#I blame my depression and current bout of insomnia

[messitydepressity]

I blacked out and wrote 8k for a fic that’s been impossible to write for lately.

I don’t know if I should be proud or concerned, but I’m pretty sure my eye is twitching in morse code.

[missmentelle]

I think that I might have narcissistic personality disorder or something similar. I am extremely self-centered. I can't bring myself to share anything and I always put myself first. I genuinely do not like my current friends. I hang out with them because I have no one else but I am repulsed by them physically as I find them unattractive. I also cannot bring myself to love my family at all, and I don't know why. I think they're annoying and I am also repulsed by them. I don't know what this means

Narcissistic personality disorder is a pretty big deal, and it’s usually a good idea to consider other alternatives before jumping to this diagnosis. Believing that you have a serious personality disorder can become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you believe you have a serious personality disorder that makes it impossible for you to have healthy relationships, you are likely to put less effort into your relationships, which tends to make them less successful, which gives you more evidence to support the idea that you have a personality disorder, and so on. That’s not to say that it’s impossible that you have a personality disorder - anything is possible - but its best to seriously consider more likely explanations, and hold off on the more serious ones until we can conclusively rule the more likely stuff out. As the saying goes, diagnosing yourself with a relatively rare disorder is like hearing hoofbeats and expecting to see a zebra. 

One of the reasons that you’re having a hard time caring about others right now could be your age. If you are in your teens or early twenties, I know that a lot of things get blamed on your age, but in this case, it happens to be true. The brain does not finish fully developing until roughly the age of 25, and the last thing to develop is your frontal cortex - this is the part of the brain that governs empathy, impulse control and complex decision-making. Your teens and early twenties are not a peak time for empathy - your focus right now is on figuring out yourself, rather than dealing with others. It’s just kind of a self-centered time to be alive. We don’t typically diagnose NPD until adulthood because it’s normal for children and teens to show narcissistic symptoms and tendencies. You haven’t finished forming neurologically, and your brain doesn’t yet have the capacity for empathy and complex bonding that it is going to have later in life; right now, everything is driven by hormones, everyone gets on your nerves, and your patience for other people is going to be razor-thin. The surly teen who rolls her eyes and stomps off to her room if other people so much as breathe in her direction is a stereotype for a reason, and it’s rooted in a grain of truth. I consider myself to be a very empathetic person, and as I get into my late 20s I have a newfound appreciation for my family, but when I was younger I just wanted everyone to fuck right off. Everything rubbed me the wrong way, everyone was annoying, and I wanted to be left alone all the time. It’s something that the vast majority of people experience, and the vast majority grow out of. 

You could also be experiencing a bout of depression. When most people think of depression, they think of sadness, but that’s not necessarily the case. Depression can also present itself as extreme irritability - sometimes depression just sucks all the joy out of life and relationships and magnifies all the irritating and negative qualities in the people around you. People who are depressed often have a hard time relating to others, are easily annoyed, and have a hard time finding happiness even in close relationships. If you’ve been experiencing other signs of depression - oversleeping or insomnia, overeating or loss of appetite, social withdrawal, thoughts of suicide, loss of interest in things you used to enjoy - it might be a good idea to talk to a professional and see if there’s something going on. 

It’s also possible that your friendships right now just aren’t very good. Sometimes we naturally grow apart from our friends, and it’s easier to blame that on something that’s wrong with them or with ourselves, rather than facing the fact that most relationships have a shelf life and that’s just kind of a sad thing we all have to experience over and over again in life. Maybe you and your friends used to have things in common but you’re changing in ways that are no longer compatible. Or maybe you never really had much in common, and your friendship is mostly based on “we went to the same school and were assigned to sit near each other in class”. If you don’t really fit in in your social circles, it’s much easier to decide that there’s something wrong with you rather than acknowledging that you just don’t have anything in common with the people around you. I never really fit in with my high school friends, and we quickly lost touch after graduating. We never had much in common beyond circumstance, and when we stopped having the same teachers and homework and gossip, we stopped having anything to talk about. My high school friendships made me feel awkward and frustrated in ways I found difficult to explain back then, but now that I’m older, when I look back I realize that I was trying to force friendships with people I just didn’t have anything in common with, and it wasn’t going to work. 

