded, where I worked myself up like I haven’t in a decade despite my best efforts to calm down and work through it myself. The second one was about my birthday, though I didn’t recognize it for a strange anxiety spike given how negatively I normally feel about contemplating my birthday. Currently, I’m struggling to contain the anxiety I feel about knowing that the world population status on Final Fantasy 14 has changed as part of today’s update (the day I wrote this) and the intense feeling that I need to take this time to make alternate characters because there’s no telling when the world will close again or how long it will be until it opens up again in the future. I’ve had a couple other spikes here or there, but they were all easier to work through: things that took a few calming breathes or waiting a few minutes for my mind to calm down rather than the day or days that these other ones are taking.
Continue readingGetting Back In The Saddle After A Decent Rest
I took a whole week off. It was only supposed to be a long weekend, but it turned into a whole week off of work. And writing. And most personal responsibilities. I didn’t even go grocery shopping and cobbled meals together out of stuff I had around my apartment, including a meal that was two bagels and the last of my jam. I did absolutely nothing that didn’t need doing and, honestly, it was kind of nice. Between actually getting some REAL rest, with proper seven-to-eight-hour nights and having an antidepressant that is (now unequivocally) working properly, that sure solved a lot of my active problems. Not all of them, mind you. It turns out that, by my approximation, eighty percent of my stress and exhaustion was actually burnout, not depression, so a single week of rest isn’t going to fix that by a long shot. It did still help a lot, though. Between having my first genuinely good birthday in at least a decade, maybe my entire life (can’t have a bad birthday if you don’t really celebrate it), taking time to sleep, allowing myself to just do whatever I wanted (which was only MOSTLY Final Fantasy 14), and reaching a point in my rest where I felt comfortable just sitting on my balcony and reading, I think I’ve gotten the most rest I’ve had in about two years. Turns out it’s difficult to rest if you have to spend a bunch of energy every day fighting your own mind in order to not be lethargic and miserable constantly and that removing that extra bit of effort can really help kickstart your other resting efforts.
Continue readingThe Price Of Burnout
After months (and perhaps even years, depending on how you want to measure it), I’m taking my first break where my depression hasn’t been a factor. Which means that, as I’m assessing myself and my well-being, my burnout is the remaining explanation for how awful I feel. Surprisingly, my depression was only about twenty percent of how bad I’ve been feeling for a long time and while it, and so many other factors, contributed to my burnout, removing my depression as a factor doesn’t decrease my burnout. It just shows me how bad things have gotten. Which is why I’m going to be taking a break from proper blog posts today and tomorrow. I’ve finally hit the point in this suddenly-a-full-week of vacation where I’m able to spend time and energy thinking about stuff, but I’m trying to avoid pushing myself too hard, so I will probably write posts, I’m just going to save them for maintaining my buffer after two days of posts and absolutely no writing as I felt myself by-and-large removed from reality by the personal collapse I’ve experienced as a result losing the tension and focus that has been keeping me going for the last eight months. So don’t look for a post tomorrow, but you can expect to see them again on Monday and I expect I’ll have plenty to say about all this which I’m sure you’ll be able to read next week at the latest.
This Hyperfixation On My Own Energy Levels Will Hopefully End Soon
Way back in 2015, I went on a pretty hardcore diet. I was trying to pick up running (long story) and having issues because of how hard it was on my legs (from knees on down), so I thought I’d try to lose some weight and see if running worked better. I took a severe, rather limiting approach that drove a significant lifestyle change I was hoping to maintain (that lasted until I went to a convention, slacked off on the severity of my limitations, and never picked it back up again), and it was all I could think about for a solid month. I had cut down my calorie intake to an incredibly low number and was fighting through the feelings of hunger that plagued me as my appetite slowly shrunk and my body adapted to burning stored fat rather than recently consumed food, so it was kind of at the forefront of my mind whenever I wasn’t focused on something else. It was all I talked about with my friends, in my group chats, and around my D&D group, so much so that I eventually realized it and (unsuccessfully) tried to stop talking about it. This past week of recovering my executive function has been kind of like that. Getting something back that I’ve been missing for so long–years and years–has consumed my mind and attention to the point that I’ve written about it every single day this week. I’m sure I could try to jog my mind away from this topic, but I’m not sure I want to yet since, well, this is a part of my lived experience and very important to me.
Continue readingI’m Recovering My Executive Function And All I Got So Far Was Less Final Fantasy 14 Time
In perhaps the least-expected twist of what increasingly seems like an effective antidepressant, while I am actually regaining my ability to do things at what feels like a nigh-miraculous rate, I’m actually doing a lot less Final Fantasy 14 stuff than I expected to do. I mean, I’ve spent so much time on the game lately that a lot of my considerations for what I might do more if I had the energy was stuff like “get back to my daily level-grinding work” or “finally work through a bunch of the job quests for fishing that I’ve been ignoring because fishing isn’t fun” or “return to my old days of constant resource collection.” Instead, my apartment is (mostly) clean, my dishes are done, my laundry is folded, work is less productive than ever, I’m more tired than before, and I’m sleeping less than I should. Turns out that stuff piling up on your mental to-do list starts to reassert itself pretty heavily when you finally stop reflexively flinching away from the thought of doing any kind of extra work because even considering the act of thinking about it made you so tired you wanted to lay down on the floor and not move for a week. So now I fill my “spare” evening time with cleaning tasks around my apartment, spend more time preparing myself decent food, and then realize I had a list of Final Fantasy 14 chores I wanted to get done such that now I’m staying up even later to do those as well. I’ve spent so much time over the past few years (and probably even longer) so incredibly tired in body, soul, and mind that now I’m starting to mistake the mental drive to do things returning for the physical ability to do things. Wanting to do stuff is unfortunately not the same as not being tired, much less actually having the energy to do stuff. Which is a mistake I’ve made three nights in a row.
