It’s all around, getting stronger, coming closer—into my world.
I can feel that it’s time for me to face it; can I take it?
Though this might just be the ending of the life I held so dear,
But I won’t run, there’s no turning back from here—
Stand my ground, I won’t give in,
No more denying, I’ve got to face it,
Won’t close my eyes and hide the truth inside,
If I don’t make it, someone else will
Well, I’m not afraid. (At least, there are now long points where I’m not afraid.) The going and doing things despite horrible feelings and memories seems to help.
The only problem is that while it settles my mind, more or less, it doesn’t settle my body’s reaction. So basically I still have a constant fight-or-flight response. The Xanax tames the fear and dread, but it does not stop the response.
Which means I’m stressed as hell, because I want to either fight something or run away from something—literally, not metaphorically. It turns out that fight-or-flight means exactly that. I’m constantly vigilant—which is all PTSD—but there is nothing to be vigilant for. And I’m sure the bipolar’s quick-cycling mania or depression intensifies the stress as well, just with a different flavor depending on which is currently dominant or whateverthehellitis.
This means I’m biting heads off left and right if I don’t rein myself in, hard. I feel like I will shatter into a million pieces from being mentally pulled in multiple directions.
As another note, none of this is an excuse for anything I do to hurt people. It’s an explanation, and now that I know it, I better keep it in mind during all interactions I have with people, because I’m really not in a right frame of mind.
It’s really hard. Really, really hard.
… on the other hand, I’m way harsher to Twitter spammers than I usually would be, and possibly that’s a force for good.
I woke up without dreams and so I’m feeling a bit feisty. It’s sunny like hell and I’ll probably have crashed horribly in a couple hours. But now! I can do anything! ((I suspect it’ll have to be my neglected chores though. Sigh.)) Says my mania.
So, the new Plan! It’s like the old plan. But with an addendum!
5. Don’t avoid, but don’t overdo, and the medication is here to help with that.
I’m going to have to do things like cook (durn food allergies) in a kitchen that triggers me. I should do the minimum I need to do to make sure I, like, actually eat something healthy. But I shouldn’t avoid doing so.
However, when I’m about to do so, I should make sure I have a recent Xanax floating in my system to make it bearable. Ish. Maybe two. But if it had to be three, time out with a bowl of cold cereal.
fin The Plan
Wish me luck because I already am losing the manic cycle to the constant dread despite a Xanax. Or take cheer in my coming downfall for being presumptuous. Whichever.
So things have been going poorly as per the usual (though I didn’t have nightmares today… I mean, yesterday). As an example, every time I pick up a knife to chop fruit or something, I remember all the moments my father used them to threaten me. Some of those memories push harder at me than others, and sometimes I can hear his voice or feel as though he’s behind me (why hello there, PTSD, aren’t you subtle today?).
I was discussing with a couple friends of mine about how to avoid this from happening. For instance, maybe I can chop fruit somewhere that’s not the kitchen, because my kitchen is a serious trigger area for me, given that a good number of my father’s various abusive explosions happened in or near the kitchens of my childhood.
However, I had to put that idea down eventually, because it dawned on me, what my bartender was trying to tell me all along: that avoidance doesn’t help. Indeed, it breeds triggers.
I haven’t covered the last… what… four sessions?… I’ve had with him because my concentration is starting to break up. There was one spectacular session, then I melted, then there was an emergency session… well. Anyways.
The point is that whatever I use to distract from or avoid my triggers, results in those activities becoming triggers or otherwise getting neutralized in very traumatic ways (case in point: hanging onto thoughts of Crimnee eventually resulted in my PTSD using him in a nightmare that knocked me into terror for an entire day).
But whatever I use to get through an episode or bad memory or other such thing… those don’t become triggers. That’s why the cows haven’t become triggers even though it’s been months: I use them to soldier on through bad and worse and hairline-suicidal times. They’re for comfort, they aren’t for avoidance.
So basically. The train of the holidays… it’s going to run me over. The feelings and emotions and memories and even flashbacks, those will come. I can’t fight it by avoiding thinking about the train, and simply staring into the headlights of the train doesn’t work all that well either. All I can do is—and yes, this isn’t the greatest metaphor in the world, but we were trying to work from a train metaphor I introduced in the session—let the train go through me.
