callunavee

[callunavee]

I need to rethink some of the things in my personal life. I’m having fun at the moment but I think that forcing myself suddenly into all this social contact and making myself vulnerable to new people isn’t the safest choice. I am a deeply traumatized person. I do not trust other people on a core level. This is worse when they haven’t established themselves as regular parts of my life, or are attempting a closeness that often leads to complete abandonment. The people that were supposed to be there to provide safety and security when I was learning how to relate to other people were abusive and neglectful. I was treated like a burden and never given the help I needed for my neurological issues. I’ve had to fight my entire adult life to survive in a world run by and made for people that have always felt alien to me. I know it’s why I’m often passed over for promotions, raises, and jobs I’m perfectly qualified for. The more I get over being rendered unable to speak by the terror of having my survival dependant on doing a confusing activity that nearly always goes badly, the more I realize I’m often inappropriate and too masculine in my speech habits to really convey how empathetic of a person I really am. I just get called harsh, savage, and cruel when I’ve intentionally left all subtext out of my speech because we’re discussing facts. I guess the question is whether I want to develop my social skills now that I understand just how off I am. 

[callunavee]

I really wish that when people hear about something odd, or frightening, or confusing they'd look it up and when relevant see what researchers have to say instead of opening their mouths.

[callunavee]

I read up on avoidant abuse today. I've been putting some thought into why I've never been very boy crazy while still being attracted to some cis men. I realized that with men I tend to lead with my faults and put up walls around getting to know me because I'm expecting to get ditched with no explanation. My first boyfriend ghosted me before that was a thing. He saw someone naive, an outcast no one cared about, and used it to sleep with a minor then bail when she wouldn't play along with the emotional abuse. The next one I still regard as a sweetheart, but he couldn't handle my anxiety disorder. He suddenly withdrew too, but had the decency to turn up after a few days, apologize for his behavior, explain he'd spent those days conflicted and break up with me in person. He's someone I'll still speak to. Then there was the rapist, I don't think I need to elaborate on my year and a half nightmare. I'm the one that left. Then there's all the ones I let in my life too easily that were seriously just putting up with the weird girl to get some ass. I wouldn't have an issue doing those things with people that like me as a person enough to look me in the eye, chat, and occasionally want to hang out once it's off the table. Unfortunately, a handful of smoke bomb wielding ninjas ruined that. And it all keeps coming back to my parents. My mother was outright hostile and I tend to let people that come on strong and want someone to hurt/control get close to me. My probably autistic father was just cold, unavailable, and sees nothing wrong with using the silent treatment to control people. He left when I was five and I spend my childhood trying to get my father to love me while he openly replaced me with a new family. I always viewed him as the "nice" one, and tended to let similar temperaments use and discard me. I never felt loved or safe as a child. It's hard to stop looking over your shoulder

[callunavee]

I didn't know until recently that most people don't see patterns everywhere. Most people don't notice a blade of grass and for awhile it's the only thing in the world as tbey memorize every pattern and every detail. It makes me a little sad to think of because there's so much beauty I wish I could share

[callunavee]

I got angry for the first time in weeks. I'm pretty sure it was a flashback. I woke from a nap that happened way too late, was groggily looking for my huband and Laurel suggested I sleep in the office with her because the boys had shut us out of the bedroom. I felt my pulse race but my head didn't get cloudy. Things didn't start skipping like an old film projector and I didn't lose control. I went for the weed and it stopped. I just remembered how I used to wake up terrified and I'd call out for my mother. She wouldn't come because she'd be busy with her lover. I'd force myself through the darkness across the house feeling hunted the entire way. Then I'd get to her door and if I knocked they wouldn't hide their irritation.

[callunavee]

I was in one of my asshole moods today. I didn't feel angry. I didn't feel frustrated. I was just cold and I didn't do anything impulsive. I just talked about the thing on my mind and made a plan. I also backed away from an argument today. I just looked at the situation through the lense of all the sociology I've studied lately and understood the other person instead. I hope I stay this way. I just remember a few weeks ago crying and reading about lobotomies wishing someone would just do it. Now I feel what that surgery was intended for.

