inconstant vigilance

jade, , 755 words1 Comment

If I stop being constantly vigilant something will happen..

I examined this thought more in an attempt to be more specific about “something” ..

If I stop being constantly vigilant I will do something that is wrong and people will stop loving me.

I have thought more about the past and the abuse and some of the occasions on which it happened. Sometimes the line of questioning would be about various things, designed to make me admit that there was things in my life I wasn’t happy about. I think this was probably things like my dad being dead; not having a lot of friends and not feeling confident or comfortable in social situations, not knowing how to be a cool person who fit in..

But once I had admitted that my life wasn’t complete bliss with no problems ever, it became possible to ask me what was required to make me be happy. Would it make me happy if she was to leave? 

Of course I said no. And I meant that, at the time. But she didn’t believe me. How did I think it would make my mother feel if she left because I was not happy? Would my mother be happy with me to know that I had made her leave?

Later on, after I’d been dismissed to my bedroom to think about how awful I was, I would hear her leave the house. I think this happened a few times. Sometimes she just went to the shops and was back in half an hour. On a couple of occasions, she didn’t come back until quite late in the evening. Long after my mum had got home from work. After I’d gone to bed. Of course my mum would ask me where she was and all I could say was that I didn’t know. And wonder how long I could reasonably wait before I had to own up and admit that the reason she was gone was because she thought I didn’t want her there, but try to also convince my mum that I didn’t feel that way and hadn’t said that.. and hope that she would believe me but not really have any confidence in that hope because the fact that I was telling the truth hadn’t made a difference in being believed thus far.

I would hear her come back on these occasions that she stayed out really late, and inevitably my mum would ask where she had been because that’s a fairly normal question to ask, but she’d be aggressive and awful to my mum, asking why she wants to know, why would she care, etc. It was clear by the sound of her voice that she’d been drinking even more than she did usually at home. I was simultaneously relieved that she had come back and ashamed that she’d come back only to be horrid to my mother, knowing that it was my fault she’d gotten into this mood in the first place. 

So I learned from these experiences that I could never feel secure, never feel like my home or my family life was safe, because one day even if I swore blind that I didn’t want her to leave she might; and when your other parent discovered that it was your fault that their partner had left, they would finally see you for how you really are and realise that you aren’t worth loving.

And I’ve been trying so hard ever since then to be as vigilant as possible to make sure that no one in my life could ever have a reason to doubt that I want them and need them and value them and that I deserve them and their love and their presence. And at the same time been terrified that even if I make all that effort, it won’t matter because people can just not believe you and one day they might just not come home. 

I want to believe that people are in my life because they want to be but there’s always that doubt: they just haven’t realised yet that I’m not really who or what they think I am, I’m really some kind of sub-entity masquerading as a human being who has worth and value. And not only will they not love me when they realise that, but they will also be angry that I have accepted love and affection and time and everything else from them selfishly and deceptively, when I knew I didn’t deserve it.

inconstant vigilance

stuck

jade, , , , , , 4114 wordsLeave a comment

The second big homework that I had to do for my ongoing psychology treatment was about this thing called “Stuck Points.” I am sure that will be a googleable thing. This one was a bit more difficult, not in terms of the ability to do it but that it meant thinking very carefully and analytically about some of the ways I think and respond to things and while doing all this is ultimately good for me and is helping me to change the parts of me that I don’t want to be burdened by, it is also opening my eyes to the scale of damage that I have been living with for so long.

For a long time, because I have struggled so much to move past the affect of this abuse, I have viewed myself as just being a weak person. Because lots of people have had people or parents that spoke to them harshly or were strict or whatever. And they managed to be ok. So why couldn’t I? While I did understand that what she did was more than strictness and harshness, it was abuse.. I still didn’t quite grasp how truly awful it was and how much damage it did to me and why I have had such a hard time. There is probably an obvious point to be made here, also, that part of the reason why I viewed the abuse and myself this was is that the nature of the abuse made it so that I was conditioned to see myself as the problem, always. She came so close to actually breaking me and erasing all belief I had in myself and my intrinsic value as a human being and the knowledge of how close I was to that is kind of terrifying.

