It's Been Even More Than a While...

A lot has been going on and it has been hard for me to figure out how to express it all. So I'm just going to post some pictures I took last year that I messed around with in Photoshop Elements. Hopefully I'll find some words soon. It's been a really tough few months.

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It's Been A While...

I figure it's probably about time I post again...

I've had a lot of stuff happen since my last post and it's all been a little overwhelming. I'm going to make another list with everything I'm dealing with right now.

1. The guy I liked turned out to be immature and changed his mind about what he wanted - he didn't want to date anymore, and just wanted to try to use me for sex. So that's not happening.

2. Work has been insane. I'm working more than my hours and I'm working through lunches and being incredibly flexible. All of this is so that the people I work for can go on a conference/vacation and have all of their studies run while they're away. And yet, even though I was assured that they were flexible about vacations, I'm still being made to take comp days so that I can take the vacation I planned months ago for my cousin's wedding... So now I get to work random weekend days after completely exhausting weeks. Luckily I still like the actual work that I do.

3. My CBT therapist may terminate with me. It's still to be decided over the next few sessions. She doesn't know if her style of therapy is in my best interest at the moment. I disagree because I have my primary therapist who is able to provide the things that my CBT therapist is not - it seems balanced to me.

4. I have just been incredibly angry at everything, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I need to be able to express the anger externally rather than internalizing, but it's still difficult dealing with all of it.

5. I'm trying to find groups or expressive therapy so that I have additional supports while I'm going through this "rough patch". My CBT therapist really wants me to find a group to address my issues with alcohol so I decided to go to a SMART meeting this evening to see if it might help. Even though I don't have a dependence on alcohol, I still have problems with it because I end up getting suicidal and making bad decisions about my safety. So I'm hoping that will go well.

6. I've decided that I want to try to go veterinary school. So I need to figure out where to take some physics courses for next year and I need to study for the GREs to take this year.

I'm so glad I have a vacation coming up to look forward to...

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Feelings

June 2, 2013

I drew this in the hospital. I wanted to show the depression side of things and the anxiety side of things. I feel like I've been mostly anxious but sometimes the anxiety will trigger the depressed feelings. I scribbled all over the picture with white after I drew it to make it even more confusing and messy.

Drinking is Bad for Me

I am trying so hard not to judge myself right now, but it feels like an impossible task. Drinking has turned into something that is just way too unsafe for me to do at the moment. I ended up taking a very dangerous overdose while I was drunk last weekend and have since been in various hospitals - first medical and now mental.

This time I have absolutely no objection to the 24-hour suicide watch I was put on in the ER. I had to go on a clear liquid diet for a day and had almost 10 bags of saline pumped into my body over the course of a couple days. I honestly feel like it's the stupidest thing I've ever done. I feel incredibly guilty about it and I'm having a really hard time going easy on myself... but that's what everyone keeps telling me to do. I just want to be like, "But don't you realize what I did?! Don't you see what a bad person I am?!"

This means that drinking has officially been added to my list of negative coping skills and therefore is something that I should not use, at least for a very long while. So I am working on making the commitment to myself to not drink as strong as possible.

10 Reasons to not drink alcohol...

1. It is potentially lethal for me because it makes me suicidal.
2. It makes me feel depressed and overwhelmed.

3. It interferes with my medications.

4. I don't like the part of me that comes out when I've been drinking a lot.

5. I often do things that I later regret if I've had a lot to drink.

6. I don't like the loss of control over my thoughts and actions.
7. It interferes with proper sleep.
8. It reduces my body's ability to fight illness.
9. It costs money.
10. It has empty calories.

