#the day she dies you can just unfollow me because I won't be posting about anything else for weeks

[jimkirkachu]

Do you have someone to talk to? Like therapy, or even just a free helpline? I mean, just ranting on here as an outlet is fine; it's your space, and people like myself are listening - and happy to listen. No judgement. x

(response got kinda long, so let's use a cut)

Ah....... well, so....... I have a therapist through an online service, so it's all text-based through a separate app/client that is hit and miss on her end; she's had some issues with the thing not giving her notifications when her patients send messages to her, so I don't really know how to make that better. As it stands, I "talk" to her about once a month because I'm too afraid of/anxious about video and phone communications in general to do a virtual appointment, and I've still never been able to get myself to an in-person visit (I'm also not sure if she's back to in-office visits yet from quarantine times). Just the thought still gives me mild panic attacks. But I have no standard to compare this with--is it typical to pay about $150/month for therapy and only talk to your therapist once in that span? (Well, with online services anyway.) Is that a typical rate for one in-office visit? I genuinely don't know.

So, all that said... I do technically have someone to talk to, but she's weirdly difficult to access. And all our communications are delayed/not "timely," per se. I just feel really bad and selfish/self-absorbed here, I mean people come on their blogs/dashboards expecting to see fun stuff and all I use mine for anymore is just to moan about my crappy mental health. Hopefully people are unfollowing me as needed, the last thing I want/intend to do is make anything worse for anybody else in the world 🤦😣

[[I would like to mention to anybody reading this that I almost never check my follower count so I won't be offended if you need to unfollow me for any reason.]]

I just don't feel comfortable talking about Emotions™ with anyone in person, and I don't want to burden any specific people here with my crap. It's the classic depression-self-help-article conundrum: "Afraid to talk about your feelings? Feel like no one loves you? Talk about these feelings with someone who loves you!" 🤦 Since I have no immediate source of in-person validation or comfort, I've gotten in this really bad habit of making these pathetic blog posts and hoping some poor, compassionate, unsuspecting soul might be passing by online and for whatever reason put themselves in the position of talking me off a ledge at 4am cst. I did the same thing with my LiveJournal as a teenager... apparently, I never learned how to communicate about anything more serious than small-talk by any means other than "post publicly to a wide pool of strangers in the hopes my sad, sob-story net might catch one who can tolerate me long enough to get me through x/y/z episode."

Thank you for touching base though, anon, and for your kind words. 💜💜💜 It really means so much more than I can express to have access to a network of who-knows-how-many people online at all/various times of the day and night, and that at almost any time I can put up one of my desperate cries for attention and have somebody respond. Maybe something like tumblr/the internet in general would have saved the lives of the people in my ancestry who died from their mental illnesses. It's certainly saved mine. 💜💜💜 (Jury is still out on whether that's a good thing or not.) Thanks for being so generous and caring, I hope someday I have a chance to repay/properly thank you for your help and support. 💛💙🖖