intersections

Wednesday 30 September 2026 jadeautism ptsd anxiety depression1666 wordsLeave a comment

People diagnosed with mental illnesses, what weird little quirk of yours suddenly made sense?

This was a question on ask Reddit that I started answering and well I got a bit heavy for “weird little quirk” but .. eh. I also felt there was more to say about this and so I copied the answer I gave on Reddit and now I’m adding to it here. The italic stuff is the original comment and other is my additions.

I’ve had depression and anxiety and PTSD for a really long time, my whole adult life and the latter part of my teenage years too, though I didn’t have enough knowledge back then to be able to label it, to even really understand that what I felt wasn’t normal. I am a parent and my children are now all adults. Over the last ten or so years they have all been diagnosed with ASD, and though I don’t have a formal diagnosis and am not seeking one mostly due to financial reasons, I am as they say “peer reviewed” and have had my psychologist state that she believes I have it too. Through the work I did with this psychologist I have really started to see how the intersection of traits that are part of ASD have made many of my mental health issues worse over the years, particularly the “rigid thinking” parts which I think can sometimes be misunderstood as to how it manifests. As a child, I was taught that you always do all your work before play and meet all your responsibilities before doing things you want to do. I was also taught that “success” in life and “fulfilling your responsibilities” means you have achieved owning your own home and having a good safety net and all that. Which isn’t necessarily untrue but many people, including me, just sometimes don’t achieve those things, and it’s not because we did anything “wrong,” circumstances just fell that way. But because of the way I became trapped in patterns of rigid thinking, I believed that not having achieved these things (or not having achieved these things yet) meant that I wasn’t working hard enough and I didn’t deserve any leisure or nice things because the “work” part of my life wasn’t done. Although I have done nice things sometimes, I have NEVER done it without feeling guilty, like someone was going to get mad at me, like I had to apologise or try to justify why I was daring to “play” or enjoy something in life when I hadn’t fulfilled the criteria of “success.” Sometimes I could kind of tell when I tried to explain why I had done something “nice” before the responsibility, that people wondered why I was telling them this but I didn’t really know why, because I didn’t understand that not everybody was working to the same rules that existed in my mind. So I have mentally punished myself for every item or experience in life that I enjoyed and my guilt over daring to have those experiences when I hadn’t earned them exacerbated the depression and anxiety that I lived with. I have also pushed myself way harder than I should have sometimes because of the same reasons, and fear of people believing that I didn’t care because I hadn’t achieved the “perfect outcome of life success”, which has probably contributed to the chronic illness I now have. Learning to recognise these things is good because it means I can finally start to try to change them, but it’s an incredibly hard process. I need to constantly remind myself that it wasn’t because of what I did that people (my family) didn’t get mad at me, it was because they were never going to get mad because they didn’t have the same expectations of me and black and white you have done enough or you have not done enough that I did. Taking small “risks” that I never would have done before because I was afraid of people judging or being mad at me and maybe ceasing to love me. It feels dangerous every time yet I keep trying to push myself to continue doing it in the hope that what I have understood intellectually will eventually trickle through to override the subconscious beliefs that I have had for so long. The hard part is that no one can tell me how long this will take. Something could click in me tomorrow or it could take years more of taking these mentally and emotionally agonising small steps until the shift occurs – if it occurs – because realistically no one can guarantee me that it will. Every day I am trying to do things that I never would have considered doing in the past, or at the very least trying to do things and not feel guilty about it. It is sometimes difficult to manage pushing myself to these “micro-rebellions” against the rigid rules that I imposed on myself and not pushing myself too hard and too much that it just makes me feel that much more anxious.

There’s one thing that I started doing a couple of months ago. After I did the napping experiment and came to the conclusion that my body just does need more sleep than is generally typical for an adult, I moved to staying in bed an extra hour or two in the mornings instead of forcing myself to get up at the same time that Daniel does. And I don’t have the scheduled naps now, which having to plan around them frustrated me. And it really makes a difference to the level of fatigue I feel through the day. Some days I still fight against a panic when I pull the blankets back around me and I hear him having his breakfast and getting dressed and stuff. And sometimes it does seem like it would just be much easier to go back to doing things the way I used to so that I don’t have to endure this “leap of faith” transitionary period that I don’t know the duration of. I have to remind myself that the “control” I thought I had over keeping people from realising that I was a bad person and not worth their time and love was an illusion the whole time. When I first suggested trying this out, instead of the naps, he said “I always wondered why you never did that.” It was because I didn’t want him to think that I was not as dedicated or trying as hard to care for our family as he was. And if I was sleeping – being “lazy” – while he was getting up to go to work, I believed that he would think that and therefore that I’d be risking that he could become unhappy and unsatisfied with me and stop loving me.

