Ripped down curtains and threw them in the wash with rugs, stripped bedding and bathrooms, the usual deeper spring cleaning kind of stuff.
Confirmed no incision hernia from all that flu coughing, yay! Always hard to tell what's going on with fibro flare and pain referral stuffs.
Also confirmed healthy bones, soft tissues, and no arthritis in feet even though they hurt like hell nonstop and make life difficult, but now have hardcore dx of diabetic neuropathy, even as stringent as I am about keeping my blood sugar down with diet. The only thing I can do going forward is increase gabapentin in order to keep moving to stay healthy, and tighten up my diet as much as possible in case my A1C is slipping, which can happen when one indulges in even small amounts of carbs regularly. Just because my blood sugar is controlled doesn't mean it's not sticky and literally shredding nerve sheaths. If I want to keep being able to walk, I have to get smarter again. Kinda slid into a bit of leniency this last year with the kiddos around me.
Spent more time being staff on game server during winter hammering other staff with power outages, but learning faster that way and handling more stuff now, including helping with the launch of official social medias. The luck perms tutorial is going over my head atm, but I'm sure I'll pick it up.
Our money is a mess this year and we're hanging in there until tax refunds and hoping that covers what we need. @bonenado doesn't get overtime since the company sold around Christmas, and Twink's work might outsource, which, if it does, means she'll have changed jobs twice in less than 5 years over budget cuts. I'm still paying cash on the genetic cancer testing, so no play money until that's done around Christmas-ish. I still have tech, a house, and a car, so I'm grateful.
Made it through about a week-long euphoric episode, crashed a little, and bounced back without missing meals or losing that much sleep, so that was nicely controlled. I'm getting better at this!
I'm otherwise time jagging a lot again and barely staying in the right day/week/month, but I think I'm making good progress with my psychologist about what's behind that. Still able to deal in real time with real life even when I don't know where on a clock or calendar I happen to be.
I'm also managing somehow to keep up with a number of people all over the webs, which cheers me up. Starting to get my regular touch bases back on. Actually making it to movie gang weekly and have regained a little control over juggling my medias.
I don't even know how all that is happening. I feel like I'm barely aware, not because of the meds but because living on the edge of full aspienado shutdown through all of this. I may need to take a day off and not interact with anyone till my brain sops up this drippy gooey mess I feel like I'm sludging through. I mean, who is this person doing all this stuff, lol. Whatever is going on, apparently I've still got some brain healing going on.
I guess March started off pretty good. I wasn't fast enough to catch whether it was a bot spam thing or a linkback, and no idea where it happened. I'm slacking off quite a bit this year on the stat stuff, but it's still nice to catch it once in awhile.
This despite sliding down a slippery depression slope, right. It cheered me up a bit. I could see myself actually repelling people for about a week there.
One of the interesting turns being taken in stats is the more dismal I become in general, the more I'm getting hit worldwide by people who start digging through the tags. I'm seeing a number of one-off trails, like an IP here and there making single hits through a variety of pages all bearing the same tag. Real readers.
We are important to each other. We are the real life other people can see happening behind the 'news' being broadcast and scripted across the webs. We are the ones living our days, the ones problem solving our ways through the scary messes we see in the news all around us. We need to be there for each other behind all that. Just keep living and talking and finding things to love and enjoy. No matter how dark it gets around me, there will always be something I will notice that I can think about, distract myself from fear and anxiety.
One thing I notice and talk about sometimes is now synchronized most of us are on social medias. We go through the same mood swings almost all at the same time, and if you look back through timestamps, you can see this really is a pattern. I know a lot of it is weather related, some of it is time of year related (the February slump after holidays and before the last school term surge is brutal), and definitely 'news' related if you watch too much chain yanking on broadcasts or in feeds.
I couldn't help noticing there was a single day a few days ago that several people I know plummeted into the depths and said very nearly identical phrases relating to depression and anxiety. Since I get around so much social media (super lurker) and hang out in real time on a game server with players from around the world, I am able to see all the little pings going off at the same time. I wish I had thought to screenshot through that entire day, it would have made for a very interesting study.
There is some controversy over 5G coming, and whether that will allow 'mind control'. Even when your tech is turned off, it still monitors and relays info. Your GPS signal, if there is location software in your tech, is always ON, unless you pull the battery out. Most tech nowadays have internal batteries to keep atomic time sync, but what else? Microwaves will blink like clocks when power goes out, but our phones and televisions and game consoles don't do that. When we pick them back up, they are already synced and ready to go.
And as I type this, my cursor is moving around of its own free will, which is very interesting considering I have remote share turned off. Hang on a sec.
Ok. You guys have no idea how often I reboot on any given day. And my phone, too. I started noticing around 2009 that I got particular attention from Langley in my stats if I used certain keywords, because only political opinion posts got those hits. I've toyed with visibility and search engines and stats for years and I see some interesting things. You'd think Oh, I'm just a little blogger, who would even care, right. Well, someone cares. It's gotten uber ridiculous with Pinky blog, and I had to train myself to just ignore it, although I have some outstanding screenshots of geolocations that would probably drop a few jaws. I'm not bragging at all saying that, and I think it would be unwise of me to share those screenshots on a public blog. All I can say is, some of those locations are top notch conspiracy level areas, and I can nail it down to where on the street or under a tree a few of these are because someone didn't have a clue how to use a proxy. At all. Like it was a brand new device straight out of a package and full location disclosure was pure green light. I don't know if that's on purpose or not, but yeah, I got the hint. One post in particular, yes. It unnerved me so badly I made that post private for awhile, and I just got hammered after that.
You know what? I don't care. If anything mysterious ever happens to me, that only proves I was right. That is all. If nothing happens, then nothing happens. I'm probably on a list, but I'm pretty sure a lot of us are.
Anyway, back to where I was going with this. There's been some concern about 5G.
Ok, stick with me for a second remembering a few things. On Ghost Hunters one of the first things they would do trying to debunk a haunting would be to check electrical fields with an EMF meter, right, because everyone knows an electrical field over a certain power level can mess with human emotional and physical states, causing anxiety and nausea and even worse. Imagine focusing an EM field very specifically. If you are carrying around tech that continually monitors your location and even measures and transmits your movements (Fitbit, lol), how easy would it be to use that field to affect your personal state of being? Some are concerned about suggestive programming, like this.
Lol, scared yet? I'm not trying to scare you, but if you aren't aware this is very real and has been going on awhile, you need to wake up a little.
Back to here and now. I'm watching anxiety and depression levels spike up and down across medias almost in a rhythm for awhile, and this latest one a few days ago was unreal because I noticed so many people said nearly identical phrases within 2-3 hours of each other across several medias in a variety of areas, and almost to the hour expressed later that they felt better. I noticed I went through the same sensations, as well, the palpable tension for awhile and then the relief later being a bit more noticeable than my usual mood swings. I don't want to immediately jump on the idea that seemed like an experimental test run of something, but I will say that was just weird.
If you are having a bad day and don't know what to do about it, it's always a good idea to touch base with someone to keep some balance. I myself heavily use tech to keep distant people around me through the day. However, I also think it might be a good idea to take short tech breaks. Do restarts and reboots. Walk away and go do a few chores here and there. Get a little distance and see if you feel better. Take some cleansing breaths while you stretch a little bit, tidy up a room, think about arranging the next meal, take care of a kid or a pet, stuff like that, and refresh your physical vitality. Hydrate while you're at it.
