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.
- 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. ↩︎
Out of curiosity, which part of this was supposed to be the bit that would cause folks to give you The Look? That you ran out of medication? Or that you have trouble internalizing that things that happen to other folks with PTSD also happen to you? Because neither of these surprise me all that much. everyone loses track of their meds once in a while, and lots of people–myself included–can’t figure out how to apply universally-agreed-upon conventions to ourselves. As an owner of firearms for “home defense,” I have to do these sorts of mental gymnastics on a regular basis. X_x