[callunavee]

So the new person didn't work out. I didn't act out or get clingy, it was just circumstances. I'm relieved in a way. I'm not reliant on anyone else for my sense of well being. I'm not even angry or hurt. Just a little disappointed that someone I can laugh that hard with won't be speaking to me anymore.

[callunavee]

I was feeling so much better. I stumbled on a med combo that crushed the anxiety. I can't get as angry either. It's a low dose of a tricyclic antidepressant and a beta blocker. My acrophobia is nearly gone. I went on two dates, transported myself at night, and spent time alone in an apartment with sex off the table with a guy I didn't know well (rape trauma trigger). I didn't freak out. It's been nice!

The downside is that the crazy isn't as managed as I thought. I started FPing the new guy. This is something I *really* don't want. What I want is to spend time with someone fun to be around that I'm not financially tied to that's not taking on a serious support role for my mental stuff. I just want to have fun and let things go in a natural non-codependent direction. So it's been a day of self reflection.

The more I read on the topic the more clear it is that the two major steps I need to take are to remind myself I'm not that little girl willing to do anything to keep Daddy from leaving anymore and to question these horrible insecure thoughts. I keep thinking that I don't deserve attention, that I'm getting written off as soon as logic enters the equation because my mental problems make me scary, and that there are all these physically repulsive things about me. None of this matches what our actual interactions have been like. More so, my value as a human being has nothing to do with whether or not someone that's caught my eye thinks dating me is a good idea.

That pain is in reality what trauma places in the void because my severely mentally ill mother abused and neglected me and my father gave the bare minimum of his obligation to me. It's about wounds I've never healed from childhood --- the insecurity that comes with learning to cook at 7 because you don't know whether your parent is going to feed you or not, or when they do everything's loaded with ingredients they know you're so repulsed by you can't choke down your food without gagging and vomiting. It's about my father replacing me with a new family while I was right there begging for his attention. It's about being forbidden from learning to drive unless I financed it myself at 15, buying a car with my own money at 18 then having it taken and given to my 16 year old step-sister for free. I moved to a city with decent public transportation and never learned to drive as a consequence.

I reject these people. They're not permitted to show up and sneer down their noses at me over the things I never got together as a direct consequence of their absolute failure as parents.They don't get to tie themselves to my advanced degree when they had fuck all to do with it. They sent me to a high school that never went beyond an 8th grade level education and encouraged me to drop out and get a low-skilled job at 16. (I finished high school and made up for the deficit on my own. )They don't get to come into my home and call me disgusting for liking girls each time I say the word "girlfriend," and they sure as hell don't get to call my relationships with people that have showed me more love and real support in the past two years than they have in 35 immoral. Everything good that has come of my life, and every act of compassion on my part has happened despite them. They can't fuck off hard enough.

Aaaaaaaad I feel better now that I know where that gross feeling is coming from. I can do this. I *am* getting better.

[callunavee]

And I'm lucid again. I'm feeling much more stable right now. I went on a walk and came across the friendliest bulldogs I've seen in my life. I listened to much more positive music than normal and stayed happier. It was a rough morning. I really need meds, but it's looking like 2 weeks before I'll see anyone. It's just when I'm too anxious to eat I'm at high risk for either a despair or rage episode.

[callunavee]

I feel the disease pushing Laurel away. I had a three-day episode where I picked apart her past until I found things to latch onto to prove that she’s a bad person. I tried to keep it in but she’s too fucking smart and picked up on the things it was about through context. We got into a fight where she yelled at me while I made myself dissociate like I did when I had to do children’s hair all day and child after child screamed in terror the entire time. I was terrified that I’d black out and get into a physical fight. The condition of us living together is that we both take treatment for our illnesses seriously and that we never have another physical altercation like we had six months ago. We both have problems that make us volatile. Anyone living with either of us will have to deal with restraining a crazy person. Through the episode, I found out new details of her past that conflict with previous ones. One thing, in particular, was something I’d connected to her on that turned out not to be true. This has been incredibly painful for me, and I can’t talk to her about it. She just talks over me and refuses to listen. I’ve had to accept that her memory, wants, and desires are all jacked up from DID. What I’m told at a given time is going to be colored by whichever personality I’m talking to, and the things I was told before they knew are going to be the things the dominant personality back then knew and thought was relevant.  I’m never going to be close to them by learning about their past. I’m simply never going to piece it together. 

