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Weerrrds
So, in an attempt to not be totally a shambles for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout, I'm keeping track of how much I'm writing drabbles in my RP as well. Which is a strange thing to do, since a) I've written in this format and with Elemental for so long it... barely even counts? It's as second-nature as breathing to me most days now, and having that other person around to both cheerlead and read in a zero-stress, not-here-to-impress mode is like having nuclear energy in an otherwise steam-powered era. That metaphor got away from me. Also b) since it's almost 100% original characters or iterations at this point, there's no fret. There's no plot, even though there is a lot of accidental plot. It's mindless self indulgence and
I realise that's utterly the point of something like this challenge: to general enough critical mass that I find myself at a point where I can declare the garbage heap a mountain of potential instead /grumbles
Still, it's hard – I've written most of my best fics when I was alone. And now I've got about... 0 personal time? I wake up, I do 15 minutes of stretches, I write in longhand, get breakfast, then go code for 8 hours. I get home, make dinner, optionally go to the gym, eat dinner, then watch tv with Boy for a few hours, bang out some RP on the side, and then fall asleep in a haze. Weekdays barely exist for me. Weekends are better, but a lot of it is recovering from the weekday.
A lot of it is the fact that I'm only just getting back into the swing of a regular schedule after the Great Mental Health and Immigration Fucking of 2012-2015. For three solid years I was depressed/stressed/freaked out of my mind, and after a rainbow of med/therapy options my doctors and I have come to the vague conclusion of the following Axioms of K:
Now, there are several things to take into account here.
One: I paid top dollar for these folk. I do, actually, trust their judgements about my health thereof.
Two: the universal conclusion from the people I've seen is that Meta Is Dangerous. As in, meta-knowledge about my mental health, ironically enough. Because I'm bright enough to understand that there 1) biochemical and environmental reasons for why I Feel This Way I end up 2) feeling disempowered and frustrated by the fact that top-notch medical coaxing is doing nothing and therefore 3) end up in this strange place where I believe it must All Be Imaginary in spite of 4) knowing perfectly well that treating depression (or, in my case, what is very likely to be some Standing Around on the Bipolar II Spectrum, neighbourhood cyclothymia) is no exact science.
Three: taking into account 4), the fact that I have high executive function fucking... fucksucks. It's great to go to work from 9-5 and work and work and be endorsed and balanced by my work. But I find myself wary of the fact that I draw so much value and stability from this great external thing (and, mind you, I'm not in the Professional of My Deepest Desires or anything - just one I randomly jumped on because it was technical enough to distract me and my employer willing enough to hire a nobody). Sure, no man is an island, but...
Four: the central difficulties I had when In The Pits (i.e. at a point where I was being denied employment opportunities, financially clinging onto my parents for dear life, guilty for those two things, and navigating the Hellzone of Bicultural Everything all at once) that I realised were as follows:
1. I completely lack self-motivated interests
2. I deeply crave self-motivated interests
3. I feel like I've lost all my sense of personality due to 1 and 2, and this bothers me and makes me feel hollow
It's not difficult to... trace the evolution - or devolution - of my brain through the decade and a half. As a kid, I jumped from interest to interest, book to book: I loved it, I loved consuming new canons, doing new things. Mid-teens, whammo, depression espresso. For two to three years I powered through on the Magic of Being Good At Books, consuming school in exchange for a ticket to university. I have utterly no time at all during university to be interested in any side things, but I choose my major on the complete whim of Oh That Guy Is Doing It. I tumble out into real life and find myself unable to read books without a friend's recommendation, watch TV shows without a partner, or even go to a movie without having some pre-depression vested interest. My consumption of new canons ceases; my participation in fandom becomes stilted.
It's a horrible, fucked up grey that I desperately want to colour in motherfucking rainbows but can't. There's no ability to invest, in spite of having all the time, capability, and privilege to do so. Before I had this Shiny New Job To Learn A Lot From, there were days where all I would want to do is disappear. Not commit suicide: cease. The drudgery of the everyday just wouldn't abate, and the more I tried to Read New Things or Go Out or Exercise, the more it seemed like shoving a square peg into an impossibly round and impossibly small hole.
