Hey, Isn’t it an Election Year?

Alert readers may have noticed that, unlike previous incarnations of my blogery, news and politics have been absent from all three or four posts I’ve made since the latest resurrection. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, anyone likely to be reading this also, likely, aligns closely with my own political views. “Preaching to the choir” is the applicable phrase here.

Second, as I believe I have mentioned previously, this is a really shitty time in history to have and anxiety disorder1. I have been something of a news junkie in the past but I just can’t handle this election cycle. In the past, not that long ago, worrying that a major-party candidate was going to engineer a coup if they didn’t win would have been the irrational anxiety, now it’s barely newsworthy.

I am aggressively trying to avoid the news. I am going to attempt to withhold comment except to say, if the country makes it through this election more or less unscathed I may have to rethink my opinion on the existence of the divine.

  1. To be fair, I can’t really think of a good time in history to have an anxiety disorder. Maybe April 11, 1954. ↩︎

Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

One of the bigger difficulties I’ve had with mental health medicine is, a good bit of the time I have no idea what those providing me advice and direction mean when they say things. Part of this is due to pop-psychology appropriating terminology and misusing it to the point of meaninglessness, and part of this is due to a large cognitive blind spot that seems to prevent me from parsing certain concepts.

I think the concept I have struggled most with, both in terms of time spent and results (or lack thereof) achieved, is the idea of “focus on the positive”. This has never made sense to me on what I think is a very basic level. All the words are common English words, the sentence is grammatically correct1, and yet I cannot figure out how it is supposed to be applied in the real world. It may as well be the sentence I stole to be the title of this post2. Or, more accurately maybe, its like looking at an Escher print. At a glance, everything looks okay but if someone told you to replicate it in three dimensions, you’d be hard pressed.

My trouble with the concept is not acknowledging the brief moments of happiness and joy that flit by occasionally, it’s with giving what I see as undue value and significance to them. I kind of see it like this3 – on one side of a balance scale, you have the core of a neutron star4. On the other side you have a pebble5. I have been assured that focusing on how much lighter the neutron star feels now that there is a pebble on the other side is the path to healing. I think my difficulty understanding how this is supposed to work in the real world is fairly self-evident.

Coming at this from a sightly different angle, my MHP has pointed out that I have a strong pattern of black-and-white thinking. Not a lot of grey area. Things are either all bad or not bad at all. If things are bad, they’ve always been bad. I can’t really disagree with him on this. Additionally, I have noticed in myself a tendency to rely heavily on avoidance and denial as coping mechanisms. These two traits combined, I think, explain the difficulty I have with the concept of “focus on the positive”. The pebble doesn’t fix the problem, and if you acknowledge the existence of the neutron star, then it’s there and you have to do something about it.

The trick, apparently, is learning to acknowledge the existence of the neutron star, while simultaneously being grateful for the pebble, even if it’s effect is negligible.

I’m not there yet.

Edited to add – The other difficulty I have with focusing on the positive is the challenge of being on fire and trying to focus on anything other than being on fire, but that’s a different post.

  1. Or, at least its close enough to not interfere with the meaning of the sentence. ↩︎
  2. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical, demonstrating that language has a structure entirely separate from meaning. ↩︎
  3. I don’t know if these analogies help communicate anything meaningful but it’s the only way I can think of to try explaining what goes on in my alleged brain. ↩︎
  4. The typical neutron star weighs between 1.5 and 2 solar masses. 1 solar mass = 1.9891 x 1030 kilograms. ↩︎
  5. 1 cubic centimeter of pea gravel weighs approximately 1.8 grams ↩︎

Another Clever Title

I never quite know what to do with myself when I’m like this. I know retreating from the world and everything in it is probably not the healthiest option right now but it’s kind of all I want to do.

I believe I mentioned previously, Dr. Psychiatrist is adjusting meds again which always seems to make me a bit unsteady no matter what is being adjusted, or by how much. In this particular instance I switched from just bupropion to a relatively new combo drug approved in 2022 that adds, of all things, dextromethorphan. The theory is the addition of DM will improve my anxiety symptoms. If I don’t have any terrible side effects, I’ll be increasing the dose of DM in a couple weeks.

