And I don’t understand why I can’t get it together, because I already had that miraculous intervention and spent 14 months in treatment despite not being able to afford a residential treatment facility. The very last time I saw Dr. X, he pointedly said that he had decided to help me because he thought I’d never had a chance, and now I did have one. Which was always an encouragement until the past couple of months, and now I feel like I’m letting everyone down. On the one hand I’ll never see them ever again, and on the other hand they went out of their way to help me. They didn’t talk about what they had to go through to help me, but I can only imagine the pressure that must have been on them to discharge me. Now I feel like I was given a chance and I still can’t make it work. They’ve already gone astronomically above and beyond the call of duty, and there’s nothing more that can be done. And my experience in the group home tells me that no matter how hard I try to imagine what T. State is like, there’s no way I’d be able to grasp the horror of what “life” is like there. I picture a dimly lit dungeon surrounded by people who murdered their own children. I picture a 1900 freak show except without the luxury of getting to at least have some contact with the outside world. You know that terrifying laugh that mental patients have in horror movies? Yeah, I found out at the group home that they didn’t actually make that shit up. Shit went down there that was too disturbing to describe on the internet, and it was kindergarten compared to the other option. Unfortunately, even though everyone agrees that I really need help and everyone wants to give it to me, systems don’t exist in society to give that to people with no money. I already got a miracle once and I wasted it. Even if I got another one, would it suddenly help me?
Well, I have no idea what’s going on with me, so I’m writing this post to find out. I discharged from the bougie inpatient unit on Tuesday of last week (so a little over a week ago) and now I’m in the bougie outpatient program that lasts roughly 15 days. Unfortunately the first five days were online due to noxious fumes in the building where the program is housed. I tried so hard to make this work, but I was surrounded by boxes that needed to be unpacked and general chaos, and I truly feel that those days were a total loss. I’m feeling extremely under the gun to get better asap, both because I’m only in a short-term program, and also because I have to go back to work. If I fail at this, what if I end up in another group home or T. State? Which, nobody wants to admit this but it seems like we all know that that’s where they send hopeless cases and they stop all treatment but keep you clinically alive while you rot away, never to be seen by society again. And either would certainly be a fate worse than death. When I was inpatient, I got terrified around the two-week mark that this was going to be brought up as an option, as my team had mentioned it in passing. So today I was at this day program and just SOBBING, because I honestly feel like if I’m in crisis, there’s nowhere I can turn for help. The places that can help are all super short-term, and if I can’t get better in that time frame then I’ll be considered terminal and sent away to spend the next 40 years surrounded by schizophrenics and the criminally insane.
One issue in the group home was that it was really hard to come by food. Anything in the kitchen was totally unhygienic, since people with fecal smearing issues reached their hands into cereal boxes to pull out handfuls of cereal, and milk got left out overnight by people “at a different level of functioning.” Staff cooked meals and left them on plates on the counter and there would be a chain of ants already munching on the food by the time we found out it was ready. I resorted to keeping canned goods in my room, but it was still problematic that I was scared shitless of leaving my room, and my stomach turns even now just thinking about it. Some freak of psychiatry could accidentally murder you and it wouldn’t even make the local news. So using the microwave, or even generating dishes or trash wasn’t really worth the short-term sensation of being full. When I got my job in early spring, I had access to the school lunch and that was great and got me one meal a day. Weirdly, since I’ve been on LOA, I’ve pretty much stopped eating entirely. Like, I’m eating 2-3 meals a WEEK. I don’t really understand this, and when people ask me what my motivation is, I always give them different answers because I genuinely have no idea and what feels true in one moment feels like it was a lie in the next. I do know that I have cans of soup in my apartment and I can actually just microwave them now, leaving me with a “what’s-the-catch?” sense of convenience. But I heat food and I smell it and I don’t want to eat it. On the other hand, I also did just spend at least four days of working almost around the clock on a budgeting spreadsheet that was primarily centered around food. I found all these recipes that could provide all the amino acid I would need as cheaply as possible, and then I scoured the internet figuring out what would be THE cheapest way to meet a normal daily calorie requirement. I even used Instacart’s website to look up prices at the local grocery store (which I felt bad about, although I HAVE both worked for them and spent a small fortune on their service, so I didn’t feel that bad). Then, between ingredients and cookware, I was still short over $200. I tried signing up for the ” flex” plan at Misfits Market, but that would have been massively out of my price range. Finally I contacted the social worker who helps me, and she said she would happily deliver food from the food pantry. I was elated, until I got totally overwhelmed by Imposter Syndrome and said that I was actually fine, just paranoid about starving. I don’t understand not understanding my own motivations. Maybe…
- I want to lose weight (either just because generally it’s been a long-term goal, or because that way I will appear physically run down when I get back to work and they’ll know I wasn’t faking to get a vacation).
- I want to communicate that I’m in distress
- I’m a princess and I don’t like canned soup
- My appetite is shot due to an exacerbation of my mood disorder and food feels repulsive
- I actually, genuinely cannot afford normal food
- Given that I grew up with food insecurity (my parents had food and sometimes my brother did, but my sister and I were most SOL), maybe I just *think* I’m going to starve, so I hoard food instead of eating it.