And at first I thought the metaphor was maybe all wrong—it implies that the train won’t hurt me, or that it would kill me anyways. I think it’s not quite so wrong after all. I mean. There’s no way around it: this is going to hurt. But it’s not going to be fatal.
I guess the closest, concrete analogy is: you’re up this really tall tree for some reason. There are no handholds to get down the tree without falling. You’re going to have to fall. But in this case, there is a path to fall and not die. Unfortunately, it’s not a path that’s going to be at all painless, and you’re going to have at least one broken limb. But you’re not going to die. And it’s better than starving to death in the tree. Possibly.
My parents are not actually here to kill me.
But nevertheless. These holidays are going to fucking hurt. And trying to employ avoidance tactics will only leave me up the tree, not get me down.
Anyways, so. Basically, need to focus on ways to help me bear exposure to triggers. Redecorating the kitchen so it doesn’t look like it’s from the @#$@ 80′s would help a hell of a lot, for instance.
My bartender is a patient, patient man. He’s only been trying to tell me all this for 1.5 years or so. I just haven’t been ready. Every session was him getting me ready for this, but not overtly so. All that time he spent convincing me to stop avoiding the living room and to use it more—it took a year, but I got there! I’m using the living room, even sometimes as a refuge from the nightmares in the bedroom. And it was a good thing.
When I sleep, the nightmares have been ceaseless. When I’m awake, the hyper-vigilance and low-grade fear have been ceaseless, although they’re very much toned down by the medication from my candy man.
This makes me pretty much useless vis a vis work that isn’t putting out a fire. For some reason having to put out fires ((Metaphorically speaking.)) (or, better yet, dig fire breaks or do general fire prevention stuff) pushes the PTSD away and I can function normally during that time period.
But it has to be an actual fire, not random pages in the night or early morning.
I don’t want to analyze, even a little, what’s happening each day. It hurts and that’s really all I know. It isn’t even the week of Christmas and I’m already losing my mind.
These feelings, or more descriptively, symptoms, come and go… I thought work was a little clueless when they called these moments “flare-ups” but, well, these symptoms are acting like that even though these are “just” psychological.
There is no time when I hate my parents more than this time of year. Do you know what this morning’s repeating nightmare was? My parents dismembering Crimnee little by little, until he was just a head and they gouged his eyes out. So yeah. PTSD took away Crimnee.
Also, Yahoo is going to kill Del.icio.us, but y’all already know about that. Supposedly they won’t kill Flickr, possibly because going Flickr Pro has been necessary to use more than 100 photos on their site without using multiple accounts and yet not all that painful year-to-year, whereas Del.icio.us bookmarks are in the hundreds to thousands per user without direct payment/pro fees. And yeah, totes easier to think about the culling of Del.icio.us than my own, likely more personally important, problems, but regardless my heart goes out to my Yahoo colleagues who are getting axed.
Before Christmas.
Yeah, they’re not having good holidays either.
P.S.: I know Yahoo is having some individual professionalism issues right now, and I want to make it very clear before someone decides to do something to trigger me further: I don’t work for Yahoo. I work for a non-direct competitor of Yahoo, someone who I dearly hope will buy some Yahoo services ((Heck, maybe even poach some Yahoo folks, especially the ones who have been let go.)), but as I’m not a high enough level of employee to directly suggest this to the top brass, and I’m having issues concentrating on work anyways, I’m probably not really a threat. Please go witch-hunt elsewhere.
Note: Corrected title. November and December are kind of a great big gob of trigger territory to me.
No, it didn’t.
Well, it started off fine. But I started to lose endurance around 3pm, and managed to stay mostly sane until 7pm (even after a long commute), only to lose my mind shortly thereafter. It was a combination of rapid-cycling from the bipolar and my PTSD triggering all over the place resulting in being suicidal in both phases, so to speak, with just enough sanity left to keep me from actually doing myself in, and to eventually remember (an hour later) that cellphones exist and you can text people through them when your mind is unraveling and you need help holding all the pieces together.
This is going to be harder than I thought. I forgot how visceral my PTSD can be; this isn’t the brutal force of a level-3 or level-4 flashback, but the subtle insidiousness of a level-2 creeping in, altering my thought processes, which is harder to fight back against, much less detect. ((I mean, I even wrote about it, but I forget to apply these things to my situation.)) But good to know that it actually does inhibit my thinking to the point where I can’t even remember that Valencia is packing Xanax for me for a reason. Or worse, where I remember it, but can’t actually make the decision to use it.
