Warning: There are a lot of typos in this. Ordinary, I would edit them out. But this is not ordinarily.
Well, it’s time for a proper update. Things aren’t actually going all that well. Previously, everything was awful except work. Work started going south, and here we are.
Background
The really major problems started with the involuntary admission to HBM, which as we know was extremely traumatic and caused severe psychological damage. [I talked about that in this previous entry.] About a month later, I got admitted to a hospital that is decidedly in the “effective” quadrant of my hospital-categorization matrix:
After the effective hospital, my mental health was stable enough for me to be discharged. At that point, my primary issue was sleep. I would be fine throughout the day, but as soon as I lay down and closed my eyes, I was getting hit with indescribable somatic flashbacks. If I re-opened my eyes, I was fine. But this did make sleep very difficult. So it varied, but I would say I was getting an average of two hours of horrific flashbacks before falling asleep at night. This was usually followed by a lot of nightmares, which are intensifying anyway because I’m going to turn 35 soon so I’m getting more gut-wrenching dreams about never getting to have kids, than I did a few years ago.
Also problematic, I’ve been trying unsuccessfully since October (so, 11 months now) to get into therapy. Something always goes terminally wrong at the last minute, and I’m back on waiting lists.
It’s chronically stressful to have to go through life with less than $5 available from anywhere ever and no lines of credit. In my case, that means that anytime I need money for literally anything, I have to ask my brother, who is toxic in all ways except sending money. But I’m not going to take his money without taking an interest in his life or caring about his opinions. And his opinion is that I’m lazy and irresponsible and self-indulgent, etc etc. Basically I’m a piece of 💩 and broke our parents’ hearts and also definitely am cognitively impaired. So I keep hoping that if I can earn money, I can move away from that relationship and not keep getting dragged into wanting to kill myself for being a burden on society and nothing I do is enough.
Meanwhile, it would be great if I had social supports but I intentionally avoid everybody when I’m struggling. Which, I understand that most professionals advise against that, but it’s been my unwavering experience that if I let anyone know how bad things actually are, it blows up in my face. Usually they don’t know how to help and feel inadequate and start avoiding me and/or being exhausted by me and/or the friend no longer wants to tell me anything about their life and now I’m a ministry and not a friend, and/or they start giving me a million clichés and insist that I would be fine if I were trying harder and making good decisions. So just given all that, and given that my life is on fire and it’s really hard to find happy things to talk about, I’ve been isolating. But I really really wish I didn’t have to.
Meanwhile, it’s been way more than 30 days since my 30-day notice to quit, so I never know if I’m going to get a court summons, or how I would find out about it if I did. That whole situation is really unfair because when I moved in, I expected to pay a third of my income, as outlined in the lease. The landlady is no longer upholding this. And it’s like, I’m clean, I’m responsible, I’m quiet, and I’m more than happy to pay the third of my income that I expected to pay when I moved in. So the fact that she’s treating me like a trashy tenant is just causing so much distress. I really try not to think about it but it’s a frequent source of anguish, plus I can’t feel safe at home because I never know if someone is going to come bang on my door with a stack of papers saying I’m a horrible person. This actually did happen on the morning before my last hospitalization.
When I was in treatment, I was supposed to be figuring out my “triggers.” But since I’ve had so much recent additional trauma, I have even more triggers than before. So I get that in theory, it would be great to enumerate them and process them and whatever. But it’s also like, I have to live my life and make money. So how can I possibly do that? And even if I did know what my triggers were, everything is a trigger now, so I don’t know what I could possibly do with that information.