If you notice anxiety and/or depression cycles hit while you are holding or right next to tech, immediately put it down and move away from it. I'm not saying be afraid of it, I'm just saying control your moment. I always use tech every day, it's part of my life and probably always will be. I've been making jokes about being in line for the brain chip for years. However, unless you have something like a parent on hospice or some other reason to keep a phone on, turn it off while you sleep. Log off your computer at least once a day, especially if you're away from the house or sleeping. Just turn it off.
Your body has a natural electrical biorhythm that needs its own default cycle to be healthy. Every day we interrupt our biorhythms with electrical fields. We get used to low grade function and not moving around a whole lot, but over time our bodies and minds degrade. We are aging faster. We live in physical bodies on this world, and they are made to keep moving around.
I think the scariest part of all of this is the idea that tech giants worth billions can influence how we use our brains en masse, and possibly even directly impact our activities. When I see so many people I care about across such a wide amount of distance hovering over their tech saying nearly identical phrases at nearly the same time, what am I supposed to think?
My first opioid since the 5 mg shot of morphine in ER last year that sent me straight into PAWS hell. Post surgery medication this time sent me super floating straight into euphoria. I. love. EVERYONE. And now that I've been intro'd to high dose vicoprofen, I'm already planning strategy getting back off it before I abruptly run out. Can't break them in half because enteric coating, so trying to stretch them out longer in between. So far handling nearly 6 hours between doses now. I know they want my pain well controlled but I started with only 20 pills every 4 hours and that drop off is going to be pretty evil.
And my dreams are wildly unreal. Everything disconnected the first night, literally watching myself doing cartoon dishes in a cartoon house, everything in my dream was animated and blinking back and forth between minecraft. Cartoon, blocks, cartoon, blocks, I finally just got up for awhile. When I went back to bed I started having memory dreams from being under anesthesia, like when my airway was put in. Felt my teeth clonk, abruptly woke up. It was fake. Felt a knuckle bump on the top of my head and abruptly woke up. It was fake. Kept falling back to sleep and abruptly waking up as I relived some of the prep before the really deeper going under, so just staying up nearly all night was easier. Couldn't really function, so just played on facebook. Sorry if I flooded your feeds with super share, lol.
The really cool thing was pre-op before anesthesia. For the first time in my life I had absolutely no anxiety at all in a medical setting. I don't know if I finally just reached a state of too tired and didn't care or what, but nothing at all bothered me or stressed me out. I knew I'd be knocked out soon and was looking forward to it, answered questions over and over again like a string pulled doll. I managed to do the smile and eye contact thing, everything went smooth with interaction, yay.
Pre-op was sad for the people around me though. A much older guy on my right was there for lots of lymph removal around his face and neck, would be a long surgery, and he rattled everything he knew about American presidential history, all the places of historical significance he'd traveled. Heard quite a lot about Andrew Jackson before someone asked him if family members were there to drive him home, then he stopped and there was a sad no. Was anyone out there for him? His pastor... Did he not have family living nearby? A son and a daughter, and neither one made the time to be there with him. He's obviously end of life in a high risk surgery and his own kids weren't there. He stopped talking after that.
An older woman on my left just quietly cried. Not quite sobbing, but nonstop quiet crying. She was asked if she'd like family to come sit with her, said no. Was anyone out there for her? Yes, her mother and her daughter. Was she sure she didn't want anyone? She answered with a very miserable sounding quiet no. I guess the relationships were better held at a distance. She wound up having a very horrible surgery involving vulva repair after leg loss, and we wound up in recovery beside each other. She was right, both her mother and daughter were emotionally distant. At least they were there, though. She got a call from her husband on dialysis during recovery, and she asked how much he'd been drinking before dialysis, sounded like he made it to fourth in a bottle of fifth and it wasn't even noon. She got after him, hung up, rolled on her side facing me and shut her eyes, didn't talk to anyone. At least he called, and at least they were there.
Through all this I reflected on my own life. I have family who loves me. We're not perfect and quite a lot of our backgrounds are highly dysfunctional, be we love. each. other. We are there for each other every day, we talk and say I love you every day, we care about each other having sucky days. And I felt fine in pre and post op knowing I was loved and I loved my people. I was truly at peace.
It's really nice to reach a place in aging life where you realize you don't have any sadness left in you about relationships. I've reached out, done what I can to heal with my loved ones, let go of the rest. Every day I do my best to reach out to someone, be there for someone. I don't always feel reciprocated, but I know those are my own brain chemicals, not theirs. I know all I have to do is say "I need help" or "please help me" and they'll be right there. If I feel blown off, I don't sit and sulk like I used to when I was younger. I ask the TV to be paused and I start talking. We talk until I either get tired of my own voice or feel like I said what I need to say. No one yells at me, and I know my own tension is a burden so I try to reign it in. I don't put head games on my people because I know I'm the one with the personality problems from my mental health diagnoses, and I do my best to communicate clearly, effectively, and succinctly. I need you, I love you, thank you.
And then realizing all the changes I've been working on also helped-
I changed my diet in 2011 and started healing my diabetes damage
I started physical therapy in 2011 and worked on better mobility and endurance
I have been working with a psychologist on depression since 2007
CPAP has been wonderful helping me get my brain problems under better control as I'm learning to sleep properly
Being on gabapentin has helped so much with the nerve pain that my anxiety levels have gone down in general
Being able to see success in what I'm doing through stats gives me goals, something to work on, so I feel productive. I hadn't looked at stats on wordpress in a long time, so when I got a real question asking for help yesterday with a real problem, I got to work focusing on helping someone instead of whining about myself after surgery. And then I looked up my stats and was blown away. Aspienado is my most viewed wordpress blog. I don't like using wordpress and rarely check stats, and Aspienado is a work blog for my first book and mostly private. But what is available to read gets found, from all over the world.
I also spent much of today downloading and reading a new book that I'm writing a review on, and I want to do a good job because I know it'll be seen over time by thousands, including a handful of directors, producers, actors, and a worldwide fandom. It's important to feel successful doing real work, and opioids through pain have made it really easy over the last 24 hours to focus on work. This is how it was for years, opioids and pain. I remember feeling good about being a difference to someone even with so much pain. Lately I've diverted into genuinely enjoying playing and being creative on a game server with a family of very diverse people, some with their own physical and mental/emotional challenges, but it felt really good getting back into writing over this last 24 hours. I'm glad I have built all that up to fall back on. I've come from hermit to twitter gang to facebook groups to #clanfam. I have a large network of people who care if I show up, and I love seeing them online, as well. I even got a phone call today and was elated. Barry is glitchy, too, like me, and we're both working on reconstructing how our friendship started. Imagine years of memories just falling right out of your head. We both know what that's like.
And most of all on my list of how I've come to be at peace is my joy. I was depressed for so many years, at times quite severely, and I hung on so hard. Bunny's little face very day is my joy, and I'm glad I'm still here every time I see her. She's my baby's baby, my pet kid, my challenge, sometimes my boss, lol. It's very fulfilling when a little kid genuinely loves you. I guess I was needing that.
