I’m exhausted but I’m up ruminating so I’m hoping this will help. As I’ve mentioned, the episode in June at HBM was the single most traumatic event of my life. When I got out, I was destroyed, to the point that it felt like nowhere would ever feel safe again except my apartment. I never thought I would be someone who was afraid to leave my home, but there I was. Additionally, because the ordeal had been so horrific, my social supports were exhausted and effectively I no longer had social supports. I mean, I do, but I have to pretend everything is fine with me so I can support whatever is going on in their lives. My turn to break down is long past over.
Back up to early spring of this year. After being rejected continuously for the better part of a year by the food stamps office, I did what anyone would have done and spent some time googling what body parts you could sell, in the USA, legally. It turns out you can sell plasma. So I made multiple trips out to the plasma office. Every trip was a long walk, plus an inter-city bus, then transfer to another bus, then working out all their paperwork, then the same thing in reverse. I even had to go to the PCP and get a physical to make this happen. Finally, I was able to sell plasma, and made $90, which I spent on groceries. I had painstakingly worked out the most cost-effective purchases available, and it’s a good thing I did because after that, the plasma bank said I couldn’t donate anymore due to my PTSD.
If anyone had ever deserved $90 in groceries, it was me. A few days later, the main breaker in my apartment building went out and the landlady didn’t want to pay extra to have it fixed over the weekend, so all my food went bad. I was devastated, but let the landlady know that I would be deducting my expenses from my rent. She never told me that she had a problem with this.
Fast forwarding again, I wasn’t able to do my summer gig because of HBM, but I was on a Ticket to Work program with social security and on months when I earned less than SGA, they sent me my old SSDI payment. Unfortunately, this did mean that I was taking home less money than when I had been working, so my total monthly income became less than my rent. Which, my rent is supposed to be subsidized and adjusted to be a third of my gross income. I told Justina at HBM I don’t know how many times, that she was jeopardizing my housing by holding me there, but she didn’t care. So, when I got out, I had missed the deadline to re-certify and the landlady refused to recalculate my rent. This ended up with me being, as far as I knew, two months behind on rent, which I thought would change once the paperwork went through. Apparently, the landlady thought I had been behind since March because of the power outage thing.
So then, I was still dealing with extremely severe trauma symptoms from HBM and had anxiety leaving my apartment, when the landlady chose a Friday afternoon to give me an eviction notice. On the following Wednesday (so five days later), I got a letter in the mail from social security that they were shutting off my Ticket to Work program retroactively starting in January and I owed them thousands of dollars. Apparently, I was supposed to have known this would happen based on previous correspondence. Which, I really thought I had read all my mail from them. I’m pretty sure that what happened, was they sent the really important mail to the wrong address. Because when I moved, I called them up to change my address. I specifically remember this because 1) I did it immediately after I moved, and 2) calling social security always involves upwards of an hour on hold. Unbeknownst to me, there was a glitch in their system and I had only succeeded in changing my address for SSDI. As far as SSI was concerned, I was still back at the group home. Which, it feels really unfair that I was supposed to know to remind social security to change my address everywhere in their database, since they only have the one phone number. It also was not possible to get my mail forwarded by the post office when I moved last year because the group home was considered a business address. And the people who worked in the group home were very clear that absolutely refused to take the time out of their day to let me know if I had mail. Because of all this, I really really went out of my way to make sure I had updated my address with everyone. So then a year later, I can’t pay my rent and the government is after me because I missed a letter in the mail.
And it just feels so unfair. Other people are allowed to miss mail. Other people work a lot less hard than I do to procure groceries, and yet they can blithely go through life without chronically worrying about running out of food. And even though I’m working ten times harder than everyone else, somehow it’s always my fault when I’m in dire straits. I missed a piece of mail. I didn’t have rental insurance. Et cetera.
So, thanks to a few really good clinicians who went above and beyond, I was able to be reasonably sure I wouldn’t end up back at HBM if I went to the emergency room. Which was a much-needed change in my luck, because I’d had the knife picked out for days and had been replaying endlessly in my mind what I would do with it to end my life. I didn’t even want to die, I just felt like I had no choice. Honestly, it’s a miracle that I survived. I think anyone in my shoes would have had pressing safety issues in that situation.
So I finally got to the mental hospital where they actually help people, and this is the part that I can’t stop ruminating about: the doctor here says that my outpatient psychiatrist is “concerned” and wanted me to do a residential. Which, obviously I don’t have money for that and obviously I don’t have time for that. But more importantly, the implication is that he thinks my baseline has dropped. When, from my perspective, I can’t stop being traumatized for long enough to recover from the last trauma.
We know that spring is hard for me. So there were a few things that went on in the spring of this year that all hit at the same time, and I ended up inpatient. As soon as I got out, my therapist said she was going to drop me for having been inpatient. I don’t deal well with abandonment, and this is also a pattern that whenever I utilize my “safety plan,” my outpatient team terminates with me. This makes it feel unfair that I’m supposed to have a “safety plan,” and I ended up inpatient a second time. Which, I feel bad about going inpatient when I’m there, due to years of intense programming from previous providers that being inpatient is not okay. So I convinced myself that I was fine and, in retrospect, I left before I was ready. My team had said there was “absolutely no pressure to leave” but I thought I was being brave. I quickly ended up being triggered again, and had to go back to the emergency room for what would have been a third admission. Unfortunately, instead of getting help, I got sent to the penal institution at HBM and took on trauma that was way beyond what I think anyone would have been able to cope with. The fact that I survived for a month after that should be testament that I was, in fact, using “skills™️”. So now I’m inpatient again, for what I’m considering to be the third time because HBM doesn’t count for obvious reasons.
It just feels so invalidating that I’m surviving all of this, only to be told that people are “concerned” that I’m declining and I’m supposed to go learn more “skills™️.” This is not a lack of skills. This is not a lack of employing those skills. This is not a lack of mental fortitude. This is me, already starting out at a disadvantage because I was homeschooled in a cult that I was then kicked out of, leaving me with less emotional safety margins than most people. Then increasingly awful things keep happening until finally I’m released from prison for a crime I didn’t commit; only to return to an eviction notice, the loss of my entire income and backup income, and sudden astronomical debt all in one week.
Personally, I feel like I should be getting congratulated. Instead, people who should know better are telling me through the grapevine that I should have been able to tough it out with “skills™️.” Like, no. There are no (adaptive) skills that would have solved this problem. I did all the right things and I employed all the techniques. “Skills™️” are not a magical abracadabra that can make me superhuman.
So, that’s all for tonight. I know people really are just trying to help and get me more supports. But right now, what I need is encouragement and validation.