Physiological symptoms of anxiety make life a lot harder. Most people don’t believe that you can get physical symptoms without there being some sort of underlying thought, belief, etc; which is an idea that probably stems from the widespread and unfortunate deployment of CBT, which frankly is a modality riddled with terrible advice. Anyway, obviously there’s a lot that I could be worried about right now, but the physical symptoms don’t really correlate to thoughts, and usually when I’m in the most pain, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what I was worried about if you asked me. I’ll be fully engrossed in some task, only to be pulled out of it and forced to take a break because of labored breathing and excruciating chest pain. Combatting this seems to mostly involve finding work-arounds for the triggers that I was able to identify pre-2024-trauma. But not only is psychosomatic pain painful, but mitigating it is time consuming. For example, I can take a shower, but then I’ll be hyperventilating and sweating profusely for an hour. Alternatively, I can take a bath, which is less triggering and takes less time than shower + panic attack. However, it still takes drastically more time than showering without the panic attack, which is an option available to most people. It’s the same situation with taking the bus rather than driving; I try so hard to convince everyone including myself that it’s fine. But it takes hours out of every day and is very limiting. So I think about what I spend time on in a day and it’s basically flashbacks, waiting for the bus, taking a bath, and other things that I have to do because I have PTSD. And after a point, gung-ho positivity just turns into denial of the reality that this sucks.
And I just wish that in between panic attacks, I could have moments of happiness. But the reality is I’m almost never happy. Even when I’m doing things that should be fun, I’m hypervigilant and can’t engross myself in the activity. I can’t feel close to another person. I can’t feel like a legitate human. I could sign up for fun activities over the weekend, but then I’d just be in hell in a different location. I tried to sign up to pick up litter with a volunteer group, but I was “triggered” by some of the people and I also get “triggered” by bending from the waist, but my knees kill when I try to bend that way so it’s pick your poison. Plus I can’t get to the events because I’m exhausted from sleep disturbances and mental health problems. So the anhedonia is absolute right now.
So, some of these problems still would have been there if I hadn’t had to go to HBM and if my landlady hadn’t decided to try to evict me rather than recalculating my rent according to my income. But those were some incredibly major events, and I wish social security hadn’t chosen this summer to kick me out of the ticket to work program.
Procuring Employment
So. My life was totally on fire, most of the issues were irreparable, and the ones that could have been fixed were still irreparable for all intents and purposes because I couldn’t get a therapist to save my life. So, I thought maybe I should just go back to work. I needed money, plus holding babies is really therapeutic. So, one Monday I applied for a job as an infant teacher. Within minutes I had an interview request for Tuesday, which I accepted, and they wanted me to start the following Monday. It felt fast, especially since I had already been wondering when I applied for the job whether I was applying too soon. But, I signed up to work M-F from 9am-6pm. I called up my references and apparently they just sang my praises to no end. Which means they believed in me. (Fast forward to the current moment: I’m so afraid I made them look foolish or let them down!)
On the Job
Once I started work, the problems started piling on pretty fast. My main problem when trying to hold down a job is usually terror of authority. This likely is because my parents were under social pressure from their cult to “spank” me as many times a day as possible. So with the slightest mistake, or sometimes totally at random, I would be pinned down and physically abused by my parents who had no other way to control their emotions other than by wailing on me. Unfortunately, this was always coupled with reminders of the doctrine of Total Depravity. For example, they were huge fans of this Bible verse:
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (Genesis 6:5–6 ESV)
It was a whole thing, how I was the most infinitely evil possible and nothing about me could ever be good and what I deserved was to be in infinite pain for all eternity in Hell. (More on that here, where I explain that I was taught that I deserved infinite punishment because I would have been running around commiting infinitely evil atrocities all day were it not for God’s “holy hand of restraint.” The only difference being a Christian made was that if I was a Christian, God would forgive me for it.)
So, having that lesson coupled with severe physical abuse several times a day from the time I was a tiny baby, makes it harder for me to take constructive criticism at work. Specifically, I cry. Which is embarrassing and unprofessional, but I can’t stop it from happening. I also can’t function as well during the day because my amygdala is constantly going into orbit out of fear of doing something wrong and being totally depraved.
Another issue is that I look at the kids, and I want to give them everything I never had. And at the same time, every act of kindness toward them is just more confirmation that what I went through was 🤬’d. Still worse, I have so many memories of my little siblings being horrifically abused. One time, my baby brother had been in his playpen for so long, that in his desperation he tried to escape by using his little teeth to pull himself up, to the point that he actually ripped both his front two teeth completely out of his head. The victim, of course, was our mother, because he was gushing blood and she doesn’t deal well with blood. Once he was school aged and adult front teeth finally grew in, they were always crooked. Which was adorable, and I still remember him with his little blonde curls and goofy smile and his favorite toy alligator always tucked into his collar.
