i'm not that naive, i'm just out to find the better part of me
Wednesday, July 31st, 2013 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erikaI have about twenty thousand lists these days because a) moving, moving, pack all the things; b) all the stress from family shit and bad dynamics hasn't magically gone away, whine; c) financial worries (now taken care of, but the money has to go out from me [where it came from you!] and to all of the fifty thousand bills); d) I don't remember what I was going—oh right, fibromyalgia, and the twenty thousand doctors' appointments; oh and e) I was supposed to be in a workshop this week and just cannot, no, not at all.
And I have an appointment with my psychiatrist today at twenty minutes past noon, because he's on a new 20 minute schedule, and if I have to listen to him do his normal free-wheeling grandiosity of let's-relate-everything-you're-going-through-to-something-existential—I just cannot cope with that today. Cannot.
Basically, I have a psychiatrist who thinks everything should be a song-and-dance number from a musical. Which, honestly, normally it's fun and I like it because I am a very metaphorical person myself (I don't know if anyone has noticed), but I am all out of my tolerance for other people's bullshit. It's only 10am!
(I already managed to snap at Josh before he left for work and some part of my hip always hurts and I'm supposed to be doing so many more things than I actually can do, and it's constantly in my brain.)
And right now I am full of resentment. I'm also full of love, but the resentment is there too, and I want to talk about it. I don't want to be 'managing' Josh's ADHD, and I'm worried it'll hurt our relationship. I don't want to have to move out of my parents' house primarily because my father is erratically an asshole (and by 'asshole' I mean occasionally physically violent and generally emotionally invalidating and abusive sometimes) and my mother is, for all intents and purposes, never in the here and now. She's somewhere else, and if I drag her down into the here and now, it hurts her, and I see her pain so clearly, so I leave her there.
I don't want to constantly perform for an invisible audience who are silently criticizing me. I don't want to need things. I don't want to need them a specific way, at a specific time, at a specific place, when I have a specific level of body-capability.
I'm hurt. I'm hurt because my family is often neglectful and sometimes spark into abusive. My family-of-origin encourages abuse. It hurts.
And what hurts most is when I cause pain to others myself. I don't want to feed into that, but it's nearly impossible to extricate myself when I'm right here, and I just want to be left alone, please, don't talk at me, you're hurting me, and all of that is roundly ignored by everyone in my family to different extents—because suck it up, because listen to me, because respect everyone else, because clean up after yourself, because you're a waste of space, you're a waste of time, I don't want to repeat myself, I don't want to give you what you ask for because it's different than I expect you to need and that's not okay. You're not Okay, I'm told over and over, and I fight it, but it hurts.
It hurts because when I fight it, many times that comes in the form of me, just lashing out. When so many things are a fight, I've lost track, I don't know what I'm fighting, just that I have to keep going——...
It hurts because when someone offers help, if someone offers a helping hand, if someone offers interdependence and love, I don't understand it, and I fight it. Even though I know it's what I needed from the beginning, and it's RIGHT HERE——but I can't grasp it fully because I don't know how. Nobody ever taught me how to accept being loved. I never really needed to know that before.
I'm hurt because my body hurts. I wake up in pain and I go to sleep in pain and between those times I'm in pain. I'm constantly tired, this riptide of fatigue threatening to sweep me under, sweep me out, that I (again) must fight against. I'm hurt because I spent a decade telling everyone that it wasn't really depression that was making me so tired, and yes I was depressed, but there was more, and no one listened. A dozen doctors or more—who wants to count—didn't listen.
More than that, they actively advocated harmful things. Suddenly my therapist telling me to go to school, to take a full class load, to do more, every doctor I saw for strep throat or a bacterial infection telling me to exercise—all of that takes on a more sinister taint. "We don't believe you, and just to make sure you KNOW that, we're going to tell you to ignore your internal signals completely and only support/advise your taking the options which involve doing far more activity than you have been capable of doing for the last decade."
But now it's been validated with a different word, so suddenly people are paying more attention to my limitations, even actually trying to accommodate them. That makes me so very sad, because what's different here? A word. What's different is not how I feel, or the pain I experience, or my exhaustion. Those were always there, and people... the same people who had been trained to KNOW BETTER... refused to see them.
And here's the word: fibromyalgia. Here's what I hear: it's never going to go away. Maybe it's treatable and maybe it's not, maybe these medications will work and maybe they won't, maybe I'll feel better physically and maybe it'll be the exact same level of impairment but I'll somehow magically be able to cope with it better. Maybe.
