#anxiety also make adhd worse so I’m squirreling off a lot

[moonfurthetemmie]

dude I want to draw so many things

even disregarding the horror idiots it would be so fucking COOL if I could draw do you KNOW how many toasty animatics I would make. Do you know how many different songs I could animate the big fight between Obsidian and Nightmare to. I have one that’s fucking perfect for it.

do you KNOW how many soft blorbos from my head I would draw that would probably never be shared but would make me so mf happy

[dhominis]

Life updates! Rambling, happy. CW for disordered eating and Bad Family Dynamics. (Happy despite this.)

I’ve been in my new apartment for a while; it‘s amazing and I love having a place that is mine. A few days after I moved in, I stayed over at my girlfriend’s house because I didn’t really want to put the effort into going all the way back to my apartment and I had this thought: I want to go home.

This is not something I’ve experienced before. Home always has been my parents’ house, and home’s always been a place for caution, for guardedness. It has not historically been a place I wanted to stay. It’s been a place that’s better than the alternatives, but never somewhere that was itself comforting.

...And now going home means I get to go into my room (and it’s mine, I would be entirely justified in being angry if someone went into it and looked through my things and took things and questioned me about what they found). And then I can reorganize my room if I want (I can move furniture around! I can buy furniture! I can throw broken things away if I want to!), I can cook something, take a shower without having to justify why I’m taking a shower, I can clean up the side yard if I’m restless, I can clean the apartment. I can be in my room on my phone talking to my girlfriend, and probably nobody is listening in, and if somebody is listening in that’s still not dangerous. I can go on a walk, I can go over to a friend’s place, I can meet people somewhere, and I don’t have to explain this.

I don’t have to be on guard.

Been doing social things – poly community and, uh, adjacent less-SFW communities. Socializing is... easier now. (A lot of things are easier!) I am still extremely awkward but not in an intractable way; I expect this to dissipate with practice. People like me. They’ll like me more when I have better social skills and this is achievable.

...I asked a cute girl what her favorite pathogen/parasite was (this was relevant to the conversation!) and she said she really liked botflies and just. I can’t. I have always had to be the one who brings up botflies! Talking about botflies historically has worked out really well for me – it’s a great filter? – and I am so incredibly enthused about this. (We’re getting coffee tomorrow. I really need evo-bio disease-bio friends, and she is smart and nice and extroverted and gives great hugs. Things like “asking cool people to get coffee with me” also are easier. And “sending an email” and “answering the phone” and a lot of things along those lines. There has been a strangely global reduction in inhibition and anxiety.)

I got a job. Not the call center one I mentioned, instead entry-level healthcare. It’s pretty much ideal! Learning skills, interacting with people, IIRC they’ll do some tuition reimbursement if I go into healthcare (that’ll help until I hit the FAFSA independent student age cutoff). Fast-paced work, twelve-hour shifts and free time on my days off. Not having to self-motivate. I think I need that right now. The person who suggested I apply for this job can model my brain surprisingly well.

(In some contexts better than I can. I hadn’t generated this as a career option, hadn’t thought it would be even sort of good until he explained how it might fit. A post a while ago: "...he understands, I think, the need to be active and moving, doing a lot of different things, short feedback cycles. For me – probably for him as well – high-intensity stressful periods of limited duration are regulating or calming, not harmful. I keep fantasizing about getting the job, just going nonstop at maximum intensity for those twelve-hour shifts, and then coming home and… not doing that. Being able to use the time for other things, hopefully having burned off some of the excess energy so I’m not pacing around organizing things really fast for twelve hours at home.”)

And they’re giving me health insurance after a few months.

It’s... I really need enrichment. I need to be busy. Right now I am not in a high-stress environment and I am waiting for things to happen, there is not much I can get done right now (lots of cooking, going on walks, occasional bodyweight exercise, self-teaching reading ECG strips, but I am not yet good at self-motivation). I am the human equivalent of a pretty competent border collie that will, if left without adequate stimulation, herd every squirrel in the neighborhood into your kitchen.

But I start work Monday, and after that things will be easier.