I believed that in the first place because a bad person literally taught me as a child that this was possible, that you could make a mistake and it could result in love being withdrawn from you. And I continued to believe it because a part of me did not understand that not everyone was operating the same as that person did and I read things into their behaviour that were never there but to my perception just reinforced that I had to be always pushing myself to the limit to make sure that people knew I cared and was trying to the maximum of my ability.

This is the part that makes me really sad, is that because I had such a low opinion and value of myself, I interpreted normal things as being aggressions against me that I deserved because I obviously wasn’t performing up to expectations. An example might be that Daniel might go and buy something for lunch instead of eating what he bought from home because he simply didn’t feel like it that day. Which is a normal thing that happens, sometimes you feel like something, sometimes you don’t. If our places were reversed, I would never do that because I didn’t believe that my preferences or whims mattered, just doing the most efficient and/or economical thing mattered. And I have literally been eating things I don’t like much for years because it’s cheaper than the thing I prefer. Of course this also links back to the not having completed all of life’s goals yet thing meaning that you have not earned the ability to enjoy life. But any time he would “break” this rule about ignoring your preferences in favour of what was right and sensible, I assumed he had done it because I had fucked up, I hadn’t properly anticipated what he wanted for lunch, I hadn’t done my job properly, so he did that to punish me and that was ok because I was a bad person. I understand now that this and many other actions he and other people took over many years had absolutely nothing to do with me, they were just people doing normal people things. The part that is most hard to come to terms with is that not only did I ascribe malicious behaviour to people that I love that was never there in the first place but that I thought they were fair and justified in the malice that I mispercieved because of how little I thought of myself. Every mistake I ever made in my life was evidence to me that I was a bad person, and every mistake anyone else ever made (according to the rules I thought existed but no one else knew about) was also evidence to me that I was a bad person because I was conditioned so thoroughly to believe that everything basically just came down to me being inadequate that even when the person who hurt me was no longer part of my life, it didn’t matter, I learned very well how to do it to myself.

better man

Thursday 16 October 2025Monday 10 November 2025 jade488 wordsLeave a comment

A while ago Daniel and I watched the movie Better Man, which is a biographical movie about Robbie Williams. Now the whole him being a monkey was hella weird but it was still a really good movie. Honestly I was shocked that Daniel wanted to watch it.

It affected me quite a lot. Robbie has dealt with a lot of mental health issues including depression and they were depicted so well in the movie, and it was hard to watch because I felt them so deeply and related so much to a lot of it.

There was a line he said at one point during the voiceover part that really resonated with me. “I probably was always going to be an addict but the fame and money made it easier.” He is acknowledging that the tendency to addictive behaviours and all that come with that is inherent in him, part of his genetic makeup, not something that can be changed. How he manages those tendencies is a choice but our choices are very strongly influenced by our experiences. When things are good it is much easier to feel like and exert some measure of control over the parts of us that we don’t like or are weaker. When things are hard, it all feels overwhelming and is too much to deal with.

I.. probably always would have had issues with depression and anxiety. I understand enough about how these things work to know that the potential for having these struggles is just a part of me, of the particular set of genes I inherited from my parents. No-one’s fault, a basic biological fact. My experiences – both the abuse and also likely the otherness I felt as a probably neurodivergent child trying to fit in with NT peers – are what has turned them from a low-medium level issue to a large-gigantic issue. It is also this combination of factors that makes it hard for me to know how much reversal of the active symptoms is realistic to expect.

One of my “Stuck Points” was “I am damaged forever.” Part of what I have been doing more recently is using a set of targeted questions to challenge the assumptions and beliefs in the Stuck Points that I identified and to untangle them into thoughts that are based in reality and facts rather than the skewed beliefs I had because of the way my experiences had shaped them. This one is a little difficult because my “damage” isn’t only because of the abuse, it’s partly because I am also just simply a person who has genetic tendencies towards being depressed and anxious. Theoretically none of that would be activated if I lived in a perfect world where all of my needs were met and I never had to deal with anything stressful, worrying, unfair, injust etc. That world does not exist.

Yeah, never got around to finishing this one.

inconstant vigilance

Thursday 18 September 2025Thursday 18 September 2025 jadeabuse, alcoholics, stuck points755 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.

stuck

Thursday 28 August 2025Thursday 28 August 2025 jadedepression, intrinsic value, psychology, ptsd, recovery, surviving, therapy4114 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.

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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.

o o m

Thursday 14 August 2025Saturday 16 August 2025 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.