It’s All Too Much

These posts focus on the downside of my symptoms: depression, hopelessness, etc.

#610 – Burnt Bridges

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Usually around this time of night I feel isolated and alone. Tonight it’s a little worse. I feel like I’ve been burning bridges left and right and that I’m isolated because of my own actions, so I feel like I can’t reach out to anyone because there’s no one left to reach out to. My rational mind is pretty sure this is incorrect, but it has doubts. My irrational mind is likely creating evidence that I really have had ties severed because of something and my rational mind … can’t just dismiss it. The reasons are plausible and that just makes me a little more confused and a lot more scared that there’s no one left for me to talk to, that everyone is sick of my crap and that’s all there is to it.

Part of me wants to stay up all night, if for no other reason that it won’t take as long as it usually does, but I know that will further wreck my already precariously held diurnal cycle. My brain says sit and stew in this – I’m not going to ever get control of my dependent personality disorder if I don’t actively spend time alone.

I’ve got a lot of other doubts going on, but those are for another time. I should get busy doing whatever it is I’m going to for as long as I’m going to do it.

#608 – Relapse

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I haven’t written in my blog for almost 14 months. Life has been just busy enough to sustain me over that time, but as I’m getting closer to applying to my degree program I’m finding myself with more and more free time as the things I can do in preparation become fewer and fewer, and that hasn’t been good for me.

Let me catch you up, in case you’ve never read my blog. I have a handful of mental illnesses that have had me on disability since 2014 and pretty much housebound for a couple of years after that. In 2015 I began the process of working with Texas Workforce Commission to get me retrained and back in the job market and we finally agreed on a plan that would see me earning an associate’s degree in the healthcare field in 2017. Two other things happened that year. I had a major breakthrough in therapy and a tweak in my psych meds that together brought me out of the agoraphobia I’d been experiencing, just in time to start college in the fall of that year. Since that time I’ve been doing exceptionally well in school. After completing 35 credit hours I’ve got a 3.914 GPA. This covers all the prerequisite and co-requisite classes for my degree program, so I can concentrate fully on excelling in those classes. I’ve been socializing, I’ve been driving again, I’ve been shopping, all things that I didn’t do during my agoraphobia.

Since the start of winter break in December, I’ve been on more and more of a downswing, which I was hoping was going to turn around once I was back in school last month. I’m instead intimidated by the course I’m in now (it’s not credit towards my degree, but it is required to be completed on the application) and I’ve gotten out of almost everything that could be considered a daily habit. The only thing I am doing is continuing to take my medication almost all the time. Periods of joy are few and far between, I hardly ever have the energy to do much of anything, which means housework is usually waiting until either one of us has energy. (My wife is also dealing with a downswing on top of her narcolepsy, so she is chronically exhausted and out of energy.) Living in a messy apartment just drives my mood further and further down. It’s rare that I can find a distraction strong enough to make me forget everything else for a time.

So I am pretty much wiping the slate clean and starting over. A lot of my habits are gone. It’s going to take a while to get them ingrained again. I’m going to write them all down and then use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to prioritize them all, and start at the bottom of the pyramid, one at a time, and work my way up. In addition, I’m going to start rereading The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, which was a huge part of my turnaround in 2017.

I’m also going to start back with the regular blogging, so there is some accountability during my efforts to reverse the downswing, so you’ll be seeing more from me in this medium.

I am aware that this all looks like the person that tries to help by saying “Have you just tried not being depressed?” I know that I don’t have a large amount of control over my brain chemicals, but I believe that working towards a goal will make it more likely that I reach it. So, I’m doing this.

It’s late, and I’m tired, and I don’t expect many people to read this entry. But it needed to be written. More later.

#607 – Reaching Out

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Regular readers of my blog – well, the ones I had before I took most of last year off – know that I use my blog as a coping mechanism whenever my mental illnesses get rough. I’d guess that most of my posts here for the first year and change I was writing were very much me coping. But since mid-2017, my symptoms have been largely dormant. There have been brief dips in my mood here and there, but the past year and a half, things have been on a pretty even keel. Until recently.