Through all these things I've been learning how to balance my natural innate negativity through embracing publicity, challenging my baditudes and praying to be good for other people. I have prayed for 2 things for myself through the years. Usually prayers are for other people or all of us or something, but 2 very definite things I have prayed for myself.
Years ago during my worst illness and growing ugliness (hair loss, weight gain, attitude affected by meds and pain), I cried and told God if I must lose everything else, at least let Scott come home happy to see my face. I looked pretty rough for a few years, and I had to stop fixing my hair and wearing makeup. I couldn't afford nice clothes with all the money going out for medical, and we went bankrupt before I wound up with full disability. I was so depressed. God, please let Scott be happy to see my face, because I don't know how he can stand to even look at me. Well, my hair still hasn't gone gray and I barely have a wrinkle on my whole face and I'm 56. I've been told that being on estrogen therapy for 20 years can do that, but was also told I'd start aging very quickly after getting off those in 2012. Not really holding my breath resisting, still can't wear makeup, but I've been able to grow my hair back out and Scott and I laugh together about something every day. I'm glad to see his face because he's my best friend, and I guess and hope he's still glad to see mine, even when I still have bad days and get very cranky with him, and he doesn't deserve it. My brain is my enemy on those days, not him.
I also reached a point where I prayed for healing. I was raised stoicly believing that to pray for one's own anything was vain, so I've never really prayed for my own well being. We are all here to learn through our suffering, right? Well, after some deep thought just before I met my latest doctor in 2011, just before Christmas of 2010, I prayed for healing. I had come through some very hard years of months and months of back to back viral illnesses on top of severe nearly unlivable nerve disorder pain, and I was reaching a point where I wasn't sure I could keep hanging on out of spiritual duty. I was breaking inside and could no longer hide it. I reasoned for a few days that if I really do pray for healing, I mustn't be stupid about it. God doesn't work miracles for us to toss it back. If I commit to that prayer, then I commit to true healing with everything possible I can do to help take care of myself. I wouldn't get better to be stupid about it and ruin my health again. One day I was ready and I prayed. The next day the holes in my pierced ears had both closed up. They had never done that in 20 years. I immediately decided it would be blasphemous to get them repierced and gave all my earrings away. From then on has all been positive progress. It has been long and hard, but I wound up with the best possible primary care doctor, got diagnosed immediately and fast tracked so the right specialists and physical therapy. Years of doctors before him were just struggles with very addicting medications and the long slow descent into the hell of premature aging, without hope.
So laying there in pre-op, I knew I am ready now. I've done what I've apparently set out to do in this life coming to this earth, and I felt at peace. I've learned how to heal relationships, how to take much better care of myself, how to network with other real people with success and hope in mind for all of us. And I want to continue that. I know I'll have brain crash days and be very mixed up and brain chemical spills splashing on others, and I hope they can keep forgiving me. I'm facing a future of dementia as I age, and since brain problems run in my family, I've accepted the idea that I need to keep brain training now while I can to be good for people before I lose more control of this wonderful machine I live in.
This is very long and right now my brain is tired. I've made it through nearly 24 hours of fairly high dose opioids and enjoyed it immensely, but soon I let it go again. Addiction is a bitch, protracted withdrawal will make me mean again, and I wanted to write these feelings out before I forget I had them.
Out of currently 1087 published posts, I have 150 with the word 'alone' in them. I tried to search for 'alone in the house', 'alone all day', and other alone phrases, but that's a lot of grind work for a blog this big. In case you want to search for anything in this blog, there is a "Search This Blog" bar in the right side column just beneath the featured post.
I used to love being alone. Many days I have craved alone time when I'm with other people. I didn't tell anyone for a long time, though, that sometimes I have days where I'm afraid to be alone. With myself. With Myself.
When I was still a young kid, I felt Me. It felt weird to feel Me. Sometimes on those days I would be very aware that I was a walking skeleton, or would sometimes feel like a doll I was moving around. I know nowadays that is called dissociation. To some degree it's very normal to click into an objective perspective and 'see' things from a different point of view. To do it constantly and feel stuck that way, like you can't get back 'in', isn't normal. I did that a lot as a kid.
When I dissociate on a bad day because extreme fatigue or pain spike or sometimes other things causing brain chemical changes (I'm hyper reactive to meds, for example), I lose being able to control how I present. I do and say things that seem confusing. For about an hour yesterday I felt like a box full of fireworks that started going off all at once, and I was experiencing all the emotions almost simultaneously or back to back without any coherent thread of why. There was no logical cause. I couldn't tell what was happening until I started writing, and pretty quickly, I think in about 10-15 minutes, I realized I had spiked into the nether regions of depression. My psychiatrist would like a harder diagnosis that I suspect would result in manic depression and possibly more, but since my psychologist monitors me and I don't seem to consistently go into the more hardcore 'manic' list of symptoms, the debate is left hanging without further testing. Yesterday, though, I definitely dissociated and once I realized it was happening, I was able to pull myself into focusing moment to moment. I did ok, made it through the rest of the day without incident, handled everything ok, made it to bedtime without any problems, at least on the outside.
I've mentioned my mom forcing me to learn to self monitor as a child through sometimes severe corporal punishment, which is now proven to be psychologically scarring and emotionally stunting. Because of that experience, though, I am much more objectively aware of myself than some people. (Not to be confused with the self UNaware state of autism spectrum, which is a social deficit/interaction problem.) I've met people who don't have a clue how to even see another point of view objectively at all, but mostly the people who can seem to be afraid of it. I ventured into objectivity at a young age and played with taboo in my head for many years, mostly as thought experiments that included every conceivable debate about God(s), right vs wrong, reality and realism, and much more. I can emotionally derail and catch myself fairly quickly with diversion, basically cutting the emotion part off. The part in between the derailing and the catching is spooky. People say I'm scary, and it's not because I'm violent so much as unpredictable, I think. I'd say the same thing about my dad because I got to see more of him growing up than my sibs, and I know his cognitive rigidity is his way of not derailing.
Personally, I know I can rely on myself to never cross certain lines, but dissociating is one of those things where you can't always see where the lines are. It's important to reach out and start dealing with real as soon as it starts happening. It's important to be honest and let people know I'm dealing. Trying to hide it never turns out well in the long run. For some people, it's a very short run because they commit suicide or start killing people, and I can tell you from the inside of that state of mind that there is no logic, no red flags, nothing stopping a dissociated person from living out a nightmare and never realizing what they're doing.
People don't like talking about this stuff. It's pretty common, because it's a reflexive survival tool the brain uses to get through something difficult, and some of us do it all the time without even realizing it. Some people cover it up with med, drug, or alcohol use, some people simply have a line of 'reasons' ready, some people just pretend it never happens, like don't talk about it and don't rock boats kind of thing, and then bringing it up is super awkward and makes things worse.
I am #aspienado and I don't want things to get worse. I am using #transparency and #honesty to talk about my stuff, and I keep using public social medias and a game server to keep my balance because it's hard for me to talk on phones and I don't have real life friends or family close by while @bonenado is at work.
I talk about being broken, and I say that we're all broken to some extent in some way or another, and I think 'kindness is logical' is a good belief to hang onto when all else fails me. I can stop immediately and ask myself- What am I doing right now? What do I want? How do I get what I want? Is what I'm doing to get what I want breaking anybody?