So I’m managing a shitload of flashbacks at work. It always used to be helpful to be in the baby room, but for whatever reason, the cons are numerous this time around. I can’t shake the image of my baby brother in his playpen in his diaper, gushing blood. Also problematic, is I was the eldest kid, so I was “in charge” when Mom was away. She didn’t start leaving us home alone until I was nine, but she always used to leave us downstairs while she would go play games on her computer upstairs. My siblings responded to questionable leadership (me) by testing boundaries, which I’m very sure is what any kid anywhere would have done. But remember we were all physically abused on the regular, so they were a bit more aggressive than normal kids. So if I wasn’t being assaulted by our parents, I was being assaulted by my little siblings. Because they were only a couple of years younger than me and I didn’t have access to as many dietary calories as would have been ideal, so they were really hard for me to fight off. Especially because I had to get them off of me without hurting them because I was “in charge” and responsible for their well-being. Fast forward to the present: the somatic flashbacks that had been at least compartmentalized to nighttime, started hitting 24/7. One that I’ve been having a lot is to bring gripped by the hair on top of my head and having my head repeatedly thrown back against a wall (which, interestingly, played out in self-injury later in life).
Anyway, having all of this going on constantly makes it a lot harder for me to concentrate on the real world at work, so I come off as forgetful or spacey. I want to sing songs and be engaged, but stopping a flashback is not the same as stopping ruminative thinking. Trying to distract by finding attention-grabbing things in the real world doesn’t work as well as it would if I were just ruminating. The real world is far away.
Another issue is that I misestimated the commute time to and from work by bus. Turns out, I’m away from home from basically 7:00am-7:30pm. This is extremely hard on my cat, and I feel like he’s miserable and I can’t be the mom that he needs. My turtle also needs more care, but it’s hard to change his tank water when I’m so tired that it’s excruciating to bend over and plug in my phone. Meanwhile, I had been getting help from an organization subcontracted by the Department of Mental Health. So although I didn’t have a therapist, I had a case manager. But, that organization’s hours are 8-5. Meaning I could talk to them before work if I were okay with sharing my deepest self out loud while riding the bus. Apparently, text messaging is not allowed by the organization. I would call them on my lunch, but I don’t have a car and there’s nowhere private to actually go. So at the end of the day I can’t talk to a clinician anymore, which has made things so much worse.
I can’t describe the exhaustion. Between the commute, sleep disturbances (insomnia/nightmares), doing things the long way because I can’t do them the normal way because I have PTSD, managing flashbacks 24/7 at that point, energy spent trying to appear normal, and still feeling the effects of COVID in August, I felt like I could just drop. I think it was the day before I started work that my microwave died. I never eat microwave meals, and instead cook everything from scratch, but I cook ahead and reheat portions in the microwave. Heating food on the stove is more time-consuming, so I wasn’t always doing it and I wasn’t getting the normal amount of nutrition that I usually do. I figured out that the easiest things to hear were either ramen noodles with cut-up soy “hot dogs,” or canned soup. Which, neither of those is great for energy. All together I had absolutely no time for rest at all ever, but then when Labor Day weekend came around, I spent it pushing myself to do projects around the house. Why? Because that’s what I was raised to do. And I’m still very much in contact with my little brother who thinks I’m lazy and irresponsible, so taking the time to sit down and watch YouTube for half an hour feels like proving him right. The crushing need to always push myself to the max, plus honestly having a lot on my plate, left me with zero time to do relaxing activities or socialize.
But I had to work. Because if I’m not earning money, it has to come from somewhere, and my parents certainly aren’t willing to let it be from them. Before I had food stamps and I was basically starving, I wrote to them asking for grocery money and it was an absolute no. I had to get a friend who I haven’t even known that long to send a gift card to the grocery store. And usually, the one who pays the price is my baby brother. When, it’s not his fault I have PTSD and it’s not his fault that our parents won’t help ever under any circumstances. But since he’s the one getting screwed, it’s hurting him if I’m not earning a living wage. And the reality is that I’m not lazy or irresponsible, but it’s hard to tell that to my brother when he constantly has to send $3 for a burrito, $20 for the train, etc.