Let me catch you up on the relevant bits of the story. In August 2017, I started taking classes at the local community college. Within a couple days of winter break starting in mid-December, a friend came to stay with us for close to two weeks. A day or two after he left, my wife and I flew to Florida to spend some time with family celebrating a milestone birthday. Once we came back home, we immediately started packing for our most recent move at the end of January. And then classes started the third week of January. The move was scheduled for the weekend of the second week in school, so there was actually some overlap between move and school. Spring semester was 14 credit hours that ended in mid-May 2018. I took one class over the summer, so I pretty much had about ten days to myself before I was right back in school mode. That class ended mid-August 2018, and then two weeks later the fall semester started, and that lasted until the middle of last month. Since then, I’ve pretty much had my time to myself, with the exception of a trip to visit family over Christmas that ended up with my wife and me in quarantine for two days thanks to the flu. So I told you all that to tell you that I’ve had from December 27 to today to myself, with minimal school obligations and not much else from there.

I had gotten used to the school routine over the previous 16 months, and having my time all to myself came as a bit of a shock. I miss the routine of classes and studying. I miss having that structure in my day. And having my day to myself means I’m idle with very little to do. This gives my lying brain ample opportunity to tell me that I have no interest in pretty much anything, and my mood has pretty much tanked in the void. Tonight, I realized that I need some help getting over this, so I’m reaching out to my friends for a bit of a boost.

I know that I’ll be better once I’m back in the routine of school, but it’s still a couple weeks away. Fortunately I have an appointment with my therapist next week, so I’m not too far away there, but I think for the time being I’m going to ask that we meet more regularly (I’d gotten to the point that I was meeting her every six weeks) until I’m sure I’m past this.

If you’re my friend and you’re reading this, I wouldn’t mind if you reached out and checked in from time to time over these next couple weeks. You all make my day better, and I could use the smile.

#604 – Been a While, Hasn’t It?

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So hey there, how are you doing? Been a while, hasn’t it? I have over two months to catch you up on, and that has been a hectic time. My apologies for disappearing, but there have been reasons.

The last time I wrote to you, I was just getting ready to start the spring semester with 14 credit hours and was preparing to move. There have been a lot of things going on, so I’m going to split this up into categories instead of trying to remember the last two months chronologically.

School: Fourteen credit hours is a lot to take on at once, and with two pre-requisites and two co-requisites on my schedule – and a target of applying to my program a year from now with at least a 3.5 GPA – performing well is very important. I’m taking anatomy and physiology I and applied physics (both pre-requisites) as well as English composition I and something called Effective Learning (both co-requisites), and none of these are really easy courses. I’ve been worried about my performance, especially since I’ve missed at least two class sessions in all four classes thanks to various illnesses, and my reading is falling further and further behind. However, here at roughly the halfway point of the semester I’ve got a high B, in A&P, and As everywhere else. That’s on target for my goal GPA – now if I can just maintain this for about eight more weeks, and hopefully bring that B up to an A, I’ll be very happy indeed.

Home: We’re moved! On moving day we’d not packed up even half the apartment when folks started coming around about 9:00 am, so we knew we were in for a long day. However, we had a lot of friends that came to help us, and by noon we had packed everything up and gotten the vast majority of our stuff down to the truck and assorted vehicles, ready to take it to our new apartment. By 4:00 pm everything we’d brought over in the first wave was either inside the apartment or on our patio. All the furniture was in place and my wonderful mother-in-law had almost completely unpacked our kitchen. That left only a few things to do on the second day we’d set aside for the move, and it seemed like in the blink of an eye our environment had transformed. We had moved from a 34-year-old 2/2 apartment in a less-than-ideal part of town to a ten-year-old gated community in one of the nicest places in town as well as a freshly renovated unit. We moved in about two months ago, and even though we’ve still got some stuff in boxes it still feels a little like us moving into a resort. And then the bills came in. We are estimating that our rent and water bills would be comparable between the two apartments – but our rent includes a surcharge for a reserved covered parking spot, something that wasn’t even offered at the old apartment, so, all in all, we’re paying less here than we would have been at the old place. Our water bill is half of what it was, as is our electric bill, and our internet bill is cheaper for service faster than we had by an order of magnitude. Even our car insurance has gone down. The only expense that’s gone up is our monthly fuel bill – my wife’s commute has doubled in length and four days out of five that trip is being taken twice to allow me to have the car for class.

