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.
why did it happen to me?
I mentioned that I had found myself a psychologist, one that I hoped would actually be able to help me make some meaningful and permanent improvement in the state of inside my head by using the correct, evidence-based therapy models with me. The thing I am doing is called CPT – cognitive processing therapy. I don’t know all of the details about how it works but part of it does involve “homework” sometimes – writing down thoughts with regards to specific prompts. This is my first such homework task.
Am I worrying that I did it wrong? That’s a trick question, no-one who has ever met me would even bother asking that. I did ask what volume of words was expected, and the answer was basically: whatever you want. In whatever format you want. Can be full prose, dot points, freeform notes, whatever. It might have been better for me to ask if there was a word limit. Oh well.
Short answer: some people are just cruel, selfish assholes that don’t care about others.
Long answer: it’s a whole lot of psycho-social buzzwords and catch phrases, including but not limited to: hurt people hurt people; generational trauma; generational abuse; systemic and internalised misogyny, especially as relates to expected gender roles; systemic and internalised homophobia; perhaps some ableism.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that many of the things she criticised in me were likely things she herself was criticised for. I broke many of the same rules that she did, but often in quite different ways – some of that just because of my personality and some probably because my personality likely includes neurodivergent attributes.
I think if I am going to expand on the list of things in the first paragraph I probably need to explain a little about her and who she was. She was the youngest child, a surprise, born right at the very beginning of the baby boom in 1946. I know she had at least two older sisters, who were already adults when she was born and maybe even already married themselves. It was a significant age gap, and her parents were relatively old when she was born. (By the standards of the time.) From what I understand they were otherwise a fairly traditional family with traditional values. She… was not a traditional little girl. What would have been called a tomboy. I got the impression that some of the interests she had were grudgingly tolerated, like participating in certain sports (women only teams of course) but other things like her complete lack of interest in being properly feminine and delicate and learning appropriate skills to grow up and be a good housewife were more of a sore point.
Obviously she didn’t want to get married because the only acceptable person for her to marry would have been a man. So I think she chose one of the few other options available to young single women and became an office worker, secretary type thing, and made a decent career of it. When she and my mum bought a house near Ballarat and we moved there, a few months after my dad died, she got given a really fancy clock as a leaving gift and I think it was because she worked for the company for like 20+ years or something. I think probably a mostly typical existence for a person that had to hide a large part of themselves from society.
I don’t really know whether she had any significant relationships before my mother. I believe that she was somewhat out, with her family, but it was uneasy and they weren’t really cool with it. So she then met my mum and there was the small complication that this fantastic woman had a child but that was, I guess, tolerable, because the kid lived with her father and only had to be endured at weekends and maybe a bit during school holidays. Then that selfish bastard of a man went and died and the child became a 24/7 problem.
I think this is probably the point when her relationship with my mum should have ended. Not explosively, or antagonistic, or anything like that, but with the honest admission that a child in her life was not what she wanted. Of course, it didn’t. And I kind of get that – I understand how deep both the social conditioning towards motherhood as well as the biological can go, and even if you never expected or wanted to have a child, whatever is left of those probably lets you convince yourself that you can adapt to having one there if it means not losing this amazing new relationship you found.
At first I think it was fine. It took several years for the resentment to build. Ironically, some of what I think are great things about me are things that provoked her to become critical and hateful towards me. My mum has always been a very accepting person, welcoming to differences and intolerant of bigotry or hate. This is something I learned and inherited from her easily. So I adapted very easily to the fact of my mother having a new partner who was a woman and accepted her as part of our life, as another parent even. I don’t think she believed it could be that simple. Perhaps she had never experienced it as such from anyone who wasn’t gay themselves. I don’t know. There were times when it seemed like she was determined to make me admit that I didn’t really accept or like her. I had a diary when I was a child. I only wrote in it occasionally but I did consider it to be private. For me only. I hid it accordingly. Not very well, apparently, because she took it; but she didn’t ever admit to having taken it. Then in one of these sessions where she yelled and ranted and criticised and I cried, she accused me of hating her and having written in my diary that I hated her and hated that she was a woman and that my mum was a lesbian and various other things. I denied that, because I hadn’t written anything like that, because it wasn’t true; and so she challenged me to prove it. Of course, I couldn’t prove it, because I was not in possession of my diary. So my ‘refusal’ or ‘inability’ to prove my innocence beyond pathetically saying “no, I didn’t do it” just proved that I was guilty, by her standards.
So this is the “internalised homophobia” part of it. But some part of her must not have been satisfied in having proved that I really did hate her and everything about her relationship with my mother, probably because it was all based on farce and gaslighting. So the next attempt to catch me out and make me admit that I hated her and all gay people was to tell me that my father had been bisexual. At the time I hadn’t really known whether that was true or not, turns out it is, but that’s neither here nor there. Maybe this was the thing to tip me over the edge into admitting my hatred because being bi is worse than being simply gay or lesbian? (I don’t think that but I am aware that there are apparently a subset of people that do.) Her telling me this did upset me. Not because of the content. I don’t care who either of my parents fuck as long as it’s all consensual, just like any other person. It upset me because for the first time I realised that she believed beforehand that this would be upsetting information to me and said it to me anyway. It was hurt she intentionally chose to inflict on me for her own “gain.” Even though she was wrong about why this upset me, it was still, in her mind, evidence that she was correct.
