The Two Percent Has Got To Go

Well, it’s October! I’ve been home for a while now, so I thought I’d post an update on what’s going on.

So, I went inpatient because I was struggling, but it wasn’t until after I’d been admitted that not one but two of my providers said they were going to terminate (for different reasons). Fortunately it wasn’t for horrible reasons, but I still didn’t handle it very well.

Back in the the day, long ago, when I was much much more symptomatic, there was an entity that I called The Two Percent. I called it that because it showed up roughly 2% of the time. Ninety-eight percent of the time I was me, and the remaining 2% of the time was Two Percent. Two Percent felt like a totally different person who hijacked my body and had one objective, which was suicide. I don’t think it’s fullblown Dissociative Identity Disorder because I remember it afterwards, but it feels looking back like it wasn’t me. One time I was inpatient and Two Percent was in charge and I was saying all these crazy things about how I was going to kill myself, and a staff member who I knew pretty well looked at me in shock and said, “I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Well, Two Percent gradually went from showing up 2% of the time to showing up less and less of the time, and by the time summer rolled around this year, I thought she was gone entirely. Unfortunately, while I was at McLean and dealing with abandonment, the Two Percent briefly showed up again. I didn’t actually do anything dangerous, but definitely said some shocking things about how there was no hope, no way out, etc. Which, given that I didn’t do anything dangerous and instead vocalized the problem to staff, I and my therapist feel reasonably confident that if I’d been on the outside at the time, I would have taken myself to the ER. This was not always the case earlier in my life, but that’s because my providers at the time were staunchly opposed to the ER. Now, I definitely think that I would have gone. Still, the fact that TP showed up at all is terrifying to me. Things aren’t like they used to be. Three years ago if I had done myself in, it would have been sad, but it wouldn’t have been as bad as if I did that now. Lots of things are different, but one important thing is that I have my True Love to think of. So, something finally has to be done about Two Percent.

So, I left my job (yes, money sucks and it’s an issue) and I’ve dedicated myself to just pouring everything into mental health until I feel rock solid. I made a list of lifestyle changes that feel attainable in the short term, and signed up for a ton of clinical supports. First, the lifestyle changes:

Lifestyle Changes

I think I’ve shared this list on here before? But as an update, the plan is to drink at least 200 mL of water at least 10 times a day, consume at least 20 grams of protein at least 3 times a day, and keep a pain log. Those three are going kind of meh. I would say each of them is successful roughly 50% of days. The water and protein go pretty well when I’m home and awake. Unfortunately, sometimes I’m out of the house and I never remember to bring water or a protein shake. Likewise, sometimes lately my body has decided that it wants to be nocturnal and I sleep too much or at weird hours and that throws water and protein shakes completely out of whack. I have gotten good at quickly whipping up a shake out of soy milk, Hershey syrup (which I think is mostly vegan) and soy protein isolate. Unfortunately, I have it on good authority that you have to also eat food. So it’s a lot to think about. It think I’m gradually increasing my success rate at both water and protein, but “progress is not linear” and it’s very far from perfect. Meanwhile, the pain log takes 5 minutes at the end of the day, but I don’t always do it. Sometimes, I’m just too tired. Other times, I don’t do it for the same reason I stopped doing DBT “diary cards”… everything I say feels like a lie. Am I exaggerating? Underestimating? How much pain was I in, really? So I psych myself out sometimes and don’t do it. But I do it some of the time!! So progress not perfection, I guess.

The Wicca class is going kind of okay. I was going to take the train to Salem to go to class in person last weekend, but I had just gotten my flu and COVID shots and I felt like crap and did it on Zoom. Which is way better than not doing it at all, but still. I had missed two classes before that (August and September) so I wanted to really do it right in October. I’m also trying to make meaningful social connections and that’s impossible on Zoom. But the class was good!! It was on “sacred cycles” and I was able to take in a lot of it and process what I’d learned with my True Love.

The leisure activities are really not going great. Somehow, I never feel like it’s okay to allow myself to just rest and do something fun. I’m always thinking that I need to be drinking water, eating food, doing physical therapy exercises, and doing all the things that are supposed to be done every day, plus cleaning the house… and allowing myself to take a break from all that and do something actually meaningful is very hard for me. It feels like everything else has to be perfectly in order first. Other challenges include the fact that my computer is old and not always the best for video games, plus I have a ton of emotions around my beloved Grandma who passed away and that makes accessing her writings very difficult.

Clinical Supports

Well, I made this spreadsheet. I labeled the days of the week as 1-7 starting with 1 for Monday. Unfortunately, scheduling has been a logistics nightmare. The TMS consult isn’t until almost the very end of October, so I don’t know yet what time those appointments will be or whether I’ll even get in. That would be Monday through Friday, but it’s supposed to only take a few minutes. I’m hoping that if I could do it at like 8am, then I could go straight from there to day treatment at the Edinburg Center. Which, day treatment is 3-5 days a week but I’m probably going to have to limit it to 3 right now. The thing holding up everything is that my neurofeedback clinician left the practice, so I don’t have a standing appointment for that yet. I’m pretty sure from what the outgoing clinician said that she has a lot of availability on Thursdays. So if that’s the case, then I could do day treatment Monday through Wednesday, then save Thursdays for neurofeedback, PT, and meeting with my ACCS team (Vinfen). Fridays are currently open but I’m trying to plug in EMDR there, and my current therapist works weekends so I get to see her on Sundays. Oh, and narrative therapy is in the evening.