I want to side step a bit here and talk about “intrinsic value.” The words are something that my psychologist mentioned during one of my appointments with the observation that I do tend to struggle with the belief that the concept of intrinsic value applies to me just as much as it does to any other person. And she is right. And it is something I have been trying to make an effort to remind myself of. Every now and then I aggressively mentally shout at myself “intrinsic fucking value!” and it sounds a bit silly but inserting the qualifier into the middle helps to remind me about how important this concept is. And we all know I love a colourful word here and there. I think that I will letter this, as well as some other important bits I don’t want to lose sight of. That way I can put them up somewhere as reminders.

Back to the part about realising that what happened and the damage it did to me being way greater than I have ever realised or acknowledged. I have said before that I really can’t imagine where or if I would be, if Daniel hadn’t come into my life when he did. I was on a downward spiral where I was losing interest in things, I had hit a wall with education that I have since learned many unusually intelligent people hit where all of a sudden your innate intelligence is not enough and you actually have to make effort at understanding and completing new work and you just don’t know how to do it because you didn’t ever develop the skills to do that and so you assume something is wrong with you because everything used to be so easy and now it is so hard. I had a few friends but still felt very much out of place in the world – probably a combination of the way I had come to think about myself because of the abuse and the otherness you can feel as a probably undiagnosed and unsupported neurodivergent person who just feels so different to everyone else. I wasn’t good, really, on the inside but I think I was keeping it fairly well concealed on the outside. I knew I was heading for an implosion of sorts when I screwed up school and didn’t get the magnificent results that everyone naturally assumed I would get. Looking beyond that year was just a big void for me and I didn’t see anything with any kind of light.

I don’t know whether or not I would have actually ceased to be living or if I’d just be moving through existing, functioning barely but not caring about anything. But it wouldn’t have been anything great and I am so glad that he did appear when he did and saw that intrinsic value – and more – in me that I had almost completely ceased to believe that I had. He pulled me back, and has held me back, from that void and it’s hard to state how significant that is. The void scares me. I don’t fear being dead, but I do fear being alive and existing in that void. That is where I was looking a couple of weeks ago and I didn’t like it. The advantage (haha) of having been close to the event horizon a couple of times is that you can recognise it and know you need to take immediate action to prevent getting to a point of no return. And I did, and I’m back at a safe distance. (I am also almost completely past the withdrawal symptoms too. The sweating has stopped and it’s just a minimal amount of spasming that remains.)

Last night I asked Daniel a question. I asked him if he ever felt “attacked” or “accused” whenever I react to things in a way that was not appropriate, because I am reacting out of fear and he has never given me reason to have to fear and so surely sometimes it must seem unfair to him that it happens. Because I’m not stupid and I know that having someone (metaphorically) flinch when you move even if you weren’t going to hurt them has to be difficult to deal with sometimes. And he said it is frustrating sometimes. Not that he is frustrated at me, just more of a “here we go again,” thing. I’m glad that he didn’t try to say it never bothered him. Part of what makes me angry about having experienced this and the way that it has left me unable to respond to certain things like a normal person is that it has unfortunately, unavoidably also affected the people around me that I am closest to and care about the most. She didn’t just abuse me, she has indirectly also abused my husband and my children and I would say my mother but it wasn’t always just indirect with her either. Not that I do feel particularly inclined towards forgiveness for everything that she said to me directly, but I feel even less inclined when I think about how it has harmed them too.

There’s another aspect to the “why?” question that I sometimes wonder about, and that is what the motivation for the abuse was. I don’t think it was to make my mum love her more or pull attention away from me on to her. She had plenty of my mum’s attention because I was a kid who was, for the most part, happy in my own company. I don’t think there was ever any conscious thought on her part that she was doing this to achieve any particular goal but I think that ultimately it just came down to the fact that I was there, and I was there all the time because of my dad’s death. I ruined her HEA, and so she reactively set out to ruin me and my opportunities for it. To hurt me as much as possible and destroy my sense of my own humanity so that any and all relationships that I might have would be ruined. But she never “won” anything with this, except maybe satisfaction for hurting me and trying to take from me what I took from her.

