Waste of Space and Time

Tonight I feel fundamentally flawed.

Having Friends.   Having a Relationship.  Success in Work.   Going Out.   Getting Married.  Having Kids.  Getting a House.


These are all things that happen to other people. I'm just one of those people who has something wrong with them and other people can see it and they avoid it, they stay away. They give each other sidelong glances when they think I'm not looking. They try to end conversations with me.

And I try so hard to be liked, it's my driving force in life. It motivates nearly every decision.

But I'm so deeply flawed I can't even find a therapist who will talk to me like I'm a normal person. They are stilted with me, condescending, treat me like I'm crazy. Treat me like I'm wasting their time.

I'm wasting their time.

wasting their time

wasting
 their time.

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Filling Time

Sometimes things will really hit me. Like tonight, maybe it's the super-red-moon or the fact that there's someone outside my window looking at the moon and I kinda wanted to go out and look at it too, but I saw myself in the mirror and I look like an insane homeless person right now. So I can't go outside.

Then I think: this is why I'm not married, it's because I'm fat and ugly and I never really mastered the use of clothing and makeup. Then I feel angry-sad and frustrated and I think of the people in my life who have what I want and how picking out bridesmaids dresses with my sister is super frustrating and awkward because I'm so hideous. Then I think about other frustrating things like my job and how this one coworker is always interrupting me and talking over me to tell me how 'precious' and 'adorable' it is that I have a backbone over some issue or another, and then I start to see red. I get the tunnel vision and I tense up and wander angrily around my apartment, looking for things to eat.

My body image issues have been pushed up-front with the bridesmaid dress thing. Trying on dresses with my sister's other, thinner bridesmaids made me feel very on-display. Plus, my sister dancing around my size issue is like an old white man trying to pander to a minority crowd. She will never really get it and she makes these terrible, cringe-worthy comments. I had to come up and tell the sales-lady that the corset they gave me was two sizes too small, and I made a joke about it that I thought was fairly funny - the saleslady chuckled. But, I look over at my sister and she makes that 'tsss - oh' face and I think: what the hell?

Sometimes I hate my family. I know I can be rude sometimes, but I don't treat them the way they treat me. My rudeness is just repressed rage that comes out in little bursts so I don't literally explode.

So I decided I needed a break from family for a little while. Except, my sister keeps texting me about wedding stuff and I keep thinking about it because I'm not good at letting things go.

AND work has become 100% more stressful. Having staff is the worst. I'm getting frustrated with a few people who are not treating me with respect and taking me seriously.

My work environment is very informal, so some of rage-y Jane is starting to show herself. I'm getting a little too comfortable and a little too stressed, I think. I'm a quiet person and I don't have a lot to say most of the time but when I do want to talk, I expect people to listen. Because it's my turn, I listened to them and they should listen to me; that's what's fair. But certain people at work like to interrupt me or talk over me and not let me speak. And that is one of my biggest pet peeves ever. So... last week I just kept talking, and cut them off when they cut me off and did what I had to do to say my piece. But it did not feel good at all. I felt angry and disrespected and dirty. Polite conversation is my thing, I don't like what I have to do to talk them. I mean, it's not like I yelled or anything but it would be nice to find a different solution to this.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this post really has any cohesive point. Maybe just that I would like to begin separating my personal and professional lives a little more, now that I'm beginning to have distinct differences there. And, focus on work during work time only, so that I can try to cut down on some of this extra thinking about work that is not productive and just angers me. If I can make my personal time more fulfilling then I'll be more refreshed to deal with work stress.

I went on two dates with a guy, but that didn't go anywhere and wasn't very eventful. I've been going to play board games at this couple's house who I met though meetup.com. I was going to a game night at a church but recently have just been gaming with this smaller group at their house. It's been pretty fun. Kinda stressful at times, because I'm not used to having friends and socializing in a non-work setting. Especially awkward was when they were talking politics, partly because they all seem to be republicans and I'm a democrat. But, they seem to like me so far so I'm trying to keep that going.

I met up with an old friend from high school who I had a falling-out with in college. We caught up and I'll probably meet with her again. (The falling-out was partly over religion. Hooray, religion and politics - worst topics to discuss with people, ever)

I started counting my steps when I work on Saturdays since I do a TON of walking, and I'll count it as an exercise day as long as I reach 10,000 steps. I did 23,000 last Saturday and at least 15,000 yesterday (I forgot to check again at the end).

