Among the Stars, Floating Freely

I've had difficulties coming up with something to write about. Part of it is that I haven't done anything dramatic in therapy lately and part of it is that I'm not feeling anything intense right now. 

I have to remind myself that this blog is not about entertaining anyone, not even myself. It's a journal of my journey through therapy and mental health. Quiet times are part of that journey — I don't think I could manage if my life were all sturm und drang.

Right now as I sit on the couch in the near dark, I feel like I'm floating almost weightless, wheeling in black space surrounded by stars in all directions, near and far. This floating is different from the floating of "broken thinking"; I am connected and centered. I guess this feeling is one of calmness, quietude, and restfulness, like the calm within the eye of a storm, or the quiet when all the neighbors are asleep and the traffic has died away.

My life contains so many difficult challenges right now, on all fronts, that I'm enjoying this hiatus, now that I've realized it's nothing pathological. I think that's one of the problems of being in therapy a lot: soon every mental state seems like a pathology. It's like when I first paid attention to "what cancerous moles and lesions look like" and I realized that most of my moles and freckles etc. have all the characteristics of "bad" ones! Yes, I am a touch hypochondriacal. Does the psychiatric community still use the word "neurotic"?

I'm going to enjoy the quiet as long as it lasts and take this time to focus on finding work and doing my damned therapy homework. More than likely, this next set of homework will take a chunk out of my quietude.

You Are What You ...

Eat. Watch. Read. Listen to. 

Everything that you are exposed to has an effect. For example, people who watch, listen to, or read the news regularly tend to have a more negative view of the world and feel that crime has increased over time, because that is what they are exposed to.

I'm a highly sensitive person. Add to that extreme introversion and PTSD and you'll find that my nerves are all right there at the surface. Some of them may even extend past my skin. 

I learned over a decade ago that I have to pay attention to what I let in. Very dark books, tv shows, and movies are hard on me. I take them inside me and the darkness tends to stick. I remember the most horrific things from such stories and they pop up years later. Given my obsessive thinking, it can take days to get the thoughts to go away. 

When it comes to the news, I keep in mind the way it can bend your perceptions, so I mostly scroll over the headlines online.

Although I learned my lesson over a decade ago, I have to keep relearning it and re-remembering it, as I do with everything. I have remembered to not read books about serial killers that won't die, but I keep forgetting about TV shows. I watch CSI and CSI NY (I think CSI NY is less dark than the original). But the worst is that I've been watching Criminal Minds. That's all about mass murderers, serial killers, and bombers! It's one of the worst things I can do to myself. It's like an addiction. When the next season comes around, I'm going to remind myself to Watch Something Else. 

Now, I cannot watch movies about psychopaths, because they are monsters that exist and I'll have nightmares and my anxieties will increase. But I can watch movies about non-human monsters, such as giant sharks and behemoths that come out of mountains. And I can watch natural disaster movies — the worse the disaster the better. Maybe these are cathartic for my anxiety, my PTSD. Certainly they stimulate me and make me breath faster, make my heart race. Perhaps they are helpful in balancing out how withdrawn I can become due to the hypersensitivity and the introversion.

Some of my friends are very thoughtful and mindful of my sensitivities and will caution me about various movies or books, even going so far as to say "don't watch that, ever" or "don't read that, ever." I love that they care and that they know me well enough to be able to tell me this. Their doing so makes me feel loved.

Lately I've been bingeing on monster movies, now that I have Netflix Streaming Video. It coincides with a lightening of my mood. I cannot even apply a correlation because I have nothing to base it on; there are other things that do have some correlation. However, the movies don't seem to have a negative effect on me, so I think I'll continue. Anything to feel better, right now. Anything to feel better.

This time I'll remember what is good for me to watch, read, or listen to. This time I'll remember what is bad. This time I won't listen to the little voice that says "it won't hurt you, you enjoy this." I'm sure many people have heard that voice and knew it meant the exact opposite of what it says. This time I'll remember to sick my big, protective voice on the evilly seductive voice. Who do you think will win?

This time I'll remember to take good care of myself. Forever.

The Cure

If you could be completely "cured" of your oddities — your moods, your tics, your dysfunctions — would you?

In the past, I have fought against reining in my moods because I didn't "want to lose my creativity or lose my real self." I was in my early 20s then and felt that having large mood swings were integral to who I was and that losing them would make me dull and boring. I fought my therapist on this point and, after a particularly bad phase agreed to consciously control my mood swings. Guess what? They weren't integral to my personality and losing the extremes didn't make me dull or boring. 