Part of this process is realising just how thoroughly she did do that and how it isn’t that I have been weak because I haven’t been able to break free of it, it’s actually been me tenaciously not giving in and not letting it eat me all up. And there have been times when it sometimes just seems SO FUCKING hard, the thought of having to tell myself every fucking day that I am worth something and that I do have a place in my family’s lives and that they do want and need me here. I have wondered if I have to keep doing that all the time then what is the point and maybe I should just give up. Sometimes I have wanted to give up and the only thing that stopped me from giving up was that giving up would prove that everything she said and taught me to believe about myself was right.

But I didn’t. And I’m working on giving myself more credit for that.

And trying to figure out what to do with the anger that I feel that I have suffered this much and the fact that it was essentially, all for nothing. She got nothing out of it. The instant that my mum ended their relationship she just began acting as if I did not exist. I remember having to ask her a question once, after that but before we had moved, and her reaction was such that it was obvious she was wondering why I would ever even conceive of addressing her. She was nothing to me, I was nothing to her and there was no reason for us to ever interact. I was pretty used to that by then, being ignored for days or weeks at a time. It was a relief kind of that the ignoring didn’t have to be preceded by the brutal dismantling of my sense of self. But none of it ever had to be that way. I would have happily co-existed in a loving and welcoming way. I didn’t have any interest in threatening her relationship with my mother. She made me into an enemy when I never had any intention of being one. And I suffered all of those attacks and the subsequent years of mental and emotional struggles .. for nothing. She got nothing from and she suffers no punishment for it. Part of me wants her to know that she didn’t win. Part of me just wants to not know if she’s dead or alive and stay entirely away from that.

But I did survive and I am surviving, even though sometimes I don’t much want to; and now I am hopefully healing somewhat, even though that’s also fucking hard and emotional talking about all of this and exploring it from a different viewpoint and scary when I consider the times I have tried before and not made any positive progress. I think it is different now because I finally have someone asking me the right questions to help me see things in a fair and realistic light. But it is also true that in seeing the light I am seeing how much darkness I have been in and that’s hard to come to grips with.

Another to add to my painting / lettering list: I AM SURVIVING.

Below is a copy of the “Stuck Points” homework I did for my therapy. I just want to make clear that the example stuck points are from a worksheet that the psychologist gave me and not necessarily talking about situations that are relevant to me – it’s the feeling or reaction to them that is what I identified with.

Stuck Points

I have copied a few of the points from the examples that related a little but below each I have expanded on how they are/aren’t relevant to me.

7. If I hadn’t been drinking, it would not have happened.

Well, for this one, it’s not “if I hadn’t been drinking,” it’s “if she hadn’t been drinking.” I very rarely drink alcohol and I have never been drunk, probably not even tipsy. Those are not necessarily bad things, since it is actually not good for you; but I avoid it more out of fear than only informed choice. I avoided it even before I became educated about the many and varied health risks. I do generally think that occasional alcohol use is fine, if that’s what people want to do. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind it, even. But the primary reason I don’t consume it is because I don’t want to take the risk that under the effect of alcohol, I behave differently and in a potentially harmful and hurtful way to people that I care about.

Overall, not drinking alcohol is not a bad thing and it’s one that I am ok with living with. I classify this as a stuck point because I recognise that there are multiple logical flaws in this belief.

A lot of the time, she was intoxicated and drinking when she was speaking to me and saying horrible things – but not every time. Some of it clearly came from her and not just the alcohol. It’s not reasonable to attribute all of the abuse to the effect alcohol had on her.

I know also that this fear and avoidance of alcohol or drugs among people who have been harmed by addicts isn’t necessarily uncommon; but because the harm often came at the hands of a family member, the fear is linked to a real understanding that because of shared genetic heritage you also likely have traits that could predispose you to the same kind of behaviour. I don’t have any reason to think that but I still have an intense pushback towards the consumption of alcohol, not just in myself but in people around me. I’ve struggled at times with being very uneasy when Daniel consumes alcohol. Though this is mitigated somewhat by his own lack of interest in alcohol, because his mother was also an alcoholic, and she died about 9 years ago from multiple organ failure following many years of over-drinking.

So that’s a bit messy and I recognise that I have some irrational thoughts and beliefs about drinking and alcohol, but in the grand scheme of things they are ones that I am ok with having because the amount of harm they do to me is fairly minimal.