So, I guess that's it. Miscellaneous update about stuff.

Jane                

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Angry at the Parents

I'm feeling very disappointed and just hopeless that I'll have a good relationship with my parents. I found out this weekend that, although my dad had found out through the insurance company that I was diagnosed with depression when in college, he never told my mom. And then I told her, and her response was pretty underwhelming. I expected she might be angry at my dad, I thought she might want to talk to me about it maybe even apologize for not being there for me.

But there was none of that. She just carried on like I had said nothing. She even had a great opportunity to talk to me alone about it, and she didn't say a word. 

Then I had an argument with my dad. We are switching cars and I signed over my title to him and now he's saying we need to switch license plates. He's a terrible communicator and I just can't believe he really understood the person at the BMV because how can you take a plate off of one car and put it on another? So I said that I don't think that's what the woman meant and he started to get angry and said, 'well, i don't want to buy new plates!'  

And it went downhill from there. First I've heard that we'd have to get new plates, and if he was so against it, why did he insist we sign the titles now in the first place? This was just something i'd been doing to humor him, because he wouldn't leave me alone about it, I don't have any idea why he wants me to have the title to this car, they're both his cars and even when I've had the title to one of his cars, he treats me like he still owns the thing so I really don't give a shit. I'm saving up to buy my own so I can be free of his insanity.

So I left pretty angry and my mom was like, 'let's make a plan to go walking next week,' and I didn't make any commitments because spending time with them any time soon is the LAST thing I want. I am at the point where even thinking about them stresses me out enough that I'll want to abandon all healthy plans and go home, curl up in bed with some chocolate. If they call or text me, I'm mad for days. Who knows how long it's going to take to recover after these interactions.

I just want to forget these people exist for a while.

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What Trust Doesn't Look Like (TW-domestic violence)

Saturday night he had gotten drunk and violent. He threw things and threatened to hurt me. He was acting literally like a monkey, jumping on top of the couch and tearing the cushions off. He cycled between yelling, rocking back and forth on his hands and knees on the floor crying, throwing things around, and talking to me in that low, threatening voice. He also spoke to people who weren’t there.

I tried to help him. I had never seen anyone like that before, much less someone I loved. I tried to talk to him, soothe him, and give him something to throw up in. But he threw it back at me. When he went to the bathroom, I ran quietly up the stairs and away from him, shutting a door in between us. I didn’t want to leave because I still thought somehow I could help him. But I didn’t go back down until the morning. His grandmother actually asked me to leave, but I said no,  I want to help him through this. Then she gave me some blankets for the couch and went downstairs and talked to him sternly. I thought that I wish I could talk to him that way and have him listen to me.

On Sunday morning, I told him what had happened and he couldn’t remember any of it. He readily promised me that he wouldn’t drink at all if we were alone together and he would just drink with his friends.

Monday night he brought three double-size beers over to my apartment. I don’t know what they are really called, but I know that each one was the size of two normal beers. I was in shock and fearful.

“You can’t drink those here.”

He was immediately angry, “it’s just beer! It’s not that much!”

“You promised me you wouldn’t drink when it’s just you and me.”

“I had a hard day at work, I deserve a beer!”

“But there are three of them, and they’re gigantic. Just have one, ok?”

“I’m a grown man.”

He sulked and acted like a two-year-old for the next few hours, while I was a ball of tension, wondering what I should do if he got drunk and violent again. In my own apartment there was nowhere else to go, no one else to help me. I could put my cat in a carrier and just leave, maybe go to my parent’s house and hopefully he wouldn’t destroy too much of my stuff. 

Finally, we got to the moment when he might have one of the beers and I said, “You know, it’s just that you promised. You gave me your word that you wouldn’t drink and now you’re breaking your word.”

I knew that would get him, since he’s always going on and on about how honesty and ‘his word’ is so important to him, even though he was still able to cheat on me and go out with other women while I was still lying in his bed. 

He didn’t have any of the beers and he took them with him when he left. A good idea, since I would have poured them out. 

Before we broke up, we had a couple other uncomfortable nights with his drinking. Once when he put his arm around my neck in what maybe his drink-brain thought was affectionate but felt to me like a choke hold. Thank god for that self-defense class. 

He told me once during these awful nights, “The biggest reason I know we won’t make it is because you don’t trust me. You’re afraid of me.”