Breaking each other is a way of life in many religious and political systems. It's very effective. The better option, though, in my opinion, is kindess. It lasts longer. No matter how I am feeling in any moment, even when everything is black and stupid, I believe Kindness Is Logical.
Aaaaand someone beat me to that hashtag by just under 2 months, lol. That person is promoting 'love is hate' and sexism. Let's see if I can change that. I'm really tired of doublespeak.
Don't even ask me where this stuff comes from, but phrases pop into my head unbidden and so far out of the blue sometimes that I have to drop everything I'm doing and google search just to see if it's a thing. Today's weird brain blurt phrase was "When the whole of Montana is screwed...", and my first thought ok, was that whole or hole? Because if there's a hole in Montana and it's on fire (i.e. wildfires), it would be screwed. You know what? There's really a Big Hole Valley, and sometimes it gets screwed. Apparently wildfires happen every little bit around there.
Sometimes I imagine myself senile in a nursing home just blurting out off the wall phrases. My only guess is that I'm somehow plugged in to the astral hive mind or something and hear random gibberish, like eavesdropping. We hear our brains talking all the time, right, they're processing on the side kinda like we do in dreams, but mine really is a continual mashup of stray narratives. Anyway, this is where it all led me to in internet searches today. Relative or not, it's all interesting. This is what I got looking up 'astral shared mind'.
You're on your own if you really want answers. I just blitz my way around the search list and then go back to what I was doing, which today is switching between minecraft and chores around the house.
I know, if anyone's been paying attention, I've been flattening out another euphoric episode last few days. Pretty sure the new BP med has triggered it. Brain chemicals are funny things.
Continuing this week's coffee surprise theme, I forgot to get the grounds ready last night, @bonenado stumbled out and half blindly put the water on anyway, I stumbled out and cleaned all that up and made actual real coffee while he was putting his contacts in, and my entire coffee operation looks sparkly clean and brand new now. Coffee is a tad strong, but I'm needing it. I forgot that one doesn't just cut off a medrol pack and had a funny afternoon contorting over chairs on ice packs. Blood pressure came down beautifully, though, so I broke the rest of the days' pills in half and took them and then actually slept more than 5 hours. (15 total now in 3 days, yay!) I'll have to remember the 'in half' thing if I ever do this again. I have never tapered well off medrol. I think in past I had to break pills and drag it out a few days at much lower doses.
Wo, was looking up funny memes and when you click this back to source, I think that gobbledygook means it got censored or something. I love it because cheese. *runs off to get some cheese*
Other very stupid and laughable things give that some extra laugh heft, but it's not Pinky stuff, and even though it would boost reader hits galore, that's not how Pinky rolls. I've decided I'm content with my page opener enthusiast, and btw, it's not you, person who commented last time I brought that up. Different country, sorry.
*cheese wafts into brain*
This kid.
They recently moved their wiki, looks nice. I think it's important to share that I'm capable of making $50 in one day off punkins now. I doubt anyone I play with reads that, so no one knows what in the world I'm talking about. When a moderator says they're going to tear down their operation and look into trying your style and then everyone comes out with 'come see my auto-farm' (I don't even auto-farm), you know you've arrived.
Ok, clicking brain into place. After a 2-month hiatus, I did a money and calendar sync yesterday, everything still holding even after a long-term set up and no peeking kind of thing, yay! So even when I feel like brain fail and can't deal, I can trust myself to make sure it doesn't fall apart. That's been a long time coming. The dissonance between how I feel I'm doing inside and how I'm really doing outside is growing, so I'm getting really good at faking or something. I don't actually live the daily faceplant fail that used to be my modus operandi, even when it feels like I do. My neurologist did a short term memory test on me, told me to remember apple, table, penny. A little way into the exam I blurted that I was frustrated that I could remember apple and table and not the other one (having pictured minecraft apple and table, right?). He said coin, I automatically said penny. I haven't forgotten them since, and my memory is actually very good for someone my age, despite the very real brain fail I've been through. However, everything my life is like that, stuff falling out all day long and me staring at empty slots wondering what was there. I'm just really good at dealing with it because I've lived this way so long. People still say "Remember the time when you exited onto the wrong ramp and went down a highway backward?" They still let me drive. Anyway, I think minecraft, and particularly the added interaction on Mo Creatures is helping me retain, remember, and stay on track in the background more amid constant disruption, so my brain feels much more agile than it used to.
Another player named a villager after me. 😄
The headache is strong with me today, nothing terrible (yet, hopefully topping out as we speak), so I'm going back to bed. Who knows, that might just work.
Conking out for 10 hours after one meets for consultation in a sleep study clinic isn't just irony, it's sorcery. >=l Pretty sure they sprinkled some kind of essence or dust on me when my back was turned. I think 10 hours is like a once in 5 years phenomenon for me.
That being said, I can barely move or think. Sorcery. It's like witch potion in minecraft.
I asked about and was told there are 2 main kinds of apnea, one does affect REM (vivid dream recall) and starts in the brain, so you can imagine I'm extremely curious to see whether they can catch that happening since I've been doing this since I was a small child with the dream recall, and going through entire years being terrified of sleeping, so I pushed my insomnia to the limits by remaining awake and alert at all costs even to the point of drinking other people under the table or being medicated out my eyeballs. This last couple of years are the first I've SLEPT consistently and fairly well in nearly my whole life.
That being said-
Last night I was an aging kitchen and laundry (it felt like) overseer in a large gentleman's Chinese brothel, and I'm not talking like in the movies. This was real grunge behind the scenes stuff, very realistic. I knew the entire building inside and out, I knew all the people who worked there, and even though I wasn't a boss, I was respected because I kept order.
But this evening there wasn't order. A recently gone famous pop artist had just walked into the restaurant area with his new very young model bride, and one of the slightly aging performers (background dancer/singer type) in really pretty costuming suddenly threw an absolute fit, screaming how could he, how could he turn to someone else after all the nasty kinds of sex he had made her do with him (during which she evidently must've fallen in love with him), and since I was walking through checking table setting perfection and closest to her, I walked up to where she was nearly now screaming in the pop star's face (everyone's eyes were really big, bad public behavior, bad taste, bad luck all around, no one had ever gunned the place up but didn't mean it wouldn't happen) and put my arm around her waist and then walked between them turning her around. I didn't even look at anyone else, just her like she was the only one in the world and guided her away sobbing, sweetly reminding her that we don't break the rules here, and it's ok if clients do what they want, got her escorted into another area and handed her off, all the while she's having this emotional breakdown and I knew she was ruined now, and they'd either kill her or finish breaking her for some other kind of work. The best I could do was remove her from my floor before I would get in trouble, too, just being in her vicinity.
And then I woke up.
My psychologist is concerned that I might have some kind of REM apnea. I'm concerned about a side article called Is Brain Injury in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Reversible? My worst brain fail came during 6 horrible weeks of NOT sleeping during the worst headache I ever had in my life (nothing shows up on CT or MRI), and then 'all' that happened was bell's palsy and all that got blown off. I've been recovering from particular function glitches ever since, like being able to do simple math. Incidentally, several brain scans over time have only ever showed natural aging. Absolutely nothing else. (:edit: Forgot about empty sella, but that was present at birth.) Since my mom had hundreds of TIAs before she started having the really big strokes (she was an insomniac, too), you can imagine my interest in all this.