Brain Overload

I'm sorry for being such an ass about posting. I just feel like there's so fucking much going on in my life right now that it's impossible to keep up. I went to the hospital. Did a bunch of art. Did a lot of trauma work with my therapist. And now there's a guy in my life that I'm pretty interested in. And that's weird for me. Usually I try to press the eject button as quickly as possible. But with this one... I really like him and he's so nice and I think he's a really good guy for me. In a drunken confession, I already told him that I have PTSD and it's because I was sexually abused, and somehow he was so nice about it. I'm just so shocked about how nice he is. But my brain is in overload. I'm dealing with all of this stupid trauma shit and then dealing with my present life with this guy that I really like and dealing with staying safe all at the same time and I don't know what to do. I just feel like there's so MUCH going on. I have my new job coming up, this new "relationship" (whatever it is) coming up and I'm feeling so dissociative. I just feel like my life isn't real. It's so hard. I don't know what I'm doing and I can't think straight. Uggghhhhhh. I'm excited, nervous, happy, scared, everything, all at the same time.

An Unintentional Rant

I've been avoiding writing a post mostly because I was feeling disappointed in myself, but I think I've gotten over some of that now. I ended up having to go to the hospital for a week because I didn't trust myself to stay safe anymore. I felt really overwhelmed, started getting a little bit self-destructive, and I felt like I was escalating out of control. So after a long conversation with my psychiatrist I agreed to go the ER for a psych evaluation. It was a horribly scary decision. She told me that she felt that I should go to the hospital but she left the decision up to me. I knew that it would be a much better and safer decision for me to go but it was still terrifying to make that call. I was scared to go home and be left to my own devices but I was also scared to go to the hospital because I felt like I was letting everyone down. I sat fighting with myself, trying to get myself to say "yes, I'll go", but all I could keep saying was "I don't know". I think it took me about an hour to finally break down my own wall and agree to go. 

I spent a whole day and night regretting my decision because of the horribly tedious and humiliating process of getting admitted to a mental hospital. The policy at my clinic SUCKS. I understand it. But it sucks. I had to take a two minute ambulance ride from the clinic to the ER that was literally ACROSS THE STREET. I had to give up all of my possessions and wear a beautiful hospital gown. Then it got really fun... I got to be on constant suicide watch... despite being there willingly. It's fun having a person sitting at the window, staring at you while you do absolutely nothing because there's nothing to do in the ER when all of your possessions have been taken away. It's just like the zoo!... but you get to be the zebra instead of the human. I received a lovely evil eye from the psychiatrist when I told her that I would rather go to a different hospital if I was being admitted as inpatient and was then treated like I was being a diva for even asking. I then got to stay there overnight and I even got to sleep for a couple hours before I was strapped into a fucking gurney, still in my hospital gown, to be transported to the hospital I requested in another fun ambulance trip. It all made me feel so good about my decision to go into the hospital.... They seriously need to do something about that whole pile-of-shit process. It reeeaaalllly didn't help my state of mind to feel that humiliated and exhausted. Most of the people that interacted with me during the process tried to be nice about it, but it was still a very dehumanizing process. Luckily the place that I requested to go to (and had a bed for me despite the whole, "They probably wont have a bed, but I guess I can try if you really want me to...") is very good about giving you as much control as possible in how you are treated while you are there.

I guess this turned into an unintentional rant. What I meant to say was that I actually ended up being very glad that I made the decision to go into the hospital for a little while. It helped me feel a little bit calmer and it renewed my motivation to use positive coping skills when I'm feeling hopeless and self-destructive. And I now have a lot of art to share because of it! 

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"I HATE LIFE"

 

May 2013

This is something that I drew a couple weeks before going into the hospital. I just wrote "I HATE LIFE" on the paper and then made it into a design. I made the 'I' black, the word 'hate' red and the word 'life' green. I kind of see it all as roots and the 'hate' is growing out of the 'life'. There's so much interconnection going on but it also looks isolated at the same time. For example, the 'I' looks very lonely to me. I guess it reflects how I've been feeling alone and disconnected from my life. It kind of looks like it's off to the side, watching everything, but it only has one line to connect it to everything. And then the whole thing is surrounded by a grey fog that makes it feel even more lonely.

