Mental Health

Emotional Processing And Pain I Could Once Ignore

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Content Warnings for discussion of childhood trauma (specifically neglect and abuse at the hands of my parents and brother).

I wish yesterday’s good mood had lasted a bit longer [it did eventually pick back up again, but today did not help much]. I made it through an entire day with it intact, but it did not survive a night of poor sleep and an unfocused day of finding myself browsing the internet because I needed something more engaging than my work to keep me awake. At least nothing bad has happened. I came by this poor mood honestly. It is a melancholy of my own making. A sadness of my own. Pure, homegrown sorrow. It was, of course, influenced by outside sources, as all such things are. It’s not like I want to think about my miserable childhood. I’ve gotten pretty good at not thinking about it, most of the time, but there’s little I can do in the face of something that will push past the blanket I’ve thrown over that portion of my mind and draw bits of my past out into the light. I’m only half to blame for it this time, though. Sure, I chose to watch last week’s John Oliver deep dive about homeschooling knowing that I was going to get myself caught up in the misery of the past, but I wasn’t exactly expecting it to be so focused on how homeschooling is used by some parents to avoid scrutiny while they abuse or neglect their children. Nor was I expecting an incredibly brief conversation with my friend about her trip to her local county fair to bring up oddly strong memories of the fairs I went to ask a child that eventually revealed to me that all the happiest memories I have of my childhood are from when I was alone or at least away from my entire biological family. But they did and now I’m trying to figure out if I have something I need to work through here or if I need to allow myself to be sad for a while since that’s a pretty reasonable reaction to my reflections and minor realization.

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My Experience Of OCD As A Whole

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Content Warning for discussions of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, specifically the obsessions and compulsions that make it up, which, in my case, includes suicidal ideation.

I write about my mental health a lot. I’ve written blog posts, poetry, short stories, and even worked on longer fiction all about my depression, my anxiety, dealing with trauma/PTSD, etc. The only thing I’ve never managed to really cover in a way that felt satisfying was my OCD. I can write about it just fine and I’ve done plenty of blog posts discussing it and the ways it impacts my life, but I’ve never really been able to capture how it feels in a way that felt true to my own experiences, as I’ve done with the other things I’ve mentioned. The only bit of writing I’ve ever found that felt true to my experience of OCD (specifically as an expression of it rather than a mechanical depiction of it) was John Green’s Turtles All The Way Down, and even the best mechanical depictions of it are still fairly rare given how often it’s falsely depicted as different types of fastidiousness in popular media. Green’s excellent book felt incredibly reflective of my own experience, even if it still fell short because of the inherent distance between Green’s experience (which he wrote about) and my experience (which I’ve yet to ever convey in a way that feels true and complete). It’s frustrating to want to capture something that has such a strong and particular feeling to it and be unable to do it in a satisfying way no matter how often I’ve tried.

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Losing Context And Burning Out

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I was talking to a friend the other day about everything going on in our lives right now and she remarked that it seems like everyone is going through a lot these days. I responded that it seemed true that everyone seems to be having a rough year and that no one who I talked to regularly wasn’t having a difficult time at some point in the last month. As I’ve thought about this conversation further, I’ve added in my on-going thoughts about how long it has been since I last felt at peace for more than a single day. Because, if you think about it, the last eight years have been full of fairly dramatic moments, events, and entire years, to the point that it now feels difficult to properly contextualize anything outside the scale of my day-to-day life. Plus, since stuff is happening relentlessly, there’s no opportunity for anyone to take a break, make some space, and try to recontextualize things, there really isn’t a way to fix this problem in a way that doesn’t contribute to the on-going problem of being constantly overwhelmed. I mean, the last quarter of my life includes Trump’s presidency, all the crimes related to that, the 2020 election, all the crimes related to THAT, the complete enshitification of pretty much the entire internet (though I’d say this marks just the conclusion of that process since it began far earlier than 2015), the various police murders of people they were arresting or just encountering in the course of their state-sponsored violence (which has going on for much longer than the past 8 years but feels like it’s been getting worse), all the mass shootings (which have been going on most of my life and seem to only be getting worse), and so much more.

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Soul-Grinding Exhaustion And Emotional Moderation

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I have come out the other side of my flu shot. I had an incredibly awful pair of days where I felt like all my joints were solidifying (the usual stiffness and body aches I expected from my flu shot were made much worse by the low-pressure front that decided to hang over the area for the entire time I was recovering). I did not have much opportunity to rest since I had to be in the office to at least set up the tests that were on my to-do list for this week. While I was able to go home on Tuesday after I’d set everything up since my coworkers were willing to keep an eye on it for me, I had to be in the office all day on Wednesday to monitor the next test myself and set up the subsequent run when that test inevitably failed. At least I was able to get enough data for the developers to figure out the problem and fix it. Now I just need to keep the test running and hope no new problem crop up, which is pretty easy work since it requires enough of my attention that I can’t really do a whole lot else but not so much that I have to look at it constantly. I can read stuff, do some research, write a blog post, or try to figure out if the last email I got was an actual scam (or a test scam by my employer’s IT department to help train employees on how to identify email scams) while I occasionally glance over at the readout I’ve set up. Every so often, I have to walk over to do a few things, but it’s really easy to divide my attention outside of those more active moments.