As for “internalised misogyny?” Well, I wasn’t a typically feminine girly girl either, by 1950s standards. I don’t think I was particularly odd by 1980s standards, but probably leaned towards being less interested in classically girly stuff than average. I read a lot, and I don’t think that is particularly coded for girly or boyish, I think the problem with that is that I preferred to read than to go and interact with other children. I had a variety of toys, dolls and bears as well as lego and slinkies and large wooden dice and playing cards. Now I know the lego was definitely somewhat boy coded (at that time) and therefore “worthy of criticism” for not being a normal little girl, if you have fucked up ideas about what any particular person should or shouldn’t be because you were also not allowed to just be. I am also not at all sporty, I could give or take fishing (I participated because most of my extended family did too, not because I had any particular passion for it myself); so I also failed at failing to be a girl by not really being a tomboy either.
Ableism: well. I don’t know that anyone would have identified it as such at the time and I think it’s really subtle, but certainly I can see that some of what was “wrong” with me is very likely attributable to autistic traits. My preference for my own company over that of other children. Some of what I mentioned as my favourite toys to play with, for example the wooden dice and the playing cards. I played normal solo card games and I built things out of stacked cards but I also arranged and sorted and dealt the cards in lots of various ways based on number and suit. I rolled the dice over and over and took notes about how many of each result I got. Sometimes I would intentionally influence the rolls, putting more or less effort into the throws. I had a travel Yahtzee game which had 5 standard d6 contained within a holder that allowed for each to be either rolled against the palm or fixed in place. I played with the combinations of results you would get on that. I experimented with how much movement against the palm was actually necessary to make the dice move to a degree where the result would be considered sufficiently randomised or not. Even with my lego – when I was not building something, I separated them out into parts organised by shape, size and colour. It bothered me to have them all just loose in the bucket. All of these things that I did which were completely innocuous, not at all harmful to myself or other people, but very much “not normal” by the standards of someone raised in a time when social and intellectual conformity were very important. So, yes, her criticism of those parts of me and those behaviours would I think definitely come under the scope of ableism, but only in retrospect based on knowledge I have gained since. Back then I just thought it was yet another thing wrong with me, because I could obviously see that I was different in many ways to other children, and being different was bad. And that’s why I got “in trouble” for it.
When I mention “generational trauma” what I am getting at is that I have an understanding that most people default to parenting the way they were parented. Even when they never intended to be a parent and denied that they were one. So if the way they were parented included abusive behaviours, they’re more likely to do the same with their children – sometimes not even realising that it is so because of the social and biological instinct to trust in our parents and believe that they are always acting in our best interest. Therefore I’m able to understand based on the knowledge I have of past generations parenting in general and her in particular that the approach she took to pointing out my perceived flaws was quite possibly done with the belief that it was necessary for someone to do that so that I could learn to correct myself and become a proper decent member of the human race. That fact that pointing out all of these “hard truths” to me clearly upset me wasn’t relevant. Someone has to do it and you just have to learn to suck it up and get over it and be normal. Or something.
That’s kind of where all of this becomes a problem for me. I assume that the point of this exercise, answering the question of why this all happened, is to make sure I know that it wasn’t “my fault.” I didn’t do anything to cause it, simply by existing as I naturally do. And I do understand that. I also understand that people are the product of both their experiences and their genes. I am intelligent enough to identify all of these common areas that I know, or can infer, were things that she herself was criticised or derided for and see that that’s why she then did the same to me, even if the way I “broke the rules” wasn’t exactly the same. I know that this is a story that has been repeated thousands, if not millions of times, all over the word, and that’s why it has been termed “generational.” It’s not unique to me.
And yet..
Lots of people who were abused manage to not abuse their own children. Being a victim of abuse does NOT guarantee that you will be a perpetrator of it. And if some people have the ability to not fall into that trap, then theoretically anybody has that ability. When you are doing something, and the person that is the subject of your actions or words is expressing that they are pained, distressed, heartbroken, devastated, crying uncontrollably, sobbing and hiccupping, that kind of intense sadness that leaves you suddenly shuddering and gasping on and off for hours after the actual tears have stopped.. it shouldn’t be a difficult step to realise that you are causing harm and that you should stop because this is not how we should treat other people. People who abuse demonstrate that they know they are hurting their victims, and that they want to hurt them despite knowing that it is wrong when they take steps to ensure that their abuse is not discovered by others. When they do things like restricting the places they hit so that bruises do not show in places not ordinarily covered by clothes, when they tell victims that “this should be our secret only because X wouldn’t understand and would be jealous” or when they tell you things that twist your perception and exploit your innate desire to please your parents by making you believe that they are helping you to hide all of your flaws and inadequacies from your mother because it would just devastate her to realise that you are such a broken, wretched and wrong excuse for a human being; so you somehow believe that their abuse is actually protecting you instead of damaging you.
They know. And they do it anyway.