So everything was crap and then on Tuesday morning (September 3, so less than a week ago), I had a psychiatrist appointment. My whole objective of the meeting was to get Borderline Personality Disorder off of my chart. Dr X back during my long inpatient stay didn’t think I had it, so I thought it was just a residual thing. Having had the BPD diagnosis sent suicidal ideation through the roof, for obvious reasons, and also caused me to isolate to the maximum extent possible because I thought that my existence was innately harmful to others. The reasons being considered borderline was harmful to me, are so numerous that they could easily be a separate blog entry. But I’d been doing well for the past two years since discharge because Dr X said I didn’t have it. So, anyway, I talked to my current psychiatrist on Tuesday and the most important thing I wanted to cover was getting that out of my chart. Unfortunately, he had a ton of other things that he wanted to cover, so I didn’t get to bring up what I wanted to talk about until almost the end. His thing was, basically, that we were out of time and he thought I had a personality disorder. So that obviously made me immediately suicidal but I decided to bury it by focusing on work.
Called Into the Office
So, that was the scene when I came to work on Wednesday. Basically, everything in my life was absolutely on fire except for my job. So I’m going about my day when I get pulled into the office and two members of admin decide to have a chat with me. So, I honest-to-God thought it was normal to bounce a baby to sleep. That was certainly what my mother did, and I always used to do it at my previous childcare job. So, earlier that day, someone had come in to observe me while two babies were screaming the absolute life out of themselves. I couldn’t lift both of them but didn’t want to abandon the one on the floor, so I was sitting in front of him and singing to him while bouncing the other baby, who needed a nap. Now, I was stressed because I’m scared of authority, and it’s chronically exhausting for me to have “managing flashbacks” as a tab running in the background, but I literally was just trying to help the kids feel better. Anyway, admin said I was being “aggressive” with the baby. Apparently, you aren’t supposed to bounce them. Which was definitely news to me. I just said that I was still learning how things worked at this center, since at the last center, we would’ve put the crying baby who needed a nap down in her crib. I wasn’t suggesting that that was the right way to do things, but that was how we did them. Admin practically screamed. “Wait, are you saying that at your last job, you put a crying baby in the crib and just WALKED AWAY???”
So I’m like “Well… not forever… ” but it was too late. I was Hitler. I said that I was really trying to be nurturing but it’s hard to nurture more than one baby at a time.
“What do you mean it’s hard to be nurturing??” I was really stressed out at this point and struggling to find words, but apparently they took that to mean that instead of being nurturing, I was just angry and aggressive. Which I was not; it wasn’t a lack of nurturing sentiment on my part, it’s just that the nurturing obviously wasn’t getting through because everybody was crying. They said I should have arranged the kids in a circle on the rug and sang them a song or done some sort of fun activity. However, they also said that bouncing a baby is unacceptable and I should have been walking around with her and swaying her. However, I should’ve also been focusing on more babies at once, instead of just two. Which, walking and swaying felt like the opposite of that? Plus I was supposed to ask the co-teacher what to do, but when the co-teacher said not to do something because she wanted to do it, I was supposed to do it anyway.
So, my thing was, first of all, professionals can accept feedback without getting emotional. So I’m trying to keep it together. I also felt like I should be listening to them and implementing their ideas, but their ideas seemed to really conflict with each other and I genuinely had no idea how to put any of it into practice. Asking questions seemed to make them think I was getting defensive, so I stopped asking and just said ok.
The meeting finally ended, and I went back to the room I was supposed to be in. By the time I got there, I had tears gushing down my face, my skin felt red and blotchy, and it was hard to talk. I got through until lunch, when I hid in the break room. Problem is, dissociation has also been way up (and it’s high at baseline) so I knew the hour would fly by. I had 60 minutes to get my body to stop crying, and it felt like an impossible task. Finally a member of admin came in. Now, I’ve had past experiences where I was shamefully crying and had to talk to admin in hidden places where nobody could see how deeply defective I obviously was based on what my face was doing. So that’s another example of a “trigger” where it’s like, I really didn’t have any additional “Skills™️” that I wasn’t using, so there was nothing I could do to address the issue. One of my greatest fears in life is asking to leave early, but I asked to leave early on the grounds that my face wasn’t working and people could tell. Unfortunately, I could not leave early. So ok. I pulled it through the rest of the day.
