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For crying out loud!
13 years ago
AWFUL, AWFUL TWO WEEKS.
So my computer broke down, first of all. I needed a new graphics card. I need a new hard drive too if I ever want to use Mac OS and all of my creativity programs again, but hey, at least I have a functioning computer.
Then my roommate and I had... well, let's just make a long story short and say we had different attitudes toward life, and now I'm in the process of moving back out again. I'm looking for a bachelor apartment. Living alone. No roommates. Yeah.
To top it all off, my job was hemming and hawing about hiring me full time, and I was constantly afraid of not working for two weeks, which would have made money extremely tight.
I had nowhere safe to come home to, no computer world to escape into, no sense of financial security... The stress all built up and I had a major breakdown. Probably the worst anxiety I've had in my entire life, with attacks so severe I thought I had the flu.
I went to see my GP and now I have a bottle of clonazepam at the ready in case I have another breakdown. Anxiety is a mental illness which manifests itself in rather alarming physical sensations. Constant muscle tension, headaches, shaking, nausea, and a general feeling of being about to die. If you've ever had a fight-or-flight moment, imagine that lasting for hours and hours, and not being able to do anything about it. I tried just about everything. I tried blaming other people. I tried blaming myself. It was all totally irrational and none of it seemed to prevent these incapacitating physical manifestations.
Just about the only thing that helped was having the patience of my friends, family and the oh so patient
rubberskunktoo with whom I traded almost daily e-mails over the phone. If you'll permit a message directly to him... I LOVE YOU! I'm always going to remember how I felt when we would talk, briefly, on Skype. You're a king among men, and I owe you a million smooches. <3
I'm going to start going to group cognitive behavioral therapy sessions (which are thankfully free!) to figure out what to do next time things start to get bad.
That's where I've been lately. It was a hard hit to the system, but some of you I'm sure have been through much worse. Things are getting better, and I hope to return to being a murry furry pretty soon. :)
So my computer broke down, first of all. I needed a new graphics card. I need a new hard drive too if I ever want to use Mac OS and all of my creativity programs again, but hey, at least I have a functioning computer.
Then my roommate and I had... well, let's just make a long story short and say we had different attitudes toward life, and now I'm in the process of moving back out again. I'm looking for a bachelor apartment. Living alone. No roommates. Yeah.
To top it all off, my job was hemming and hawing about hiring me full time, and I was constantly afraid of not working for two weeks, which would have made money extremely tight.
I had nowhere safe to come home to, no computer world to escape into, no sense of financial security... The stress all built up and I had a major breakdown. Probably the worst anxiety I've had in my entire life, with attacks so severe I thought I had the flu.
I went to see my GP and now I have a bottle of clonazepam at the ready in case I have another breakdown. Anxiety is a mental illness which manifests itself in rather alarming physical sensations. Constant muscle tension, headaches, shaking, nausea, and a general feeling of being about to die. If you've ever had a fight-or-flight moment, imagine that lasting for hours and hours, and not being able to do anything about it. I tried just about everything. I tried blaming other people. I tried blaming myself. It was all totally irrational and none of it seemed to prevent these incapacitating physical manifestations.
Just about the only thing that helped was having the patience of my friends, family and the oh so patient
rubberskunktoo with whom I traded almost daily e-mails over the phone. If you'll permit a message directly to him... I LOVE YOU! I'm always going to remember how I felt when we would talk, briefly, on Skype. You're a king among men, and I owe you a million smooches. <3I'm going to start going to group cognitive behavioral therapy sessions (which are thankfully free!) to figure out what to do next time things start to get bad.
That's where I've been lately. It was a hard hit to the system, but some of you I'm sure have been through much worse. Things are getting better, and I hope to return to being a murry furry pretty soon. :)
Shit.
Sorry hun - I can sympathise.
I really hope that medication hits it on the head and helps you get sorted out.
*Many toony hugs*
The meds make me SUPER TIRED. Luckily I only need to take them when I'm having a panic attack, so I'm not going to be constantly hopped up on chemicals. When I was on SSRIs my libido crashed and I couldn't drink and it ironically made me even more depressed! Not the case here. :D
Glad you're on something more situational!
Also the title of your journal immediately started Meatloaf singing in my head...
This is kind of a weird question but do you find that being a furry helps you cope with the stress of the mood swings? I find it has a weird sort of curative power because it's so... freeform, I can kind of be whatever it is I want to be and project an image which is more congruent with my personality. It's kind of... relaxing to know that I can do that. Does that hold any water for you?