So then, that just comes back to: some people don’t care enough about other people to make the effort to be better than they have learned to be. They may be the product of a complex web of factors spanning various social, political, familial, generational issues; but very few people have had experiences such that they would develop entirely without empathy. They are choosing to ignore the empathy and the conscience that tells them what they are doing is wrong. Choosing to be cruel and selfish by passing the harm onto someone else instead of figuring out how to excise that from themselves. You might not always be able to be perfect but you can try to be better, and they choose not to. Some people just suck. That’s why.
hope and fear
I’m hopeful that it’s more hope than fear.
I have found myself a psychologist. Not just any random one – theoretically one who is actually qualified to give me the type of therapy I need to have some of the kind of recovery that I want.
Although it hasn’t ever been specifically diagnosed by anyone, I think I have PTSD, or if not fully qualifying for the diagnostic criteria of that, then I certainly have disorder caused by traumatic stress :D And I discovered recently that “bulk standard” therapy, i.e. CBT, is not the right way to treat this kind of mental health problem. Who could have fucking guessed? I think someone higher looked out for me and a few weeks ago a reddit post popped up on my feed that was an AMA by a psychiatrist talking about treating PTSD and other trauma related things and what the current evidence based standards are and things like that. It was just the information that I needed right when I needed it. Ok, well, I could actually have done with it like 15 years ago but…
I also should not have to be the one figuring out what treatment I need. I understand the importance of people being involved in their own healthcare decisions but this is beyond that. GPs refer to any psychologist they know of that seems ok. Psychologists will take anybody, regardless of what mental health condition they actually have and whether or not they have the right skills to treat it. The worst part of this is that THEY DON’T KNOW that they are doing it wrong, that they are potentially harming people with this approach. Because, yes, one of the things I learned in that enlightening AMA was that normal therapy can actually worsen the issues when a mental health problem is trauma related. And I see that. I have sought help so many times and got nowhere and essentially come to the conclusion that it was just me. I can so easily see how someone else in a similar situation, who maybe didn’t have the same family support and love that I do, would see their failures in therapy as evidence that they are just broken beyond repair and decide to fix it by ending their life. I’m almost certain that has to have happened, because if I’ve had this problem then it’s almost certain others have too. That thought makes my chest hurt for real.
Obviously there are some huge flaws in the way mental health is handled. I already know that although they are the people you get referred to for help with autism things, many psychologists don’t know shit about autism. I don’t believe that autism/ADHD/neurodivergence should be classified with and managed by mental health professionals anyway, because it reinforces the idea that having one of those things is a flaw or a disorder, and I’m not certain that is really is because of the number of people that are affected. Being left-handed used to be a correctable flaw, then they realised it actually doesn’t affect anyone else at all and chilled the fuck out about it and learned a bit about how to make things easier for left-dominant people and all of a sudden there were gajillions more left-handed people. I think that maybe diverging neurotypes will come to be seen the same way in the future, that it’s not the people that are the problem, it’s society. But anyway. So psychologists don’t know stuff about autism unless they’ve made an intentional choice to go and learn, they don’t know about the proper way to treat basically anything except general anxiety and depression; but worst of all they don’t know that they don’t know. And in a healthcare provider, that is unacceptable. A GP is a good example of this – a fundamental part of their job and their training is to be able to identify when someone’s complaint is within the scope of their practice or whether it is something that is better dealt with a specialist in the area, and if that is the case they will refer the patient to the appropriate person. It seems like something similar needs to exist in psychology and mental health care so that the exact needs of the patient can be identified and they can be matched with someone who can actually help them rather than potentially causing more harm by applying the wrong approach to the therapy.
Seeing and understanding all this, knowing that mental health care was very deliberately excluded from Medicare and our public health system, it’s hardly any wonder why there is a crisis state existing now in the mental health care industry. Because fuck them crazy people from up here in our privileged perch. I’m sure that many actual scientists have understood that there is no real difference between mental health and physical health for a long time, but the stigma about having a mental health condition and the tendency to view it as a character flaw rather than a medical issue has prevented that information from becoming widely known. Mental health isn’t an entirely separate entity, it is a sub-category of healthcare, and I think most people understand that now but not necessarily that there’s no fundamental difference between it and conditions that have entirely physical symptoms. It is something malfunctioning in a part of your body, it just happens to be the part that controls your perception of self and self-expression, not the part that filters toxins or pumps blood or senses optical information.
Anyway. I am really hopeful that I can actually get somewhere this time. But also scared. Because my previous experiences tell me to not be too hopeful because it didn’t work all those times. Then there’s the worry about how much it will hurt to actually do this thing, the right kind of therapy for dealing with my issues. And wondering what and who to expect afterwards, assuming some level of success? I have been like this for so long that I find it hard to imagine functioning any other way. Like, I can imagine it, but it seems like a fantasy story where suspension of disbelief is an essential part of being able to enjoy the story. It is so different to anything else I have experienced that I actually do not know how to picture myself in a real life setting, just less burdened by these ghosts. I don’t want to make the mistake of aiming too high and imagining myself as suddenly being the most zen, laidback, unflappable person on the planet – lol, like that would ever be me – but I don’t know how much change and relief to expect or hope for in a realistic sense.