I fought going on medication for my depression, because I didn't want drugs and I was afraid they would tamp down my personality, make me dull. Neither happened in that case, either. It took years, but I finally accepted that I would need to be on some medication for my whole life. I became okay with that.

I have not come to terms with the amount and levels of medications I am currently on. I have good reason to be against this on a long-term basis because last year at this time I was on just two of these meds, and at significantly lower dosages. It's my belief, thought, and opinion that once I've healed to some specific extent, or once I've dealt with enough trauma through therapy, or once a fairy drops enough pixie dust in my hair, I will be able to drop back to last year's medication regimen! 

Last year, I felt good. I felt right. I've always had and always will have mood cycles — we all do, but most people's don't affect how well they function — but they were controlled both by the medication and by me. My anxieties — free-floating, social, PTSD-related — were controlled, probably almost all by the medication. Or else, enough was controlled by the medication that the rest of any anxieties became insignificant, maybe weren't even there because the big stuff was fine. But I felt Just Right. The way I would feel if I hadn't had to struggle with this mental and emotional crap.

I'd love to be cured of needing medications. I'd love to be fully functional for the rest of my life without wondering if and when another bomb will drop me into the Abyss again. But would it be good for me to be entirely free of them? And would being free of my "cycling mood disorder of unknown origin" and my PTSD and other anxieties also "free" me of my idiosyncrasies and quirks? I know that I've always been afraid of losing myself and all my quirky bits. So afraid that a "cure" will cure me right into being just like "the norm" rather than the endearing little statistical outlier I have always been.

I've learned self-discipline (which I always seem to forget about) when I began to control my mood swings. I learned self-awareness by becoming aware when my moods were becoming negative; I could use the discipline and skills to dampen the intensity. Maybe I would have learned them some other way, but maybe I wouldn't.

However, there is no reason to stay handicapped if you don't have to be. My mental and emotional turmoil have handicapped me for months, keeping me from being able to even look for work, thus taking me to the very brink of absolute poverty (I'm not kidding here — I need money NOW). I would agree to be cured of my mood disorder and my anxieties, but not my personality or my way of looking at things from my own special perspective or even those times when I think I'm being perfectly normal and everyone else is looking at me like "and how long have you been visiting our planet?"

I'm pretty sure that no one knows where mood disorder stops and personality quirk begins. Maybe it's all just about how well you function.

Karen the Wonder Therapist wants me to not define myself as "mentally ill" or by my mental and emotional problems. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't; it depends on how they are affecting my life. I have felt terribly ill since my mom died and have been barely functional for most of the time since then. Insurance isn't paying for my therapy — they obviously have decided I'm not sick — but I'm not exactly well.

I'm just me, swimming around in the Sea of Life, looking for hospitable land and trying to not drown in the meantime. I really could use a life preserver about now.

Maybe I'm Resting ...

As Julie suggested in yesterday's comments, maybe this muted feeling I'm experiencing is my psyche's resting phase. If so, I'm still in it. I'm moving slowly and not doing much (did 2 loads of laundry and a bit of a project and a short walk, however). 

But I've had to up the anti-anxiety meds today. I took a whole pill this morning (well, in 2 halves because I thought a half would handle my anxiety) and a half a pill this afternoon. It's not quite time for my evening one, but it will have to be an entire pill. While part of my psyche may be resting, the other part is almost paralyzed with panic. It is, of course, mostly about money.

I haven't paid my bills. I haven't paid the Estate bills. I haven't looked at my bank balance. I haven't contacted an agency about helping me pay my health insurance. I haven't contacted anyone about bankruptcy (because I overslept by several hours last Saturday and the next open lawyer day is probably not until next month). And I am thinking about looking into food stamps, although I haven't done that yet, either.

There is a pressure inside me, so strong that I feel as if I am about to blow into bits. I want to wrap my arms around myself to hold myself together. Having someone else's arms wrapped around me would be better — isn't being alone so fun? I find that being alone exacerbates my anxiety and panic, whereas having someone who will hold me, or just touch me and who I know will watch out for me and keep me safe relieves those feelings. Yes, I know. I'm supposed to handle it all myself, whether that's because it's the lesson the fucking Universe wants me to learn or it's something I have no control over that I have to accept or it's just what grown-ups do — I don't care.