[callunavee]

Today I learned that it’s not normal to construct mental timelines for friends and family filled with any and all facts they choose to share including relative times and dates of significant events, birthdate, height, and weight. Apparently, it’s even more strange to be upset by new facts conflicting with the old timeline. Whoops!

[callunavee]

I hope that the Earth opens and swallows the entire southern United States whole. I’m tired of sending money to a teen-fucking backwards shithole. Where I live you go to prison for fucking high-schoolers as an adult, not prom. 

[callunavee]

I keep reminding myself when I start to slip that we’ve agreed not to engage in that sort of thinking. It helps. It amazes me how much of my time is naturally spent on insecurity and judgment. The thing is that when I’m just open with people it becomes clear that the insecurity is really just my illness. It’s another set of lies I tell myself. When I don’t engage in it I don’t engage in judgment. When I stick to happy things I’m happier. That’s an important thing to not lose perspective of. 

[callunavee]

I wasn’t always like this. I didn’t wake up every morning with an anxiety attack. I wasn’t constantly trying to manage it. My diet didn’t consist mostly of fucking apple-sauce and sipping soup because I dry heave all morning whenever I have to leave the house. I can’t force solids. I try but I just can’t fucking swallow and I get sicker and sicker through the day. I had to stop taking the anti-depressant that had all but cured my migraines because of it. We don’t know whether the new med is going to work yet, so those are back worse and worse with the not eating. They made me sick, don’t care, and no one is going to make them care.

 I want the motherfuckers that victimized me to live with it. I want them to be afraid all of the time. I want them to have to wonder whether they’ll become to incapacitated to get through the day each and every day. There is no making up for this. There is no making it right. The city let them hurt me when I showed them all of the recordings. They admitted what was going on was illegal and a violation of the agreement made to get out of six figures in fines. I told them I was stuck there, for weeks at least, snapping and getting close to needing inpatient to avoid a violent crime. They knew this, and they knew the entire construction operation consisted of undocumented workers, all of which were being taken advantage of with long days, no safety equipment, and less than minimum wage. The guy with access to keys was entering and stealing from apartments. He kept entering ours and running away quickly when he saw someone was home. I‘ve never seen so many grown men shit their pants at the sight of a camera. None of this was enough for the city to enforce its own laws. I was told directly, by the city, not to report the workers. So I guess despite all this $15 campaigning and P.C. hero self-adulation we’re deep down really OK with slave wages now. Good to know.

[callunavee]

The most alienated I feel is when I'm in public desperately wiggling my feet in my shoes to manage my horrible anxiety because the stim I need, the one that works better than the drugs they like to toss at me is socially unacceptable. I'm too ashamed to do it in front of people that don't, even at home.

[callunavee]

Things I’ve learned about myself lately:

I need to stim for my mental well-being. Anxiety medications make me angrier. Stimming soothes me just as well as medication with none of the side effects and no rage in its place. 

When I feel explosive rage building up, or despair starting to spiral my body needs pressure. My husband and my girlfriend both do this for me with tight hugs or laying on top of me. I can do this for myself with a tight hug while I brace myself against something. 

I need to exercise if I want to sleep. I lift weight to exhaustion every night immediately before bed. When I wake up in the middle of the night I lift to exhaustion again. I repeat this 

CBT is one of the most valuable things a therapist has introduced me to. Since I’ve gone off meds I’ve been able to combine the techniques I learned for managing anxiety with stimming and pressure to manage irrational anger and mood swings.

[callunavee]

I found out about more rage blackouts today. I don’t know why my partners stay with me. I just want to go away when I find out about the terrible things I do. I want to protect everyone from me.