That’s enough rambling for today. Need to get dressed to go and get myself a mental health care plan so that I can start this new therapeutic adventure on Friday.
hah, suck it
That’s what Daniel said to tell the voice. The one that keeps trying to make me doubt myself. Isn’t it kind if interesting, in a psychology type of way, how it is always about doubting my value to him, my worthiness of him, my competence as a wife and mother. It’s never “does he really love me?” but more like “why does he love you when you are obviously rubbish? what have you done to make him think that you are not?” Sometimes it is more like.. “one day he will realise that you are not actually any good and will find someone who really does have all of the qualities he thinks you have.”
As ridiculous as saying “hah, suck it” to this inner part of myself is, I have actually been trying to do it. The levity of the words actually kind of helps, as well as of course the deeper meaning of what he was actually saying when he began with that. It’s almost a kind of… hmmm, juvenile comeback and the incongruity of that to the heaviness of those thoughts and feelings is great enough that it helps to break the hold.
I think I have probably specified before, but I’m not certain, so.. there is no actual voice that exists as an entity that I perceive as separate to myself. It is a hard concept to translate into words. Although I have an inner voice (and mind’s eye), I am aware that not all of my thinking happens on a verbal level. Some things seem to exist also as a kind of hybrid of a thought and a feeling, or they are thoughts that have such intense attached feelings so as to be essentially inseparable for the purposes of trying to describe and define them. Generally, I think that you don’t really consider where your thoughts come from when they make their way from the subconscious part of your mind into the conscious part. I don’t always. But when I do, I can tell the difference between thoughts that have come from the part of my mind that is entirely me, versus the part of my mind that exists in a permanently brainwashed state of self-doubt, self-hate, self-loathing. If this was a physical wound it would be a scar, a large, rough, discoloured and unsightly one that frequently pulses with pain despite the original thing that caused the injury being long gone, because the nerves and tissues are damaged. So when I talk about ‘the voice,’ this is what I mean. If I don’t pay close attention, it sounds and feels enough like my own natural, unadulterated self that it is essentially indistinguishable. Only when I take the time to consider the detail and content of these thoughts and feelings that come to the surface via the medium of my inner voice can I tell that some of them come from something else, some part of my mind that isn’t working properly and isn’t genuinely reflective of me.
The hard part of that is that it is really exhausting all the time to have to question if my thoughts and feelings can be trusted, and if the answer is no, to try to convince the rest of my mind that even though they look and feel native in so many ways, these are very much actually an invasive species and should not be given any room to grow. I devote so much mental energy and bandwidth to trying to stop the invasive thoughts from taking over, and sometimes I wonder what else I could be achieving with my mind and thoughts if I was not using so much of my capacity to do that.
Those can be dangerous thoughts to have, too, though. Like what could I be doing, what would our situation be if I didn’t have fibromyalgia and hadn’t lost so much ability to be productive? What if I hadn’t spent the last fuck-knows how many years slowly losing my ability to sleep – would I ever even have been diagnosed with fibro? Would it have been as hard as it is to manage the thoughts and feelings? It’s an interesting thought experiment but it is both too tempting to consider that I could have been “completely fine” and too difficult to imagine what that actually would have looked like. Despite the limitations that these states have necessitated that I live with, I have tried to carry on like they weren’t there and sometimes probably to my own detriment. So I don’t know that I would have actually done that much more, I just would be a lot less decrepit for it.
Something that often seemed odd to me was that if I forgot to have my medicine for some reason, the next day I would be fully unable to stay awake. Like, falling asleep with a cup halfway to my mouth kind of absolute inability to do stuff. Even worse than what I ended up like the last few months where I frequently fall asleep, just never literally in the middle of having a drink. And this did not make sense because when I first started taking Efexor, it made me drowsy like that within an hour or two of having it, which is why I switched from having it in the morning, as is usually recommended, to having it at night instead. So I didn’t understand how a drug that made me sleepy could also make me sleepy by it’s absence.
I think I have a kind of theory about that now. On Sunday, I made the second dose reduction in my initial phase of this plan to improve my sleep. For four weeks I was taking 262.5mg a day, and now I have begun four weeks that will be at 225mg. Then there will be a 187.5mg period before going to 150mg. At that stage I want to assess how things are going both mentally and sleep-ishly before I decide how to proceed further. Over the last month I haven’t really noticed any lessening of the day time sleepiness, but I also haven’t had any of the incredibly unpleasant side-effects of SNRI dose-reduction, which is a big positive. I have noticed a difference between the days where I’ve had some valium before bed and the ones where I haven’t. Even though I’m only doing that at the weekend, the effects on my day time state last a day or two longer – it is usually Tuesday or Wednesday before I am struggling markedly more with staying awake. Yesterday and today, though, there has been a small but noticeable difference in how sleepy I am, which I wasn’t really expecting. But that brings me back to my theory. So for whatever reason I had a side-effect of essentially immediate onset sleepiness when taking the medicine. And over time, it’s also had a more subtle side-effect of cumulatively interrupting my ability to go to Stage 3 and REM sleep phases up until I got to this point where I was like, come on there’s seriously something wrong. I think the reason why I feel such overwhelming sleepiness when I have missed a dose or even the subtly increased sleepiness yesterday and today when I’ve had just a little bit less of the drug is that something in my body and/or brain is recognising that the substance that stops it from reaching those stages of sleep is absent/reduced and the response is, well then, let’s go to fucking sleep finally! Because the lack of those types of sleep have become such a dire need that it’s almost like my body is constantly attempting to begin that process instead of just restricting it to night time like a person with a normal circadian cycle and undamaged sleep ability would do.