The Aftermath
It’s a huge trigger for me when I’m trying to help someone and other people feel like they have to defend that person from me. That was exactly what happened when I was 21 and sacrificed everything to go live with my mom’s mother, only to have the whole family decided that I was The Enemy and it was so hard on Grandma to have me living with her. So when I’m bending over backwards because my purpose with this job is to give kids what I never had and help mold them into happy, trusting people… and then admin was angrily trying to advocate against me on behalf of the baby who I had had in my arms, that was triggering. More troubling, what if I actually was the enemy? What if, try as I might, I would always be like my parents and my existence was harmful to vulnerable babies?
This is where dissociation really started taking over and there are a lot of lapses in my memory. I know I cried most of the night. I know I called the on-call and they came extremely close to calling an ambulance because they thought I would kill myself immediately, although I don’t remember exactly what happened to make them come to that conclusion.
I do know that immediately after the meeting in the office, even during the time I was still at work, The Voice came back. Now, the jury seems to be out as to whether this voice is auditory hallucinations, or just extremely bad intrusive thoughts. It used to just always be there, and just as a fish doesn’t know what water is, I had never known a life without it. During the 2021-2022 hospital stay, though, Dr X got rid of it. It was just gone. I don’t remember if it went away gradually or all at once, but I remember remarking that it was so nice to have that voice gone, and the person looked at me like I had three heads. Let me describe it to you:
- It’s an internal voice. I never hear voices and look around the room expecting a speaker.
- It identifies itself as me, but it only speaks in the second person (ie, “YOU are an absolute piece of shit, you need to smash yourself into a wall, set yourself on fire, jump off a bridge” etc etc.
- It’s EXTREMELY aggressive and uses a lot of cuss words
- I cannot control the voice
- The ideas it endorses are really different from my personal values or desires. However, just like how you need to be careful who you’re friends with, once I’ve been having a voice screaming at me every minute of every day to commit suicide, I start feeling like maybe it’s making some good points and speaking the truth. As another way of putting it, I don’t especially want to kill myself, but when you’ve got someone making the same suggestion every three minutes around the clock, it can be really disruptive to my problem-solving skills and it gets harder and harder to argue back with the voice. Eventually its suggestions actually start to seem like the only logical choice.
- Trying to speak logically back to it really does not work at all. So back in the day when I was holding out hope for CBT, I would logically explain the flaws in its ideas, and it did not care at all. (Incidentally, the is one and only ONE thing that has ever helped with the voice, and that thing was Zyprexa. I was doing pretty well when I was at 10mg. Unfortunately it has really bad metabolic effects so my psychiatrist won’t even go to 7.5. This feels unfair, since it’s a lot easier to tell someone else to suck it up, that it is to actually be the person with an aggressive voice telling you to commit suicide 10,000 times a day.)
- The voice has ONE objective, which is to get me to kill myself. It never wants to hurt anyone else, although it accuses me of being a danger to others and uses that accusation as a reason I should commit suicide
So anyway, my thing was that the voice is no longer present at baseline, but it’s been really, really present for the past few days, so I felt like that was either an emergency, or one of those things that would be a 911 emergency for basically anyone but me.
The voice sure sucks, especially when I’m also dealing with everything else. Having constant somatic flashbacks at the same time as the voice is a match made in hell, because the voice always suggests the most violent suicide methods imaginable, and it’s a self-perpetuating loop because the somatic flashbacks are of being the victim of violence. So as an aside, there was a point in my life when I would smash my head into the wall because that’s what the flashback was of and the voice said to do it to myself because that’s what I deserved. I had to, or I would be evil.
Meanwhile, I was terrified that I had turned into the aggressor (people who had assaulted me as a kid). What makes this seem especially scary is that it’s impossible to give warmth when I’m never on the receiving end of warmth. I thought giving warmth would have the same effect as receiving it and I could break the system, but that’s not happening. So am I doomed to be a monster?