It explains a lot of the previous years, actually. Now if I can just remember that instead of forgetting it instantly, which is what I’d usually do. So I’m blogging it. Hoorah.
So anyways. Tomorrow we’re going to try this again. I did regain my sanity after eating… um, three Leapin’ Lemurs chocolate peanut butter rice bars, three servings of tater tots with generous amount of non-HFCS ketchup ((Simply Heinz. Which is actually quite good.)), and a non-alcoholic pina-colada. I think this diet is definitely on hold.
Also, while I’m sure this is unhealthy, I’m going to occasionally hold my Crimnee ideal close to my mind, even if I have to do it with Creed. Maybe I’ll tell y’all stories about that time in my life. They’re bittersweet, although I don’t think they qualify as “war stories.”
Typing this while buried in cows. There’s even a new cow in the fold: Elmer, who is basically mini-Kaiser (one of Gund’s cow models). The Overcow is pondering careful expansion of the herd so that there’s both an upstairs and downstairs guard of maybe 6 to 8 cows of various sizes. At the moment I can’t bear to leave any of the cows separated from each other for long because, you know, monsters.
One slice of toast from a loaf baked from Pamela’s GF Bread Mix, cut in half and filled with American Grilled Cheez (the latter made using quinoa flakes rather than quick oats ((I have an allergic reaction to oats. It’s not as severe as to wheat/gluten, but it’s not pleasant either.)) ). There are also Hickory Bits in there, which are somehow as addicting as bacon bits.
Respectively: 170 cals, 72 cals, and 23 cals. Or suchlike.
There’s also half a boiled egg….
Side Dish
… along with its other half in the upper container, for 78 calories.
There’s half an apple in there (think it’s a Fuji) for 31 calories. I think I’m going to keep fruit in their own side, snack bentos from now on, though. They tend not to mix well with main dishes, unless the main dish happens to be a fruit salad.
There’s an unseen bento box here that had almond nut thin crackers (11 for 89 calories) and approx 2 tablespoons of Colby Cheez in cube form (32 calories).
Every weekday I post a bento is usually one in which I’ve managed to go to work. This is starting to become a bit of a miracle working every day as December goes.
I actually should have just left the divider in the middle and filled in with the fruit on both sides, as it otherwise shifted during transit anyways. Sigh….
- 1/2 Cortland apple. Cortlands are awesome, they stay white long after cutting without needing the lemon and/or other acidic treatment that most other apples do. Too bad they’re pretty rare out here in the Pacific Northwest.
- Colby Cheez, 1 tablespoon, 16 cals. Oh, fake cheez, I love thee….
- Pomegranates, 1 ounce or thereabouts, 19 calories
Total
407 calories
Surprisingly, adding vegetables, even a small amount, to a bento automatically makes it more filling. Without the carrots, this would have been too small of a bento for me—but with the carrots, it becomes much more.
However, I dislike this box. It’s a bit too small and squished, but I guess I’ll show that later when I finally catalog all my bento equipment.
For those new to the blog, a summary of the situation: the holidays trigger my PTSD. My PTSD is the result of my childhood, as my parents headed into the kind of abusive territory you usually only see and hope only exist in dramatic novels and movies. I’ve had good years and bad years, and… well, this is hasn’t been a great year.
Every attempt to cope with the holidays in the past have ended in disasters of varying degrees. Last year left me screaming inside my head for 72 hours straight during Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day, because those days in my tender years tended to be celebrated via knife threats pinned to the wall in the kitchen, and other such fun activities. Family tradition, what can I say, apart from WHAT THE FUCK WHY MUST SOME PEOPLE FUCKING SUCK AT PARENTING AND THAT’S REALLY AN UNDERSTATEMENT HERE.
Also, to make things really good and explosive, I suffer from bipolar I. The version that can yield hallucinations, which do not work well when one is susceptible to flashbacks. Or really well, depending on your point of view.
Anyways.
So… new plan for trying to make the holidays not suck as much.
1. Acceptance.
I’ve tried to deny and pretend that neither my PTSD nor bipolar exist. This doesn’t work for me; maybe it works for other people, but the past years have been quite visceral demonstrations that my PTSD and bipolar don’t work at a conscious level. A friend of mine, despite having seen said demonstrations at least once, during a really bad particular event, still believes it’s all because I’m just not… ignoring it strongly enough, basically.