Almost everything has, in fact, been easy. I can feel many of the anxieties falling away, many of the maladaptive behaviors. I am investing effort in this, but not enough to merit the improvement.

I have been realizing that living with my parents took up so much mental bandwidth. The personality and cognitive and life-skills improvements that I’ve seen in the few brief periods I’ve been away from them... I should’ve left earlier, of course. I would have been okay. I didn’t know that before recently, but it would’ve have been better.

So the cognitive changes are substantial. Behavioral too. I have for a while had great difficulty in eating adequate food – I mean, often going a few days without eating, going months with inadequate caloric intake, rapid enough unintentional weight loss that doctors have been loudly concerned. (There is a physical thing that I have been blaming completely for this, but honestly it’s not just that, there’s an irrational aversion to eating. Caloric deprivation always makes me want to eat less – want to hoard food, conserve it for when I really need it. I go into a famine mindset very easily; when hungry, I find it difficult to alieve that food is available. And the physical problems are worsened by not wanting to eat. I tolerate food worse when I don’t make myself eat regularly.)

It’s not effortless; minor inconveniences tend to make me want to stop eating and I don’t ever really want food. (Cooking and baking my own food helps. It is easier to want to eat when eating is part of a skill-building process.) But now, and not before: I need adequate nutrition and when I don’t want to eat I can just tell myself no, you need food, you want to feed yourself, you don’t want to lose muscle mass, you don’t want to lose fat, you don’t have to conserve food because there will always be enough. And I miss meals sometimes, still... but when that happens, I can make myself eat when I notice. Peanut butter interspersed with enough water doesn’t really feel like food and I can pretty much always do that.

And sleeping. And physical activity. And social interaction. It is getting easier to give myself the things I need. Sometimes when you do not have any realistic chance of global comfort, when your life will despite your best efforts be almost unbearably unpleasant, choosing your own mode of suffering makes it easier to tolerate. Adjusting to a situation in which I do not need to expect suffering is... strange.

So – I got a job and an apartment and I’m finding a friend group and I am doing okay with finances, and long-term things will be okay, and my brain has so many things wrong with it but I am fixing myself.

This all has been startlingly easy so far and I am waiting for something to go wrong. This is prudent – something will go wrong eventually, I’ll be able to handle it but it will happen – and also just really neurotic. Still I’m less neurotic than at any other point in my life.

And I have health insurance! I probably can get an ADHD evaluation and treatment, therapy if I decide that’s a good idea, whatever. (Potential issue with ADHD treatment: I’d have to go to the pharmacy like every month, it would suck so much, I have never done this successfully. Thankfully there is a pharmacy in my workplace. I am so lucky.) And I have social supports, I have a community. My roommates are great. I have my partner; she’s unbelievably amazing.

Leaving has gone better than the realistic best-case scenarios I’d generated. It’s been like a month and there is definitely time for things to go badly but I also think things going badly will be less bad than I had expected it to be, if that makes sense.

I’m happy. I expect to stay that way.

[zauniteenforcer]

TW: Anxiety, Depression and Medical Mentions

TL;DR: I’m going crazy, and just needed to put my thoughts on paper.

PS:  If you aimlessly flame in norms in League of Legends, delete the game.

// Honestly, I’m just trying to get better at things, and have a little fun in my free time. I’m tired, and have quite frankly been really depressed recently. Every other game someone’s flaming something over something fucking stupid, and half the time it’s me -- no matter how good or bad I’m doing. You don’t need to tell me I did poor -- I already know. People like that, I really wonder if it makes them feel any better about themselves. I hope it does so maybe SOMETHING productive can happen with it at the very least if it has to happen at all. People like that are the reason so many of my friends quit the game, and I don’t want to think like that. I love this game with all my heart; I’ve gained many friends playing it and it’s something we can share. But like... IT’S JUST A FUCKING GAME. Like holy shit. I’ve been called so many names over the years I’ve lost count and been screamed at... hell, how many times have I been told or seen someone who got told things like ‘Kill yourself.’ -- You should NEVER say something like that. To anyone. You don’t know them. You don’t know what they’re going through... and you certainly don’t know where they’re at mentally. You could just say that to the wrong person.

