(Positive) Changes

Well, those who read my recent Big Reveal have probably been waiting on pins and needles for an update! To recap, I purchased an OkCupid subscription in the fall of 2025, and matched with “B” a few days after Thanksgiving. I’ve done online dating extensively in the past, but B was and is different. So I made a trip to visit them (they live about four and a half hours away) for Easter weekend, and it went well. At that point, B was my “romantic interest.” Well, they came to visit me a couple weeks ago and we upgraded ourselves from “romantic interest” or “mutual crush” to bona fide “relationship.” I will share a few photos because I know you’re dying to see them:

Having B in my life has been awesome, but it’s also a huge adjustment. My whole life, I’ve been told basically, “You are nothing and you deserve nothing.” The only person who ever actually loved me was my paternal grandma, who died in 2017. My mother didn’t let us spend any time together when I was a kid (god forbid I find out what it meant to be loved!) but we reconnected for about a year and a half before her death. I had absolutely no skills whatsoever in this regard, so I kept screwing everything up. For example, one year I was going to see her for Christmas, but my dad called and said that I was going to be a burden and it would be hard on her, so I didn’t go, and I never told her why. Cancelling plans felt at the time like the kindest thing to do, because I had never had anyone who would be genuinely disappointed not to see me. I was kind of starting to get the hang of things just before she died.

So now suddenly I have this amazing person who for some reason loves me, and I don’t know what to do with that. Am I going to accidentally ruin everything? Have I somehow duped them into thinking that I’m a way more loveable person than I actually am? Are they going to eventually figure out that I’m actually just an imposter pretending to be a semi-functioning adult? Are they going to leave me? I’ve been mostly alone in life since 2017 except for pets, people who are paid to work with me, a few longsuffering friends who I usually keep at arm’s length because I don’t know how to be close to people, and a few brief and highly ill-advised romantic arrangements that never really took off. So now I discover my dream person and my nervous system is in shock. I tell them, “Are you sure? I’m pretty damaged” and they say I’m a survivor. I say, “Why would you want to be with me?” and they attentively rattle off a list of my positive qualities. And I just look at them confused, because nobody has done that before. Don’t they know that I’m nothing and I deserve nothing?

Anyway, that’s not all the positive things happening right now. First, I’m taking a summer class. Usually I can’t get scholarships because I already have a degree, but apparently the department of Early Childhood Education is so desperate for employees that they’re giving free classes at the local community college for anyone who wants to sign up. Meanwhile, I finally got a start date for my new job, which begins in about a week. It’s in a preschool. I’m really nervous about going back to work, but I also desperately need money. Besides, working with the littles usually is a lot less triggering than working in a public school, especially if they let me work in the infant/toddler rooms.

So, my life has been on fire all the time pretty much since I was born, and now suddenly I have this Life Worth Living™️ and my nervous system has no idea how to handle it and is freaking out. So, I’ve been dealing with “symptoms.” I typed up a memo for my mental health clinicians last week, and tinkered with it throughout the week. Ketamine was on Friday, so it was the last appointment, so it got the most recently-revised memo.

For the Ketamine clinic:

• Things that are going well:
  • Social supports have drastically improved [heheheh]
  • I got a job (starts June 15)
  • Abilify had been helping somewhat (although now it’s not)
• Things that are hard:
  • UPDATE: I originally wrote this earlier in the week when I was trying to figure out what the “trigger” was. At this point, it’s very obvious to me that absolutely none of this warrants the level of distress that I’m experiencing, and I’m low-key concerned that I’m having a psychotic break
  • I’m scared about tapering off ketamine
  • Another anniversary reaction is going on for me right now (HBM)
  • They adjusted my Zepbound and now it’s working way too well and I pretty much can’t eat at all
  • “Command thoughts” are going off the rails
  • Somatic flashbacks are also going off the rails
• I feel like I’m not able to effectively relay everything that goes in my life during our check-ins before treatment, because I don’t know exactly how long we have and I’m afraid of taking up too much time.
  • Maybe we can establish exactly how long we have so I’ll know?
  • I also wrote up the following notes that you can read at your leisure:

***

I’m having a really hard time with the fact that I ultimately have to switch from weekly ketamine to every other week and then probably taper from there. I don’t want to be angry at the people at the ketamine clinic because they’re good people, so I can only be angry at myself, and the self-directed anger has gotten problematic. Why can’t I handle this when everybody else obviously can? Is something subconscious within me self-destructing on purpose so I can come every week for the rest of my fucking life? And, I already feel like a total failure for needing this treatment every week and not being able to hack it with every other week, so it’s really hard for me to advocate for something that we all agree (especially me) that I shouldn’t need. Like, I don’t want to live my life dependent on drugs!