And while all of that literally screams "BIOCHEMISTRY PROBLEMS," some insidious part of my head still says: it's you, not the brain talking.
My fault for not being interested in things, for having random crying jags, for being unable to maintain long-term goals, for having up periods of Serious Involvement and then down periods of lie-on-the-floor do-nothingness. I graduated top of my department after spending two point five out of four years weeping every night and having something close to panic attacks.
But the DSM says I can't be classified as actually bipolar or depressive, because my self-preservation filters have never broken to the point where - short of a few terrible months - I could swing that high or go that low. I will get out of bed the next day. If I have a degree to earn or a job to do, I will be at my desk the next morning, even if I've been sobbing till 5am. I'm well-spoken enough and quick enough on the uptake that I can bullshit through 80% of the layman's world that most of us non-technical folk live in. So I'm not at risk of being a suicide, and if the medications don't work then the Work will work. It's fine. I can Function Without.
I don't know where this was supposed to go – it's all coming into words now that I'm in good enough a financial/emotional/whatever position to look back without wanting to toss my laptop out the window in anger. I've never struggled in my life for anything because I'm really fucking lucky, and for a long, long, long time I've never wanted to make mention of any of this - especially not IRL - because it smacks of Asking For Pity when so much of the universe has it Worse Than Me.
That's true - but as someone told me, my problems are my problems, and they're the biggest problems because they're mine. Subsuming this all into a category of "not so bad" is like pasting a plaster over a gaping wound, and does nobody any good in the long run because it all gets under rug swept.
So where do I go from here? Partly because of the healthcare system I'm in – one in which the best psychiatrists and psychologists are often "out of network" for insurance companies, and one in which I happened to be uncovered at the exact same time that I needed help the most (oh, wait, what, not being allowed to work perpetuates major negative health outcomes that only working and being financially solvent can help alleviate?) – I'm disinclined to go back to my doctors. I've spent an enormous fucking sum of my parents' money on them to really not much avail. I rationally know this is stupid, but on the other hand, there's this: I'm difficult to diagnose. I have idiosyncratic reactions to the blandest drugs. I go to talk therapy because a myriad of sources say it's good for me and end up reaffirming everything out of my therapist's mouth.
It's not so much a failure on their part as it is a failure in the current model: on one hand there aren't sufficiently good diagnostics to help me, and on the other hand the diagnostics and treatments that are available for my brand of not-urgent-care are either insufficient or outweighed by the price of admission.
There is no Pareto optimal move: if one axis is financial well-being and the other axis is mental healthcare, there is no point in which a spend on the mental health axis is justified by the drop in financial well-being I face beyond the vague (still triple-digit per visit) checkins I do out of Good Rationalist habit.
I'm doing what I can - trying to get out more, trying to read more, &c. But if that sentence reads to you a lot like one from earlier in this entry that was swiftly followed by "fuck this shit" and "I don't have energy" with a sprinkling of "my body can't seem to do this" subtext, you're not mistaken.
In the meantime, I chug along with the mechanisms that have helped: kicking ass at a job that is marginally interesting (any margin is better than zero; a river can flow downhill at even the slightest of grades); being a sort of benign human incubus-vampire (your fandom/work/life energy! let me sit next to you and absorb it!); going at exercise once more. It's not bad - it's far from bad.
But there's this nagging, nagging feeling in the back of my head that this is great on paper, but not – not... eudaimonia, for lack of a better term.
Now I've just wasted ten minutes trying to google an adequately annotated translation (not that I speak any Greek), and having found none must leave that to another post with the bare post-script reminder to myself to re-read the Nicomachean Ethics because that stuff makes a shitload of sense.
