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.
- 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. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- More on this when it isn’t 0330 during a windstorm. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- No “I told you so”s from the peanut gallery, please ↩︎
Happy to see this back up, and happy to see you posting again!
Really hoping that Nicole and I might be able to see you when we pass through Washington on our way up to Vancouver next month. We’ll be leaving LA at the beginning of April, and have our new place lined up starting April 10. The time in-between there is kind of up in the air right now, and we may check into our new place a couple days later as well. The only really hard date is that I have to be checked in with Canadian Immigration by April 24.
Glad the internal things are doing better for you. Sorry the external things are terrible, but I guess take some comfort that they’re terrible for everyone – including the people who misguidedly think things are going well.