Meanwhile, a bad hospitalization at HBM (Hospital for Behavioral Medicine in Worcester) happened in June two years ago. I know I complain a lot about anniversary reactions, but HBM was the single most traumatic event of my life, and this week I can’t stop thinking about it. I’d been dreading June and now that it’s here, there have been times when I’ve worried I’d end up back in the ER. I don’t want that because I’m there way too often and if I go back, there’s a huge risk that horrible things will be done to my life in an effort to “provide more support.” But it’s hard because I finally have my life worth living, and there have been times this week when remaining alive felt overwhelming.

Anyhoo, the somatic flashbacks got WAY worse after HBM, and it’s been two years so I don’t think they’re going to get better. But they’ve been unrelenting this week, which would make sense if it’s an anniversary reaction. Except what’s weird is the flashbacks are to childhood trauma. I think it’s just the same theme of being trapped with no way to escape. Either way, I frequently have this intense sensation that I’m being pinned down by a huge, crazed person who is about to beat the shit out of me. I’ve tried the CBT approach of reminding myself that I’m not being pinned down by said person, but that goes nowhere. Because even though I’m “safe” in the present, I’m also having flashbacks in the present, so it’s not like I’m having a great time. Besides, we can’t technically eliminate the possibility that I could end up back at HBM, which makes it all the more terrifying when I’m falling apart, because what if they sent me there? I know rumination is bad but I can’t stop worrying about it.

“Command thoughts” or whatever started sliding back in but have been increasing drastically by the day. At this point they’re constant, unrelenting, severe, and totally exhausting. At the beginning of the week, it definitely felt like they were not coming from me or advocating for anything I wanted, but I wondered if I was just trying to pass the buck? Then, the past few days, I sometimes get this intense feeling that I’m ALWAYS “going through a hard time” so it’s not temporary, and I don’t have the “right” to be in crisis 100% of the time, so the morally correct thing would be to kill myself. Which, I’m not planning on DOING that, but I’m stressed because when “command thoughts” started at the end of last week, I felt confident that they weren’t advocating for anything *I* wanted. I get scared because now they’ve managed to break me down enough that thoughts coming from ME start to think that maybe I should do myself in.

So, I’ve spent a lot of the week lying on my bed in the tightest fetal position that my body can handle. But I can’t have anniversary reactions 100% of the time!! So what do I do? I just desperately want to be able to just choose to be fine, and I’m trying so hard!! It’s like, what’s wrong with me? So many things are going well. I want to be HAPPY.

I rejoice to report that the ketamine significantly reduced command thoughts, so that was good. This also means that they’re not breaking me down to the point where “real” thoughts start to get dark as well. I’ve been getting lots of support from lots of clinicians. My therapist even is willing to meet more frequently so I can at least survive the month of June. I’ve also been reassured by several clinicians who read various versions of the “memo” that I’m not having a psychotic break. This is good! At this point, the problem is more just constant, really intense intrusive memories (possibly flashbacks, idk) that often feel more real than my actual reality. This is problematic because how am I going to be working on my class or whatever when my brain doesn’t know that it has a class because it thinks it’s 1995?

Recomputing

Well, I thought maybe making a blog post would help, and so far it has. I apologize to my poor readers that my only post in May was about the EA buyout! I’ve had a lot going on, as you can see. I posted in March about various ideas for self-improvement that might help my mental health. Eating food is not going well but I’m working on it. I did get a job and mostly cleaned my house, so ✅. When I was getting rapid-fire vivid memories to every horrible thing that’s happened in my life, I looked into whether I could just do self-directed EMDR through a site like virtualemdr.com, because there are just absolutely no clinicians who are going to be able to do this for me anytime soon. However, it turns out that it can be dangerous to do that when you have heavy cPTSD because it can bring things up. I managed to hydrate almost every single day in May (the sticker chart worked!) but that fell off when my mental health crashed. So the astute observer might suggest, how do you know that this isn’t a self-perpetuating cycle and not drinking water isn’t also a cause of your current mental health problems? Well, I don’t know that, so I should probably try to make hydrating a priority again. I need to clean my filter and my water bottles and that means washing dishes and that’s a lot of effort, so I drank some Gatorade and it kind of helped. I always tell myself I’m going to get up early and read Grandma’s books while soaking the rays of my sun lamp but then I don’t do it. Getting up early is hard when you’re not hydrated. I should probably wash dishes. Oh, and one positive thing is that I’ve been taking a class called Introduction to Wicca (or something to that effect) and I think that it’s definitely something I would want to incorporate into my worldview! It meets once a month so I had that earlier today.

So, that’s the scoop! TL;DR: Good things have happened, and I’m not used to things going well so now my mental health is below baseline. This also happened when I got my apartment, so maybe I should have seen it coming. I just desperately want to be “held” right now, but I have supports that are going above and beyond for me. I’ll probably feel better once the new job has started, because right now the anticipation is killing me.