But being an artist and embracing the dragon and furry community had its own influence. I know before I was diagnosed (mid way through undergrad), but around the time when I finally realized there was something seriously wrong with my head; doing art was something that helped my manic swings stay manic and not blow over into anxiety and me turning into a useless piece of depressed goo. It took my mind off from all the mounting school work, that for the life of me couldn't focus on, the two tests that are at the end of the week that I have no hope of passing, and the idea that because I have all this stuff hanging over my head I am far too busy to eat. (none of that was true in reality, but mania does weird things to a person's perspective). It got me through the manic swing until it passed and I could return to being a student again, sometimes it only lasted a night others 3 or 4 days of running on 3 hours of sleep a night and being, well, fine with it. And sleep, the bipolar disorder created its own type of insomnia due to the anxiety and never ending thoughts running through my head. And I am a seriously light sleeper. People walking passed my dorm room not saying anything, just the movement would wake me up. It was bad times then, and 3 years of hard work getting on the right combination and dosage of the meds I am on. Worth it, but hard work.
Treating anything should be a dynamic experience. There is always newer and better meds coming on the market. And lifestyles change. My doc and I are experimenting on getting me off the meds I am on currently and seeing if I can manage my bipolar disorder with therapeutic techniques now that I am not in school anymore and my job is a stable and requires mostly the same tasks day in and day out. I want to start a family at some point in the next 10 years, and the meds I am on shouldn't be taken while pregnant (no side-effects are known for it) but still probably not the smart thing to do. So this will be a test run to see how things go. I'm getting concerned that at the much lighter dose I am now on, I am experiencing dramatic shifts again for the first time in a long time. So when I see my doc next I might not let him prescribe me down further for a while.
It was good to tell myself that the cards were stacked in my favor, because I was spending a lot of time berating myself for not being able to solve such simple problems. And it's true, sometimes life just picks a moment to throw everything at you at once. Statistically, it's bound to happen to anyone.
I'm no fatalist, but I do like to pretend there's a sort of narrative consistency to life. We're presented with situations that seem insurmountable in the same way that a character in a story might during its climax, only it seems to happen over an extremely long period of time and we can't just skip ahead to the last page. In the way that the events of your past have made you the person you are today, the events of today are shaping the person you'll be tomorrow. That's a pretentious way of saying it builds character which is what absolutely nobody wants to hear. It reveals hubris, it strips away your ego, it makes you take stock of the resources you have at your disposal. The character-in-a-book metaphor becomes crazy when you're revved up like that... a stormy, windy night echoes your brooding mood, the music on the radio seems to be piping lyrics straight out of your brain, every transpiring event develops this psychedelic uber-significance because your body is in fight or flight mode and that's how your brain responds to the panic chemicals. You're looking around for why all of this is happening to you so that you can stem the cause, and that's when things can get downright spiritual. But spiritual ain't all bad, so long as you're skeptical.
Is there anywhere you can go where you'll feel safe? Having safe spaces and safe times helped me immensely, even if it means going to a coffee shop or diner routinely when things get too wild.
"and that's when things can get downright spiritual. But spiritual ain't all bad, so long as you're skeptical."
OCD is the Doubting Disorder. I can be intellectually skeptical as I can be and the fucker won't /totally/ go away, though it has helped to get rid of the full force of it in the past. It effectively got rid of it as the central mind problem, in the past. Now I am in a period of both emotional and intellectual uncertainty, and I have a mess here. Really does feel like a spiritual thing, like demons, eating me.
Also, when I hit this pretty rough last year the guy I talked to about it mentioned that we have a tendency to talk much more harshly to ourselves than anybody else and we would often never let someone else say such nasty things to us. Try to get in the habit of saying positive things when you're freaking out. I like to embellish my accomplishments by making them slightly fantastical and bandying about the phrase "badass." I hope you feel better.
I have taken to way overusing the "first-world problems!" meme myself, but it is a pretty good one for reminding myself that I am only free to worry about esoteric shit because I am not actually spending all my time just trying to maintain my basic existence. (Actual emergencies are pretty good at 'resetting my thermostat' because I don't have time to panic about possibilities 20 steps down the road. Imagining myself in one turns out to work almost as well.*)
*Outside of REM sleep. This is pretty anecdotal, but some Nova on PBS or such outlined a theory that REM is a bizarre evolutionarily-favored adaptation to use some of the "idle capacity" in one's downtime to simulate survival situations, often to one's "limits" - and showed snippets of some of the research apparently backing this up showing that people kicked awake during REM self-evaluate way more harshly [in the moments after waking] than those jostled at other parts of the sleep cycle. Since I stopped following the "conventional wisdom" that REM is somehow magical and good and using every trick in the book to optimize it, things have smoothed out a little. [Now I welcome letting the alarm kick me awake at an arbitrary point in the sleep cycle rather than trying to time two to guarantee I should be somewhere REMish when the second blares, say. It turns out that getting punted from 'deep sleep' often feels more 'rested!']