Well, asshole, maybe you should behave like someone who can be trusted.

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Dealing with Dr. Dickhead

A few posts ago I wrote about was what I was thinking before my appointment with my psychiatrist in February, when it had first been brought up that I might have Bipolar Disorder. That appointment was a turning point in my treatment.

For the worse.

This is what I wrote in my journal afterwards;

Cried a lot after meeting with Dr **** because he was dismissive and very disrespectful. I cried on the way to work and tried to text G and when she gave me a very PC answer and said she couldn't talk I cried more because it seemed like no one was treating me like a human being. At least the girls in the psych office were nice and helpful. I was so frustrated. Dr **** just wanted to write me a script for lithium and not listen to anything I had to say. But I sat in my car when I got to work, waited until I could speak clearly, and called my insurance company and got a referral for a new psychiatrist. I called their intake line and hopefully they will call back soon. I will not see Dr **** anymore and I want a second opinion on my diagnosis from someone who won't tell me “I don't want to talk about that anymore” when I’m trying to list my symptoms, or “you're OCD, people with OCD tend to worry a lot about new medications but you'll just have to trust me” and “every medication for bipolar causes weight gain, do you want me to give you a different medication that causes weight gain?” when I brought up legitimate concerns about the lithium.

I'm an intelligent person and OCD or not, I deserve to be listened to when I ask questions, not dismissed! And no, I will not just trust you, you old, white dinosaur!

…..

He constantly interrupted me, told me to stop talking, and raised his voice to me several times. Here I thought psychiatrists were supposed to be good listeners or at least caring individuals. Not Dr Dumbass. I got the feeling I didn’t even need to be there really except to pick up whatever script he had decided on for me. I basically had to shove information down his throat, but trying to force him to hear my symptoms was like trying to search for extraterrestrial life by hiding under a blanket and trying to ‘think’ my message to the stars.

After talking to my friend and some people from my online support group, I decided it was best to go with Dr Fucktard’s treatment plan for the time being, although I dropped my Cymbalta dose more slowly than he said to. Cymbalta has little white beads packaged in a capsule and there are 200 beads in each one. I took 60mg and I needed to taper off to 30mg, so every 5 days I took a few more of the beads out of the capsules. I went down an eighth of the capsule at a time, and then once I got to 30mg, I started taking the Lithium. 

I have a mail-order pharmacy but I wanted to be sure to talk to a pharmacist when I got the Lithium because there are some warnings online about it that worried me; such as the weight gain, making sure to eat salt, drinking more water, and not sweating??

Since I could get a sixty-day supply from Target for $10, I just went to Target and not through my insurance for at least the first supply of pills I got, so that I would be able to talk to the pharmacist. I suppose I could have called my mail-order pharmacist but I’ve never really done that before and I preferred something this important be discussed face-to-face.

So far, officially, I have Bipolar Disorder, OCD and Social Phobia. 

I also believe I have Anxiety, Dermatillomania and Binge Eating Disorder, although I wasn’t able to talk these over with Dr Loser, since he was done talking to me.

I think when I fall hard into depressions it’s usually because I’ve slipped and there was no one to catch me. I talk a lot about how lonely am I and it’s really key to my disorder. When the people who are supposed to care for me and help me fall through, that’s when I fall down hard.

 

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Newly Diagnosed, Confused and Anxious

The next few posts are going to be ones that I wrote this past winter and never got around to publishing. This is a post I wrote in February and didn't publish.

I don’t know what I’m writing today. Perhaps just an update. I’m one day away from seeing my psychiatrist and possibly getting my meds changed. Hopefully for the better and for the cheaper.

I’ve been so anxious lately, though, I’ll definitely have to mention that. I got a little behind on my work so for the past few work days I’ve been anxious in the mornings to the point where my throat closes up a bit and it’s hard to breathe. I can usually take deep breathes and breathe through it, though. It takes a while to calm down and then I’m yawning the rest of the day. I’m getting plenty of sleep; I’ve been going to bed regularly at 10:30pm (then it takes about an hour to actually sleep) and then getting up around 7:30am. It’s all part of my effort to get to work on time.

So, I’ve been sleeping ok, waking up pretty well, and getting to work mostly on time. I’ve been taking my meds and even tracking my moods with moodtracker.com. I like that website because I can send myself reminders to track my mood, I can track multiple times a day, and even report mixed moods. I’m not sure if the anxiety has always been there so often or if I’m just noticing it more now that I’ve been tracking my moods.