Narcissistic personality disorder is very rare and severe - it impacts absolutely every aspect of a person’s life, and makes it almost impossible for them to function normally. NPD goes far beyond a lack of empathy or annoyance with people around them - people NPD are hyper-sensitive to criticism, have constant serious mood swings and emotional episodes that they find difficult to control, have a constant need for attention, feel constant secret envy of the people around them, have a severe inability to cope with stress or change, and constantly struggle with depression that comes from failing to live up to their own impossible standards. People with NPD have major issues in relationships, and have a hard time functioning at work or school; their relationships are often volatile, and they struggle to hold a job or pass their courses. If you are experiencing these kinds of difficulties and symptoms in your life, it’s important to speak to a mental health professional right away so you can start to get to the bottom of the issue. 

Hope this helps!

Miss Mentelle

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 20199-06-02: Dealing With Some Weird Convention In A Hotel (And Also An Explanation Regarding My Absence)

Some of you have probably noticed that I have not updated my dream journal for about a month. Part of it I can squarely blame on depression/anxiety, and another significant portion I can conveniently blame on my various medications making my dreams harder to recall. There was also a weird and sudden bout of insomnia that happened, which didn’t make anything better.

But there are two other reasons that I haven’t been updating as regularly:

I’m running my first homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign as GM, and it required a LOT of prep work in the beginning. Because I try to keep non-dream stuff off my main blog, that’s why there haven’t been any posts about my massive love of D&D and my ever-so-understanding players.

These posts take a lot of time to write. Maybe I’m just a slow writer, but the average post takes 1-2 hours to write and that doesn’t include all the weird and random searches I have to do to find a suitable header image. Actual work was running later than usual, and on the days when I actually had a dream, I was opting not to write about it so I could allocate that time toward my other creative projects. An unfortunate reality of being a human with limited time means that I can’t give all my projects the love they need.

But don’t let that last point lull you into thinking that I’m permanently abandoning this blog! I fully intend to keep it going to the best of my ability, but I’m trying to not beat myself up if I miss a few days here and there (because that’s how the anxiety monster wins). Anyway, enough groveling! TIME FOR DREAMS!

The Main Dream: The Convention

We begin in an alternate reality where international pop sensation, the Spice Girls, never broke up. Only they pivoted their musical style toward industrial dance and any attempts at subtlety in the innuendo department had been removed from the lyrics.

The manager of the Spice Girls in this reality was a heinous Dolores Umbridge character who wore a lot of purple and was really interested in insurance fraud. Seriously. The manager hired me as a dance instructor and physical trainer, both of which I am horrendously unqualified for in dreams and in reality, in order to sue me for contractual misrepresentation and receive a convenient settlement from the insurance company.

Yes, that is an actual thing that almost happened in this dream. I say “almost” because although I did indeed get hired, I caught on to her scheme pretty quick and informed her with a great assortment of swear words that I was resigning and knew what she was doing. If she did not allow my resignation and/or attempted to proceed with involving me in her plan anyway, I announced my intention to counter-sue her. Hooray for subconscious threats of litigation!

My threats (or maybe it was the attempted headlock?) got me out of my duties with the Spice Girls, but I was stuck at a fancy hotel in New Orleans until the next long-distance charter bus arrived. According to the schedule, I had an entire weekend to kill.

There was a convention going on at the hotel for high-achieving students who came from private religious schools. Naturally, I attempted to assimilate into their group because they had lots of pre-planned activities and free food.

Despite not arriving on the tour bus with the other students, it was trivial to convince them that I was definitely a decade or two younger than my real age and currently enrolled in a private religious school. You just tell the person in charge “I am a student,” and they’re like “This guy’s legit, come on in!”

It was a perfect plan!

The chaperones give me a key to the room I’m staying in with several other people. My luggage has already been brought up to the room, and I take a moment to inventory my worldly possessions because it’s always a hoot to find out what my brain thinks important luggage should be.

For this trip, I brought along:

A cell phone

Several extension cords

A bright red, extra-large gym fan

Dress slacks with a small hole in the crotch

An ornate bird cage

My angry calico cat

Supplies for my angry cat

Five pairs of socks (but zero underpants)

Pills for alleviating flatulence

Looks like I came to party!

And there was a party scheduled later that evening at a bar downtown within walking distance. We were going to be caterers/waitstaff for the event, but we would get free drinks and a small stipend for our efforts. I put on the slacks to get ready for the event, since they were the most formal thing I’d brought to wear.

But then the angry cat escaped our room and I had to chase her down the hallway before she could reach the Forbidden Outside Lands. A nearby door started blaring “When That Helicopter Comes” by The Handsome Family when I apprehended the cat. This is a real song that exists in the waking world, and it happened to be the alarm song for my wife this morning.

“WHAT SONG IS THAT?” the religious students scream as they clutched at their brains. I am unfazed. I start singing along. I am forcibly removed from the hotel california (and also the dream)

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Header image is of the Millennium Biltmore Los Angeles