Back to the dream! Srsly, another seemingly 'not me' experience out of the blue, like I was somewhere else being someone else with no other connection that I can see to real life, TV, minecraft, reading something, overhearing convos, nothing. I guess the experiment will be to 1- confirm REM disruption, 2- attempt to treat, 3- see if I stop remembering dreams. My sleep study is set up for October. Sadly, no one cares about studying whether I'm actually experiencing someone else in another time and place. We're supposed to stay in our own quantum localities, after all, right? It's not unusual for us to fuzz out and be somewhere else, apparently. The problem is tuning our brains back to ourselves. We need to be here and now. We need to learn to be holistically healthy individuals while we are here on this earth in these lives because we have things to do here and now that only we can do.
I've been able to go through deeper sleeping more in the last 2 years than in many years before, cumulatively speaking. I know it's possible for humans to survive severe sleep deprivation, because I've done it, but I'm a mess. However it started and whatever the underlying cause (brain wave disruption is the likeliest for long term, plus now probably aging into regular apnea), I have never been able to sleep normally like I'm supposed to, and because of that I've successfully learned other coping mechanisms, like positive imaging, self hypnotic meditation, free associating (very necessary to 'let go' so the brain can mimic the dream cycle while awake), lucid dreaming (different from free associating), stuff like that. But as I'm getting older, it's getting harder to control this so that I don't wind up 'spacing out' so hard like when I'm driving, because that's way too dangerous. I arrive places and have no memory of how I even got there, sometimes no clue what day it is or why I'm even there in the first place.
I have a feeling I'm not at all alone, and stuff like this could probably explain numerous traffic accidents that people have. Since I've already rolled a car and experienced the brutal pain and have spent my life recovering and in pain, I'm probably more aggressively alert than a lot of drivers out there, and I very seriously do NOT ever want to feel that kind of experience again, so I think my brain gets stuck in the hyper vigilant part of fight or flight, and that's probably where my anxiety attacks in traffic come from, major PTSD stuff.
Anyway, they splashed some kind of potion on me or something yesterday, and now it's taking me 2 hours already to deal with getting my brain on and my body flexible enough to do a few things. I really don't like sleeping hard...
Music like this helps. Sometimes it's about the only way to calm my mind down. I might play this on my phone at the sleep clinic while I'm going to sleep.
My head doth protest. I quip that it's going soft, to crawl back to the primordial ooze it organized from and weep, and it tells me it needs more coffee first.
lol, click for cute blog
I used to be so tough, springing forth and getting right to work at 3 and 4 a.m. Lately I'm staggering forth, whining, and this in spite of a virtual A+ with the psychiatrist yesterday. Is this what normal feels like? My God, how do you people stand it?
Ok, I mock. It's been a very long month in a very long year. I feel like I've already slammed through 6 months, not 4. Every day I'm still amazed at how quickly I'm cramming things into my head now, miles of tutorials, hours of vids and streams and recordings, even actually reading a book in between all of it, and this on top of keeping up with my house and my errands. This month has truly sucked, and yet I still conquer in so many little ways.
I used to curl up on the couch at a certain time every day. I used to pace out my days in increments just to get a few things done. I used to hang on by my fingernails on a phone tethered to social media, and a few people thought I was already a machine back then.
I'm about to go full machine. I know, I keep saying I'm about to do something, have been saying it for years, and this is really no different, but my days have so drastically changed and I have become so capable that turning my attention to something produces results in one third the time now, or even less. Everything in my head is reorganizing, everything settling into a new rhythm, and I can feel serious flow logistics being tested. It wasn't that long ago that it took all the focus I could muster to produce content, and I did it out of sheer stubbornness.
The keyword yesterday was all the various incarnations of functionality. I have worked very hard to become a functional person, versus a dependent person. I am still dependent in many ways, and always will be. I need help with meeting my financial requirements, for example (for now- I still dream of shooting for some stars). My physical function, however, is nothing short of miraculous (and which I still work very hard for), my emotional function is probably the healthiest it's been in years, my cognitive function continues to improve (which was initially unplanned, and I'll probably always be glitchy, but I'm getting better at managing it), and my social function is at least remaining steady. By the way, both my psychologist and psychiatrist (back to back appointments this week) see my trend away from social media as a healthy one. (The diversion into minecraft is still up in the air.) I set up social media as a platform, it turned into a crutch, I know exactly when it started doing that and why, and I've reset back to my own path. Key phrase- my own path. As in not someone else's.
Speaking of my own path, this is happening. My followers know that I've recently very seriously downsized my twitter by over 1500 accounts, and that I'm not aggressively or even passively looking for more numbers. I understand that many people get asked to 'follow', but deeper waters across the years would reveal that I'm being asked to pledge my influence. I support a variety of fandoms, have even publicly supported a few funding drives, but I cannot support a site that directs actions I disagree with and then quietly solicits funds. I feel so strongly about this that I wrote about it and linked it across several medias, on SyfyDesigns on Facebook on grandfortuna, but I will be gracious enough to give my readers a chance to check it out and follow for themselves if they'd like. Just click this convo snip to reach twitter, and from there you can link to their dotcom in the bio.
I've made note in the past that a few Merlin fans have created the most brilliant and beautiful fansites I've ever seen, and they've inspired me deeply. I could be doing that same thing with Lexx, making a big beautiful site and quietly holding a donation jar just out of sight. I don't solicit fans. I especially don't use all the fan content I can find to promote my own fansite. In the past, when the Lexx fandom was more publicly active, yes, I rescued a site from utterly disappearing with its own blog (but you guys never saw me beg the original owner of the content to take ownership of the blog after all the work I did), showcased fan involvement (most of you never saw the flak I took for highlighting ostracized fans banished for not correctly playing the head games), and worked diligently to create diplomatic relationships with webmasters in other countries during raids and bombing blitzes that had most fans diving for cover. What webmasters of other fandoms may not know about me and my past is that I've already been threatened with lawsuits, already been asked by state police on a convention floor if I'd like to press charges, already heard every conceivable rant and wistful depression about bringing a show back.
Politely asking me to openly follow a fandom initiative hellbent on remolding the world to their wishes runs much deeper than politely just following back. What most of my Pinky readers (barring a few deep lurkers) wouldn't understand is the politically rippling message that would send across the other fandoms I support, and around the world. I am closely followed by several key webmasters in cities around the globe, and there are people who keep me on mobile notification day and night that you know nothing about.
So I sort of politely decline. I'll also add that after all the personal work I've put into my own emotional and social mental health, I'd invite a few other webmasters to do the same. This level of obsession is very unhealthy in my eyes, and to actually get so many people around the world worked up and following commands amounts to cult level leadership. I really don't want to see a bunch of Merlin fans drinking any kool-aid.
In case some of you think I'm being ridiculous, I'll just say back that I know a few private things that you don't about a few fans. It's neat that they collect all the things into internet scrapbooks and have the money or access or support to share real time travel stuff on sets and at airports and it's fun that we get inside snippets from unnamed unfaced people who are really inside and leak stuff out (I've been privy to a few really cool things), but when links go up for donations or a list of directives start rolling out, that's where I draw the line. Not accusing anyone of doing anything illegal, just saying I don't play the head games, and I don't expect fandoms to pay for what they see or get from me, and I especially don't require membership registration for anything I do. Everything I put on the medias is wide open to the public. I don't force lurkers to reveal themselves with forms and account IDs.