-----------------------------

That rant aside, I’m just gonna put my thoughts into words. I’ve been so stressed out of my mind for WEEKS. I had to file taxes pretty last minute, and I hadn’t had a haircut in almost a year and a half. These are the little things that were just icing on the cake. That being said:

I just got laid off with work, and nothing available around here would remotely pay my bills (here’s to hoping unemployment pulls through for me. My boyfriend did manage to get a job, but it’s honestly not gonna cover even his half of the bills unless he gets a quick pay raise. Everyone has been pressing me about getting a job too. Sending me stuff at all weird hours, shoving down my throat things I’ve already told them I’m not interested in. Just -- Generally making me feel like I’m completely just a useless waste of space because I no longer have a job... and yeah, that’s really helpful to me getting one.

My last job was as a customer service rep. I took calls assisting with account support and tech support.... So what I really mean is for the past 3 years, I’ve worked 40 hours a week to get fucking screamed at. I’ve been told 8 hours a day for 7 days a week that everything is my fault. I think my favorite quote I heard from a customer was this:

“I bet you feel so proud of yourself. You just love taking money from little boys.”

I have two points that I would like to make to this person who said this to me, but they would never believe me. 

1. I absolutely do not. I do not like what I have to say to you. I am required to do things how I am presenting them to you because I have to have income.

2. If you can’t afford $15.00... you probably shouldn’t have a Netflix account.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Every other call towards the end of my time there was exactly like that. I would be almost in tears if not outright nearly having a panic attack several times in a work night. When I sleep, I’m not resting.

For another thing... my grandmother has been in the hospital since Wednesday of last week. So it’s almost a week now. She had open heart surgery that day, and I don’t think she’s been conscious since. They’ve had her on oxygen, and at this point she has pneumonia and is possibly getting a Tracheotomy tomorrow from the sound of things.... It’s not inherently looking worse, but honestly, it feels like there’s been virtually no improvement. She’s the last direct grandparent I have at this point, and it scares me. It scares me so much, and I just don’t know what’s happening. 

I need to get out of this mindset... but I don’t get a lot of time to myself right now. There’s always someone to please, and it’s never myself. Where do you go when you’ve been at your wit’s end for several weeks... always saying “Just a few more days and then I can rest.” How do you tell family to get off your backs before you lose your goddamn mind? Especially when they don’t believe there could ever be anything wrong with you because “you handle things differently.” Isn’t... that... the point... of a mental illness??? 

I’ve struggled with anxiety my whole life. That much I know for sure... but at this point, I’m not sure that’s all it is. I know my anxiety is bad but... every day I lie in bed not wanting to get up. Like taking a shower is such a chore. I stare at the ceiling, stuck in my own head because anything I could start just doesn’t sound like fun anymore. It always feels like a lot of people are just out to make fun of me. I lay in bed unable to sleep because all I want to do is cry... and looking back on my life, this isn’t the first time I’ve been like this. It just hit me like a ton of bricks this time around. 

I also have the attention span of a squirrel sometimes. I was told by my teachers back in elementary that they thought I had ADHD because I would act out and practically couldn’t focus on the lesson. My parents told them that I was just bored because I would finish the work early. Now I wonder as an adult if there was any merit to this, or if they were right. Someone can get my attention, say something directly to me, and I just won’t hear it. Like my brain hears sound, but it doesn’t process it sometimes. If more than one person is talking, or more than like 1-2 different things are playing (games, shows, etc.) the conflicting sounds legitimately make me crazy. It just sounds like jumbled static and my brain tries to pick apart what’s different and focus on anything, but I can’t. It gives me a headache. It makes my whole body feel like the static I hear, and I want to throw up when it happens. It basically feels like what I’d imagine could be called sensory overload at that point. 

To be honest, I haven’t spoke with a professional about these things, and maybe one day I will. I’ve mostly been functional enough that I don’t really feel like I need to. I just need a day or two to breathe. I just want the world to slow down for 5 goddamn minutes.

If you’ve read this far, just know that I’ll be okay. I just needed to put it somewhere and my IRL friends and family follow a lot of my other media. -- And honestly, some of my interactions here are some of the happiest things I have to cling to recently. You all are amazing.