Continue readingPumping The Brakes On Optimision In The Name Of Due Caution
After a few months of trying slowly increasing dosages of an anti-depressant, I might have finally found one that works. “Might,” being the operative word. I’m only a week and a half into this new dosage as I’m writing this, but I actually have had bursts of adequate executive function in the past few days and while the biggest bursts of it could be attributed to the common early side-effect of “manic energy,” I find myself wanting to feel cautiously optimistic about it. Well, cautiously willing to consider that this might be the medication working. I’m not sure I can call myself optimistic if I’m essentially trying to prove to myself that something other than the medication might be responsible for my buoyed mood. I mean, there’s been all kinds of studies in recent years about how eating a reasonable amount of ice cream every day can have positive effects on your health, so maybe my recent little treats of just a little ice cream every couple of days is responsible. Maybe it’s my improved sleep. Maybe it’s the fact that absolutely nothing horrible happened last week and all I have to deal with was the normal stress of a very busy work week. There’s a lot of things it could be. But its still probably the medication taking effect, even if I’m nervous about whether this feeling will last, grow, disappear, or whatever else could happen. As a teen, I had a really bad experience with mental health focused medications and my experiences so far this year have done little to resolve the general trepidation I feel at the thought of altering my mental state with outside chemicals. A trepidation I’m willing to forcefully overcome since that effort is so much less than the effort it takes to not look and feel miserable constantly that I’m spending just about every single day.
Continue readingMuddled Musings Through A Weary Skein Of Brain Fog
Today (the day I wrote this), I took a day off of work. I woke up feeling pretty crummy and in desperate need of more sleep, so I spent a little time debating myself about the merits of taking another day off versus going into the office and eventually agreed to let myself take a day off if I spent some time doing some chores I’d been putting off once I’d finished sleeping. It took a bit longer than normal to make up my mind because I felt kind of out of it, kind of mentally foggy, but the generally exhausted and ill feeling of my entire being that morning made it a pretty easy decision in the end. Unfortunately, sleeping didn’t really make me feel that much better. I felt a bit more clear-headed for a while, but the mental fog has returned by the evening (when I’m writing this) and though my stomach problems passed eventually, like they have every morning this week, I still felt crummy enough that I only did one of the chores I bargained with myself about. Given how I feel awful still, I’m pretty sure I’ll still have tomorrow to do the balance of them. I mean, I literally went back to sleep for another three hours and STILL felt exhausted and murky when I woke up. Almost like the sleep I got wasn’t terribly helpful, like back when my insomnia was at its worst and I’d be able to sleep a whole nine or ten hours and feel the same way as if I’d taken a very long nap. It’s not a great feeling to wake up tired, decide to take a day off so you can rest, get as much rest as you can, and then still feel tired and out of sorts.
Continue readingA Week Of Ups And Downs And Sudden Lateral Movement
This has been a difficult week. I’ve had a lot of emotional turbulence as I’ve started up a new medication while still on an old one. It’s not making me feel things, but it does seem to be amplifying my naturally occurring emotions in weird ways. Or doing nothing except leaving me incredibly sleepy. I also had a day where I just felt out of it, like I had a bad head cold that was making me feel foggy. Today (a week before this posted), I feel mostly normal except all of my emotions are hitting me at full power rather than drifting up and down as normal. I think this is the unfortunate combination of weaning off my previous medication while starting up my new one and the sort of daily variability of it is giving me hope that this is just a temporary side effect as my body adjusts to the changing chemical levels within it [this seems to have played out as I hoped it would, with these symptoms largely vanishing by the time this posted]. That all of this emotional variability will calm down eventually and my body will adjust, settling into routine side effects and new chemical balances that will hopefully have the desired effect of treating my depression and anxiety. Eventually. For now, though, I’m implementing a lot of “Shut The Fuck Up Friday” best practices because I’ve caught myself prepared to say some things in the workplace that wouldn’t necessarily get me in trouble but would give my coworkers a better glimpse at the person I am than I’m prepared to show them in a structured work environment. I mean, I don’t exactly trust them after all…
Continue readingThe End Of My Ceaseless Exhaustion Is Hopefully In Sight
After three months of miserable side-effects, unending exhaustion, and sleepiness that dominated my every waking moment, I’ve finally hit the end of my “wait it out” period for the antidepressant my doctor recommended. I had some small improvement from it at the highest dose I took, but I was also so tired on it that I’d be falling asleep every afternoon even when I was sleeping a minimum of seven and a half hours. Which, you know, wasn’t exactly a viable outcome for me. It took me a couple weeks to even recognize that the medication was having a positive effect on me because I was just too tired to feel anything but nigh-overwhelming exhaustion. It was a bit of a lateral move rather than an improvement or worsening of my general well-being, but I can work through feeling incredibly depressed and I cannot work through exhaustion that complete, as I learned throughout the last three months. It never quite got bad enough to actually make me mess up at work, but I also took a lot of vacation time during the peak of the exhaustion and I had plans for that time later this year. So it wasn’t great but I got through it, told my doctor it wasn’t working for me at any dose, and now I’m officially on the “slowly wean off the antipressant” path. As of this blog post going up, I’m one week away from my last dose of it and what will hopefully be the end of my constant sleepiness.
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