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The First Step Is Sleeping. After That, Everything’s Doable.

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It finally happened. I finally had people over to just hang out. Took three and a half months, but it finally happened. They weren’t my first house guests, since I’ve hosted an in-person tabletop game day for a Pathfinder 2e one-shot (that became at least a two-shot) and had a friend stay the night just a couple weeks ago, but they were the first people I had over with the express purpose of just occupying my space with me. It was really nice. We didn’t do much, other than hang out, go pick up pizza, and then idly watch the first two thirds of the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring while we made idle chitchat, ate our food, and did stuff on our phones. Exactly the kind of chill, no expectations, no greater purpose type of hanging out I’ve been wanting. Now all I gotta do is make it happen again! Hopefully in less than three and a half months. It’ll probably be easier, what with the impending winter, but you can never know for certain. Some winters, people will just hole up in their homes and avoid leaving it for anything other than necessity. Some winters, people can’t wait to escape their homes for any reason at all. You never know until it’s happening.

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My Exhaustion And Depression Teamed Up On Me

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Between therapy, not sleeping well last night (I was actually in bed on time for once, I just couldn’t fall asleep and then I kept waking up throughout the night), and the general events of the last two weeks, I just do not have the energy for much today. I finished Sea of Stars and want to write about it, but the thought of even starting on that post (by copying over the relevant bits of a discussion I had with someone about the game) have me feeling so exhausted that I’d rather lay down on the dirty floor of my office and not move for a week than try to parse through all the pieces of that largely one-sided discussion (my mistake for engaging with someone without checking if they were up for in-depth critical analysis). I mean, hell, I can’t decide what I’m doing to do for dinner and tonight’s grocery night, which means I could guiltlessly cop out by ordering Chinese food from the local place since I’ll be getting home late. Nothing like buying a bunch of food and then not eating any of it. Sure, it’s because I’m exhausted from a long day of work and then going grocery shopping afterwards, but it still feels weird to do. Plus, as much as I enjoy getting takeout from the local Chinese restaurant, I tend not sleep as well after eating it. Seems like eating something else might be the better choice in order to address my exhaustion, but that will take a degree of effort that picking up my dinner would not.

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The Difference Between Mourning And Closure

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Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.

I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.

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I Feel So Relieved Already

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Just one week later, not even seven full days getting my mole removed, and I’m already wondering what I was worried about. Sure, I’m still in the active wound-care stage of things, but I’m notably less self-conscious of the bandage stuck to my face than I ever was of my mole, and that’s even with the bandage feeling way more noticeable than the mole ever was. It just bothers me so much less. Honestly, the only gripe I’ve got about this whole process is how I have to shave every single day. I learned the hard way that more than a day’s worth of facial hair growth makes the bandages fall off much more quickly. Most of the other gripes I’ve had (such as how bad the wound looked) either faded away in the first few days or I’ve learned how to counter them. For instance, I might still be unable to bite into large things (like an apple), but I’ve gone back to drinking as usual and gotten the hang of eating various more easily bitten foods without making a mess or accidentally putting pressure on my wound. It has all become fairly routine at this point and while I’m definitely eager to get to the point where I don’t have something stuck to my face twenty-four hours a day, I’m honestly just happy to not have the mole anymore.

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I Overextended Myself Once Again

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I wound up staying up until about 2am Friday morning, since I only finished building my character and all that in Baldur’s Gate 3 at about 11:30 Thursday night. It took a long time to download and I had a D&D game I was playing in during the earlier hours of the evening, so I was faced with either going to bed without playing BG3 or staying up a bit to play just the intro. I chose the latter, which turned into playing for about two hours. That, plus a bit of research I did following my introduction to Gale is what informed last Friday’s post since I wrote that during work breaks in my morning and then finished it between chores Saturday morning. I was pretty busy for pretty much the entire day and evening, so I had to get pretty focused with my topic for Friday. It’s not like I had any extra time to play more or do more research about the game that day, nor have I had much since then.

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I Miss Pretending To Be Someone Else

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I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve hardly had the time or energy for doing anything after work other than settling down in front of my TV and not moving again until it’s time to go to bed. I had plans to start putting a puzzle together or maybe work on a Lego set at some point this week (in an effort to spend some time away from screens and take a break from books. The book break isn’t because they’re bad or they’re twisting my mind in some way (though doing a massive binge of The Dresden Files has definitely influenced my recent dreams, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), but because I’m spending too much time hunched over things or folded up in chairs. I need some activities that let me sprawl. Or, I thought I’d need them since I planned to get a full week of daily workouts in this week. Instead, I’ve done zero workouts, stuggled to get to sleep on time, and all the energy I have for any given day has been consumed by work as I juggle projects, prepare for a company event (that has happened by the time this goes up), and attempts to sort through my feelings about a whole range of stuff.

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