A cousin who has been there for me through thick and thin commented yesterday that I had “come so far in the past two years.” This really meant a lot to me because I tend to have my 🤬-hole dad’s voice in my head characterizing my “entire adult life” as ” a steady decline.” On most levels I know that he was just trying to convince me that all my problems were the result of not living with him, but cognitive dissonance kicks into high gear when it’s a parent.
So, I decided to look into the matter for myself. I downloaded the facebook app for just long enough to look at my old posts, I went through my old emails, and I looked at myactivity.google.com to see what I was up to in November and December of 2019, just before the pandemic hit.
I knew it would be dark, because in May of that year, my therapist/one-and-only confiant called me while I was in the psych hospital and fired me because I was too emotionally demanding. She refused not only transitional sessions, but also a termination session or even a referral to a new therapist. I had been seeing her twice a week for about four years and in my mind she was a surrogate mother figure. I was discharged from the hospital the next day and had no therapist at all until I signed up for online therapy and it would be months before I got another therapist in person. When I did, the therapist who fired me told her that the abrupt end to our therapeutic alliance was due to an insurance issue.
I really didn’t like the new therapist and 45 minutes a week was not enough to even scratch the surface when I really needed to be in a residential program, but I knew that it was a miracle that insurance had approved anything so I kept going to the new therapist. Every time I saw her I was suicidal, but she was young and cheerful and pregnant and generally in love with life so I stuck to talking about time management because what kind of jerk would knock down someone that happy? I was still seeing her in the November-December 2019 timeframe I just looked up. Anyway, here’s what I found:
I turned 30 in November of that year, and a friend was kind enough to take me to Olive Garden so that it would be almost like I had a party. She’s a good friend so she got them to do the clapping dance, which most people hate but I had once mentioned I had always hoped would happen to me. I even put on makeup for the event, and the picture I took is still probably my most recent photograph.
The only thing I had to live for was my turtle, so I was engaged in a myriad of little projects to improve his set-up and conditions. I read that turtles like ash gourd, a fruit with more different colloquial names than any other food I’ve ever heard of. I went to the nearest city and bought him one at the Asian food store where it was called “winter melon” in the English translation. My turtle who hates most veggies absolutely loved it, and so did I. I managed to convince a woman I was sort of friends with to let me use her kitchen since I didn’t have one, and cooked it up with an Indian recipe I found on YouTube. ( https://youtu.be/Ty23XmHw2Mc ) It was a bit of a hassle, though, so I mostly stuck to dandelion greens, collard greens, and sweet potato. My turtle gets all these things in their raw and unaltered form, but I tried to find things to do with the leftovers that I could make in a room with no cooking methods allowed except a microwave and a cheap blender.
I was physically sick a LOT. It turned out later that I had IBS, but the PCP thought I had Crohn’s because the symptoms were so severe. I also had athlete’s foot, probably due to the showers at one of the myriad hospitals I visited around that time. Psychosomatic illness is very real, and it’s not hypochondria, although I was terrified that I was making things up because my body was constantly malfunctioning in one way or another.
I was so lonely that I looked for social connection any way I could find it. I had a couple of amazing cousins in other states who stuck by me, but other than that I was totally alone. I tried to find friends in creative ways. There’s an app called HelloTalk that is designed for language learners. The logo looks like this:
The idea is that it connects people who want to learn each other’s languages, who already basically have a handle on things and just need to practice. Then, users have a conversation, half in one language and half in the other. Everybody wins and nobody has to pay for a tutor. The only problem is if your life is totally abnormal due to mental illness and you can’t talk to anyone for more than five minutes before they figure out that you’re a loser. I didn’t even have a legitimate job at the time, so I tried to make being an independent contractor for Instacart sound a lot more glorious than it actually was. I actually did really like the job; I was good at it and I felt that the company treated me fairly. But if the only job you can hold down is gig work, things get tough financially. I remember the day I did this series of google searches:
Everything I could find was for people who had more than one account and somehow had money somewhere. Finally a found a YouTube video by a down-to-earth African American young man who promised that I would learn who my real friends were and have a mental map of where every single Dollar Tree was to boot. I was soothed simply by knowing that I wasn’t alone.
