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 Wednesday, July 31st, 2013 04:29 pm (UTC)I'm glad you're holding on, though. <3
no subject
on Wednesday, July 31st, 2013 05:45 pm (UTC)A few thoughts:
-It is very hard being a caretaker for someone with ADHD, or even feeling like you must "manage" their lives, especially another adult. Could Josh look to see if there is a semi-local CHADD (http://www.chadd.org/) support group that he could glean some support from to help himself? (You can also look to them, as well, for caretaker support). I'm wondering if that might help take some of the stress off of you, or at least give you a safe outlet to vent. They can work with him on a list of goals that he can implement to help you out so that it's not a strain on the relationship.
- Regarding hip pain, is there any sort of stretching that can help alleviate it? Like these: http://fibrodaily.com/treatments/yoga-poses-for-fibromyalgia-patients-yoga-hip-stretches-for-fibromyalgia-patients/ ?
-Psychiatrists who have a need to monologize to their patients just drive me up a freakin' wall. I sympathize.
-I know I can't help you with your family, but I'm glad that you have a plan to focus on for getting away from the abusive behaviors. There's a light at the end of your tunnel.
-Re: grief and resentment. I struggle with grief on... a near daily basis, I think, because I had envisioned this sort of life for us that is likely never going to be. When my son's diagnosis of bipolar became official (and here I can relate to the "no one believed us until we had a name behind it"), his psychiatrist told me that this was likely a lifelong condition that may be managed, but will never be "gone". There's a tremendous amount of grief in learning that the life I envisioned parenting him is very different than our reality, there's more grief stacked on the idea that this isn't going to go away....ever.
It's hard to find joy or relief or calm in times like these. I'm glad you had a friend who could talk you down. I'm glad you had someone able to listen. It sounds like you really need that sort of support right now, so allow me to offer you an ear or an email when you need it.
no subject
on Wednesday, July 31st, 2013 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on Friday, August 2nd, 2013 01:15 am (UTC)That sounds creepy. I'm sorry. I just want to say that it fits. In my head, too.
Please keep writing.
no subject
on Friday, August 2nd, 2013 11:21 pm (UTC)And you have an amazing friend in that person.
no subject
on Friday, August 9th, 2013 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on Monday, August 12th, 2013 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
on Monday, August 12th, 2013 05:49 pm (UTC)Josh is in therapy right now to deal with related anger stuff, and trying some medications too, but an ADHD life coach might be just what he needs later down the line. The problem is that it's nearly impossible for me to set things up for him while I'm trying to manage my own shit; I want to be more awesome about it but I don't know how, and trying to figure it out is taking time/energy/emotional-caring spoons I just don't have. Right now, we're sort of implementing one new habit a month. This month's new habit is that both of us text each other if we spend more than 5 dollars on anything, and there are to be no 'gas station purchases': i.e. no convenience food, no soda, nothing like that.
I'm not supposed to do any real physical exertion until I see a PT, and I had such a shitty time with a physical therapist at the local hospital that I just haven't been able to convince myself to reschedule. She snapped at Josh for rolling a rubber ball back and forth in his hands (he brought it in, too, it's not like it was 'theirs'), she said I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome instead of fibromyalgia, and she LEFT THE APPOINTMENT while I was IN THE HEATED POOL doing my FIRST SET OF EXERCISES. I'm pissed, but I need to stop putting it off.
I cannot explain to you how tremendously relieving it has been to be away from my family. So much relief. SO MUCH.
Grieving is hard. I thought I'd done it all for my mental illnesses, I thought I knew what I was coping with, and then this comes up and it's completely different from anything I imagined.
Thank you for your offer. I may take you up on that!
no subject
on Monday, August 12th, 2013 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on Monday, August 12th, 2013 07:23 pm (UTC)That PT sounds awful. I'm still dealing with the fact that our community support services have my son's diagnosis wrong...it irritates me to no end because I feel like I'm constantly reminding the same people that it's not just ADHD....and these are people who are in our house twice a week. *bangs head*