So, diving into what everything is and what it does. I talked about a lot of this here. But TMS is there to temporarily replace Ketamine until I feel like everything else is working and I don’t need either of them. Day treatment is just really intensive group therapy all day.

The narrative therapy is a pro bono program that my therapist shared with me, which I’m doing so I can re-write my own story. My mother has long been saying horrible things about me, and it will give me some control back over my life to be able to have my own perspective instead of trying to just see everyone else’s. Plus, maybe it will help me process enough that I can finally write my book. I have thousands of index cards just waiting for me to get my PTSD enough under control to do that!

Neurofeedback of course is neurofeedback and has historically been wonderful. Unfortunately I did have to put the delta symbol by it because I’m getting a new clinician 😭 Physical therapy is back in full swing because miraculously my person didn’t terminate when I was in the hospital for 3 weeks. I have a lot of chronic pain which right now is mostly in my neck and jaw, and it finally got bad enough for me to do something about it. Vinfen is ACCS services which basically means I meet with these very nice people who work for the Department of Mental Health to try to keep me mentally stable. It’s an adjunct to individual therapy, and has been very helpful because it’s very consistent. They also have after-hours crisis lines available, which therapists typically do not have. And instead of having to schedule a 45 minute session once a week, I can call my Vinfen clinician anytime during business hours for a 3-minute pep talk.

EMDR has not started yet but it’s supposed to be a temporary thing to help process specific troubling traumatic memories. I’m hoping to use it for the HBM incident, among other things.

My therapist is wonderful but has encouraged me to consider looking for a replacement who is more specialized in PTSD. So when Two Percent showed up, I decided I should probably get to work on that. I contacted some people who specialize in IFS and I’m on waiting lists. I’m kind of hoping the waiting list will take a long time because I’m already going through more than enough changes right now! But if IFS ever becomes a thing, it’s supposed to be the gold standard for studying the different parts of your psyche. So I figure they’d be the ones to know what to do about Two Percent.

Then there’s the psychopharmacologist, complex care coordinator, and physical health providers who all work at the same major hospital and are available by appointment.

A Word About MDMA

A final thing that’s supposed to be extremely effective is very difficult to research because almost all the information about it seems to be behind a paywall 😕 Basically, one time in 2023, the Hill Center had called 911 to take me to the emergency room. Once I was there, instead of admitting me, the doctor said to just go home and watch this one Netflix documentary with Michael Pollan. I did what they said, and this was the documentary:

Gibney, A., Pollan, M., Walker, L., Offman, S., & Perello, R. (Executive Producers). (2022). How to Change Your Mind [Mini-series]. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/title/80229847

I hope the citation is right; I had to get the executive producers off of Wikipedia. Anyway, it’s a miniseries on psychadelics. Note that I don’t know anyone with a Netflix subscription, so I had to get one just to watch the content. Since most of my readers probably don’t have Netflix, either, I’ll just say that the drug that was supposed to be by far the most effective for PTSD is MDMA. They interviewed this one elderly lady who had been a young clinician when it was first being used, and it was just completely changing people’s lives. Then Ronald Reagan made it illegal, and she cried. I tucked this information into my back pocket and moved on with my life. Then at the end of 2025, I got Ketamine, and although much of the effects weren’t that long-lasting, it has definitely left a lasting improvement on my religious trauma. It helped me feel that if there is a God, they definitely aren’t angry with me. Mom is angry with me, not any sort of celestial being. So given that I had such a positive response to Ketamine and that isn’t even the drug that’s supposed to be best for PTSD, MDMA might be life-changing. I had kind of put it out of my mind until a few weeks ago when the doctor in the Ketamine lab said she was going to discontinue treatments, but put it on my radar that they’re going to try to do a study at McLean on MDMA for Borderline Personality Disorder. I had forgotten about MDMA until she brought it up, so I went home and googled it again. It looked so promising. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that I don’t have Borderline Personality Disorder. So I was trying to figure out how to get it, and I found an article in the New York Times. Unfortunately, that’s also behind a paywall, but I’ll link to it here in case my readers happen to be subscribers:

Jacobs, A. (2026, March 24). MDMA Therapy in Australia Shows Results, but the Cost Is Limiting Access. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/health/mdma-therapy-ptsd-psychedelic-australia.html

Basically, the good news is that MDMA is legal in Australia. The bad news is that it costs tens of thousands of dollars for the treatment alone. And in order to get the treatment, you have to be able to relocate to Australia for the duration of the treatment, which literally takes months. To put this into perspective, I had to soul-search for weeks regarding whether I wanted to cough up the $4.60 to get the New York Times article. So Australia is probably not in my price range.

I was lamenting about this to Dr. 🦊, and mused that the only way for me to get this life-altering treatment would be to either move to Australia or try to hype up my fear of abandonment so the good folks at McLean would think I had a personality disorder. She comforted me that that was only one upcoming study, so there might be others in the future that don’t require you to have BPD.

So, it’s an option that’s out there. It probably won’t happen in the short term, which is sad, but the good news is that I have lots of other positive things going on in my life right now. And hopefully, one day the FDA will legalize MDMA in the United States.

Putting it All Together

So, it’s a lot. I’m sure my insurance company has me flagged as hell. I’m exhausted, and I hope I’m not taking on too much. I would 100% rather be working and earning money. But the thing is, I’m not okay with being randomly hijacked by a terrorist. The Two Percent has got to go. I’m fighting for my life.