Well, I’m hanging in. The hospital increased my dose of an antipsychotic, which has helped a lot with voices and somatic flashbacks. In an ideal world, I would have been able to take a couple weeks and do a partial program but unfortunately, I have to make money. So I’m substitute teaching again. Then, this happened:
I hope he’s not mad. He did give me this whole thing at our last appointment about how “We may have clinical expertise, but we need YOU to take the lead and tell us how we can help you!” And I was like, Really, Sherlock? Because I’ve been trying to get you to go up on [antipsychotic] literally for months, and you wouldn’t do it because you thought you were smarter than me.
I just said “Ok.”
I don’t know if I’ve explained on here what the somatic flashbacks are like. But, basically, when my parents were flying off the handle and about to be at the shit out of me when I was a small child, I freaked out. So they would pin me down by my upper arms. I was “defiant” because I would do basically what physical therapy calls a “bridge” where I would lift my waist off the ground, struggling to get away. But I couldn’t get my upper arms free. Anyway, my parents were doing this because they were waiting for me to calm down so they could go ahead and beat the shit out of me. Thirty years later, this still causes issues with sleep, because I lie down and feel like I’m being pinned down by my upper arms. And if I relax, I’ll be assaulted. The antipsychotic helps with that. So, I’m incredibly resistant to going back down on it.
I’ve been discharged for a couple of weeks or something. I got a new therapist, she seems okay. She consistently uses the first person plural when what she means is the second person singular. Which is annoying but I do the same thing all the time with the kids. It will be a while before she gets me, so I’m trying to be patient with that. I’m pretty sure she thinks I have a personality disorder, so I’m going to have clarify that I don’t. But a lot of people think that anyone with trauma automatically has a personality disorder.
I will say, working in public school can be hella triggering. I texted this to someone today:
It’s a problem at work because my thing is, people say things to the kids all day every day that would have me sobbing for a week, but it seems like it’s normal communication because the kids just change their behavior for the better. So I’m communicating to them with extreme gentleness because I can’t mentalize what it would be like to not have an inmate work ethic that’s chronically teetering on the edge of a total mental collapse. I saw this video not too long ago:
https://youtu.be/4gdpvLQjdrE
I was the kid who wanted to be “good” more than anything in the world, and nobody ever noticed. So I push myself so hard that it’s just absolutely ludicrous, and when someone tries to push me harder, I can’t handle it. But from the outside, it looks like I must be apathetic because how have I not done more with my life by now?
Anyway, that’s that. I’m hoping the substitute teaching thing won’t be for too much longer; I really would prefer to be working in early childhood. Thing is, I can’t do 9-5 jobs because I have chronic illness and the doctors, therapists, etc are also only open 9-5. So I’m going to try to do like 20 hours a week of childcare and just find some other source of income to make up the difference. Part of me just wants to get an evening gig at a grocery store or a sandwich shop, because that way I would have guaranteed hours. Another part of me thinks I could make more money (inconsistently) by freelancing. I’m probably going to need to just do a pros and cons list and force myself to not jump into anything.
