Month: February 2025

Since I Have a Moment

It is currently stormy AF outside and the power keeps blinking. I usually1 sleep with two white noise machines going, and music playing in order to keep me from hearing things at night and waking up. The difficulty is, of course, that the white noise machines shutting off wakes me up, so I turn them back on and go back to sleep. Then the power blinks again. You get the idea.

Anyway, through the miracle of battery technology, I might as well take advantage of this unexpected up-time instead of just lying in bed and seething2. So what has been going on in my head?

The most confusing bit for me is that I feel both better and worse than I did, say, six months ago. I feel better because my mood is generally more stable (for the last few weeks anyway) thanks to getting a combination of meds that seems so work, having a therapist who is good at his job, and transcranial magnetic stimulation treatments3. On the other hand, the world in general, and the United States in particular, have managed to engineer a set of circumstances that are similar enough to the winter of 20204 that my PTSD is on Extra-Jumpy mode. I think I’m coping with the increased symptoms better than I would have if I didn’t have a few things working in my favor but it still isn’t much fun.

The coping methods include, picking up writing again5, and aggressively ignoring as much of the outside world as I can for the time being. I assume someone will let me know if any of the four or five things swirling around that could cause another pandemic actually does.

  1. This is a habit left over from working night shift. I have needed to continue doing it because I tend to be jumpy enough that nearly anything will wake me up. ↩︎
  2. I’m still seething but I’m not doing while lying in bed and I’m also doing something else, which makes the seething better somehow? I don’t know how these things work. ↩︎
  3. More on this when it isn’t 0330 during a windstorm. ↩︎
  4. I’m not going to go into a detailed list of the similarities between today and 2020 and today because it would likely cause my brain to spiral. It’s all the things you would think would be on the list and a few things that might be a bit more obscure. ↩︎
  5. No “I told you so”s from the peanut gallery, please ↩︎

Well Then

Where even to begin? It was pointed out to me, by more than one person, much to my surprise, that this site, whatever it is, was down. I kind of knew it was coming up, as the host service had an expired card for billing purposes, but I also didn’t think it was really worth doing anything about. More important things to worry about and all that. I was encouraged to pick it up again so I will make an attempt to post somewhat more frequently.

The difficulty with posting updates more often is the same as it has been for some time; there really isn’t that much going on. I remain in bureaucratic limbo with disability. I would say my overall level of functioning has improved somewhat. That said, compared to where I was 12 months ago, I have made definite improvement but compared to, say, five or six years ago I am still a giant mass of quivering dysfunction.

We’ll see how it goes.