I won't go into why I don't monetize again. If you really want to know, here is my 'stat' tagged post list. I've turned down funding support and hosting several times through the years. I have bigger plans.
click for a delightful waste of time
Screeching around a corner into a wildly different topic, have you guys ever wondered where we get this automatic idea from that pandimensional beings either root for us or plot against us? Angels protect us (from what?), devils whisper in our ears (for what purpose?), fates taunt us while destinies call to us, and we oscillate betwixt guilt and glory in our tiny little minds. What in the world started all this?
I'm a Lewis fan, so of course I think The Screwtape Letters are the bomb, and Dr. Weston becoming a shell for that horrible evil thing in Perelandra was about the truly creepiest thing I ever read, but when it all boils down, I have found that the negativity of the dark side, as it were, can be brain-trained out of one's automatic response system. Why does the brain play these tricks? What is it about society that trains the brain to play these tricks? Is this a necessary survival mechanism for maintaining culture in general, and whose bright idea was it to incorporate it into mainstream cognitive programming of our species so many millennia ago? Because if you want to debate that with me sometime, I'd love to point out the all new brain training going in in current media, with Lucifer and the antiChrist and dark angels and whatevs being held up as entertainment icons. Is the general public now being calloused to the old ways through repetitive story bending, or is this a mass brain training at an all new level of doublethink? I see way too many 'Christians' and other spiritually minded people out there slurping up every sloppy splat of blood and angst they can get on the networks, and I'm wondering how empty some of you are to be this thrilled with 'new' ways of thinking. I'm watching the old open minded Star Trek fandoms being dumbed down to devil fans and wondering just who's in charge here.
I don't believe in accidents of fate, but I believe in synchronicity. One could argue this is basically the same thing, but not really. Just as the universe is webbed with dark matter and our brains are webbed with neural pathways, so the human race is webbed like a network around our globe. The pattern is the same, no matter how big or how small. We are all part of each other, and we are all part of the whole thing. It would be one thing if we moved in tandem with our own species, but we don't, we continually disrupt each other with negativity. Some postulate this negativity was introduced by dark forces that beguile and deceive us, some are convinced it's just part of our nature. The dark forces have been explained as everything from fallen angels and demons to aliens who once visited our planet and may still walk among us, and the nature explanations throw babies out with baths unable to take sides on justice and moral principles without begging all kinds of questions.
I won't go over everything I've ever read, which is quite a lot, going back thousands of years, studies from every conceivable angle (including science), and even the new medical philosophies. I'm just asking where it comes from. No one knows. It's still just a guess. Our brains haunt us, and we are trapped in them, an existential horror that no one can grasp enough to say why it's even happening. I personally think it should be impossible to be this aware in a universe where the only thing that happens is cause and effect. The observer thing only confuses us. I think we're still not looking deep enough. Our minds are still too tiny.
So, back to in the moment. What is right and what is wrong in any given moment and what we do with our time here is completely up to us. We can blame it on whatever we want, but in the end I think all our motivations boil down to whether we are selfish or selfless. I've said this before, a long time ago somewhere, that I think all our miseries really do boil down to this- selfish people ruin things, selfless people fix things. Human brains are natural problem solving machines. With good directives, humans do amazing things. With bad programming, humans do despicable things.
So I'm asking who is doing the brain training? Who is programming all this philosophical frappe into our entertainment? Who is breaking down the barriers and remodeling what is good and bad for our amusement? I'm not against it, but I'm a little surprised by the flocks that fall into it so quickly. I'm not seeing a lot of thought being generated about what our entertainment industry is slipping into our belief system cocktails. I'm all for shaking things up, but part of that shaking up needs to contain more than being upset that our favorite character died or that a show got canceled. I'm saying this across the board, not because of the Merlin thing up there. I'm seeing this everywhere, all around me. Are we really so spiritually bereft that we cannot handle dozens of icons almost being force fed to us (think about it- you pay them to let you beg for programming...) and then ripped away? We are practically drowning in heroic characters, or at least stoic ones. The fictional characters we idolize far outnumber the amount of people we know in real life now. We live in a dichotomy, lead double lives. What are we hanging onto, and why? It's ok to question what's in your head.
I've been able to slack off on the benadryl a bit this week, thanks to storms. Here's to hoping tree season is just about over. I'm tired of being pickled on H1 blockers.
Next week I start the hard stuff again, back in physical therapy.
I think I've mentioned a number of times I often forget what day or week (sometimes month) it is, and in the past during my worst brain fog years I've gotten lost in stores or driving around town and at one point felt I was making dangerous enough decisions in traffic to warrant legally becoming a non-driver. But a lot of that has gotten a bit better last couple of years, and it doesn't happen as much.
Well, it's happening again. A couple of months ago I couldn't remember which Walmart I was in between 3 towns and God knows how many Walmarts, took me nearly five minutes to reconstruct where I'd been just before and what I was doing that day (and what day it actually was). A couple of times lately I've out of the blue not remembered at all what building I'm standing in or how to get to a building I've been to several times.
I'm writing this down so I'll remember to tell the next medical professional or two over the next month that this is happening again. Brain scans have always turned out fine, and since this is familiar, I'm not really worried. I've been glitching like this since my daughter was about 8 years old, and that was way before the big brain crash and stuff. I'll never forget casually asking her one day if she knew what side of the road I was supposed to be driving on and then asking her if I was doing it right.
I think my pain level has been so high again lately that some of my light strings are flickering, like old Christmas tree lights when one bulb goes out and makes the connection bad for a whole length of string. Remember the old days, checking all the bulbs?
I haven't really said that much. Yes, I keep mentioning arms and hands. I'm still doing stuff, still getting my chores around the house done, still driving and getting groceries, still writing and playing minecraft and stuff. I'm sort of even doing more for longer, yay! It's nice being more capable. But I guess it's pretty overwhelming. I think what struck me was getting lost in my own house this last week. It's not the same as walking from one room to another and not remembering what you were just thinking (which is a legitimate and very common phenomenon that has to do with moving through doorways psychologically). I mean actually not remembering which direction to go to walk out of my house or something. It's one thing to get the wrong drawer when I want a fork, or open the fridge when I'm really wanting to open my oven, but getting lost navigating over a very short and extremely familiar space to a door I can't remember is another.
All my sensations get mixed up when I'm like this, too. I can't tell if I'm really hungry or not (saying this very seriously because I suddenly can't remember sometimes if I just ate a meal, and I have to watch my blood sugar) (I used to do this when I was working in the old days, too, try to punch back out for lunch 30 minutes after I'd punched back in from lunch), or getting whether I'm feeling hot and cold switched. I noticed this winter I kept feeling really hot until I put a sweater on, or really chilled until I took the sweater off. I've never done that one before. This is life with a glitchy nervous system. Doesn't even matter what it is. I'm positive for so many things that contribute to it- lyme, epstein-barr, bartonella, the car wreck, bell's (they're leaning more toward viral cause now), CMV, fibro... yes, we're all tired of hearing about it. But you know how like people wonder what they're old age is going to be like? That's what I'm saying NO to with everything in my power.