Health: My anxiety has been doing very well given the added stress of a heavy course load, and only in recent weeks has my anxiety been really elevated. (More on that in a minute.) My blood sugar has been slowly rising, and this morning I recorded the highest glucose reading I’ve had since my diabetes has been controlled, so I’ll be going to the doctor soon to talk about that. Good thing too – my blood pressure has been on the rise as well, although part of that is likely due to school stress.

Family: I got a call from Mom one day a few weeks ago with her telling me that she was in Dallas strolling around the thousand acres that she’d just bought, and wanted to know what kind of cars we wanted her to buy for us, and took special care to point out that she had a private plane on call to whisk us from Austin to her property in about an hour and a half. Since that point, my dad has apparently taken over $2000 out of her account and changed her banking password and disappeared with her car. She figured he’s gone for good and is talking with a divorce lawyer about what she needs to do to file. Fortunately, her brother and sister-in-law have been visiting on the weekends and keeping her company. Here’s the problem: Mom is in a skilled nursing facility in North Carolina and has been unable to walk for well over a decade. My father passed away in 1995, and both her brother and sister-in-law are also deceased. There’s no property in Dallas, there’s no money for his and hers cars, there’s certainly no private plane. My thought is that she has a chronic infection that’s been causing hallucinations for weeks, and despite the facility supposedly treating it her symptoms have not abated. If she were living in the past, then I’d be more concerned about dementia setting in, but this is all new stuff that she’s telling us, so it seems to be more hallucinatory than memory loss. The good news is that the ball has finally started rolling to make me a secondary medical power of attorney for her, which means that the facility will now start calling me, her actual son, when they need to advise us of treatments and progress in her conditions, as well as the family friend who’s local to her and who has been taking care of her for years – and who is her primary medical power of attorney due to his proximity to Mom.

Community: This is where the elevated anxiety comes in. It is not internal. I live in Austin, which has until earlier this week been dealing with a domestic terrorist that planted seven bombs in town, six of which detonated with two fatalities and several more serious injuries. The suspect had started to change up his level of sophistication as well as his delivery method, with one bomb exploding in a FedEx facility south of town, which had the whole of Austin on edge. That fear was almost palpable in the 48 hours leading up to police catching up to their primary suspect, only to have him die in a self-triggered explosion early Wednesday morning. The whole thing hit home with me on several fronts. A friend of mine lives just a couple miles from the sites of multiple explosions and was seriously considering keeping her kids home from school until the perpetrator was caught. Another friend of mine was told by police to stay in her apartment while they investigated a suspicious package left at the high school next door to her. One of the explosions was just a few doors down from a fellow physics student and she was being told to stay indoors until the all-clear had been given – she’d gone so far as to write our professor and tell him she’d likely miss class that day.

So that’s pretty much been my last two months. My schedule has been hectic and a lot of things I used to do on a daily basis have fallen by the wayside since the semester started. I mentioned this to my therapist a couple days ago and she brought up the excellent point that the important things, the medical reasons that I started keeping a daily checklist in the first place, are all being done more or less without fail, so I shouldn’t worry so much about keeping up with everything. She’d also like me to write more often, so I’m going to try my best to get back to at least a couple times a week. On that note, I’ll be around again in a few days with a shorter post.

 

#578 – Productivity and Devastation

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Today was a busy day. Got laundry done, did some pre-cooking for later in the week, finished an algebra quiz that’s due tomorrow, cleaned up the kitchen a couple of times, got all my usual stuff on my checklist done, watched V for Vendetta (“Remember, remember the fifth of November …”), then settled in for an evening of hanging out on the internet.

This evening my thoughts are in Sutherland Springs, Texas. I cannot fathom what makes a person commit such atrocities and why people defend his right to have the firepower to do it. At what point are we as a country going to stop and say “enough is enough” and take definitive action to prevent this sort of thing from happening again?