That makes me a bit mad about all of the times when I was fucking exhausted and even had a headache or something and I forced myself to not have a nap, because all of the doctors told me that if I napped in the day time it would just make it that much harder to sleep at night. Yeah, maybe if those naps ever had the potential to provide me with sleep of adequate quality and quantity, they might interrupt me sleeping at night, but they never fucking did. So in denying myself those, I felt shit physically, I felt shit emotionally and mentally because I felt guilty about wanting a nap I was being told I shouldn’t have, and I was even in small ways contributing to the worsening of this problem by exacerbating the sleep deprivation when I didn’t have to.
psych
I have been thinking a bit about the last time I tried to get help from a mental health professional. We had gone to the Adult Mental Health place at Cleveland again and they asked me so many, many questions, hard ones – not hard because I didn’t know the answers but hard because sometimes to articulate something you have to feel it again and those are not nice feelings. It takes effort.
They make it seem like they care and are listening to you and taking notes so that they can help you. It seems like it’s getting to the end of this “please explain all of the ways you are broken so we can see if we can help you” and then they ask two more questions, so casually, like it’s an afterthought more for curiosity than anything else.
But in reality it’s your answer to those two questions that determine whether or they think you’re worth helping. If you say no, you aren’t thinking about harming yourself, and no, you aren’t thinking about harming anyone else.. then the assesment determines that there is little risk in returning you to society and telling you to get your help somewhere else.
Actually, that was wrong. As long as you’re not considering harming yourself or someone else, you are “fine.” I made the mistake one time (apparently) of saying that I did sometimes think about that, harming myself, and then got interrogated about what I planned to do. I said I wasn’t going to do anything. I think about it, in an academic sense, not in a scheduling sense. I think about lots of things I have no intention of doing. But apparently I’m the first person in the history of the world to ever think about hurting myself or ending things for science instead of for practise. For people meant to be helping and reassuring you that you’re not actually crazy, they certainly dropped the ball there.
My cynical part says it’s just because they need to be absolutely sure you aren’t going to leave and go on a killing spree, whether or yourself or others or both, because if that happened they’d be in big trouble. People don’t like it when they read in the news that a crazy person did something bad after trying to get help for being crazy and getting sent away.
So, anyway. They decide you’re not a harm risk and therefore there isn’t room for them to help you but they have this really helpful list of psychologists and if you go to your GP and ask for a Mental Health Care Plan, you can take that to one of these psychologists and you can have 5 sessions and it won’t cost you anything.
They believe that.
In reality, the list of psychologists hasn’t been updated in fuck knows how long, three quarters of them are no longer working at the practises listed, three eights of them are not accepting new patients at the moment or charge a huge fee on top of the MHCP.. and if you’re lucky you might find one who will give you an appointment.
Luck is relative.
Turns out, this psychologist is actually really retired, but was kind of bored, so decided to see people one day a week on MHCPs as a two-birds, one-stone way to pass some time and do a good deed as well.
I don’t know if the problem was me or if maybe this person hadn’t done any professional development in a very long time, and had some outdated information about how people work.
Because I tried to explain that because of my past experiences and things I was taught to believe about myself, I struggle with trying to overrule those thoughts.
I have irrational, fear based reactions when people I care about express irritation towards me, or in proximity to me – even when I’m relatively sure I haven’t done anything wrong – because whether or not I did something wrong isn’t really relevant in whether or not they might be angry at me…
I try so hard to squish it down, literally bite my tongue and hold my breath and use all of my brain power trying to make my eyes not give away that this is happening. Because I know it’s irrational and it’s not fair because the people it happens with now have never given me any reason to start fearing what is going to happen next. That it’s going to turn into several hours of just being berated and told, over and over, all of the ways in which I am just a poor imitation of a proper human being; selfish; abnormal; a disappointment. Don’t I think that if my mother knew how horrible I really was, she’d be heartbroken and disappointed? And I’m lucky that she is such a good person that it never even occurs to her that I am so bad. And of course the person telling me this isn’t going to tell her, and do that to her, because they are not like me.
More than twenty-five years, now, and every time he is a little bit snippy because he has a headache or he’s hangry or just because he is a human being and every fucking time I have to
there was a two day gap here, because I got too worked up trying to write it. let’s see if I can keep going.
Sometimes it is Daniel and occasionally it is one of our children. But every fucking time I feel that flood.. of something, in my chest. It’s probably cortisol and adrenaline coming out of my adrenal glands and I feel it first around my heart and lungs. I feel it starting and I desperately try to tell myself no, this is not that, you don’t need to do this, we don’t need those hormones and the shaking and the tears and the burning face. I tell myself it’s a minor irritation about a single thing which is really normal and it doesn’t mean they’re blaming me. I try to. But that nervous system reaction happens so quickly that it is beyond my control to stop. And the more I try to hold it at bay and the more I fail, the more guilty I feel for being broken and stupid and reacting that way to someone who has never hurt me like that.