But who lives on maybes? Someone at the end of their rope.
Last Friday I texted a friend and basically said "I want to jump off [a specific bridge], will you meet me there?"
She calmed me down, talked to me and finally, delayed me. Delayed me long enough I could confess what was going on to Josh, if no one else.
(I'm petrified of being in a locked ward. I'm fucking terrified because I know that if someone takes away my escape routes, I fight harder, and what I need right now is to rest and recuperate, not fight. But fight I will anyway.)
I've lied about that conversation for the last week; I talked about parts of it but not the trigger, but—— I lied out of gratitude. I'm not sure how to explain that, that I lied because I knew that someone I love had told me their inner demons and reassured me that I'm not alone, so I didn't need what I thought I did.
And if I did need it after all, she promised me she would help me get there, just so I could stay on her sofa and tell her in person.
In order to change, I have to accept the reality first, and here is my reality: right now, I'm so overwhelmed that killing myself seems like a really great option, and while my reasons for holding on are many and varied, I'm still extremely overwhelmed.
I'm so very very lucky to be able to change. To be able to perceive my limitations clearly, so that I know that my family-of-origin has written into me these coping mechanisms which are hurtful to others and to myself, so that I know that my body cannot do these things regardless of what a doctor tells me, so that I can even express these things.
Though it hurts. It hurts to know so exactly what I'm capable of, because that draws a large circle around "the things that Erika cannot do" and some of those things I want very badly.
Nevertheless, though my 'internal reset' has been triggered, and large parts of me are screaming that the time has come for me! It is imminent! You must withdraw from everything because you are INDEED a tremendous failure! ——I choose to acknowledge that and not participate.
It still hurts. I'm angry that I know exactly what's wrong and I can't fix it right now. I'm sad, I'm grieving a new diagnosis and a new prognosis. I'm grieving my relationship with my family. I'm grieving myself. And in the middle of all that, I'm navigating a relationship which is growing and changing and all good things full of life and love, but....
It still hurts.
I need to fix a lot of this and I am, I'm actively working on fixing it. But what hurts the most is everything, that right now, here——all of this cannot be wrapped up at the end of this entry, at the end of the song, at the end of the metaphor. It just is.
And I have an appointment with my psychiatrist today at twenty minutes past noon, because he's on a new 20 minute schedule, and if I have to listen to him do his normal free-wheeling grandiosity of let's-relate-everything-you're-going-through-to-something-existential—I just cannot cope with that today. Cannot.
Basically, I have a psychiatrist who thinks everything should be a song-and-dance number from a musical. Which, honestly, normally it's fun and I like it because I am a very metaphorical person myself (I don't know if anyone has noticed), but I am all out of my tolerance for other people's bullshit. It's only 10am!
(I already managed to snap at Josh before he left for work and some part of my hip always hurts and I'm supposed to be doing so many more things than I actually can do, and it's constantly in my brain.)
And right now I am full of resentment. I'm also full of love, but the resentment is there too, and I want to talk about it. I don't want to be 'managing' Josh's ADHD, and I'm worried it'll hurt our relationship. I don't want to have to move out of my parents' house primarily because my father is erratically an asshole (and by 'asshole' I mean occasionally physically violent and generally emotionally invalidating and abusive sometimes) and my mother is, for all intents and purposes, never in the here and now. She's somewhere else, and if I drag her down into the here and now, it hurts her, and I see her pain so clearly, so I leave her there.
I don't want to constantly perform for an invisible audience who are silently criticizing me. I don't want to need things. I don't want to need them a specific way, at a specific time, at a specific place, when I have a specific level of body-capability.
I'm hurt. I'm hurt because my family is often neglectful and sometimes spark into abusive. My family-of-origin encourages abuse. It hurts.
And what hurts most is when I cause pain to others myself. I don't want to feed into that, but it's nearly impossible to extricate myself when I'm right here, and I just want to be left alone, please, don't talk at me, you're hurting me, and all of that is roundly ignored by everyone in my family to different extents—because suck it up, because listen to me, because respect everyone else, because clean up after yourself, because you're a waste of space, you're a waste of time, I don't want to repeat myself, I don't want to give you what you ask for because it's different than I expect you to need and that's not okay. You're not Okay, I'm told over and over, and I fight it, but it hurts.