It really never helps to compare a person's suffering while they're going through the suffering. I know you broke your right hand and you'll never draw again but don't feel bad because THAT GUY HAS CANCER AND IS GOING TO DIE! It's fucking twisted as shit to say shit like that. Don't say it.
Sorry, I fucking hate "first world problems" so much and when people use that phrase I fly off the handle. Can we please just let people have their problems regardless of where they're born or their income level (and mine is not all that much)? I know you're trying to help but that really doesn't help.
*waves his own giant sack of medication-to-attempt-to-tolerate-existence around vaguely*
Also not trying to draw any income/class distinctions other than that a significant portion of the population is within walking distance of a public library to locate resources to deal with what to do next / stay out of the rain for half the day if personal shit really does hit the fan, and that a portion of the culture is [strike]sane[/strike]rational enough that they probably won't completely disappear even if someone axes all public funding in favor of "faith-based institutions." Reminding myself of this helps, too. (Another delightful facet of my anxiety is worrying about where I'm welcome to spend time existing without spending money I might not have - and I manage to finger my 'feel like an undue burden' buttons just occupying a table at a restaurant as a party of one - so I'm with you on 'safe places.')
My deal is that I have figured out how to pull some mindfulness judo on myself not by lightly comparing my shit to that of some theoretical nameless person, but actually intensely examining how I would react to other situations I could possibly be in. I doubt any therapist from any school would go at it with the casual "eat-your-peas-because" phrase because it's so gauche, but since (go figure) I could calmly deal with finding out I had cancer (oh well, some DNA went rogue, gotta deal with it) and if I were limited to a more 'bucolic', telecommunication-free village life, I probably would not exactly have the opportunity to freak out about what to do with some years-long text-based petplay relationship that took a hard turn into unhealthy dysfunction, it helps me reflect on So what the heck is it about [possibly actually not dire situation] that has my hackles up, adrenals in overdrive, and depressive self-loathing switch flipped on? .... Another prerequisite for that to actually help is to be able to have that level of realization actually do anything to the underlying pathology... and I don't know exactly how I finally managed to get there, but I had the dumb luck to have a friend who liked to watch anime and point at every absurd scene and shout "NO! NO! WRONG!" ["RABBIT-CATS DO NOT TURN INTO SPACESHIPS! TEARDROPS DON'T APPEAR OVER PEOPLE'S HEADS!"] and at some point just recently I managed to train myself to start doing that to myself every time I'm down a rabbit hole that I would wince at if brought to me by someone else. (CBT might approve?) I'd wager it's probably too personal an experience to immediately replicate, but it's also a really fun way to sit through a bunch of Tenchi.
Note: Worrying about being perceived as histrionic means we both have anxiety issues. Actually being histrionic (or whatever they changed the name to) is in a different section of the (possibly-completely-arbitrary-but-hey-we-gotta-start-somewhere) DSM!
In that metaphor where there's a control room of tiny Swatchers inside of my head, there's a really incompetent foreman who has no idea how to run things, and he needs a bit of training to get him up to speed on how to control this monstrous beast at the helm of which he's allegedly in control.
Just about the only thing that helped was to remove myself from the situation and talk to my friends, even if it wasn't about the problem, having people who weren't adding to my stress was immensely helpful!
Now running on a treadmill or around a track at my old high school with some good music is a good enough twice weekly habit to give my brain a break from thinking. If I don't take an hour twice a week to work my body to exhaustion and get my brain distracted on sore muscles and OMG water now!!! it gets into trouble... I don't want to let my brain get into trouble thinking down paths of thoughts that aren't good for me. So good habits and drugs work for me.
Just get a GOOD doctor and never hesitate to get a second opinion from a doc that is a generation younger. Mental illness is a dynamic field of medicine. I'm taking an anti-epileptic for my Bipolar disorder. I got a second opinion when traditional meds weren't getting me anywhere. I took that second opinion back to my original doc and he said "sounds good, the studies support it, let's try it and see where you are at in a month". It's what I am on now. If your original doctor gets offended and is resistant to change well that's a red flag and it might be good to reach out to a support group organization related to anxiety and get a good referral to someone who specializes in your issues.
But I know it is no fun.
I had my own little meltdown in early December last year.
Not being sure you won't be out on your ass tomorrow is a universally horrible feeling, no matter how first-world comfortable the current digs are.