Daniel obviously knows why this happens but I think sometimes he (and everyone else) doesn’t really understand how intense it is for me, how much effort I make inside to try to have it not happen and how little it can take sometimes to make it happen. When it happens sometimes he will ask me why I am crying, because he actually has no idea, because to him the exchange was of such little import and intensity that it has already passed from his mind. And most of the time he will remind me he was just irritated, but not at me and give me some tissues and give me a hug. Sometimes when I take a bit longer to calm down he says all sorts of things to try to distract me, to help break me out of it, to make me laugh, to make me feel less powerless.
“What do you call a one eyed dinosaur?”
“If I ever see her, I am going to fuck her up.” It’s the sentiment that counts, because I doubt he could even pick her from a line-up. Sometimes I wonder if I could, even, after all this time. In my dreams (should I call them nightmares? I kind of think of those as having non-human monsters,) I recognise her, of course, but it’s an odd kind of fuzzy older version of the face I remember.
“You just got to let things not bother you, like I do. Let it go in one ear and out the other.”
“What’s the difference between sand and period blood?”
And, I very much appreciate him doing this and it does help to break me out of this heightened state, but the thing is that the whole time he is trying to make me feel better, the broken part inside me is pushing back just as hard, telling me that I’m just still lucky that he hasn’t yet realised and understood that he has married a dud, that one day he will realise how stupid and useless I am, that maybe next time this happens it will be the time that he decides, fuck it, I don’t need to deal with being insulted like this all the time as if I’m doing something wrong when I’m not. Or sometimes, just for a bit of variety, that he already knows all of that and he is just here because he is a good person, not like me, and he feels sorry for me and how pathetic I am so he puts up with me because he is a good and a kind person, not because he actually loves me because of course he doesn’t because what is there to love?
I think sometimes that is why my mind is so active, has so many threads going at once.. because it needs to, in order to make more noise than the broken part in the subconscious that keeps sending out those thoughts that do their best to convince me that I am the person that someone I was supposed to be able to trust, a long time ago, told me I was.
The trust part is the part that made the difference. I can remember kids being mean to me at school, really fucking cruel sometimes even, and it upset me but it hasn’t left parts of my mind broken and brainwashed into believing that what they said about me was true. Because they didn’t have authority, they didn’t have a position of trust. And also, it was a lot less intense. Lunch time ended, school ended, and it might happen again on a different day but there was just as much chance that they would be mean to someone else that day or have forgotten they ever said anything nasty to me. She always disclaimed herself by saying, “I’m not your parent, I’m not anything, I’m nobody, I just live here.” And I’m intelligent enough to recognise that those words contain part of the story about why all of this happened. To everyone else outside of our home, she wasn’t my parent, she was just some person that happened to live with my mother and I; perhaps they realised that it was roommates and not just roommates, perhaps not. But I accepted her as my parent almost immediately and now in reflection I don’t think she knew what to do with that. I’m fairly sure she never had a child in her life plan, and even when she met a woman who had one it was ok because the child lived with her father and they’d only have to deal with her every two weeks and sometimes in school holidays. Then the child’s father had the selfish audacity to die (fucking MEN amirite /s) and everything was fucked. I assume she told herself, and maybe even believed, that she could tolerate me if it meant getting to keep my mother. I think at first I was a novelty. I was probably the perfect age for being tolerable without being difficult. Past the messy baby and toddler stage, able to do shit by myself some of the time and reasonably agreeable. Wasn’t until a few years later that I got a bit older and became more of my own person with my own ideas and personality that I became a problem. I’m fairly sure she had two very rigid ideas about who and what a young girl could be: she could either be a proper little girl who did little girl things like sewing and cooking and was ready to grow up and be a good wife and mother; or she could be an active, sociable, sporty tomboy who pushed all the rules to stay out late doing undignified unladylike activities but ultimately knew she would still have to be a secretary one day. I was not either of those, because it was the 1980s not the 1950s and people were a lot less uptight about gender roles, and I think that is what led to her forming the opinion that I was flawed as a person, because I wasn’t the perfect little girl she had not been, nor was I a reckless rule breaker disappointing and scandalising adults everywhere. I don’t think she had any other template for what to expect from me so logically it made sense that I was broken, and as an adult in my proximity but who was certainly not my parent, it was her responsibility to tell me just how very wrong I was. Whether or not it was supposed to make me change who I was so that I was not a misfit or just supposed to make me feel terrible about being one, I’m not sure. Maybe a bit of both.
An oddly funny thing is, I’m actually very much like my mother. Someone she supposedly loved so much she wanted to spend her life with her. Just about every thing she ever criticised about me is a trait or interest I share with my mother. I don’t know why it was good on her, but a mistake on me.
The insidious part of what she did was the part where she convinced me that I was so fucking fortunate that none of the other people in my life had yet realised that I was a badly formed, pathetic excuse for a human. That’s the part that made me ashamed of myself and ashamed that she “had” to point all this out to me and ensured that I would never actually properly express to anyone the extent of how absolutely cruel to me she was. A lot of people knew that there was friction sometimes, disagreements or differences of opinion. Even my mum. But I never wanted to tell anyone just how big it all was because to do that would mean having to reveal the extent of how bad of a person I was, and I desperately didn’t want people to realise that and abandon me because of it.