10. Expressing any emotion means I will lose control of myself.

I think it would be more accurate to say “expressing any intense emotion means I will lose control of myself,” and what that means is probably that I do or show some kind of physical manifestation of emotion that other people have taught me to feel is a bad thing. Like crying. I cry at movies, at books, occasionally at toilet paper ads with cute puppies. Those things aren’t so much the problem. I cry when people are angry at me, I cry when people are mean or cruel or unfair to me. But their reactions tell me I shouldn’t be so affected by things that involuntary physical signs of my emotion become apparent. I shouldn’t be so weak that I can’t stop myself from the inevitable tears when I am feeling something intensely. I just shouldn’t be. It has made me hate my emotions sometimes, because it is something else that sets me aside as being different from other people and sometimes that they either ridicule or accuse me of doing in an attempt to manipulate them somehow. When my involuntary tells of emotion offend someone else, they seem to forget that they are involuntary and seem to perceive it as an expression of weakness that I choose to not stop. And people’s criticism of this just compounds the problem and it does become something that becomes too much for me to be able to consciously take control of and stop. I need a break and change of situation to let it all subside. 

Logically I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of feeling things, and people probably get angry at me because my display of emotion has made it obvious that they have caused some hurt in me and that makes them uncomfortable. So it’s easier to blame me for being too sensitive than it is to acknowledge that they behaved in a way that was unkind. The problem is that I have become so conditioned to hearing criticisms about the way that I exist that I just assume that these are just yet more ways in which I am flawed.. and that makes me even more bereft for the person that I am not that I apparently should have been.

14. Mistakes are intolerable and cause serious harm or death.

Mistakes cause anger, derision, frustration. I don’t want to be the subject of anger et al, so I try to not make mistakes. The difficulty is that it’s hard to know what is going to be a mistake before it happens. Even situations that feel like it’s not possible to make a mistake in.  So it becomes a balance between trying to anticipate every possibility in order to choose the one least likely to be the one that causes anger or trying to make yourself as small as possible so that you do not get noticed because if you aren’t noticed then they aren’t noticing that you are making mistakes.

This is a game that can’t be won because there are no rules, and what constitutes a mistake one day might be the right choice the next day. I’m still desperately trying to win the game in fear that the people around me will become my opponents, even though they have never heard of this game and could never in their wildest dreams imagine playing it.

16. If I let myself think about what has happened, I will never get it out of my mind.

This one relates pretty strongly to #10 about the emotions becoming too much and me losing control. Thinking in too much detail about people and events that have hurt me do make me feel bad and that seems like a pretty good reason to not think about them and start that descent into the loss of emotional control. On the other hand, not thinking about them means that I have been stuck in the peak effect of like.. grief right in the very immediate after someone has died, and I have been there for nearly 30 years, and it’s not just the bad things that I can’t think about but also even happy, normal or neutral memories from my childhood that just happen to have her in them because she was there.

20. Other people should not trust me.

Other people should not expect to receive input of value from me to their lives because I always manage to do the wrong thing. I might do some right things for a while but eventually I will screwup and they will realise that I am not worth the time and effort.

25. I am damaged forever because of the rape.

I am damaged forever. Sometimes the rest of the sentence is “because I am just a fundamentally useless human being” and sometimes it is “because of the abuse.” It probably depends on how my general mood is. If I’m just feeling really, really down on myself it will be the former. I do think this is a less of the time thing than the latter ending, that I am and will be damaged forever because of the abuse and the behaviour/adaptations/coping mechanisms I have developed as a result of it. I do think it’s relevant that part of why I sometimes think or fear that I will be damaged forever is because thus far, every attempt I have made to engage with mental health professionals so that I might learn not to be “damaged” forever has always been a failure because they always seem to tell me that I don’t actually have the problem that I am telling them I have. That if I can identify that it is a problem then fixing it is as simple as just deciding to not have that problem. Whereas for my part, if it was that simple then I wouldn’t be seeking them out in the first place. As a result, it has reinforced the ideas that I’m just a not-right, flawed, broken person and I will probably always be that way.

