#she wants a legit fursuit so bad though but of course i do not make that kind of money and she is only 11 so she wants to make do

[definitelynotwinter]

My niece has gotten really into warrior cats and is mid process of building a makeshift fursuit for herself for our upcoming anime cons this summer. I swore to her up and down I'd take her, but she'd have to handle her outfits herself and let me tell you she is DETERMINED to get this suit together by herself. It genuinely makes me so happy to see her finding herself and putting her effort into creating her art and self-expression .

[scramblednoodle]

Day 2 - Anxiety

This is a vent post; you have been warned.

I’m turning off the filters because I’ve been holding a lot of this shit in.  And here is a comment born of anxiety:  NO ONE IS GOING TO FUCKING CARE ANYWAY.

Please don’t message me that you do care.  Please don’t.  I know you do.  LOGICALLY.  But logic and anxiety DO NOT MATCH, and if you don’t grok this, then you need to think long and hard about what that REALLY means to people with this fucking malady.

Yesterday, at the end of the day, I was hit by crushing anxiety because of an incidental interaction, that I can’t even remember the details of, just that it called into doubt NOT ONLY the individual interaction, but the cascading tree of causality of all branches of my own personal Yggdrasil.

I have anxiety, pure and simple.  I worry about everything.  I analyze and I double analyze and I triple analyze, and even when I set a course, I do so full of doubt.  I think that people who don’t have to deal with this sort of anxiety lack even the barest hint of understanding on how deeply this affects those who do.  This is not to say that they have not experienced or experience anxiety; those with the disorder just experience it at an exponentially enhanced factor.

This is Day 2 of my transition.  I felt great yesterday.  Almost euphoric.  And by the end of the day a little...weird.  I looked at the side effects of Spironolactone and Estradiol.  The former wasn’t of much worry, but one side effect of the latter burned itself into my eyeballs:  anxiety.  And like a hypochondriac, it may have been the very suggestion of this POSSIBLE mental shift that began the spiral.

I began to question.  Myself.  What I’m doing.  Who I am.  Lingering thoughts from work intruded.  Did I do the right thing?  Did I make a mistake?  Was my analysis of that DKIM question correct?  Was my reaction to a campaign vendor out of line?  Did I offend that random person in my last ticket update?  I could handle it, though.

And then someone in one of the various chats I’ve been in did something that I had been thinking about, and what’s more, they did some of the things I’ve already done.  And I think they did it better than I could, and they did it CASUALLY.  What took me tremendous amounts of mental effort seemed to be a casual thing for them, DESITE them claiming they were new to this.  What is wrong with my brain?  Why do these things become a herculean struggle for me, when others breeze through them?  Why can REVEILLE not be special?  Why am I so mediocre?  People must think I’m useless, worthless, a whiner.

What does anyone know me for, anyway?  The trumpet?  I suck at it.  I practiced my heart out at it, and still I was mediocre.  I couldn’t hack being in even a low-end, community symphony orchestra.  I can’t hit the high notes in the funk band I’m in the way the subs could.  The ESTABLISHED LEAD could not perform as well as the subs were sight-reading the parts.  What the fuck am I doing there?  I’m not a trumpet player, I’m a fucking hack.  And all of these synthesizer, this music shit.  I have such great ideas, and when I sit in front of these things, I stare.  Or I make something, and it feels mediocre.  It feels like I strayed from my original intent.

What else would anyone know me for?  Posting excessive amounts of pictures of VRChat on Twitter?  I can’t even get most of my fucking old friends to play the fucking game, so why would they fucking care about the “neat” things I do?  Neat things that other people have already posted about.  I’m retreading everyone else’s path.  I don’t know why I fucking bother.  Half the time in VRChat I’m horribly lonely anyway, and the great times that I KNOW happened are fully eclipsed by all the fucking times some asshole in that fucking rexie crowd stepped in front of me in a conversation as if I wasn’t fucking there. or the times in my protogen group that I said something that felt relevant, but turned out to be from an old fuckface that has nothing in common with these young, excited, optimistic kids.  that That’s ALL I REMEMBER.  I remember that I DIDN’T EXIST.

My art is awful.  I don’t practice enough, but how can you practice when everything you touch is shit?  I diddle, I dabble, and when I seek some sort of affirmation that someone appreciates my garbage, it’s always the same people.  It’s like drawing a stick figure and your mom putting it on the fridge.  At some point you realize she’s doing it BECAUSE YOU MADE IT, and that makes it special TO THEM.  It SHOULD be special to me, that I mean that to someone, but IT DOESN’T.

I surround myself with STUFF AND THINGS because each little item has a dream associated with it, each item, EVERY ITEM, has a story not just about what I’ve already done with it, but an even bigger story of WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH IT.  They will never happen.  Look at this 3D Printed Toothless.  “I will paint that someday” I say, but I won’t, because I would ruin it with my shoddy painting.  “Look at this dull knife?  I will learn how to sharpen this dull knife.”  But I don’t because I’ll just scratch it and make it worse.  Look at this Loopstation.  I’ve made some fun loops, but I’m going to get better at it, I’m going to practice.  But I won’t, because I KNOW that I can’t make it work the way it works in my head, in the story that I wrote for it.  Look at this fucking trumpet I bought that costs as much as a new car, 4 top end fursuits, or a year of mortgage payments for someone in a “reasonably” priced home.  The THINGS I COULD PLAY, but I FUCKING WON’T because I CAN’T.  Because I’m TERRIBLE.