Brain Meltdown

I relearned some important childhood lessons this weekend. "Don't take candy from strangers" and "Drugs do crazy shit to your mind". Short version of the story: Went to a friend's party. Left with some people that I had just met (dumb). Ate a pot brownie that I was assured was not strong (really dumb). Realized that I was too high. Made a quick exit and got home (smart). Started really flipping out: had waves of intense panic; thought I was dying; thought that I was having seizures; started having crazy paranoia about everything; wasn't sure what was real; felt like I might lose my mind. Finally figured out how to use my phone to call my parents to come get me. Managed to calm down a little knowing that they wouldn't let me die.

I have gotten very high and very paranoid from pot before but nothing even close to what happened this weekend. This was just a complete sensory overload - every sound, light or movement felt too overwhelming. I felt like everything was happening for the second time but then I wasn't sure if it had ever happened at all. I wavered between complete panic and complete detachment. I was seeing things in my heartbeat and I could look into the center of my mind and see a rotating patterned column. And every time I surfaced into a second of relative lucidity all I could think was, "Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong."

So either I had a horrible reaction because the brownies were way stronger than they told me and, because I've been stressed recently, panic just completely took over, or they could have been laced with something else. No idea which. Either way I feel like a total idiot for going to a complete stranger's apartment and eating their drugged brownies.

Here was my rationale for being an idiot... these people seemed "safe" because they were in my friend's apartment when I met them and they knew someone who knew my friend. I ignored my anxiety about leaving the party with them because I just assumed that I was having a PTSD overreaction to meeting new people. Apparently I didn't have the sense to also think about the fact that it's normal to feel anxious about going to a stranger's apartment with a bunch of people I don't really know. But I convinced myself that it would be fine because making new friends is a good thing and I need to stop being afraid of flirting with guys. I only realized how stupid I was being once I told one of them I was leaving because I felt too high and he told me that I would be fine, that I should stay, and that I should just trust him. It's pretty creepy when someone tells you to trust them when you don't even know them and they just encouraged you to take drugs.

I think that this might be life's way of telling me to stop fucking around with mind-altering substances. I had a few drinks before I decided to go off with a bunch of strangers, which definitely relaxed me enough to ignore my anxieties about it and probably altered my decision making skills. So I'm going to stop drinking, at least while my life feels this overwhelming, and I don't think I'll be able to touch pot for a long time after this experience.

Change

I think life is trying to drive me insane. It finally lets me get a little bit more comfortable with it and then *BAM* my job, which I love, is moving to a different state and I have to look for a new one because I would probably completely fall apart if I lost my entire support system all at once by moving. Obviously major life stressors are unavoidable - people lose their jobs, get sick, lose people who are important to them - but I could have used a little more time without an extra anxiety producer.

I'm trying (pretty unsuccessfully) to think of it as a positive... it's forcing me to deal with some social anxiety. My therapist and I made an anxiety hierarchy and noticed a theme. Instead of "normal" job loss fears such as actually finding a new job, having the right qualifications, etc., my anxiety has a lot to do with social things. My biggest fear from this is having to change health insurance and having that new insurance company make me choose between keeping my primary therapist or my CBT therapist. I know how hard it is to lose a therapist, and even though it wouldn't be the same situation as before, I know that it would still be difficult.

My second fear is the change of people. I like my current coworkers and I'm comfortable with them. Changing that is nerve-wracking for me. The thought of learning the dynamics of a whole new set of people makes me uncomfortable even though I know that I am perfectly capable of normal social interactions and fitting in with new people. But I also know that before I get more comfortable, I'm going to feel very unsure of myself because I unfortunately care way too much about what other people think of me and I usually tend towards thinking they don't like me.

My third fear is the interview process... And the more I think about it, the more I think this might actually be my second biggest fear. Interviewing is basically someone judging you. I don't mean that in a necessarily bad way, but someone is making a judgement of your skills and personality to determine whether you will make a good worker and whether you are right for the environment of the workplace. Knowing that, makes me tear apart every single detail of every single conversation and wonder if I've ruined everything by saying "and" instead of "but".

So basically my brain is melting from all of this anxiety. I am completely incapable of having a conversation without getting distracted or zoning out at least once. I pretty much constantly feel like hurting myself. My appetite has been really weird. And I've been having ridiculous dreams/nightmares.

Change sucks.