It hurts because when I fight it, many times that comes in the form of me, just lashing out. When so many things are a fight, I've lost track, I don't know what I'm fighting, just that I have to keep going——...
It hurts because when someone offers help, if someone offers a helping hand, if someone offers interdependence and love, I don't understand it, and I fight it. Even though I know it's what I needed from the beginning, and it's RIGHT HERE——but I can't grasp it fully because I don't know how. Nobody ever taught me how to accept being loved. I never really needed to know that before.
I'm hurt because my body hurts. I wake up in pain and I go to sleep in pain and between those times I'm in pain. I'm constantly tired, this riptide of fatigue threatening to sweep me under, sweep me out, that I (again) must fight against. I'm hurt because I spent a decade telling everyone that it wasn't really depression that was making me so tired, and yes I was depressed, but there was more, and no one listened. A dozen doctors or more—who wants to count—didn't listen.
More than that, they actively advocated harmful things. Suddenly my therapist telling me to go to school, to take a full class load, to do more, every doctor I saw for strep throat or a bacterial infection telling me to exercise—all of that takes on a more sinister taint. "We don't believe you, and just to make sure you KNOW that, we're going to tell you to ignore your internal signals completely and only support/advise your taking the options which involve doing far more activity than you have been capable of doing for the last decade."
But now it's been validated with a different word, so suddenly people are paying more attention to my limitations, even actually trying to accommodate them. That makes me so very sad, because what's different here? A word. What's different is not how I feel, or the pain I experience, or my exhaustion. Those were always there, and people... the same people who had been trained to KNOW BETTER... refused to see them.
And here's the word: fibromyalgia. Here's what I hear: it's never going to go away. Maybe it's treatable and maybe it's not, maybe these medications will work and maybe they won't, maybe I'll feel better physically and maybe it'll be the exact same level of impairment but I'll somehow magically be able to cope with it better. Maybe.
But who lives on maybes? Someone at the end of their rope.
Last Friday I texted a friend and basically said "I want to jump off [a specific bridge], will you meet me there?"
She calmed me down, talked to me and finally, delayed me. Delayed me long enough I could confess what was going on to Josh, if no one else.
(I'm petrified of being in a locked ward. I'm fucking terrified because I know that if someone takes away my escape routes, I fight harder, and what I need right now is to rest and recuperate, not fight. But fight I will anyway.)
I've lied about that conversation for the last week; I talked about parts of it but not the trigger, but—— I lied out of gratitude. I'm not sure how to explain that, that I lied because I knew that someone I love had told me their inner demons and reassured me that I'm not alone, so I didn't need what I thought I did.
And if I did need it after all, she promised me she would help me get there, just so I could stay on her sofa and tell her in person.
In order to change, I have to accept the reality first, and here is my reality: right now, I'm so overwhelmed that killing myself seems like a really great option, and while my reasons for holding on are many and varied, I'm still extremely overwhelmed.
I'm so very very lucky to be able to change. To be able to perceive my limitations clearly, so that I know that my family-of-origin has written into me these coping mechanisms which are hurtful to others and to myself, so that I know that my body cannot do these things regardless of what a doctor tells me, so that I can even express these things.
Though it hurts. It hurts to know so exactly what I'm capable of, because that draws a large circle around "the things that Erika cannot do" and some of those things I want very badly.
Nevertheless, though my 'internal reset' has been triggered, and large parts of me are screaming that the time has come for me! It is imminent! You must withdraw from everything because you are INDEED a tremendous failure! ——I choose to acknowledge that and not participate.
It still hurts. I'm angry that I know exactly what's wrong and I can't fix it right now. I'm sad, I'm grieving a new diagnosis and a new prognosis. I'm grieving my relationship with my family. I'm grieving myself. And in the middle of all that, I'm navigating a relationship which is growing and changing and all good things full of life and love, but....
It still hurts.
I need to fix a lot of this and I am, I'm actively working on fixing it. But what hurts the most is everything, that right now, here——all of this cannot be wrapped up at the end of this entry, at the end of the song, at the end of the metaphor. It just is.
(Once again,
I finish an entry thinking
"this wasn't the entry I intended to write,
but maybe it's the one I needed to write.")
I finish an entry thinking
"this wasn't the entry I intended to write,
but maybe it's the one I needed to write.")
no subject
on Friday, August 9th, 2013 03:11 pm (UTC)