Trip to the Emergency Room
I ended up at the emergency room at 11:27am on Thursday. As a foreshadowing, I ultimately made myself a counter and this is how long I spent in the ER:
So that was tough. By the end, I definitely felt like I should have never come in. Especially because I had already been hospitalized three times this year, not including HBM/Guantanamo. But I went in because the somatic shit was awful and the voice really isn’t supposed to be there and last time it was there, I tried to end myself and spent a few days in the ICU. But the problem is that my life is on fire, and what can the hospital do for that? I mean suicide was definitely my mom’s idea in the first place since she was the one who suggested it to me when I was nine years old and struggling with severe trauma symptoms as a result of her choices. (It was framed something like, “Oh no my poor baby, you probably ‘have problems’ just like your father. It’s genetic, you know. In fact he tried to commit suicide one time. Do you know what that means? Let me explain it to you since I’m so deeply and authentically concerned about your wellbeing…”)
When I was an adolescent, I dutifully tried to avoid suicide so I wouldn’t hurt my mother. When I figured out that my commiting suicide was what she wanted, ending myself started to seem like the kindest thing. Neither of my parents ever called in 2021 when I spent a few days in the ICU, and my brother just taunted me that I didn’t really try that hard. My sister won’t let me have any contact with her kids, my turtle and cat are miserable, my friends are stressed out, and I’m scared to go near babies now because what if the voice is right that I’m a monster? Staying alive has been an uphill climb, and I don’t know what I’m doing this all for. Basically, I don’t feel like I have much to add to the world at this point, and it’s not even practical for me to keep trying to survive. I’m out of money, I have an eviction notice, and there seems to just not be any way this could possibly end well. I want to live but not this life. And not if living means hurting other people simply by existing in their periphery.
Anyway, I got to the ER, and the psych team pointed out that I’d been showing up a lot. This one guy sat me down and said that because I’d had multiple admissions, going inpatient probably wasn’t the best option for my “long-term wellbeing.” He said that he’d been working in psych for years and when people keep coming back, “It lowers the threshold.”
So there I was in the ER for hours and hours and hours worried about my threshold. Would other people really be able to cope with all this? Other people can just put the angry voice in the background and not be affected by its screaming? Am I just weak? I’m still not completely sure I did the right thing. Maybe my threshold is too low. Maybe the problem is that my life is irreparable and the hospital can’t do anything. Maybe society has given up.
I don’t know if I mentioned, my body has been breaking down really badly for about the past year. I have chronic pain, especially in my jaw (TMJ) and my knees. I should be in physical therapy I couldn’t take time off from work, plus I’ve missed a million appointments because I’m always in the hospital. So I had finally persuaded the physical therapy office to give me another chance. I knew it was next week but thought it was Wednesday or something. So who calls yesterday when I’m in the ER worrying about my threshold, but the physical therapist’s office reminding me of an appointment on Monday. I had to cancel, and they didn’t take it very well. Which, work definitely didn’t take it very well when I called in, because as far as they know, I just really hate feedback. So physical therapy I guess is now off the table which sucks because my whole life until now has basically sucked, and the future just looks like more of the same except held back by bad knees. My whole also body feels crazy heavy, especially my arms, as though I were carrying weights around my limbs. And I have a million other physical issues, such as orthostatic hypotension that makes it much harder to function and greatly affects my day-to-day. I recently waited months to see my PCP but we had no time during the appointment for anything. So what was the point of the appointment? My body is almost as screwed as my mind.
Anyway. A frustrating thing is that I don’t have things in my life that are going well to balance this all out. I don’t even have many happy memories. As a friend once put it, it’s been “A lot of monumental sad moments but almost no monumental happy ones.” I can’t imagine a safe space because when was I ever in one.
So why would things turn out okay in the future?
Anyway, Dr Threshold did begrudgingly send me inpatient and I’m back in the good hospital that I’ve been in a lot lately. My hopes are not very high but if I can get a med adjustment, find a therapist, and figure out what to do about my job, it’ll be a good start.