The fact that I had accepted her into a parental role, and I know she knew that despite what she said out loud, meant that I trusted and believed her when she told me those things.
And children are programmed, wired, primed, however you want to describe it, to trust and believe the people that they rely on to meet their needs. Even when they are also doing unimaginable amounts of damage to your developing mind, sense of self, sense of worth. It has caused a whole bunch of my neurons to be programmed to repeat that message to myself, so that I don’t ever forget it, even when the person who put that programming in place has been absent from my life for longer than she was ever in it. ‘Cause that’s how brains work, and most especially children’s brains. “Learning sponges” that soak up whatever they are taught, regardless of whether or not it is actually good for you or correct.
So that brings me back to this last psychologist I saw a few years back. I had managed to express some measure of what my issues were, that I had these overly intense and inappropriate reactions to what should be innocuous interactions, and I don’t want to. I want to find a way to make that stop happening. Because it fucking sucks, and it is painful to me and sometimes even to those around me who have to wonder why I am reacting that way when they didn’t do anything worthy of it.
And this guy said to me, “but if you know it’s irrational and incorrect, then it’s not really a problem, is it? You just tell yourself that and the fact of you knowing intellectually that it is wrong overcomes the issue.”
And I was like, “Um, no it fucking doesn’t.” And it didn’t seem possible to make him understand that simply knowing the reason for my reactions and knowing that it’s not normal isn’t enough. It really made me question whether he was the idiot or I am; because apparently he has professional qualifications and education on how to help people with this stuff and he was absolutely certain that simply knowing the problem exists and is abnormal is equivalent to having solved it.
But I think to myself, someone having blackouts or seizures or something like that doesn’t go to the doctor and explain all their symptoms for the doctor to say, “Good news! It’s just epilepsy. You can stop worrying now,” with absolutely no other treatment, medication, warnings about things that could be dangerous, etc. No, of course not. People try to reduce the chance they will have episodes like that as well as making sure they can be as safe as possible when they do still happen. They don’t just start to feel their consciousness fading while cooking at the stove and think to themselves, “Oh, it’s just that pesky POTS,” and stay completely still and collapse over onto the hot burning stove because as long as you know what’s happening it’s all fucking fine.
Would be nice if I could get a dog who would tell me when I was about to have an existential crisis and help me prevent it from happening. Of course that would require the dog to be actually precognitive instead of just having senses far superior to our own.
I want to be able to hear people express something negative, which is completely normal for people to do, and not automatically assume that it’s my fault and start that frantic internal process of trying to pretend it isn’t happening and stopping it from happening at the same time. By the time I get the chance to try to logic myself out of it, it’s way too fucking late. That faulty neural and limbic avalanche has already started and there isn’t any logic or intellect in the world that can neutralise all of those chemical and electrical signals until they’re just spent. It is painful and exhausting. I want to teach my brain and my body to not do that, not just ineffectually tell myself afterwards that everything will be ok.
I want to be a person who feels ok about myself more often than I don’t, rather than one whose default mode of existence is believing that I suck and one who has to exert constant effort to ignore and counter that inner voice. I want to be a person who is occasionally insecure rather than a person who is occasionally sort of not entirely unconfident. I don’t want being conscious to mean I am in a constant battle to anti-brainwash myself, which clearly doesn’t work anyway.
I don’t want every good or nice thing that Daniel does that would make Green Flag Guy get excited to make a mean voice in the low, dark part of my mind to say, “Don’t get used to it. Ever. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. One day he WILL realise you don’t deserve him.” I don’t want to have to argue back every time I feel proud or impressed with something one of our children does and it says “that’s nothing to do with you, that’s in spite of you. All the times you felt like you weren’t good enough of a parent, you were right. They’re just lucky they had another parent who isn’t a disaster.”
I don’t want to feel guilty every time I feel pain or exhaustion and hear the inner voice say “see!? Everything about you is badly designed and malfunctioning. You are a bad person, in a bad body, with a bad mind.” Though that is the one nastiness from the broken part of me that I feel like I am sort of able to semi-successfully rebut. Because there’s lots of studies and evidence to suggest that a big part of the reason bodies don’t work well is due to the stresses and trauma of the past. There’s even a checklist to see how many Bad Shit you have experienced in your childhood and how much risk that puts you at for experiencing other Bad Shit as an adult. (Adverse Childhood Experiences.)
I want to make that horrible voice be silent, not just constantly try to refute what it says, with varying levels of success.
Supposedly it is possible to recover from the effects of abuse and learn to be normal again. I just don’t know how to do it on my own. And that’s why I’ve asked for help, so many fucking times by now. But the constant agony of living inside a mind convinced that you are a terrible, horrible, pathetic failure of a person isn’t enough to make me worth any of the help the public health system is able to give, because their measure of success is “physically alive and likely to remain that way.” And the private mental health system is not any better; there is SO much demand and so little availability and the costs of that kind of treatment are considerable. Especially if you are the kind of fucked up where it’s obviously going to take a shitton on sessions to get anywhere.. if you even find someone that is able to help you and doesn’t just try to convince you that understanding the reasoning and the background behind your mental health woes is the same as curing them.