Anyway, so I wrote down some stuff to tell the psychiatrist tomorrow to help him diagnose me correctly and I’m going to list them out here to help me organize my thoughts. Shit, I forgot my notebook. Maybe I can do it from memory?

Happening now

·         Anxiety most days; throat closing up, shallow breaths

·         Binge eating; out of control cravings when I feel like I just have to eat and eat NOW! Usually chocolate, cookies, donuts, etc. I will go out to the store and buy snacks if craving is strong enough. Definitely interfering with my weight loss efforts.

·         Peeling skin off the bottom of my feet. Sort of like the need to eat, sometimes I feel a need to peel skin. It’s really gross, my feet smell bad all the time and sometimes it’s difficult to walk because I’ll keep peeling them even after they are bleeding.

·         When I leave in the morning I check that the door is locked at least 10 times, sometimes more if I’m feeling more anxious.

·         I have very vivid dreams that can be violent and disturbing. I have been raped in my nightmares several times.

·         Sometimes my dreams are so real that I think they’re memories.

·         I’m often depressed; it doesn’t always last all day. Lately I have been anxious/happy/elevated in the mornings but then down in the afternoon and evening. It hasn’t been super bad lately (the past week).

·         I did feel ‘sped up’ when I first started Cymbalta, but I didn’t report the symptom because I thought it was just a really good antidepressant. Also, I liked the feeling and didn’t want it taken away.

·         Sometimes I have a lot of projects; I make huge lists of all the things I want to do, but then when I feel down again I don’t do any of those things.

·         Last year, about August or something I met this guy and slept with him on the third date, which is very unlike me. I wanted to sleep with him on the second date and I even told him we didn’t need a condom (but he said no because he wanted to be safe and he didn’t have any condoms).

Happened in the past

·         Extreme mood swings during college that happened very quickly. Feeling like I can do anything to despair within a minute. And then back again

·         Was a point when I couldn’t read anymore in college; my eyes would just slip off the page

·          Again, in college, outbursts of violent anger. I felt out-of-control; I hit things, threw things, kicked things, broke things, yelled and screamed.

·         Sometimes I could get suddenly ‘rage-level’ angry at someone just because they were near me or slightly in front of me. I yelled at my sister a lot sometimes because I felt like she was getting in my way on purpose to block me from a conversation or keep me excluded or away from whoever we were with, usually my mother.

·         Felt like people were purposefully excluding me a lot of the time. I felt like people were always talking about me behind my back or watching me.

·         Sometimes I thought there were cameras watching me (middle school and elementary school)

·         Once, I had a hallucination that spiders were crawling all over me when I was in bed, but I’ve always thought of that as a one-time thing. Just a weird thing that happened between waking and sleeping.

·         There was some time where I thought I had been in space (elementary school/middle school) but I had just dreamed it.

·         I used to think that if I didn’t worry, something bad would happen. I was very superstitious and I felt like if I had certain thoughts, they could make things happen.

·         Racing thoughts and ruminating thoughts so bad I would use TV to literally and purposefully ‘stop’ my brain.

·         At one of my friend’s parties when I was younger I was ‘the life of the party’ (elementary school)

·         Once, at a dance in high school I just went up to a guy I didn’t know and asked him to dance. But usually, I could barely talk to anyone.

Right now I’m thinking he’ll say ‘Bipolar with OCD, anxiety, and Binge eating disorder’. I’ve read that Bipolar + Binge eating is really complex and behaves differently than other Bipolar types and can even be more severe.

Shit, that’s a lot of stuff and I don’t think it’s even all of it. That list covers most of the things I remember that might be important for diagnosis. Except for some things that I’m not sure I can admit to anyone. I’m still not sure I’m going to tell him about wanting to sleep with a guy without a condom.

I’m also a bit nervous because my psychiatrist (pdoc) is a much older man and I’m not sure what his opinions are. I’ve had a lot of experience with older men and how they treat me like… well, like a little child who doesn’t know anything and doesn’t even deserve to be listened to. I’m not sure older men even HEAR young woman like me when we speak to them. But, my therapist is in partnership with my tdoc and he is also an older male (although not quite as ancient). Seriously, my pdoc looks like he’s mostly in the grave now, he’s just sitting up inside his coffin, pecking at his computer with his pointer fingers.

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