I think it's just that underneath everything, my arms and hands hurt so continuously and so much that I think I just turn my brain off so I don't have to feel it. It's like shutting down unnecessary programs to shunt off incoming overload so I can stay focused on what I need to do in the moment.
Need to try going back to bed now. I was so exhausted earlier that I conked and took a 4 hour nap, which is a dumb thing to do on the eve of setting the clocks forward.
~this morning~
-_-
And even with all that, we slept in. We never sleep in like this. I think it's the zombie fog. (And you can see Scott is kid proofing the deck so Bunny won't go plummeting to her grisly death.)
Even after all that junk I wrote last night up there, my brain is still zooming around way more than it used to. I like it.
Between the zombie fog and @bonenado computering, there's no way I can pull a youtube. See ya.
I took vengeance on my paper.li yesterday after the latest edition came out and restructured the content gathering. I really do loathe the new algorithm. Even with stricter, tighter controls (which I pay for), I can't seem to stop one or two people from hogging the entire paper every little bit, based only on the very simple fact that their particular tweets or shared tweets get the majority of faves and RTs that day on twitter, and the algorithm notices and prioritizes by popularity, which means there is no truly random tweet sampling, it's all skewed to who is tweeting or retweeting the most popular tweets, which is NOT what I want because it knocks out nearly everyone else on the same or alternating list who have actual awesome content. I'm not thrilled about how the leading stories are picked up, either, might hafta dig a little deeper and see if I can cinch up how the story leads land in the upper section. Also toying with doing a guest list once a week just to splash a big load of different stuff in one day. The dangers of that are, say, getting a cool scientist on a rant day (srsly? plz to stop being uncooooooool), or getting a filmmaker on a drunk day (facepalms g.a.l.o.r.e.), you get the picture. Anyway, I've got so many lists, several of them are business-y, might be fun to see what happens. Or not. But perhaps I can theme within a theme if I can rig the controls.
As I was thinking all this (in the shower, like corporate execs do, naked), I also thought how easy it would be to start another paper.li (for free) purposely grabbing my fave celebs on twitter, just make it all about the twitter buzz from the cream that's already risen to the top. It wouldn't always look cool like this, of course, but it might be fun. This one clicks back to the smooshed together survey.
We all know Groovy Bruce has a Shat crush. He likes it sticky, apparently. Anyway, not sure how soon I'll get on that.
Halloween pulled some cosmic trickery on my family. Most people start their Halloweens later in the day or near sunset, well, ours started bright and early before the crack of dawn after Twink texted us a pic of her very swollen face and off we all went to the ER. Her lips were pretty spectacular, stuff you see in lip injections gone awry on places like Buzzfeed, and her whole body was doing this lumpy neon pink leprosy thing. Couldn't have picked a more perfect day for it, right? I mean, Halloween. While mama got shots and more shots, a very busy Bunny and I took up hallway monitor patrol and probably put a couple miles on our matching neon pink Nikes, and we were so awesome in our fall fashion long sleeve autumn tees that all the old people smiled real big at us. And it was a good thing Grampa was there, too, fixing the kid stuff.
After the scary part was over, we all went home and collapsed back into bed and woke up to Sploit sending flooding pix from Houston, people knee deep out in a residential street kind of stuff, and then on twitter I saw all kinds of tweets about Halloween plans going soggy over several areas for lots of people. So, Happy Halloween, right?
We had rain all day here, too, and not one single trick-or-treater for the first time EVER, but that didn't stop me from donning my costume. Big thank you to Walmart for making it so easy this year with their 'Awesome Gramma Costume' loungewear selection, lol. I don't do fleece very well, though, no way I could actually sleep in that outfit without having to turn on the AC in 40 degree weather, so I guess I won't be wearing Pinkyween all winter like I thought. It's still cute, though.
A couple of Bunny and Batman pix rolled in, they were really cute. The 'cranky ninja' pose cracks me up.
We've been having another spectacular ladybug year. I call this one "Bob on gray frosting." We won't talk about "Bob bits in hair" or "Bob drives a CRV" or "Bob caught in human nostril". Bob is a really busy guy in a multiplex of universal being, which means he's really good at quantum flux. If you ever think Bob was a goner, you thought wrong. He manifests in the millions, kind of like the Master in Master Race on Doctor Who.
November in my house is pretty much about recovering from one holiday while we wildly slide toward the next one, with all kinds of stuff happening in between. There are birthdays and another baby coming to one of the nieces, and this is also the month @bonenado and I visit the cemetery and remember our lost babies, not between us, but from before we became our own thing. And everything gets crunched under football and deer season, and by the time Thanksgiving gets here, we really are a big chaotic mess. I keep a firm grip on visualizing hot chocolate and Macy's parade and turkey in the oven smells until it actually gets here while my reality usually turns into bumbling around forgetting things and getting lost in stores. Things have been changing so much this year, I'm looking forward to the what ifs of November 2015 maybe being a nicer experience than usual. It's really nice having my brain mostly back.
It was inspired by the visual art in a vid I shared last week, which reminds me of a sophisticated math render used with a several different techniques, and of course I love the pinks and blues and the way the visuals flow. I've been a Vanessa fan for years, regularly make it back around to her stuff on youtube. I don't think most Americans are very aware of her unless they are hardcore Johnny Depp fans, and even then, everyone's cool if you take Vanessa's side and still love Johnny.
Pinky blog is a cover for a lurker deluxe, a shadow in the dark. You guys have seen me work on putting my own puzzle back together in public posts, and I appreciate the respect that goes into staying back from the temptations to snark bomb my comments, or worse. The history I have with some of my lurkers is heavily tenuous, if I may wring a visual out of an uncommon word pairing.
Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay. I've mentioned a few times being around the block with blogging, saying I've seen it all. I've also said a few times that blogging saves lives. But I don't really say more than that, do I? Pinky blog is for my stuff, not other people's stuff.
However, part of my stuff, part of what has helped create who I've become, is other people's stuff. I've privately logged many hours in the past with a number of people who blogged about their stuff, mostly privately to friends-only. What I'm about to share is a delicate summary of some of the long, haunted nights I've been privy to with other people on protected (partially private) blogs.
Each of these sentences represents a summary of someone else's dark journey, and these are all different people who didn't know each other. It is by no means an exhaustive list. I will never forget these people.
I drank a whole bottle of benadryl last night. -teenage boy with terminal illness desperate for distraction.
I lost custody of my kids because I can't stop cutting. -mid 30s woman with severe depression.
I got this recipe from (***) and it's loaded with calories. -young medically anorectic 20s female with terminal illness.
I had to leave my psychotic mother before I was legal age and get my own apartment and a job. -young lady on double lung transplant list.
I've been stuck in a bed on IVs for so long that I'm losing hope. -middle aged woman with cancer.
I really like knives, is something wrong with me? -teenage girl with the most beautifully twisted dark goth blog I've ever seen.
I hate everything about myself because my stepdad raped me since I was 13 and my mom didn't do anything about it. -girl in her late teens trying to get a job so she could leave home.
I'm afraid to go to sleep for months and can't see myself coming back from the next hospital trip -a young lady with a terminal illness who died a couple of weeks later in a hospital.