I really don’t know how much stronger denial can get past forgetting that it exists at all, and I’m a master at forgetting—consciously, anyways.
So, on the days when the warning signs appear, or fuck, if it shows up at a certain severity, I will not try to delude myself and instead take early action to mitigate it, even if it means knocking myself out with three Xanax pills at a time and… I hate this… missing work. I have a great job, and it hurts to miss it, plus missing work just leads to perceptions of decreased viability and….
Anyways, that sucks, but it sucks more to crash due to denial.
2. Keeping up health.
I hate this, but I’m temporarily suspending my 1.5-to-2-pounds-a-week diet in favor of 1 pound to weight maintenance. I need all my energy to deal with… well, whatever. Ill effects from being sick or exhausted intensifies all my reactions.
This means: balanced meals with veggies and protein and carbs and all, always breakfasts and filling out all my calories for the day, and enough sleep. Especially the latter. Even if I’m scared that the nightmares will come and I’ll wake up in flashback mode, because I can trigger in my sleep, since life apparently hates my guts. (That probably ties back into #1 above.)
3. Keep up good social connections.
I can withdraw into myself during times of emotional intensity and significantly increased triggering potential, partly because that’s simply how a lot of people react to this kind of crap, and partly because I’ve hurt people during these periods. Sometimes they don’t forgive me, nor should they. I’m a plague and human being of negative worth, honestly, during the holidays.
I have friends now who understand more this kind of stuff, or at least are willing to. And the commenters on this blog. I can’t promise I’ll always blog, because even my mania during this period turns from crazy productiveness into insane paranoia; but… I’ll try to at least keep up with a couple folks. It’s hard for me to concentrate on multiple people during these times. Or really any time.
I notice also that when I’ve been cooped up in my house for days for one reason or other ((Like the Seattle area not plowing when we get a couple inches of snow, resulting in frozen packed slurry and hell on commuting.)), away from my coworkers, I start to lose touch with the present something serious.
And… I guess I just have to stay away from the friends and acquaintances who actually hurt me, not intentionally, during these times. One of my friends actually helped a lot in pushing me over the edge during the final week of Christmas, and the only reason I stopped crying about what he did was because the screaming started.
Anyways.
4. Attempt to keep up a schedule.
This soothes the bipolar. Anything that soothes the bipolar will help. This means keeping really strict medication timing, proper sleeping hours, and dragging myself into work with a bento box every time. ((I can’t really not have a bento box these days, due to being allergic to gluten, wheat, and dairy, which almost no restaurant or delivery place will take into account, because it’s just a bother, you know.)) I have checklists for mornings and evenings, and have been trying to keep up with them.
Plus GTD helps out with the planning, more or less. ((A shout-out to Appigo’s Todo foriPhone, which has enough features to support full-out hardcore GTD, and yet is flexible enough for doing almost any variation of GTD that fits you if you’re not hardcore.))
Of course, I have to accept that sometimes my PTSD will derail some, most, or all of this. I don’t want to, it feels like I’m just accepting defeat, and those who know me, know that my usual attempt to problems is to beat them with a hammer until either they break or I do.
Dunno what else.
Dunno.
Anyways, such is The Plan. And now I need to sleep. Thank the gods for Ambien.
Hello my friend, we meet again.
It’s been a while, where should we begin?
Feels like forever.
— Creed, “My Sacrifice” ((Ibid. next six blocks of lyrics.))
I suppose I might as well write this down.
Amongst the many things I and my bartender discussed in the last session (which I ought to write up… but… it’s hard, there are so many ideas to work through), we discussed avoidance and how that, for me at least, breeds triggers.
Basically, this means that side hobbies or interests I take up will, sooner or later, turn into triggers—they become associated with something I do to attempt to displace the fear and attempt to postpone the coming attack, in the hopes that both will just go away. And one day, my PTSD turns them against me. ((Yes, I’m aware how personalizing and externalizing my PTSD might have bad results, but it’s how I grasp the idea of it, and if I can grasp something, I can plan for it better than if I just leave it at a nebulous definition. No definitions are permanent in this area anyways.))
Thus far, however, there are three things my PTSD can’t take away from me, no matter how many times I support myself with them while it rages at me. They are:
Sunlight and natural spectrum light. That seems a pretty intrinsic human instinct, and thus the PTSD can’t uproot it. It might as well try to uproot an ancient oak.