My thoughts are also with someone I know who’s a 20-year member of First Baptist Church. Today she slept through her alarm and that likely saved her life and the lives of her kids. I cannot imagine the flood of emotions that she’s experiencing, the pain that she’s going through. I’m devastated for her.

The random, senseless acts of terrorism and violence that seem to be happening every other week nowadays have got to stop, and soon. I wish we knew how.

Perfect Storm

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Right now I’m in a headspace that I haven’t been in for some time.

For starters, today has been spent unsuccessfully fighting a persistent, nagging, unproductive cough left over from the cold. I feel constantly just on the edge of a coughing fit that makes me dizzy and causes pain in my right shoulder during the bad coughing jags. That’s been a wet blanket on my whole day, and honestly there’s nothing I can do about that except continuing to throw cough medicine at it and hope that it works for a while.

I’ve spent half the afternoon and evening being supremely frustrated at my algebra homework, and that’s led me to avoid reaching out to someone for help with what’s got me stumped. My brain’s been telling me “you go see the instructor tomorrow morning anyway, bring it up then” when there are multiple people that have offered to help me with any questions I may have. Continuing to avoid the situation has only served to make me more irritated at myself, which just serves to lock me into place regarding reaching out to someone. To top it all off, I’ve been dealing with someone online that I really dislike, and my mood from earlier has got me feeling quite confrontational – something that anyone that knows me well can tell you is very much not me – which is further aggravating my own anger at myself.

It seems practically everyone and everything is capable of getting under my skin tonight, and I’m apparently leading the charge.

It’s been months since I felt like this. I used to feel this way fairly regularly not that long ago. Since my mental illnesses have subsided in recent months, I’ve been virtually symptom-free, and it’s been glorious. To be going through this now, after such a long time of not experiencing this anger and frustration, feels like a bit of a setback.

But.

I know that what I’m going through is temporary. I know that even though I’ve basically lost most of today in productive study, I’m not quite yet in over my head, although my weekend plans are at risk if I don’t get this resolved quickly. The assignment that I feel so far behind on isn’t due until a week from tomorrow, so there’s time to recover, even though I’ve only barely started the assignment. (Note to self: time management skills are your friend. Use them next time.) Tomorrow morning instead of going into the classroom close to a half hour early, I’ll stop off at my instructor’s office to get things figured out, even though that means admitting I’m pretty much behind schedule. It’s not the end of the world. And my online frustration can be mitigated by not participating in and ignoring the conversation that’s got me so worked up. That’s an easy fix.

So while they’ve taken a little bit of time to get on board, my coping mechanisms are finally in place and my frustration and anger is easing off. Writing this post helped immensely with taking the edge off my emotions. Besides, the evening’s almost over, so it’s time for me to work on unwinding before bed and letting go of all that stuff that’s trying to ruin my day.

Tomorrow is a fresh start. I should be back to normal then.

Not Claustrophobic After All

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Today’s section in The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, Sixth Edition by Edmund J. Bourne, PhD dealt with claustrophobia. This was a section that I was looking forward to, since I’ve been dealing with what I thought was claustrophobia, but after reading the section, I have doubts about that.

My so-called claustrophobia started sometime last year, when I had to have an MRI done of my head. They put me on the table and started to put me in the machine, and I got stuck. (I’ve got a generous belly.) I panicked and yelled out to the technician that I didn’t fit. He was quick to pull me back out, so I wasn’t stuck in the machine but for a few seconds, but for months after that I would have dreams of getting stuck in claustrophobic places and wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for breath.

I’ve noted, however, that I’m not claustrophobic in enclosed places like the car or an airplane. The only real instance that I dealt with it was in the MRI.

I mentioned this to my therapist yesterday and she told me something I suppose I already knew, but needed it pointed out: everyone’s claustrophobic in an MRI. That’s why they invented the open MRI, to be able to service patients that couldn’t otherwise use a regular MRI machine. So she doesn’t think that I’m claustrophobic.

Today I read that section in the book and it made a point of noting that it is very common for people to experience claustrophobia in an MRI. So I’m really starting to believe that I don’t actually have claustrophobia.