So that’s why I have accepted, a long time ago, that I’m probably going to need to take medication for the rest of my life to keep me at this level, that while it isn’t optimal, is just vaguely manageable. And I honestly don’t have a problem with it if I do need medication, I’m not anti-drug in the slightest. It does bother me that I just have to settle for this place right here with little likely chance of ever being able to explore whether or not my mind can actually be healed at all.
Medications rarely only do the thing you want them to do and nothing else, though.
Stephanie suggested to me a while back that maybe it was the anti-depressant medication affecting my sleep, because she noticed her sleep go a bit shit when she first started taking it too. But when I first started taking it, it actually made me crazily sleepy, so much so that I had to move to taking it at night instead of in the morning. And that way the sleepiness hit when I actually wanted to be sleepy.
Then I had the sleep test in February and the doctor was like, see, you totally do have sleep apnoea except a barely there form of it that is hard to detect. Do a CPAP, it will definitely fix you.
As I previously established, that has not been the case, and because I want fucking answers and to go to sleep and wake up feeling refreshed, which I understand as a concept but actually truly cannot remember what it feels like anymore, I have been doing so much research and looking over the sleep tests and looking over the data produced by the CPAP machine each night and just trying to find anything that might explain why it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to and how to fix that.
Finally, I noticed a small detail on both of my sleep tests, both the 2018 and 2025 one. Each of them recorded a lot more arousals than respiratory irregularities. So that suggested to me that the respiratory stuff, the “very slight” reduction in air flow as the sleep doctor described it, is not the main cause for me flitting between sleep stages like a directionless butterfly, because more than half of the arousals apparently happen when my air flow is just fucking fine.
So if it wasn’t the breathing, what is it? That bought us back to the medication, and I looked up the research and well, there’s a fucking lot of it that says that in some people venlafaxine heavily interferes with acquisition of both Stage 3 and REM sleep states. My test in February didn’t detect me ever entering either of those states, it was just a constant bounce between S1 and S2. My 2018 test did detect some S3 and REM but much less of them than there should be and more of the other two than there should be. So it appeared that both of the tests support the theory that the medication is what is fucking with my sleep, and it was bad 7 years ago and has been progressively getting worse..
It’s not like I never told anyone what medications I take. I am honestly incredulous that all of these doctors, sleep specialists and GPs alike, had that information right in front of them, as well as extensive data on how damaging venlafaxine can be to sleep quality and none of them ever thought “hmm, that’s something we should look into.” I LITERALLY HAD TO BUILD MY OWN COMPETENT PERSON TO FIGURE THIS OUT, and she hasn’t even had a fraction of all the magnificent education they supposedly have. Perhaps there is something to be said for that adage about wanting something done right.
That brings me to why I have made a huge and difficult effort to go into a level of depth I don’t think I ever have before about what the inside of my mind is like. This is what I am like, damaged, but at the best I have managed to be with both the counselling I have had in the past (and sometimes in spite of it) and the medication. But if I continue on this path of extreme sleep deprivation I will lose all ability to function and it will probably eventually kill me. Not next week, it could still be another 10 years, I don’t know, it’s hard to find concrete data on the long term effects of sleep deprivation which I think I mentioned before, but I have been able to feel that it was a real possibility that it was becoming a direct threat to my health, not just a melodramatic “oh I’m so tired I could die.” That is actually terrifying because sleeping is meant to be the easiest thing in the world and to not be able to do it properly and know that it is affecting you more and more is .. scary. Proper horror movie scary.
I need to try to start reducing the amount of venlafaxine that I take. Unfortunately, venlafaxine is somewhat well known for having a fucking shit show of discontinuation symptoms, even among other similar anti-depressants. I have even had some of them myself one of the times we sought help and the guy said that if I reduced my dose we could add in another medication so the combination of them would work better and then after I spent a month in misery with a constant headache and nausea he said actually, yeah, nah, I think you should just have some vitamins instead. So I’m doing this but doing it really slowly. I’ve been on 300mg, the lowest size the pills come in are 37.5mg, so I’m going to reduce by that much and try maybe a month at a time, to hopefully avoid symptoms and give my mind time to adjust and hopefully not slip back into the abyss. I say that somewhat casually but it is a real concern. I don’t want to go back there, where I was unable to keep a lid on all of the negative thoughts. My hope, for a best outcome, is that I manage to slowly taper at this rate so that I’m only on 150mg instead of 300 and that is enough to restore my ability to sleep without being too much that it erodes my ability to stay out of Tartarus. In reality I have no idea how this is going to go. There’s a reasonable chance that I am going to start falling back in there. And in the absence of proper psycho treatment of some variety, I am hoping that by having taken the time to lay out the full detail of the dark nooks and crannies of my mind, and then asking them to read it.. and then hopefully no one proving the cranny-voices right.. I will have a better position inside myself to fight back from. If I have intentionally made all of the people I care about aware of all of the broken pieces in my mind then the fear of them one day realising shouldn’t be something that can harm me anymore. Maybe. Eventually.
I am throwing myself at the ground and I really, really hope I manage to miss it.