Yeah. So. It’s still there. And I hate it.
Yesterday after the last continue—by which I mean my last Xanax I could take safely for the day—the fear hit me around midnight or so, to the point where the hammer of the merciful goddess Ambien did no good.
So after an hour of this I took another continue. And then another an hour later, before the fear let go. This is beyond a Sledgehammer for me (Ambien plus Xanax; they feed into each other).
I slept peacefully (thank you, Overherd) and then when I woke up this morning, the jackhammer of fear started when I failed my PTSD check. I forget these things can last a few days after the triggering holiday has passed. Fucking GM.
I may or may not get an emergency appointment with my bartender or candyman. I got pretty desperate yesterday. But they seem to have mixed up my appointment time. So perhaps not. It took a while to convince them they had screwed up… oh well.
I feel like hell. I feel like screaming and not stopping for a few hours. And I can’t walk straight. It’s like a Friday repeat, but I have to go in to work or else I’ll go mad for lack of seeing people, but I’m probably borrowing against tomorrow’s spoons.
See, this is how PTSD is. It’s terrifying, but also fucking boring. It’s the bad D&D campaign that goes on for too long.
Anyways. Hopefully I can see somebody and/or at least last the day, but I feel like I’m losing it. I was hoping the long weekend would be enough, but it did come with the trigger holiday embedded in it, didn’t it….
I do an awful lot of things because I have to. We all do. I just hope I don’t snap.
Spontaneous ∂erivation 
I was catching up on your journal entries from last year, and it looked like your birthday inflicted aftereffects that lasted almost all of August. Since you found that the Fourth was about a category-4 this year, it makes sense that you would feel aftereffects for at least a week.
This kind of thing, where the traumatic dates spread their effects before and after until a large part of the year is taken up dealing with them, is why I keep wanting to offer help. But all my help is on the level of “Have you tried taking calcium and magnesium? They help keep emotions from causing ungovernable physical reactions! And exercise helps burn off adrenaline!” which is useful for stress on about levels 1 through 5 of a hundred-point scale, where you seem to be experiencing levels 80 to 90.
So, anyway: I admire and respect your ability to keep things more-or-less together in the face of difficulties that would overwhelm a lot of people. This is not your fault and you’re handling it really well; it’s just that the tools for producing a more-than-barely-tolerable outcome don’t seem to exist.
Oh. I had been afraid to look. There was also some dick who, in a rather recent August, managed to jump up and down on one of my most sensitive triggers (unsolicited communication), more or less because he could, so that didn’t help at all.
Hum. Well, I have experienced periods of really low stress in my life. Unfortunately, those were during my periods of mania. Maybe it was still stress but I just didn’t care about much during those times. (Like, you know, eating, sleeping, rules of the road, etc.)
Of course, they cycled with the depression, so… less good.
Thank you for the good wishes and compliments. It is just me being me. I just wish the train didn’t go off the rails quite so often.