Skip to main content

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


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Better is relative.

"How are you feeling?" I feel better than the day I woke up in hospital.  Some days, that's all the 'better' I feel I've achieved.  Other days I can achieve more than that; I talk to people, laugh with them, even enjoy myself; before collapsing back to bed, my energy level back at zero. 'Are you feeling better?'  Well, yes, but better for me is not wanting to kill myself today.  I still have a lot of 'better' to go before I feel secure in my own stability. I understand that the people who care for me, are simply asking me (very importantly!) how I'm doing.  I understand that they don't have a timetable for me to meet.  I understand that my response is supposed to be honest, and without 'spin'.  This is roughly what goes through my head: If I tell them 'I feel bad today' will they think they could have done something different? it's not their fault I can't function today.  I can't say that.  If I tell them ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Iggle-aggle-oddle-adle-ay

Toddler Talk.  The noises junior humans make as they create language pathways in the brain.  This week, I dipped into my meagre energy savings, and visited people I adore, that I'm proud of, and I'm lucky enough to somehow be family to, despite being related to none of them.  It's been a while since I've been around a toddler - I've got other family and friends with younglings; but toddlers are their own class of people. Small humans are as diverse and fascinating as any other group of people.  Yet they're harder to get to know.  A small person's vocabulary is still being filled with words, and a conversation is an exercise in patience.  Truly junior humans, are even harder, as their words are barely that.  With all of them, the trick seems to be giving them a gap long enough to figure out what they want to say.  Even the wee-est seems to understand that I don't   understand, and will try to find a different path of expression. Ma...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rollicking Rossini

One of the things I've spoken to my counselor about; is what I DO with my days.  It's not a lot.  It's struggling to get out of bed.  It's finding the motivation to eat something that has some nutritional value.  Time spent trying to find focus to achieve something, anything.  Chapters of books, instead of whole ones.  Small puzzles instead of massive ones.  Amassing enough oomph to go and buy milk.   And lately?  While listening to classical music. Music is profound.  There's a reason you don't play dirges at weddings, the William Tell Overture at funerals, or waltzes at the gym.  Music is an emotional shortcut (this is why movies have soundtracks after all), it signals the appropriate mood for the moment.  Toddlers are the best examples of how music can hot-wire your brain.  Ever seen one stop in the middle of a room when a lively song is heard, and boogie on down?  I've discovered over the last few m...
Post a Comment
Read more