I am, for the most part, not “stuck” in this point at the moment. There are moments of doubt but I am mostly able to push them away and tell myself that things are different now and I am finally working with someone who knows the right way to manage the things that I am dealing with. I don’t think I’ll necessarily be the most zen, chill, go-with-the-flow mentally healthy person on the planet following this treatment but I can see, finally, hope that I can learn to not be always burdened by this. Some of that has already started, some ways of looking at things and even simple reminders to myself. Intrinsic value. I have been repeating it to myself and reminding myself that it applies to everyone, even me. Even with flaws. And just existing is not a flaw.

28. I deserve to have bad things happen to me.

It’s more of “I don’t deserve good things to happen to me” than I deserve bad things to happen. Which is now an interesting thought to me because it suggests that somewhere deep inside my mind I do (and have) held onto the belief in my own intrinsic value, because if I didn’t then I don’t think I would believe that I don’t deserve bad things. Somehow having that realisation makes me feel a little better, and like there is a little bit less distance to go before I can truly break free of this stuck point and natively believe it rather than just having to tell myself it.

When I think about what “good things” are, it is very varied, it ranges from something as significant as my husband loving me to things as mundane as buying a tube of paint that I like the look of. In terms of whether or not I deserve for Daniel to love me, a lot of the time I am telling myself that at the moment he does, so even if I can’t understand why, just go with it and make the most of it for as long as it is going to take for him to realise that he’s misjudged. But actually.. even that is contradictory because at other times I reassure myself by reminding myself that even if I don’t feel like I am worth anything, he (and other people) do, and I trust their judgement even if I don’t trust my own. For the paint, or any other material type stuff, I don’t think all of this comes from inside me, some of it is fairly obviously the influence of a society that tells us our worth is directly linked to the ability we have to generate income, and if you are limited in that then you do not deserve to have nice things, ever – the “avocado toast” premise. This all borders into some societal issues that are much bigger than just me, and I know that they affect millions of other people too. When I think rationally about this it is easier to see that it isn’t true because there are so many other people pointing it out, both people in situations like me/us and people who are more fiscally fortunate. I can believe that I don’t know what I am talking/thinking about but it’s a lot less easy to believe that all of these people are also sharing the same delusion.

—

To try to sum all of these partial related pieces into a grand unified stuck point:

If I try hard enough, I can manage to never do anything that will cause someone I care about to see me in a negative light and that will prevent the possibility of them ceasing to love me or wanting to be around me.

stuck

o o m

jade406 wordsLeave a comment

I did set an alarm so i could take the efexor at 0630, but i was still already drenched in sweat by that stage.

i have done some things today but have felt much more lacking in energy today. It’s an odd tiredness. It’s not exactly sleepy tired, though I think I probably could go to sleep if I relaxed enough. I haven’t been doing that though because I don’t want to risk making it harder to sleep at night. I don’t even know if it makes a difference. If I felt really shit I would have a nap. I’m not denying myself sleep. I just want to have the best chance to restore a proper circadian rhythm and that means trying to do the typical kind of schedule where possible. My mind is awake but my body is lagging behind a bit. My mind is alternating between thoughts that move very slowly and in single threads and then very complex thoughts all happening together at the same time at high speed.

It is a bit lonely here staring into nothing and thinking thoughts of varied velocity. I can see things around me that need doing and that I would like to do but I can’t summon the energy to make my body do them. And I am not beating myself up about that although I am exerting a bit of effort to not. But sometimes I feel like my body is trembling although I am pretty sure that it isn’t and it would be nice if someone was here to snuggle and make that unpleasant feeling a bit more bearable. That is when I find myself starting to have some idle dark thoughts. Is it really that a cold turkey change of medication is super bad or is it that they do it this way so that they can be reasonably sure it’s safe to leave me alone(ish) and unsupervised and I won’t have something bad happen to me. Coz that way no one needs to take time off work to watch me or I don’t have to be put into hospital or something. And the progress of commerce and economy and capitalism is not interrupted..

I feel like those thoughts would be a bit less likely if I had a warm lap to lay my head on while I was thinking them, or maybe a fluffy body with a little vibrating motor inside it.

o o m

documenting

jade, , 1297 wordsLeave a comment

Friday morning we went to doc. Explained my sudden drop in mood following the 225mg -> 187.5mg dose reduction. That I felt in terms of the sleep the reductions need to continue but obviously that means something else needs to be done for the mood.