Now, I do have a phobia of suffocation. I can only hold my breath for a few seconds before I get panicky about not breathing, and that’s folded into my fear of death. That could run alongside claustrophobia, but in my case, I wasn’t worried that I couldn’t breathe in the MRI, and my subsequent dreams of being in an extremely tight enclosed space dealt more with being trapped than not being able to breathe. The whole thing seems complicated, but at the root I think I just intensely dislike head-first regular MRIs. (I got an open MRI on my head last year and my recent MRI on my knee was feet-first, so I didn’t feel trapped or stuck with my head outside the machine.) Fortunately those are easy enough to avoid – just make sure any head-first MRIs are done in an open machine.

Yet Another Family Emergency

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I’ll be waking up at 4:00 am tomorrow to get my wife on a plane to Arizona to see her dad. If you could keep her and her family in your thoughts we would both appreciate it. I can’t be very forthcoming with details at this point, but things are not good.

On a related note, I will be on my own this weekend and would appreciate company from my local friends, especially on Sunday, as that’s my birthday. Let me know through the usual channels.

I’m getting tired of family emergencies. They take a lot out of people, regardless of their mental state, but they especially affect me, when I can finally unwind from the travel and stress of the event. They affect my wife the same way, so I’m especially concerned about her essentially traveling over the weekend and coming back home just in time to go to bed for work the next day. She’s not going to have long to be able to process the trip at all and I worry about her, especially since I won’t be by her side for this trip.

Just keep us all in your thoughts if you would. Thanks.

Quick and Dirty Mom Update 4/19/2017

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My wife got a call from my mother earlier tonight, something that’s highly unusual for Mom to do. Mom asked my wife if she could be outside the front door to her facility in 20 minutes to pick her up. Mom says they’re recruiting an army from the residents in her skilled nursing facility and Mom doesn’t want to be recruited into their army. We had to let her down easy by telling her that we live in Austin, Texas, which is over a thousand miles from her in Raleigh, North Carolina, and that there was no way we could be there in twenty minutes. She said she’ll “have to figure out other arrangements.”

Apparently this is pretty par for the course when Mom has a UTI, but I’ve never seen things this bad with her.

I’m not sure how much of this is the UTI and how much is the stroke.

That’s about all I have energy for tonight. For some reason I am bone tired and really want to go lie down.

Mom Update 4/7/2017

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Today Mom had an MRI done to determine the cause of the speech aphasia and loss of motor skills. It was as I had suspected from early on.

Mom has had a minor stroke.

That explains all of the weird symptoms that she’s been exhibiting – the loss of communication, the loss of motor skills, the loss of connection to reality at times (today she told me that a fish on the ceiling helped her sleep last night and that there was a hat on the fence outside her 5th floor window, not to mention the black widow spider that was on my glasses at one point). At least now we have a direction to move in and to see what we can recover of what she’s lost.

I’m terrified for her at this point, because she’s unable to communicate even the most basic wishes when she’s tired or hurting, and she’s usually tired or hurting. I don’t know how her care is going to change at her nursing home, and I really don’t have an easy way of checking on her, unless it’s to check with Kenneth and get reports from him.

I’m more scared of what I’ve just inherited. As her financial power of attorney, it’s now fallen to me to make sure that her bills are taken care of and that things run smoothly for her with regard to her money. Fortunately I’m a signatory on her bank account, so that helps immensely. But her budget and all of her finances are locked away on her laptop at her facility, something that I’m likely going to have to get my hands on to be able to efficiently execute her finances. That will likely be something that Kenneth is going to have to retrieve for me and ship to Austin so we can get things done.

Right now, though, I have another priority that I need to look at – that being the trip to Arizona to be with my wife’s family over Easter weekend. With my knee in an immobilizer, this might be a long trip for us. I’m dreading the flight back to Austin, even though United was kind enough to not only put me on the right bulkhead aisle but to move my wife’s seat from somewhere else on the plane – our reservations were made at different times – to right beside me on the bulkhead.

I’m kind of numb given the news of Mom’s stroke, so bear with me if I seem out of it for the next little while. Life is too busy to be able to process this effectively and it’ll be over a week before I can really start to do that.