Hurrah! You've made it through an entirely rambling post about mental health diagnositics, way too much personal information, and Aristotle. /o\ To think that post was supposed to be "I want more personal time in the evenings" and nothing more...
getyourwordsout, I'm keeping track of how much I'm writing drabbles in my RP as well. Which is a strange thing to do, since a) I've written in this format and with Elemental for so long it... barely even counts? It's as second-nature as breathing to me most days now, and having that other person around to both cheerlead and read in a zero-stress, not-here-to-impress mode is like having nuclear energy in an otherwise steam-powered era. That metaphor got away from me. Also b) since it's almost 100% original characters or iterations at this point, there's no fret. There's no plot, even though there is a lot of accidental plot. It's mindless self indulgence andI realise that's utterly the point of something like this challenge: to general enough critical mass that I find myself at a point where I can declare the garbage heap a mountain of potential instead /grumbles
Still, it's hard – I've written most of my best fics when I was alone. And now I've got about... 0 personal time? I wake up, I do 15 minutes of stretches, I write in longhand, get breakfast, then go code for 8 hours. I get home, make dinner, optionally go to the gym, eat dinner, then watch tv with Boy for a few hours, bang out some RP on the side, and then fall asleep in a haze. Weekdays barely exist for me. Weekends are better, but a lot of it is recovering from the weekday.
A lot of it is the fact that I'm only just getting back into the swing of a regular schedule after the Great Mental Health and Immigration Fucking of 2012-2015. For three solid years I was depressed/stressed/freaked out of my mind, and after a rainbow of med/therapy options my doctors and I have come to the vague conclusion of the following Axioms of K:
- Yes, there's probably something biochemically Up With You
- No, none of these medications help
- Except this one, which is the cheapest, safest, most general thing we could find that is also very well tolerated and, what's that? You have a deadly rash allergy to it? One in multiple tens of thousand chance of that! Oh well.
- I feed off of executive function
- If I were to Acquire A Job, Executive Function would be supplied to me in spades, and like being on a perilous bicycle I could cycle back on to the path of Neurosortatypical Healthiness
Now, there are several things to take into account here.
One: I paid top dollar for these folk. I do, actually, trust their judgements about my health thereof.
Two: the universal conclusion from the people I've seen is that Meta Is Dangerous. As in, meta-knowledge about my mental health, ironically enough. Because I'm bright enough to understand that there 1) biochemical and environmental reasons for why I Feel This Way I end up 2) feeling disempowered and frustrated by the fact that top-notch medical coaxing is doing nothing and therefore 3) end up in this strange place where I believe it must All Be Imaginary in spite of 4) knowing perfectly well that treating depression (or, in my case, what is very likely to be some Standing Around on the Bipolar II Spectrum, neighbourhood cyclothymia) is no exact science.
Three: taking into account 4), the fact that I have high executive function fucking... fucksucks. It's great to go to work from 9-5 and work and work and be endorsed and balanced by my work. But I find myself wary of the fact that I draw so much value and stability from this great external thing (and, mind you, I'm not in the Professional of My Deepest Desires or anything - just one I randomly jumped on because it was technical enough to distract me and my employer willing enough to hire a nobody). Sure, no man is an island, but...
Four: the central difficulties I had when In The Pits (i.e. at a point where I was being denied employment opportunities, financially clinging onto my parents for dear life, guilty for those two things, and navigating the Hellzone of Bicultural Everything all at once) that I realised were as follows:
1. I completely lack self-motivated interests
2. I deeply crave self-motivated interests
3. I feel like I've lost all my sense of personality due to 1 and 2, and this bothers me and makes me feel hollow
It's not difficult to... trace the evolution - or devolution - of my brain through the decade and a half. As a kid, I jumped from interest to interest, book to book: I loved it, I loved consuming new canons, doing new things. Mid-teens, whammo, depression espresso. For two to three years I powered through on the Magic of Being Good At Books, consuming school in exchange for a ticket to university. I have utterly no time at all during university to be interested in any side things, but I choose my major on the complete whim of Oh That Guy Is Doing It. I tumble out into real life and find myself unable to read books without a friend's recommendation, watch TV shows without a partner, or even go to a movie without having some pre-depression vested interest. My consumption of new canons ceases; my participation in fandom becomes stilted.
It's a horrible, fucked up grey that I desperately want to colour in motherfucking rainbows but can't. There's no ability to invest, in spite of having all the time, capability, and privilege to do so. Before I had this Shiny New Job To Learn A Lot From, there were days where all I would want to do is disappear. Not commit suicide: cease. The drudgery of the everyday just wouldn't abate, and the more I tried to Read New Things or Go Out or Exercise, the more it seemed like shoving a square peg into an impossibly round and impossibly small hole.