I hate Christians and everything about them. -young man after leaving his parents.
My parents secretly performed 3 basement abortions on me and I'm so scarred up I can never have children. -mid-20s woman working on a counseling certification.
I'm so desperate for answers that I'll go to great lengths experimenting on myself and learning everything medically and scientifically related to every little thing that goes into my body. -middle-aged woman living with years of chronic illness and infection.
I know God will heal me if I just have enough faith. -woman who vanished from the internet and likely committed suicide.
I know the military is watching everything I do and just waiting for me to slip up. -military personnel hiding a schizophrenia diagnosis.
My wife hasn't let me touch her for years except to give her a massage, and I like to wear my jeans loose around my hips. -older man grappling with his mother raising him as a little girl, likely due to birth defect or botched circumcision.
link source riddled with bugs I no link u no get bugs
One of the reasons I keep telling you guys that you are not alone is because you're not. One of the reasons you feel alone is because those around you are either inexperienced and don't know how to see what you're saying or really talk to you about it, or because they have already been through so much themselves that they can't carry someone else's emotional load, or because they are in place where they must emotionally withdraw for a little while and recharge themselves. Please never take it personally if someone doesn't emotionally respond appropriately to the mixed and cryptic messages you are sharing. Just keep trying. There are loads of people on this earth, and internet makes finding someone who understands a lot easier and faster than the old days.
My core belief that I have developed from seeing all these things is that we need to share our stories so others can see they're not alone. It's not about trying to get attention or empathy or validation when someone is just whistling out loud in the dark. We must become the teachers allowing the inexperienced to learn on us if the world is to heal. In a world of block and mute buttons, it's becoming easier to share who we are in real time, and others can come and go as they wish without pressure to respond. Lurking through other people's living thoughts is better than hanging out at a library. Humans on the internet are becoming a living library.
Blogging helps. I have gotten through so many bad days knowing even just one other person would read my stuff. Simply just sharing your stupid bad day and how you got through it might actually save someone else's life. You might never know that a lurker in the dark found the thoughts you wrote down and made a decision to keep hanging in there because you did.
Sometimes I say "I love you guys". If we could see other people with the same empathy we have seeing abandoned, neglected, and abused pets, who knows how the world could change. I see the pain and sadness in the dark when I lurk around, and I just want to say I love you guys, so I keep blogging.
I know I beg off personal interaction nowadays with aspie's so aspie and talking about the saturation level I've been through in my own life. It's true, I'm barely capable any more. In the past while I was more private I was able to handle more personal interaction, and I've even been encouraged by other professionals to finish my master's and get my certification in counseling. I've chosen to be a public person and reach as many people as possible. Even when I hit walls, with a blog I can keep sharing my own stuff and help point the way for others.
Mental health is such a stigma. I wish my mom had been able to get more help without others fussing over her fails and poor decisions and not having enough faith, all that crap that strengthens the lie of masking who we really are. I fought the stigma myself for decades with doctors arguing with me over whether I'm a hypochondriac, and whadayaknow, it's all medically validated now. I know what it feels like to be dismissed and blown off and gotten after, even insulted by the people who should have cared the most. I've come through years of anger and the hate that those blow offs inspired and have arrived to the conclusion that I can't live like that, and that my own emotions were killing me. I've further determined that I no longer care who says what any more, and I would even be selfish to keep what I've learned to myself. depression, suicide, and Pinky's revenge
I'm sorry stuff is hard. And it's not a contest, sooner or later it gets really hard for every single one of us in one way or another. You are part of a world family, and all of us are going in the same direction and learning the same things. In the end, we will all be able to say we understand, and part of learning the understanding is walking alone in the dark for a little while. But please don't despair. None of us are ever really and truly alone. Somewhere on this earth someone wants to know your story from your point of view, because they want to know someone else gets exactly what they're going through, or what someone they loved must have gone through.
There are so many ways to share ourselves, from social media to volunteer services, from a variety of art forms to simply hanging out with someone watching TV for awhile. Even if you are the fabled crazy cat person, you are sharing yourself with other living beings.
I think I've figured out that the flash drive thing bothering me so much was because I went through actual fail for several years. One of the reasons I started hoarding info on tech was because the brain crash was unbelievably sucky and tech became an extention of my brain, holding elusive thoughts and glitchy memories in place for me. And here I am on the other side now apparently almost traumatized by the shock of having gone through it. I don't think I could really see the overall emotional impact until that flash drive fail happened.
It's one thing to cut off feelings (all my life) or even memories here or there (blocking is a survival tactic), but it's another to have systems fail because of viral infection hitting an already faulty nervous system and being left with glitchy old strings of Christmas tree lights. I spent years rebuilding and reconnecting through a haze of meds and seemingly neverending illness, and about the time I've finally started feeling like I'm patched back up and clearing the debris field, I go through a very symbolic memory crash with that flash drive. Thank goodness it was only a stick and not my brain this time. All the same, I've been reeling through several days of flash backs and emotions, and even though I'm actually quite up for the most part, I'm realizing I've never really talked about what it was like back then. The closest I came to being really honest in public was blinking in the light on my spaz blog. Up to that point, not a soul in internet land and all the fandoms I'd been in ever had a clue. No one who met me after 2004 ever met the me before brain fail.
As I've recovered my cognitive function, I've also recovered some memories and reconstructed more out of a pile of rubble covered in brain fog. This last year has been marvelous and thrilling like I haven't felt in 11 years. Anybody read Flowers for Algernon? That. That was me. Only I started off with this brilliant IQness and a nearly perfect ACT score and plummeted to the black depths of not being able to count a little bit of cash buying a burger. I asked bank tellers and cashiers to count my money for me for several years. I couldn't dial a phone number without help. Nope, not one sign of any kind of brain damage, or blood vessel problem, or cancer, or anything else, just function loss and some outlying trigeminal nerve damage. And even now, every time I get a simple cold virus or even just too tired teetering on the edge of flare up, I go all glitchy again.
I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I've gotten to wake up for awhile and everything has changed, and I've gotta get all over the program before I fall out of step again, because surely this can't last. I feel like I'm racing the sad, and the more I can look back and see it now, the harder I run. And I don't think this is an irrational fear. I've already got four really big strikes against me and was barely into my 40's when the brain crash happened. I can still hardly believe sometimes it's all coming back on again.
Memory glitch, loss, fail, whatever you want to call it is such an incredibly sad and lonely thing to go through. It's bad enough living with prosopagnosia and not remembering faces, but to not remember times and events and which holiday is coming up next is like feeling lost all the time. And how do you say this to anyone? How do you tell people in the wake of your impact that you're flying blind in a ship that lost its core memory? Big nod of thanks to Douglas Adams for providing frames of reference via Grebulons and Hactar the Krikkit war computer. The whole Janika Banks tagline thing is about surviving epic fail. "I asploded. I'm ok. Like the Central Intelligence Core of the Krikkit War Computer, I'm everywhere, in the mists all around you." Because that's what it's been like since 2004, leaving people in the aspienado wake of my brain fail impact. You guys realize it's the mice's faults for building Deep Thought in the first place, right? (I'm also epstein-barr positive from an actual mouse bite. How ironic is that.)
I feel like I've got to say all the things before I can't again.
(Lyrics- Anni B Sweet)