My loneliness persisted and I figured out that I wasn’t going to have much in common with “neurotypicals,” so somehow I briefly scraped together the money to get a subscription to PTSDdating.com. I got about 20 emails a day and virtually everyone on the site was a bot. For a couple of days I was talking to a guy who I thought was worth talking to simply because he was the only human I’d found on there, but he was convinced that I was a bot and anyway he ghosted me. Then I had a brief but intense relationship with a guy in South America, but eventually I found out that he didn’t have PTSD, didn’t know that the site was supposed to be for people with PTSD, and on his end the name of the site was Aisland Upp Datting. He also had the goal of converting me back to Christianity because (as far as I could surmise) he was trying to balance his sincere religious faith with his deep desire for a visa to the USA. Anyway, that relationship didn’t work out. Not long later I unsubscribed from PTSDdating.com.
Other interesting tales from the end of 2019:
- I was definitely on my phone a lot because I visited like hundreds of sites a day
- Some jerk smashed the side mirror of my car completely off when I was parked on the street outside my domicile
- I was already into constant list-making and kept using to-do list apps in the hope of being more productive. It didn’t work.
- I was using Noom and it would have worked if the thing that it had needed in order for it to work had been for me to google the number of calories in things
- My house was a mess. There was a vermin problem from the time I moved in but my piles of dirty dishes surely didn’t help. They got increasingly nasty the longer they sat, so I got increasingly creative as to what I could use as a cereal bowl when no other dishes were clean.
- I couldn’t afford to go to the laundromat so I got good at hand-washing laundry. I went to Big Lots or Walmart, the only two stores that actually sold bars of Zote laundry soap, and scrubbed down each individual piece of clothing on a washboard. Once again, having studied abroad in the third world in college paid off because I knew not to believe the American YouTubers who thought you could just swish your clothes around in the tub and they’d magically be clean. The amount of time I spent in my underwear scrubbing clothes in a bathtub not designed for washing clothes may or may not have contributed to my back going out in February 2020. It would have worked a lot better if I had had any space to hang things to dry properly after washing them.
- I was volunteering as a tutor at the local library. My student was a lovely woman learning English. Sometimes she cancelled because she had a demanding job, and sometimes I cancelled because I just didn’t have the emotional energy to be expected to perform adequately at anything.
- I bought my siblings Christmas presents but I’m pretty sure I spent Christmas that year alone in my room.
- I spent an extremely unhealthy amount of my day re-sharing posts on facebook decrying Donald Trump. I still think I was right that he actually was that bad, but it’s likely that I won zero people over to socialism by posting on 🤬-ing facebook.
- After one hospitalization, I tried to get off caffeine by listening to energizing music in the morning. It wasn’t even music; it was binaural beats or something. I was actually that desperate to control my anxiety.
- In an attempt to be social, I took up knitting and tried to join a knitting group but only made it to one actual gathering.
- I spent a lot of time watching “100 Baby Challenge” Let’s Plays of the Sims 4 on YouTube. It was a chance to live vicariously and I was too stressed to handle anything with an actual plot, antagonist, and suspense anyway.
- One thing that was good was that I had apparently had enough money a few months prior to book cheap flights and an AirBNB and I to go to a conference with the International Cultic Studies Association in November. It was only a two-day conference, I skipped a lot of the second day, and even then it was so emotionally intense that it was only recently that I’ve been able to think about it without freaking out. But I got to be with “my people” and I’m thankful that I got to see them once more before the pandemic shut down all in-person gatherings. And now that I’m in a better place mentally, the information I gleaned has proven very helpful!
Some telling screenshots I took while searching for information for this post:
I don’t know what to say now that I’ve written all this. I tried to convey how dysfunctional it was and I think it came out sounding a lot less 🤬-ed up than it actually was. It’s interesting for me to look at it in a way that isn’t totally judgemental of me, because before I wrote it out just now, I’ve always had a lot of self hatred for times like this in my life, which have been most of the times in my life. Now that I’m looking at it in writing, maybe I actually was doing the best I could.
References:
Sreenath recipes. (2014, Jan 1). Ash gourd / Winter Melon / White gourd fry [YouTube video]. Retrieved January 1, 2022 from https://youtu.be/Ty23XmHw2Mc