I'm not communicating with others much right now, which may seem counterintuitive. But this muted phase, which may be partly a resting phase, is also one where I have to keep everything in complete lockdown to keep myself from having one mother of a panic attack and become even less functional than I already am. When I'm locked down this tightly and holding myself so strongly, I can't say anything meaningful to other people, whether it's in person, over email, or in a blog. I can't risk losing control in this particularly situation. Yes, losing control — or letting go of control or the illusion of control — is a good thing in some situations. If I did that now, you'd all hear the screaming. Control is a good thing right now. And I just don't tell people what I'm experiencing, because what could they do? They'd feel uncomfortable. They'd feel powerless and uncomfortable. It would be awkward.

I'm vibrating with these feelings, with the feeling that something is trying to get out, and I continually need to take deep slow breaths to ratchet the intensity back down a notch or two.

I wish I ran. If I ran, or if I had a bicycle and could ride it for a long ways, I would go and go until I was so exhausted I'd have to stop and recover before returning. I feel as if they would quiet what's inside of me; too bad I don't do either. When I was in my 20s, that's what I did. Or sometimes I would walk and walk, and sometimes end up places I would normally not go, such as fifteen feet off the ground. Then I'd have to wait until I accepted that the only way to get down was to do it myself. I don't miss doing that.

This was part two of the Muted/Resting aria. If I don't write anything tomorrow, just say to yourself "ditto."

Muted

Lately I have felt like someone turned my volume down. My voice (already soft), my interest in beginning or maintaining conversations and my attention to anything — it is all muted. Nothing feels urgent or important. I use fewer words when I do have to communicate. My best friend called me on it, but what could I say? Not much. No interest in analyzing it — I'm tired of self-analysis, of analyzing anything. I'm tired of myself and my life, and I don't know what to do. Right now, I don't feel like doing anything.

Other than my soft voice, I usually tend to live unmuted. I'm in bright, living color. When I am well and fully myself, I am vivid and saturated and vibrant. And I feel odd just writing this, because I don't feel any of those things. Even my usually strong feelings seem to be set on "low."

Intellectually, I see a need to unmute, to be all those other things again. Maybe to analyze, maybe not. But right now it doesn't seem important.

Well, this post isn't keeping even my attention. But it seemed worthwhile to post something; I didn't post anything yesterday and I would rather stay closer to every day than further away; I don't want to make extra work for myself.

What Do You Think You Feel?

Most people consider thinking and feeling to be two separate things: you think thoughts or you feel emotions. Not me. I tend to mix them up a bit.

If I feel something, I have to analyze it. "I feel sad" — am I sure I feel sad, that it's not depression or a headache; why do I feel sad; what else am I feeling; is this a true feeling or a habitual one. If I can over-think it, I will. I was surprised when a previous therapist informed me that not everyone thinks about their feelings.

Then there are my thoughts. Often, if I have a thought that isn't one of my every-day thoughts (need milk; remember to take clothes from dryer; where is my turquoise ring), then I ask myself how I feel about that thought. "I wonder if I should move?" — do you feel lonely; why would you want to move, I thought you were happy here; it's scary to move; you'll be sad if you move.

Today in therapy, I read my therapy homework that I had managed to pull together this morning. Afterward, my therapist suggested I get back into the routine of writing my homework as a narrative. Doing so will incorporate the emotional aspects better. The last two times I've done this homework, I've presented it as bullet points of events. They've been quite unemotional. If I keep doing my trauma work that way, it won't provide me with any benefits. I don't know if I've been doing the homework like that because it's quick and easy or if I recognized the lack of emotional content in doing it that way and so went with the lesser emotional content path. Because, doing with full emotional content hurts like hell.

One of the problems with therapy, especially therapy that goes for years, is that nothing seems simple. Every thought, feeling, and action has layers and layers of meaning. A banana is not just  banana. I'm not sure if I was naturally this self-analytical before I started therapy or if therapy created it in me. Or if I had a tendency toward it (I think I've always thought about my feelings and felt about my thoughts to some extent) and therapy merely enhanced that in me. See? Always questions, seldom answers.

I would like things in my life to be simpler. I'd like to feel an emotion and simply feel it. No questions, no analysis. I'd like to think a thought and if I don't accept the thought as is, then the only thing I want to do to it is think other thoughts about it. No more screaming meemies or greyhounds on hamster wheels or anything else that keeps my mind going and going and keeping me awake or keeping me from simply thinking or feeling or doing in relative silence.

I'd like my mind to simply shut the fuck up already.

Like a Rerun

I didn't do my home work. Again. Because suddenly it's after 9 pm on a Sunday and that's way too late to do something as potentially emotional as my therapy home work.

And, that's just it, just like every other week in recent memory. So much for my being so motivated to get through this therapy, right?