Cows. For reasons I don’t understand, but has something to do with being able to hold onto something, and thus the PTSD can’t take it away. I’m not sure why a similar immunity doesn’t apply to things like crafts and other kinds of hobbies. Oh well.
Friends. Although they can certainly do things that hurt me, having them—a support network—is better than without.
Within my heart are memories
Of perfect love that you gave to me.
Oh, I remember…
And now I suppose I must expose you to the Creed song, “My Sacrifice”, that makes me cry (although all of Creed sounds far too similar to me…). But don’t worry, it’s got Hiro Nakamura, my absolute favorite Heroes character, in it (and only the first season of his best moments, at that).
My favorite part is at the 3:00 mark, but I can’t bear to watch past 3:30.
When you are with me,
I’m free
I’m careless
I believe
Above all the others, we’ll fly—
This brings tears to my eyes…
I have said before that I don’t know what love is. I think I’m wrong; I think I did know, at least what a certain kind of love is. I think I loved somebody before. I tend to call him my Crimnee, because in many ways he’s quite like that Sinfest character. Or at least was. I don’t know where he is anymore, and he doesn’t know where I am anymore, and this is good, because my parents traced my number through him once during the Years of Zorn and Tharn, and that was more than enough.
Although I can’t really call him “My Sacrifice”, because that somehow implies he’s “mine”, but he was always his own person, just like anybody else. I guess you could argue I sacrificed my connection with him. ((Yes, I know, it’s probably only just a one-way thing. I know that deeply, and people don’t have to bang that into me in the hopes of either helping and/or hurting me, because others can’t hurt me more than I already do over this aspect.))
But despite knowing him through the beginning and the first part of the Years of Zorn and Tharn, being with him somehow made everything better. Even when it really, really wasn’t. Even when my parents were actively tracking me down, and I just didn’t—no, I was in denial about—how dangerous they were.
We’ve seen our share of ups and downs,
Oh, how quickly life can turn around
In an instant
In the end, it was not to be. Life is a bitch, sometimes.
It hurts, years later, now that I have enough mental space to think about it.
Everybody goes through this. It’s a normal kind of grief. And while it hurts, it does push away the PTSD. It’s something else the PTSD can’t touch. At least for now. And I think… it’s never been able to.
It feels so good to reunite,
Within yourself and within your mind,
Let’s find peace there
I dreamed about him last night (well, I guess, now the night before last night).
Which is why I cursed about Creed this morning on Twitter. When I think about my Crimnee, I pretty much have to listen to “My Sacrifice” on a loop. And watch this YouTube in the morning after, to try to ground myself. And to grieve.
That’s why the PTSD didn’t hit that morning, even though it’s grabbed just about every other morning since December 2nd or 3rd.
Also, I think I’ve found out who “he” is when I listen to this particular song, below. I kept hoping it wasn’t my abusive father. And I think it’s not.
Ah, faith. My friend, even though he was very much a devout Christian, never forced those ideals on me. He never asked me or told me to forgive my parents; he never told me to have faith in God’s plan; he never told me that God meant this to happen to me. I don’t think he ever thought these, even though many people around us did.
I just want to say hello again,
I just want to say hello again—
Anyways, I won’t seek him out. I do wish I could, but at the same time, I know it’s not practical, and we’ve both moved on with our lives. These memories of those times are precious to me, and I don’t want them destroyed right now. And so I don’t wish I could. Kind of confusing, and yet true.
You know, I’ve fallen in love twice more after my Crimnee (and not always with guys, which is when I realized I was neither straight nor homosexual, but bisexual, although an awful lot of people will try to tell me there is no such thing). Never worked out, and they never could.
Maybe someday I’ll be ready. Not necessarily with him, but with somebody else. Or heck, maybe somebodies else. I’m not restricting myself here. Life has taught me not to do that, though I still resist the lesson.
Okay. Now to wash all that out with a segment about cows. And also Zorro-masked cello players. No, really. See 1:30 to the end. Especially 2:15. And someone who probably has the same gender identity as I do, which is… complicated, I think.
Sweet dreams are made of these,
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas,
Everybody’s looking for something.
Hold your head—moving on
Keep your head—moving on
Hold your head—moving on
Keep your head—moving on…
— Eurhythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)”
