I hope you guys don't mind if I do more off-topic journaling. It seems to help me figure stuff out.

I’m so sorry I’m still having a hard time with getting onto chat programs or social media sites. I’m working very hard on it. Over the last few years, I've developed terrible agoraphobia, and this seems to have translated to things like chat rooms, chat programs, and social media. I'm also still having a hard time with weirdly powerful depression. This time, however, I've been able to identify a pattern that keeps arising, in a cyclic fashion, in both my mind and feelings. Finding a way to interrupt this pattern will be key.

The pattern has been:

I start feeling better →
and because I feel better, I can more clearly understand some new characteristic of a trauma that happened to me in the past, and how it shaped who I am today →
this understanding is deeply and profoundly shocking, enough to activate moderate to severe depression →
the depression aggravates my agoraphobia, which makes using chat programs and interacting with other people very difficult. So, for about two to three weeks, I will be both hard to talk to a little down in the dumps →
I begin the process of integrating this knowledge, which is not easy, and can take a week or two. →
I start feeling better →
and because I feel better, I can more clearly understand some new characteristic of a trauma that happened to me in the past, and how it shaped who I am today →
this understanding is deeply and profoundly shocking, enough to activate moderate to severe depression →
the depression aggravates my agoraphobia, which makes using chat programs and interacting with other people very difficult. So, for about two to three weeks, I will be both hard to talk to a little down in the dumps →
I begin the process of integrating this knowledge, which is not easy, and can take a week or two. →
I start feeling better →
Etc. →→→

It's something like that.

Some good personal news is that, every time I feel better, I feel slightly better than the previous time. Over time, I’ve begun to notice this pattern intensifying and becoming more visible. If possible, my goal is to remove the "this understanding is deeply and profoundly shocking," and by extension, "the depression aggravates my agoraphobia," stages. I just need to grind and punch my way through this wall of “trauma* scar tissue," I think, and I seem to be getting close to breaking through. If I do that, I'll be able to freely hang out on chat programs again without being distractingly and obviously anxious.

(*When I say "trauma," I am not talking about romantic breakups or personal drama. I am only talking about three specific experiences of a violent nature that were permanently tattooed directly onto my nervous system back in 2012. The nervous system, by the way, never goes back to "normal" after such an insult. It assumes that "one danger equals to possibility for more similar dangers," so it remains constantly online, for the rest of your life. Hey man, this shit is what kept animals alive as they fought to survive in the nightmare of evolution, and we have a nervous system very much like they did.

Honestly, the PTSD is 50 times worse than the original upset. I wish I could tear my nervous system out of my body and slap it in the face in order to snap it out of its wild panicking. It can make you crazy. Sometimes literally.)

Anyway, I'm still working a lot of this stuff out, but with the drugs completely out of my system, I can see it much more clearly. I can't blame myself for what’s happened to my career and reputation. The damn PTSD, combined with the baffling and unnecessary drugs, rendered me manic and psychotic. What happened to me over the last ten years was not my fault. It was not intentional. Parts of me watched in horror, aware of what was happening yet unable to do anything. It’s just a puzzle of the nervous system that I've had to adapt to and solve. Thankfully, I know what I need to solve it, and I really am feeling better than I have in a very long time.

Please just give me a few more months (maybe less) to figure some of these things out. Once I've exhausted most of their supply, I have no doubt my attention will return to full time work. I'm giving it my best. I have a shit load of art I want to do.

Thanks for reading this if you have. I'm not writing them with the expectation that people read them. I feel so crazy sometimes, lol.