I definitely know that today during the lunch break when I couldn’t afford to go to the cafeteria and buy food, I absolutely for sure felt that it was an economic issue. Which is just incredibly isolating, because I have this extreme fear that if I tell someone that I’m desperately hungry and can’t afford food, they will feel obligated to give me food. But then when everyone around me has food and I don’t, I resent them all because it’s not fair. So during the hour after lunch, I found myself asking for a “check-in” with this lady and crying so hard I could barely get out that I couldn’t procure food and I was so hungry and I didn’t understand why because I had canned food and a lot of people in the world don’t have that and etc and etc. She said she’d bring it up in a team meeting at 3pm. Which, the program ends at 2pm but I was having transportation issues and I felt like I desperately had to get out of there by 3 because otherwise they might give me food when I had this extremely deep, unshakable belief that I had been lying and making it all up. And to be fair, I have like $500 saved for Christmas present for my sister’s kids, but that’s because literally the only contact that I get with them. I’ve begged for a month for a Zoom call with my niece for her birthday, but my sister and her husband are always “too busy” to schedule a time when they can set her up with the computer. She’s six. She can definitely handle a Zoom call unsupervised. I would call my sister or BIL if she passed out or something. But yeah, I’m an apostate so I’m probably just going to start spewing cuss words in front of a little kid or try to convert her to Satanism or something. It makes total sense. It’s not safe for me to be around a child. However, last Christmas I sent her a blanket that said that she had an aunt who loved her, and my sister has remarked that she sleeps with it every single night. So what am I supposed to do? Obviously I’m going to prioritize infiltrating the cult with messages of love for a vulnerable little girl over eating every day. Maybe if someone had known what was happening to me, they would have done the same for me and I would have had a prayer of having a normal life.
The push-pull is real. I also posted this crazy post to Reddit today about how I don’t understand why society is complacent about the existence of HSLDA (which is linked below for anyone who can’t get enough of my content), and people responded with deeply compassionate answers and promised to look up the organization and said how truly sorry they were that I had been through what I had. Which, to me, was terrifying because when they look up HSLDA they will see happy children smiling in their happy families and they will know that I’m a fraud.
In other news, I’m up at 2:35am and I feel like I have an elephant on the center of my chest because I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I figured out that I could get certain types of food (such as beans) for cheaper by buying in bulk on Amazon, but even though I swear I clicked “Amazon day delivery,” Jeff Bezos got a little overenthusiastic and is sending me like $400 of food and cookware tomorrow. If I go to the day program, I’m going to be distracted the whole time worrying about porch pirates. My neighbor said she’d be on the alert but it’s a lot of packages. But how can I possibly just miss a whole day of my program? But if I go, then they’ll think I’m starving when there are actually several other possibilities and I might be wrong about the whole thing. But I may or may not have come across like a lunatic today so if I stay home, it’ll look like I’m attention-seeking. And above all, I’m being offered help. Just MISSING an entire day would be absolutely fucking deplorable. And it’s a short-term program, so it would be one more missed day out of a 15-day treatment program of which I’ve already effectively missed five days, plus basically today because I was totally losing my shit all day. And yet, despite the fact that I can literally hear my heart beating because I know how egregious this is, I already know that I’m going to call and beg them to understand that I’m staying home to guard my porch tomorrow.
After I got home today, I did take some money out of the kids’ Christmas fund and buy myself an Impossible Whopper meal. I felt better afterwards. I mean, I still feel like my life is a lost cause, but at least I can form complete sentences now. Remember how my mom randomly volunteered to send money recently? I had to ask her for more money and she did the thing she does where she ultimately sends it, but she makes me wait a while while she “talks to dad” and makes a HUGE deal out of how INCREDIBLY HARD ON THEM this is and whatever. So I got the money, but I have a massive incentive to never have to ask for money from them again. I also had to get money from my brother, who seems to have at least been viewing me as a human lately since he found out that I’m employed again, but it still hurts my soul to ask. The only reason he has money is because he became a workaholic instead of getting into therapy. Every single aspect of his life is absolutely on fire except his job and his wallet, and he has severe symptoms of mental illness, but if he ever actually became aware of that, he would have to take a massive financial hit just like I did. So I’m basically exploiting my baby brother’s lack of treatment to fund my own treatment. And my poor cousin, I can’t call him again. My current LOA is unpaid, so although I have money in the bank, when it runs out it runs out. Three out of three of my rent checks so far have been severely late. What am I going to do when I need to wash sheets again? I can wash clothes in the tub, but hand-washing sheets and towels in a North American bathtub is not very effective and does not get them very clean, especially since I’m not the most adept at hand-washing to begin with. What’s my plan for if I need to locomote somewhere for any reason and I can’t go on foot? I have this TINY amount of money saved in addition to the Christmas fund, but even optimistically if I don’t go completely insane and get locked away under the opera house and I go back to work on September 1, I’m not getting paid again until September 22. But when I technically have money but I’m unwilling to spend it on basically an episode of hangriness so severe that I considered taking my own life, am I just like my dad hoarding money away because he’s “anxious about retirement” and blinded to the reality that his whole life is burning down all around him (or at least mine is)?
I don’t know. I feel trapped and paralyzed. Everything I say feels like I lie, and everything I do feels irresponsible. I don’t want to throw away the gift I was given by Dr. X and my social worker. But right now it feels like it’s slipping through my hands.