So we have added in mirtazapine at 15mg and dropped the venlafaxine right down to 75mg and moved it to the mornings. I don’t seem to be having any serious side effects from those changes, but to be fair I have been doing a lot of sleeping which might be protecting me somewhat from consciously experiencing it.

Friday night I went to bed and didn’t wake up until something like 10:30 on Saturday morning. When I woke up the strangest thing happened.

I had sleep in my eyes.

It was a very surreal experience because I was noticing something which I know to be an actually very normal thing but I realised that I don’t know when the last time that happened was. Not just like.. oh that hasn’t happened for a while, but.. oh, it’s been a really really long time since I had that happen and I hadn’t even noticed because it’s not the kind of thing you keep track of, so you never notice that it was missing. You only notice when it returns.

So in the range of odd experiences.. I had another one. I did a “morning pee.” Like I got up in the morning after a long stretch asleep and my pee was noticeably different than it is at other times of the day. Like it is supposed to be. More rubbish, less water. But I also can’t really remember the last time that happened. For years my pee has just been a pale clear yellow and that didn’t vary no matter what time of the day or night it was. And for the record that, the fact that I was peeing as much as night as I did during the day is also something that I know I have mentioned to doctors multiple times when I have tried to talk about my sleep problems. I wonder if they all just internally attributed this to me having three children and didn’t specifically say that because they think people are sensitive about bladder issues caused post-childbearing? I’m only making this guess because the lady when I was getting the CPAP machine, the lady there was showing how to quick-release part of the tube instead of taking off the whole mask so it is easier if you have to get up for some reason, and I agreed, saying I do get up several times each night to pee, and she nodded knowingly and said something like, “Well, you’re in your mid-40s and you’ve had three children.” Like it’s normal that after you have kids you just never pee properly again? ‘Cause I don’t think it is meant to be. I know it does happen to lots of people but I didn’t think it was so common that it’s the expectation rather than the exception.

I feel very .. weak and slow. It is very much like having a bad cold or flu. Doing something relatively simple just leaves me feeling wrecked.

There are definitely classic symptoms of withdrawal happening, but they are mostly restricted to the early to mid-morning. Which makes sense since I am now taking the (greatly reduced) amount of Efexor in the morning. Sometime in the early hours my dreams start going crazy and I start cold sweating buckets and shivering like mad, I feel so cold but I am low-key nervous to try turning on my electric blanket because of how wet I feel. But also I can feel that my bed is warm, there is heat around me, and I am not actually cold.. it just feels like I am. I’ve woken a couple of times from the feeling of laying in a puddle and can go back to sleep ok unless I actually do have to get up and go to the toilet and then I really am cold because it’s like 16° in our bedroom and I’m wearing a wet tshirt.

Around 0700 to 0800 is I guess when the twitchiness starts. Just random shudders or jerks and movements of my limbs. I can kind of tell it is happening but I also can’t wake up enough to do anything about it. I have been stuck in this kind of half-awake, half-asleep, cold, wet, shivery, shuddery loop having strange, vivid dreams, trying to get myself to wake up and remember that I need to take my pill so I will feel better but not quite able. Eventually I do get there. I have asked Daniel to try to get me to take it when he is getting up instead. And hopefully that is coming before that worst part of it all and stopping it. Or it could just shift the whole process forward by a couple of hours. Who knows. I don’t like several things about this. I don’t like being stuck in that not-awake and not-asleep state. I hope that as time progresses that will happen to me less and less. But the shivering and jerking and stuff, that’s actually kind of exhausting and leaves my muscles aching and fatigued, like I have done something really intense. It’s quite a lot more effort to get myself upright and moving around. And I have this odd thing that happens, not all that much, maybe a few times a day, where it is kind of like I am dizzy and I move in an odd way like I expected the ground or doors or wall to be somewhere else, but I don’t have the spinning and lightheaded part of it. Only the disorientation and clumsy part of it. Which admittedly, does sound somewhat normal for me but just take my word that it is different to my normal clumsiness.

