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[secretrecoveryjournaltymb]

12/11/23

The last few days have been pretty fantastic, in comparison to the rest of 2023.

I ran a lot of errands yesterday and stayed pretty positive all day today. I scheduled a consultation to bleach my hair, which is either impulsive and destructive, or an act of self-care. Who's to say. I'm excited anyway. I'm almost done getting all of the boxes out of my apartment from my recent purchases, and I don't think I have anything else in transit. (That's good)

So I guess everything feels pretty calm right now. I am coming down slowly, I think, from a hypomanic thing that lasted since March? With small bouts of depression mixed in. I'm not sure how long this relative normalcy will last. I won't be up to the full dose of my medication until sometime in January, so I just have to deal with it I guess.

In order to help reach a state of order and normalcy, I have some new rules for myself-

No vaping inside my apartment/office. Only in the car/outside. Count on laziness to get me to quit

No laptop or snacks in bed. Makes it way too easy to "rot" as the cool kids are saying.

Eat lots of snacks! - Apparently something that happens is you can stop hearing the messages from your body as well, so it's important to practice listening and figuring out what your body needs.

Be the person you need. My favorite example is if I'm really craving someone to just be there and sit with me in my darkness, then I have to do that. It's so hard, but accepting the sensation actually helps the feeling pass that much quicker.

Some background-

I left an 8 year relationship last November/December and went out into the world on my own for the first time, at 25 years old.

I suspect that my ex was a narcissist, but I also think it's hardly worth thinking about at this point. Looking back, I can recall several instances where I was fully convinced that I was "too weird", and I would need to change myself in order to be accepted. So, I spent a long time in that relationship feeling like I had no personality, wet blanket, y'know?

There was also some childhood trauma that I became aware of, nothing dramatic, just some suspected emotional neglect, so I'm thinking that when I was 17 and met Matt, I had already not been given the opportunity to fully develop my personality.

I went through the standard Anxiety/Depression diagnosis process when I was a teenager and landed on Bipolar 2 this summer. The medication seems to be helping.

I'd like to start a log that tracks energy level, overall mood, and self-confidence per day, or however often I can get myself to update it. I bought a large pack of colored pens to experiment with that.

I have to remind myself frequently that I'm actually doing a pretty good job taking care of myself, because everything feels out of control usually, for no reason. I pay my own bills, buy my own food, and take care of my cat with minimal difficulty.

I feel a lot of resentment for my parents for not doing a better job. I kind of wish they would just leave me alone at this point in my life. This is not a fun feeling, there is a lot of guilt associated here because I want so badly to believe that at least my dad did his best. He's the only constant in my life. Alcoholism is not a choice; it seems to be a generational curse in my family. Whenever I visit him, he makes casual references to it as if it's not that big of a deal. I guess that's a trigger. The worst part that I remember is when it was just my dad and I in Fremont. He was drunk most of the time and sat in front of the couch watching Columbo. I have wondered if I spent more time with him during this period if it would have helped. Another thing that's not really worth thinking about.

Leaving home while he was in the thick of his disease was heart wrenching, but he got sober 6 months or so after I moved out. So it turned out for the best, I suppose.

I'm not sure if my Mom loves me in a traditional way. I don't know much about her. The first time someone implied that she abandoned me/the family I remember breaking down, because I thought there was more to it than that, but I guess she had had enough. After the divorce, I only remember seeing her on holidays. I have a memory of picking cherries with her and Fred once, but she didn't seem to recall that. Little ironic.

My stepmom, JoAnne was involved for a little while. Her and my dad met when the family was living in North Judson, and after they married, we relocated to Valparaiso. A couple years later, JoAnne was laid off or fired from her job and got a new one in Omaha, so she took my brother Matthew out there with her to a 2 bedroom apartment in Bellevue; my dad, my brother Fred, and I stayed in Valparaiso.

I've been asking myself lately what kind of effect JoAnne had on my mental health and emotional development. I remember her as a very abrasive person, somehow very passive aggressive and confrontational at the same time. She was controlling and once grounded me for closing a drawer with my foot instead of bending over. She told me I was too young to have cellulite when I was 15 and refusing to go to the gym with her. I remember her dragging me to get acupuncture while I was having a full-on meltdown. She gave me the gentlest little slap when I spilled nail polish on some fabric. We had an argument about steamed broccoli the night I decided to run away from home and do my second suicide attempt, among other things. During the process of her divorcing my dad, she approached me and informed me that it was my fault they were splitting up, and they'd be happy together if it was not for me. So it goes.

My dad and JoAnne sent me to detassel the summer I was 15. The process was to be dropped off in a Home Depot parking lot, or something like that, and a school bus would take the group of detasselers to a cornfield to work. Afterwards, they would drop us back off in the parking lot. My horror story is that I was dropped off in the parking lot after detasseling and no one was available to come pick me up, so I sat there for hours, which is what I remember anyway. Maybe it's an exaggeration in my mind, but this could definitely be contributing to a feeling of being abandoned by my family, or a general feeling of being insignificant.

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This is all in the past of course. I'm just writing it out to make it make sense. I'm big on organization so hopefully after the initial blurbs that need to happen, I can get some sort of structure going.

I also need a certain amount of attention, so I figure putting this in a place where someone might actually read it will be a good motivator to keep up with it.

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