Month: October 2024

It’s a Process?

As I have mentioned, something I’ve been learning, slowly, is I can’t ignore things anymore. I was really good at ignoring things. So good, in fact, I assumed that I was letting things go and moving on instead of continuing to drag all these things behind me. I had another example of this phenomenon over the weekend.

In the interest of providing full context, I am going to confess to something that will likely make more than one of the people reading this make the Look of Disapproval ಠ_ಠ. Due to very typical glitches in The Best Health Care System In The World™, I ran out of eszopiclone (brand name Lunesta) which Dr. Psychiatrist prescribed to help me sleep1. I was out of it for about a week and finally got it filled again on Wednesday or Thursday of last week. Keep in mind, I’ve been chronically sleep deprived for probably 30 years, so I assumed a few days with disrupted sleep was not going to have that much of an impact.

Another item on the list of things I didn’t think would matter was anniversaries. October 0f 2020 was close to the peak of my mental health implosion. The significance of anniversaries for PTSD is something that falls into the “Know vs. Believe” category for me. I have been assured by multiple sources who all know way more about these things than I do that your brain keeps track of these things and they can potentially be quite disruptive. The part of my brain that understands science knows this to be true. The part of my brain that doesn’t really believe there is anything wrong with me in the first place rejects this idea. As has been pointed out in other contexts, science doesn’t really care if you believe it, anniversaries appear to affect me whether my brain wants to admit it or not.

On Saturday, in the midst of these two things both of which I was firmly convinced were not affecting me at all, I took on something of an emotionally charged task. This was a project I had been dreading taking on for some time and had a number of factors, rational or not, that had built it up to something quite intimidating in my mind. It turns out this was probably not a good idea. I was an absolute basket case on Sunday and only started feeling like my brain was functional again Monday afternoon.

What I have learned from this experience is, I really do have to pay attention to my own state before I dive into anything. Not only that, I have to have enough on the ball to say, “I have too much going on, I can’t take on anything else right now”. My previous history has not provided me much experience with doing this.

  1. As an aside, I want to sing the praises of eszopiclone. My relationship with sleep aids is peculiar. Anything I have tried previously has either not worked at all, or worked too well. The last medication Dr. Psychiatrist tried, doxepin, turned me into a zombie for 24 hours on the lowest available dose. When I was working, the solution was to turn to medications to promote wakefulness instead of trying to help me get more sleep. Eszopiclone has been flat-out miraculous. My sleep patterns on this drug have been more normal than they have been, possibly ever. I sleep 6-8 hours, I’m a little dopey in the mornings, and then I’m pretty much a normal human. I have REM sleep every night. It’s astonishing. ↩︎

Clever Title

It turns out Dr. Psychiatrist is very likely correct in that I have found a plateau of stability with my current medication regimen. There are unquestionably still some bumps that need to be smoothed out. I still startle at just about any unexpected noise, although this is better than it was previously. I still have occasional episodes where I see or hear something three or four conceptual jumps from anything hospital related, my brain immediately decides to make those jumps, and settles on “Hey, isn’t this just like [$awful_thing]”? No, it really isn’t like [$awful_thing]. In fact it isn’t connected at all. Thanks for bringing it up though, because now all I can think about is [$awful_thing]. My brain is not particularly helpful a lot of the time. And, of course, I still can’t seem to tolerate being out in public for more than 2-3 hours. On the up side, the first hour or so seems to be getting a bit easier but when it’s time to go, it is still time to go.

Bumps aside, this calming of the inner turmoil has allowed me a bit more clarity than I have perhaps had in the past, which brings me to the point of this particular post1. I am improving, and I continue to improve, but I am not doing it quickly. Also, there really isn’t much I can do to speed up the process. It has been brought to my attention that putting pressure on myself to recover may, in fact, be counter-productive. This is a realization that has been growing for a while now and I am only starting to really grasp what it means.

Among the more obvious sequelae of not being able to hurry recovery is the effect it has on my prospects of returning to work. Previously, as recently as this summer, I had been operating under the assumption that when it came right down to it, and I had used up all the resources that have been made available to me, if I wasn’t ready to go back to work I would sweep everything under the carpet again and just go do it, much like I have in the past when I was feeling run down and burned out. What I have come to realize is, this is how I ended up here in the first place. There is no room under the carpet anymore and I can’t keep trying to sweep stuff under there. Not “can’t” as in “shouldn’t for my mental health”, “can’t” as in “am actually unable to”. I find that I can’t2 ignore things anymore, which may also explain why I jump every time there’s a noise.

I know I have posted about how I never really understood how people who survive disasters could describe themselves as lucky3. If you were lucky, your house wouldn’t have been hit by a tornado. My difficulty was misunderstanding the word. You can have Win The Lottery luck, or you can have I Didn’t Die luck. I bring this up because I am incredibly lucky4 in that I have a great many supportive people in my life. The time will come, sooner rather than later I suspect, when I’m going to have to lean on the people in my life even heavier than I am already.

  1. Penalty; unnecessary alliteration. Five word penalty and repeat the paragraph. ↩︎
  2. See previous discussion on the intended sense of the word “can’t” ↩︎
  3. Nope. Still not going to go back and look up which post it was. It’s back there somewhere. ↩︎
  4. In the I Didn’t Die sense of the word. Again, in the I Won The Lottery sense I wouldn’t be in this position to start with. With as vague as this goddam language is, it’s a wonder anyone can communicate at all. ↩︎