Another Dancing with Psychologists post. This time, it’s my psychiatrist (or candyman, as I like to call him).

So last Friday I had a talk with my candyman. These consultations don’t go for very long, usually, but it was longer than most because my candyman was trying to get a feel for whether I was experiencing problems with the medication or if I was suffering the slings and arrows of life.

So yeah: slings and arrows. He commented to me that I’d been moved out of a place where I felt safe to somewhere out of my comfort zone, and that I would need time to adjust to that, and in the meantime, he and my bartender are always available to help me cope. My candyman is very, very good about not prescribing too much medication.

It’s hard to deal with holidays at the moment. I’ve gone down for two days ever since July 1st. And the 4th… well, I only managed to make it awesome by going out and letting myself get buffeted about by people.

And now that’s over and I have to face tomorrow. Am I going to be ok? Is some memory or echo going to twist my mind again? Am I able to do the work that I’m supposed to do under a pretty tight time schedule (which is frankly also causing me stress)? Do I have the concentration to do it?

Probably. It’s just going to hurt a lot when I work. Which is not exactly helpful to gelling with my new duties and such. Which is feeding back into my feelings of failure and… gods, I need to break the cycle.

As I write this, I’m overcome with tears again. D’you know, just to go off on a tangent, that I’ve never really tasted Vietnamese cooking because my parents burned all the food that wasn’t boiled out? I burned some rice quite seriously in the microwave (cooking skillz woohoo) and it smelled like “home”. Which is something of a trigger. Obviously my parents burning food wasn’t abuse; it was more like this and this and that and that and more and argh.

I really wish a lot of bad stuff—to understate it—hadn’t happened to me.

I’m processing a lot more sadness, and a little anger, than fear; but the fear is still there. What’s worse, I’m at the same point with the sadness and anger that I used to be with the fear: i.e., sometimes the hands really want to get to kill-yourself-o-clock. It’s through friends, Twitter, and my own coping strategies that I’ve managed to not go there.

This self-destructive aspect of me has been around for years; for pretty much three decades, even when I was very small—I mean, hell, my first memory is trying to keep my father from killing my mother, you know? The trauma gets to you.

I’ve made it really, really far. It would be a shame to return to start.