Part of me doesn’t like that I know I’m going to have that again tomorrow and feels tempted to just stop taking the Efexor altogether. I’m not going to. I know that cold turkey is not a smart way to do things. But I understand why people try to do it that way, even if it is so much more intense. In case you were wondering, as I was: The origin of the phrase is debated, but it’s often linked to the physical symptoms of withdrawal, specifically the appearance of skin during withdrawal, which is said to resemble a plucked, refrigerated turkey. The “cold” part likely refers to the cold, clammy skin and chills associated with withdrawal, while “turkey” might be a comparison to the appearance of a chilled, plucked turkey according to Merriam-Webster. I don’t think I look that bad though. But I know a gradual wean is much healthier, and I have already been feeling my heart beating sometimes, so I know that I don’t want to put even more pressure on my body and nervous system. Never claimed to be a perfectly patient person though.

It feels a little strange to be talking about withdrawal like that. Because it’s usually referred to in association to someone that is trying to break an addictive dependence on a substance, and – from what I’ve seen, anyway – much less often in terms of people who are simply trying to end a dependency that does not have any aspects of addiction to it. By which I mean that behavioural part that becomes irrational and unsociable in order to continue to have access to whatever the substance is, rather than just being a person who has taken a medication that was prescribed to me in the manner that I was instructed to by my doctors and pharmacists.

documenting

all in

jade, , , , 837 wordsLeave a comment

I’m really scared

but I don’t want to be

and I was trying to just hold on and hope that this would stabilise after a bit, after the dose reduction on Sunday

but I don’t think I can
it is clear that I have passed some kind of threshold in the medication and I am not handling this

and it’s terrifying to me to admit this to you all because the overwhelming dread in me tells me not to because you will think I’m .. pick any negative word really, and that works.

there is still a little bit of rational mind in there that tells me that’s not right and I need to try to trust you all to help me and not be disgusted by me. well. I hope this is the rational part, and not the other part.

so I’m doing the opposite to what feels like the smart thing to do and telling you and asking you to please help me and please be patient with me and please not let me lose myself to this darkness

because I don’t think there’s an immediate fix. I am obviously feeling this way because I have been decreasing the amount of Efexor over the last 3 months in the hope I will learn to sleep again, and I have reached a tipping point in the depression side of it where I can tell that I actually need the drugs to balance some shit in my brain so that I can actually experience life the way I want to. but I can’t just start taking the Efexor again and be fine, because the lack of proper sleep was .. well, is.. also really fucking me up. and I haven’t felt any improvement in my sleep quality, so the Efexor needs to keep decreasing.

but I have other fears too. what if I get all the way to zero on Efexor and I still can’t sleep properly. what if that ends up being another incorrect theory and all of this was for nothing.

what if I try other medicines and they don’t work or they have side effects? I know you can’t always avoid side effects but I just need to find some that I can live with and tolerate. and even if I do try other medicines they don’t usually work immediately. maybe I will be a little better off in that regard because I do have the Efexor still and that is already doing part of the job and something else can just pick up the slack and slowly build to doing the whole job as I continue to decrease the Efexor.

I don’t want to keep living like this and I am doing this to try to be better. more clear minded. more energetic. maybe even less pain. I don’t know if I am doing the right things or if I am just going to make more problems. I thought I was doing the right thing taking this medicine for so long like they told me to do. it scares me a little bit that I don’t think anyone actually really knows “the right thing” because I don’t think there is one single right thing and even the doctors are just giving their best guesses.

but I am trying to do something and I hope that me trying is enough and that if I fall further into this darkness you will help me keep trying until something makes a difference. it’s really scary to acknowledge that I need to change things and try something new and to know that things might get worse before they get better and know that means I need to trust the people I love to keep me moving forward when the overwhelming feeling inside me tells me that I am not worthy of you all and the much safer thing would be to try to pretend I am fine and not give anyone reason to doubt me or get frustrated with me. it tells me that by doing this I am just giving you the reasons you need to see that I’m a waste of time.

that feeling is so loud and overwhelming right now. I can only push it away for short bursts.

and i’m just really fucking tired of always having to push it away and so I’m saying to that depression and disease.. fine. prove it. either way, it will be proved right and I won’t need to bother trying to counter it all the time or the sliver of hope in here that keeps trying to tell me it’s wrong will be proven right.

but I’m tired of fighting and tired of being scared and just begging you please to tell me that it is worth it. I am worth it? I need you to tell me you believe in me and want me to keep trying and push through and get better because you want me and need me. because Ive run out of believe in myself at the moment.

all in