I should be discharged soon from the psych hospital! This fiasco started (in my mind) in December 2018 when I was hospitalized and just kinda never could stay out. Before that I used to go inpatient about twice a year, but after Dec ’18 I was literally inpatient more than not. However, insurance doesn’t cover residential programs, so I could only go to facilities that are supposed to provide 5-7 days of care. This length of stay was useless except in keeping me from harm for a week or so. It’s literally impossible to make substantial progress against C-PTSD in a week, so as soon as I was outpatient I got put back inpatient by the first provider to see me because I had never actually even approached an outpatient level of functioning. It was a truly horrible time in my life when the internet wants to say “You’re never alone” but I was, in fact, 100% alone and there were absolutely no resources available to help me because I didn’t have money.
This changed in April of 2021 when Dr. X and a social worker at the hospital I’m at now decided to save me. I’m not really sure why they did it, but I do know that it couldn’t have been easy. They took on insurance and kept me here for what has so far been 13 full months of treatment. Having that amount of time to just be safe allowed my body to calm down enough that my mind could start processing what it needed to process. I still have C-PTSD but I don’t live 100% of my life with crippling and unabating chest pain, for example.
Now it’s finally time for discharge to a group home. Well, not today. Hopefully next week. Maybe not until next month. I’m slightly nervous but not nearly what I would have expected myself to be. I’ve tried to look deep inside and see if this is an avoidance thing but I think I’m genuinely excited to write my memoir. I already have like a thousand index cards of things to put in it, but it turns out that it’s a lot harder for me to write without a computer so I’m mostly holding off until discharge. This blog has chronicalled a lot of the last year and I plan to keep it updated until blogging becomes so far past obselete that the format is no longer supported. But I don’t talk about my past much on here, which is what the book is for. I’m not much for wallowing in painful memories and generally avoid doing so, but I feel like my story should be available so people know that what I went through is a real thing that can happen and is probably still happening to children somewhere right now.
So yeah I’m writing a book! And I have other goals and I will keep my readers updated! It’s finally the new beginning that I never thought I’d see.
