What’s on my reMarkable

I’ve been saving lots of things on my reMarkable 2 (not a sponsor) because I’m allowed to have it during non-phone hours, so I thought I’d share a bit of my recent writings.

Dreams

I write about my dreams, goals, and ambitions, starting with the mundane and working my way up to my life’s plans. When I do have my phone, I’ve been watching Super Nanny and she says that a routine is good for everybody, so I made one for myself.

This is actually version two of the schedule because at first I had one that required me to get up at 6am and go to bed at 10pm, which would have nudged me in the direction of a normal person’s sleep schedule. However, it didn’t work because I always fell asleep, so I finally had to adjust my schedule to accommodate my current reality that my body requires extra sleep right now. I’m hoping this changes either as my mental health improves or when I can get tested for sleep apnea. Anyway, every single day my goal is to follow this routine and every single day I fail at my goal. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing wrong. I have a separate to-do list of things to get done during phone time and I notice that things I want myself to do consistently (such as reaching out to friends) often get ignored and I’m much more likely to do one-time tasks. I honestly don’t have any ideas for how to get a routine going other than to just keep trying to do it every day, which is extremely frustrating because I feel like I’ve already attempted this strategy without success.

Anyway, I need to get that worked out so I can pursue my other dreams. I already have an extensive wishlist with everything on it from things that I will need as soon as I discharge (like clothes that fit and aren’t sweats) all the way to the spices I want in my pantry when I have a home. I even looked up the prices of the things so I can estimate how much various life transitions will cost. I would share the wishlist but it’s literally 50 pages because it includes every item in a house plus my game plan for organizing everything perfectly, so it might be a bit bulky to upload here. But look, I found a picture of my dream house:

It’s a barndominium! I like the idea of a “barndo” because they’re supposed to be cheap, highly customizable, and their steel construction makes them low-maintenance. Unfortunately, most of them are really ugly. Not this one, though! I’m going to put a crabapple tree in the front because I’ve dreamed of having a pink flowering crabapple tree since I was a little girl and my my parents ripped me away from our beautiful townhouse with a crabapple tree. I also want a clothes line in the backyard like Grandma used to have.

I used an app that I forget the name of to make the interior:

In order to have this nice space, I’ll need a job. My most recent degree is nearing ten years old, so I hope to go back for some more school. I found the programs I want to go to and even saved a screenshot of the catalog of one.

This is the timeline that ties it all together. I can hear people whining that “life doesn’t go according to our timelines,” but I think it’s still good to have a game plan. It makes me feel like there’s at least one possible path to getting my stuff together before menopause.

My outpatient team recently required a “power statement,” presumably so that I would feel empowered. However, they did attempt to write it for me and sent me their rough draft so I could make some edits, which felt a lot like it was defeating the purpose. So I scraped their draft and re-wrote it, mostly by copying my 10-year plan into text. I formatted it like they wanted and made it as brief as possible. I had it here so I’m including it. It’s a bit easier to read than the 10-year plan.

Putting on the brakes: Problem 1 of 2

As usual, there are some bugs in the system. First, if I’m going to have enough money to scrape out any kind of existence, I’ll need to be a classroom teacher and not just an assistant. Which means I’ll need to be able to be like these women:

Look at the ease and confidence that they exude. They’re not dissociated at all! They don’t constantly have to rescue themselves from spacing out and losing time. I know I would have the ability to do this if I could just not become terrified and dissociate. I was thinking that maybe my biggest problem is confidence, since I have an education and credentials and I could probably do this perfectly if I were in an empty room and not thinking about a million things at a time but still somehow not able to dedicate any significant amount of cerebral real estate to the task at hand. I looked up “how to build confidence” on YouTube and found this:

I had never thought of this point of view, but I thought it might work. I’m so sensitive to and thus terrified of criticism that I went into a massive dissociative episode last week when Dr. X overheard me talking to a staff member told me later that he didn’t like my tone. I had had no idea that I was doing anything wrong. So then I figured that I probably always talked to everybody wrong and no one could ever love me and I really ought to die. This sort of discomfort with having flaws obviously has major repercussions in a work environment, which contributes to why I’m dissociated all the time.

Problem 2 of 2:

So, you know, I figured I’d just work on that a bit when this lady who worked for the state or something showed up and told me that a group home requires that you pay them SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT of your monthly income. I asked if literally anything was included except shelter and staff members to gripe at you and order you around and, no, you’re on your own to pay all your other bills with the remaining 25% of whatever already-meager income you started with. Not even food is technically included; you have to sign up for food stamps and then give your food stamps card to the community. The woman said that most people in the home subsisted off of $200/month to themselves. She tried to make it better by saying that that was about $50/week, as though a little arithmetic were all I needed to make the numbers work. I’ve had the same Android budgeting app for years and I love it because you just plug in all your expenses and it tells you how much money you’ll have on any future date. So I made a copy of the budget I already had and updated my income to see how I would fare. I even prefaced my calculations by assuming I would be earning money by working in addition to collecting social security. What I did not include was the $2,000-$3,000 it’ll cost me to buy a new complete wardrobe, a bicycle, and other things that I’ll need in order to function in the world after discharge.

In the end I could only conclude that this group home (“GLE”) was another classic example of the It’s-Fine-For-You-Because-It-Could-Never-Happen-To-Me Economics that systemically dehumanizes people and at the same time forces us to be dependent on the very government that views us as vermin and does not and has never actually cared whether we live or die. Ask the average American to give up 75% of their income on rent alone and they’ll protest that it’s impossible and they could never meet their basic needs that way. And then make the same demand of someone with an even smaller starting income and thus even less ability to meet their basic needs with 25% of their money, but say the person has PTSD, and suddenly everything’s fine because people with disabilities don’t deserve the very air we breathe.

So I complained to Dr. X. I explained that by charging 75% of our money and disincentivizing us from working, the “GLE” system showed that it did not value its clients and would harm me more than it would help me. He gently tried to remind me of how unsuccessful I had been at living independently all the numerous times I had tried before. He validated that the “GLE” seemed awful to me, but also broke it to me once again as though it were the first time we had had the conversation that I was “severely psychiatrically ill” and a group home was the best option available. I protested that I don’t understand what my current symptoms are or why I can’t just “snap out of it”/choose to not be ill anymore. Even in my frustration, I remembered my 90-year-old grandfather just months before his death, lying on his bed in the nursing home wearing nothing but his shirt and an adult diaper, and protesting that he had no idea what was actually wrong with him and he thought he would be fine if he left the nursing home and got a job.

I come by it honestly.

So finally Dr. X had to take a different approach. He got me a snack as an exit strategy from the conversation, and then came back a while later with a meme that he had printed out and personally annotated for me in his hyper-perfectionist handwriting.

I guess at least my decision-making stress is down. Which, as awful as all this may be, not having to carry the burden of making this decision actually is a monumentous relief.

So there you have it. My dreams of owning a home and having a family contrasted with the reality that there’s apparently something very wrong with me that’s holding me back. And somehow, I have to make peace with that reality.

Oh who am I kidding I’m going to be old and gray like Grandpa and still insisting that I’m probably fine and could really pick myself and dust myself off with some hard work and good choices. At best I’ll reach cognitive dissonance on the issue. In my family, we’ve never been famous for going easy on ourselves.