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It's been a while


It's been over a year, and there's been a lot of changes, yet, nothing much has changed.

What hasn't changed: I still live alone, in a teeny unit. I still haven't had contact with my children. I'm still not working.  I'm still struggling to eat healthily, and I still feel like I'm treading water.

What has changed: I have a regular counselor. I've discovered that I had an undiagnosed stroke sometime between 17 and 12 years ago, leaving enough dead brain tissue to be picked up in a CT scan. I'm re-learning how to be a better friend, and I have a more specific mental health diagnosis.

The most impactful thing has been the knowledge of a stroke, and the resultant psychological consultations. This has led to PTSD being recognized as the umbrella under which my Depression and OCD have thrived, and changes to my medication as a result.

 
Regular counseling, from the same psychologist, is much better than getting a short 3 or 4 session burst from a different person, in vaguely annual cycles. For the first time, there's the chance to move past the introductory information: where I'm at now, what my family dynamic is now, what it was as I grew up... and now, instead of going back to the beginning again, we can look more closely at my past, and I'm being helped to understand how those years impacted the pathways of my brain, and why it's called PTSD. 

All these years, I've been trying to find a way to deal with Depression, something that can be dealt with - you just have to get the mix right, the right lifestyle, the right mindset, the right medication. Only to discover now, that I was always doomed to fail. PTSD is structural, not chemical (well, not just chemical, some of the structural changes alter what chemicals are produced and their volume), and  it's not something I can learn my way out of. My brain has built itself to function in ways that are FRAKING STUPID, but ways that got me through some horrible stuff.

So, me, with my FRAKING STUPID brain, wired to avoid conflict, made decisions based in what my FRAKING STUPID brain thought were rational and logical ways (hot take: they weren't). Those decisions had me taking 'safe' paths of least resistance. At some point, in a relationship I was in for all the wrong reasons, I had a stroke, making personality changes we still haven't figured out, behavioural changes I was unable to notice, and causing my PTSD brain to feel even more threatened, deepening the FRAKING STUPID-ness I was already dealing with. 

From the outside, my life looks exactly how it did last year, and the year before - trying to find ways to alleviate the Depression, to have tools to fight the suicidal ideation that frequently takes up head-room (I've made a lot of progress there), and struggling with the daily grief of no contact with my children.

Inside, I'm beginning to see how my childhood defined my personality, and limited the paths I've taken in the years since. I'm working out how much of my apparent apathy is Depressive in origin, and how much is inability to take in truly new things due to stroke.

It's a lot to deal with, a lot to try and encompass, and to some extent it doesn't matter - PTSD is something I have to learn to work with forever. There is no peak to this Everest. There is only the climb.


Derri


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