And while all of that literally screams "BIOCHEMISTRY PROBLEMS," some insidious part of my head still says: it's you, not the brain talking.
My fault for not being interested in things, for having random crying jags, for being unable to maintain long-term goals, for having up periods of Serious Involvement and then down periods of lie-on-the-floor do-nothingness. I graduated top of my department after spending two point five out of four years weeping every night and having something close to panic attacks.
But the DSM says I can't be classified as actually bipolar or depressive, because my self-preservation filters have never broken to the point where - short of a few terrible months - I could swing that high or go that low. I will get out of bed the next day. If I have a degree to earn or a job to do, I will be at my desk the next morning, even if I've been sobbing till 5am. I'm well-spoken enough and quick enough on the uptake that I can bullshit through 80% of the layman's world that most of us non-technical folk live in. So I'm not at risk of being a suicide, and if the medications don't work then the Work will work. It's fine. I can Function Without.
I don't know where this was supposed to go – it's all coming into words now that I'm in good enough a financial/emotional/whatever position to look back without wanting to toss my laptop out the window in anger. I've never struggled in my life for anything because I'm really fucking lucky, and for a long, long, long time I've never wanted to make mention of any of this - especially not IRL - because it smacks of Asking For Pity when so much of the universe has it Worse Than Me.
That's true - but as someone told me, my problems are my problems, and they're the biggest problems because they're mine. Subsuming this all into a category of "not so bad" is like pasting a plaster over a gaping wound, and does nobody any good in the long run because it all gets under rug swept.
So where do I go from here? Partly because of the healthcare system I'm in – one in which the best psychiatrists and psychologists are often "out of network" for insurance companies, and one in which I happened to be uncovered at the exact same time that I needed help the most (oh, wait, what, not being allowed to work perpetuates major negative health outcomes that only working and being financially solvent can help alleviate?) – I'm disinclined to go back to my doctors. I've spent an enormous fucking sum of my parents' money on them to really not much avail. I rationally know this is stupid, but on the other hand, there's this: I'm difficult to diagnose. I have idiosyncratic reactions to the blandest drugs. I go to talk therapy because a myriad of sources say it's good for me and end up reaffirming everything out of my therapist's mouth.
It's not so much a failure on their part as it is a failure in the current model: on one hand there aren't sufficiently good diagnostics to help me, and on the other hand the diagnostics and treatments that are available for my brand of not-urgent-care are either insufficient or outweighed by the price of admission.
There is no Pareto optimal move: if one axis is financial well-being and the other axis is mental healthcare, there is no point in which a spend on the mental health axis is justified by the drop in financial well-being I face beyond the vague (still triple-digit per visit) checkins I do out of Good Rationalist habit.
I'm doing what I can - trying to get out more, trying to read more, &c. But if that sentence reads to you a lot like one from earlier in this entry that was swiftly followed by "fuck this shit" and "I don't have energy" with a sprinkling of "my body can't seem to do this" subtext, you're not mistaken.
In the meantime, I chug along with the mechanisms that have helped: kicking ass at a job that is marginally interesting (any margin is better than zero; a river can flow downhill at even the slightest of grades); being a sort of benign human incubus-vampire (your fandom/work/life energy! let me sit next to you and absorb it!); going at exercise once more. It's not bad - it's far from bad.
But there's this nagging, nagging feeling in the back of my head that this is great on paper, but not – not... eudaimonia, for lack of a better term.
Now I've just wasted ten minutes trying to google an adequately annotated translation (not that I speak any Greek), and having found none must leave that to another post with the bare post-script reminder to myself to re-read the Nicomachean Ethics because that stuff makes a shitload of sense.
Hurrah! You've made it through an entirely rambling post about mental health diagnositics, way too much personal information, and Aristotle. /o\ To think that post was supposed to be "I want more personal time in the evenings" and nothing more...
no subject
Which is basically to say, this sucks, and I feel you. Good luck dealing with it.