I lean a little more towards DBT than CBT, but statistics say the latter works. Grouping up probably can't help but throw 'dialectical' (how-to-think) aspects into it beyond the 'just do this, it'll retrain the reflex' approach.
<3 you Swatcher!
It's funny that anticipating this was my whole schpiel about being haunted by my reputation, and that really came to the fore in my anxieties. I felt like there was this other Swatcher who was a failure and a shitbag and no amount of effort I put into changing my ways would ever shake that reputation... I kept wanting to just escape this world but natch, that's impossible because we really only have this one world to fuck around in. It's even harder when you don't have the Internet which is like, escapism embodied, but even then it's still just a little partition of the same world you're fucked in and you need to leave it eventually in order to go to work and feed yourself and shower and not be a vegetable. A lot of people in this world are way more fucked up that I felt. I've met some people with schizophrenia when they were having episodes and I fucking feel for them because it's incredibly difficult to relate to that amount of suffering and alienation. That doesn't help me feel a whole lot better, but it at least tells me that this Thing that exists, this feeling of being a fucked up alien who can't get help and just wants to run back to their home planet, is not something anyone needs to feel alone in.
Last year I spent a lot of time researching all sorts of crazy esoteric stuff for my undergraduate thesis, and I keep coming back to fan cultures and why they draw the kinds of people that they draw; the artists, the misfits, the weirdos. You think of all of these people building, say, the Companion Cube from Portal, and you wonder... what does it mean? Why bother taking this fictional thing that exists only as a bit of math in a computer and turning it into a physical object? Most of the conversation I see surrounding this concerns copyright and originality but there's an unspoken desire underlying all of these fan art practices. With a popular culture that is increasingly focused on creating alternate dimensions (there's a fascinating history to this that suffuses the entire 20th Century and even before that), we've been using fiction to examine alternative ways of structuring the world. Where would the Ron Paul ReLOVEution be without the fiction of Ayn Rand? William Gibson gave us Cyberspace, and need I mention the SCA? And of course, furries and fursuiting!
On the one hand, I can take my brush with THE DOOM as a way of seeing something wrong within myself, but aaaaalso it's about something that's wrong with a world that doesn't forgive that kind of shit. It's a world where I have to shell out money to get pills which will prevent me from reacting badly to a situation that I don't think I should have been allowed to be in in the first place. I have to do extra work that other people are exempt from in order to barely feel normal, plus I have to feel like shit about complaining about it because That's Just The Way The World Works. I think I kind of just... disagree about that.
Anyway I guess what I'm saying is that as an artist I can't help but come away feeling inspired and like I have a better understanding of what to do with all of these weird motivations and compulsions to make Things and set up Events and show them to other people. It reminds me that art isn't just some frivolous shit that people just do because they kinda wanna sorta.
Ack, I didn't mean to get on a rant but you mos def know where I'm coming from, I think.
I am on a little bit of an anthropology trip when my brain and life are functioning enough to permit it, so gotta note that "religions" have been experimenting with various possible structures for the world for ages - we are apparently structured to try to model things because it was a good way to stay alive - but unfortunately the ones that tended to endure were mostly the ones that included "and it's important to go convert or kill everyone who doesn't accept this one model" within the structure.
Being able to explore as many participatory fictions as a critter can handle might be a relatively new thing! But also a natural extension of 'literature'. (Digression about 'Rule 34' bringing a certain sort of 'revolution' to the realm of collective imagination saved for parentheses.)
I definitely do know where you're coming from! The weird feeling of being something other, someone who doesn't really belong, and the importance that escapism and fantasy plays in my life. When I'm feeling at my lowest, I really don't feel like a person at all (alternately I strongly desire to be something else) because I don't seem to function right or have the emotional responses I'm "supposed" to have. If there's one thing the internet has shown me, it's that I'm definitely not the only person that feels this way. Even talking to other art majors on campus made me realize how prevalent this sort of feeling is.
There's a lot of things wrong with the way society works. I mean yes, the fact that I've had all these weird nervous reactions probably means that something is not quite right with me, but the fact that there's so many people who feel the same, and so many others who can't correctly address those with these issues means that something about society is pretty wrong too. At least in the way we view people with our kind of issues. I think about the first therapist I went to- she was a definite example of a person who didn't know how to even understand who I was or why I felt this way.
I really agree with the sense of being inspired by these things too. Art really is all about communication. If you can reach out to others in some way, maybe even reach a level of understanding or inspire something in others, it's worth it. Art is also just such a necessary source of escape (and not just for the person creating it).
My thoughts are a bit disorganized atm, but yeah, I dig.
you're the best.
glad things are heading in the direction that causes the least crappiness.
<3 forever,
drake