I love to dance.  It makes me feel alive.  The music just moves me.  VR has been a blessing for this.  I can dance whenever I want, to whatever music I want.  And then someone shows up the other day and starts cutting loose.  They’ve never even been to a fucking club.  They watch YouTube videos.  They just started doing it.  Their energy is TREMENDOUS and overwhelming and I CAN’T COMPARE.  I realize that I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING CLOWN when I dance.  I preach to people that it doesn’t matter, that everyone looks goofy, that it’s okay, but I’m FUCKING LYING because everyone is looking at me and judging me and thinking how embarrassing it is that I’m even in the same fucking ROOM with them.  WHY DO I EVEN TRY?

Do you have ANY IDEA how life is when EVERYTHING YOU DO is worthless in your eyes?  It’s not that I THINK it’s worthless, it’s that I KNOW it’s worthless.

You want to argue?  Fine.  Logically, you are correct.  There is a rebuttal for EVERY SINGLE ONE of these admissions, and a rebuttal for the hundreds of other issues.

My hair looks dumb.

I look stupid with painted fingernails.

I can’t drive very good, and people notice.

My musical taste is awful.

I’m doing a bad job raising this new kitten.

I did a horrible job raising Bean.

I did a horrible job raising Harley.

I’m terrible at physicality.

My cooking is mediocre and samey.

I’m fat and gross.

I’m ugly as shit.

I look stupid in a dress.

My makeup looks like a kindergartner with a sharpie.

I suck at all video games.

No one likes the books I read.

I like the MCU and that’s horrible.

I like Apple products and that’s horrible.

My taste in computer hardware is shit.

My taste in clothes is shit.

My taste in cars is shit.

My glasses look dumb.

I made a mistake the last time I got my eyes checked because I’m stupid.

Only morons have as many knives as I do.

My voice is awful.

My photography was a joke, and I was a fool to have ever thought anyone gave a rat’s ass about my photos.

People think I’m a useless stoner.

I drink too much and am a fucking drunk that no one wants to hang around with.

My various bands have me there because they don’t know how to tell me to hit the road.

My VRChat characters are unremarkable and beneath notice.

DO I NEED TO CONTINUE???

These are the random thoughts that went through my head in rapid fire in the past 5 minutes.  It took me longer to type them, at over 100wpm, than it did for them to fill my brain with their toxicity.

Do you have any idea what that’s like?  To have everything you’ve done, ever done, and will do be called into question ad infinitum?  To second-guess everything you say, everything you do, even every thought that goes in your head?  Now wrap your head around this part:

Every one of those thoughts goes through multiple iterations of “Is it real?  No it’s not real.  But what if it is?  What if you’re wrong?  It’s probably real.  Yeah, it’s real.  But is it real?  What if it is?  Maybe I’m wrong?  Yeah, I’m wrong, it’s real.  But what if you’re wrong about it being real?  Maybe it’s not real?  Yeah, it’s probably not real.  But you could be wrong about that, too.”

Every.

Fucking.

One.

*deep breath*

I started this post with the intent to write a little bit about the anxiety I’d been feeling.  Turns out, I was wrong about how much was in there.  I have anxiety dreams on a regular basis, more times than I admit, and likely even more than I can remember.  I was at a convention last night.  As usual, I missed every event.  As usual, I missed every friend.  As usual, I was late to every party.  As usual, there was an elevator.  Usually the elevator goes tot he wrong floor, or dumps me off either at the top of a maze of hotel rooms, outside a giant building with multiple staircases, or in the service tunnels beneath the building.

This time to elevator fell.

And it fell.

And it fell.

I legit thought this was it.  I was going to die in this dream.

The brakes snapped on, and I woke up.

I never got back to REM.  Tossed and turned for a few hours.  Tried my usual trick of counting backwards form 100.  I would lose count at about 94.  My brain just...disintegrated.  Over and over, it fragmented, then reformed back at my anxieties.  When I don’t sleep, I’m especially susceptible to anxiety and depression.

Case in point.

========================

I’ve been mulling over what I just wrote.  I felt all of that, in the moment.  It looks silly now, on paper, as it were.  But that’s just another aspect of the anxiety.  A coping mechanism, if you will.  “You’re just being silly”.  And as usual, I’m already getting brain-foggy over the things I said.  I forget about it again, because that’s what the brain does:  it suppresses trauma.

All I know is I was near tears when I wrote all of that stuff up there; I remember that much, very clearly.

That memory will fade too.

And anxiety says to me, to write “It will fade, just like everything about me.”

So I wrote it, and I pretend to myself that I don’t believe it.  That I don’t feel that I am all of those things I wrote about above.  That everything...is fine.

And, at least for a little bit, it will be.  Those scores of thoughts will reduce to, oh, maybe 10.  Not all will be toxic, but most will be a worry of some sort.  A question.  A question to myself, of myself, about myself.

Anxiety and Depression and ADHD and Mania and other “Mental Misfires” are not things that ever “go away”.  I may wake up, and the dream may fade, but the harsh reality is that, no matter what meds, no matter how much therapy, if you have this stuff, the dreams will come back.  The severity will come and go., but...

The dreams always come back.

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I’m out of steam.  The fire is cooled.  I’m done writing for now, and no one wants to hear anything else about this, anyway, least of all me.

Peace, y’all.