Whatever the DM is supposed to do I wish it would get on with it. I’m certain I’m not terribly pleasant to be around when I’m this symptomatic and, as I mentioned above, I have increased difficulty doing anything other than sitting and moping.

I hope people will bear with me until I’m tolerable to be around again. Fingers crossed it won’t take too long.

Clever Title

Lead in paragraph that is long enough to make the drop cap work. I don’t care what anyone says, I like drop caps.

the difficult is, you see, days and months can go by when nothing changes. I could post endless variations of “I woke up, ate breakfast, then sat around the house doing nothing until it was time for bed again” but I don’t think that’s what my audience wants.

So I am forcing myself to write about something. This week has not been great. The symptom du jour is anhedonia which has meant I haven’t really wanted to talk to anyone about anything, ever. So of course this was the week I had three people reach out wanting to chat. Which I would love to do, if my brain could figure out how to break out of this funk.

I was going to write in a bit more detail about how the funk is hitting me this time but instead, I’m going to bed.

This Was Going to be a Different Post

I started out intending this to be about all the outlandish assumptions my brain tries to function under. Instead, its going to be about how difficult it is for me to accept help, or even praise.

First, it has come to my attention there were a few people unaware of the existence of this blog until now. For anyone in that class, I apologize. It was not a deliberate oversight, when I started this thing I thought I had mentioned it to anyone who might be interested. I was apparently wrong. Not in that the people who I missed weren’t going to be interested, I just missed some people somehow. Anyway, welcome to whatever this is.

Back to the actual topic of this post.

It is very difficult for me to accept help, or praise.

Thank you for your attention.

Edited to add: It has been longer since I looked at this blog than it has been for many of the people reading this so, out of morbid curiosity, I went back to start reading some of the older posts. I can’t do it. I started reading them and was okay until I started hitting posts about covid. Looking those over was not a good idea. Lesson learned

Edited further to add: The thing is, I’m kind of interested to go through those posts because I really don’t remember much detail at all between about March of 2020 and sometime in 2023.

Somewhat More Verbose

Among the happenings over the last year was being denied social security disability benefits. In spite of opinions to the contrary provided by my actual care providers, SSDI felt there was no reason I couldn’t “adapt to other work”. The nature of the “other work” was not specified.

I had tried, over the preceding 16 months or so, to not count on getting disability benefits. I knew it was a long shot, at least the first time around, but I also didn’t have a long-term Plan B. This has not contributed anything to my peace of mind.

The Plan B I was pretending I had, and which I don’t think was really fooling anyone, involved me sucking it up and going back to work. What with my preexisting doubt there is anything really wrong with me in the first place (well documented in previous posts) and social security insisting I could adjust to other work, I tried hard to resign myself to the idea of returning to hospital nursing. Several incidents of greater or lesser significance over the last few months have persuaded me this isn’t realistic, in spite of any protestations I might make to the contrary.

As one might infer from the numbers in the previous post, I remain symptomatic. I still don’t know what to do with myself when panic-brain takes over, which happens much too frequently in spite of everything. Dr. Psychiatrist is still experimenting, trying to find some combination of meds to make me a bit more functional. which is a process I am trying to not get discouraged about as well.

Am I better than I was this time last year? Probably? But certainly not better enough.

Hi Andrew

If anyone is likely to have some sort of RSS or whatever the latest subscription/reader/feed application is on this site, its you. So hi.

My MHP (mental health professional, for those not in the know) suggested I should share more information with the people around me. I have been assured this will be therapeutic for me and appreciated by the people around me. I remain unconvinced on either point, fortunately the chances of anyone actually reading this are negligible so off we go.

Very little has changed since the last post, made over a year ago. Read that one and make of the situation what you will.

Almost A Year Later

Oh look! This place is still here! I am not going to bother trying to summarize what went on over the last year beyond saying, things have continued to be a little closer to the “Dumpster Fire” end of the scale than I’m happy with.

I am, as we speak (read? type? communicate?), unemployed. I left my non-patient care job at Swedish and started an actual clinical education job at the University of Washington hospital. Unfortunately, the environment was still much too hospital-y for my anxiety and I was having almost daily panic attacks at work again. I’m not at all sure what this bodes for my future employment, but I’m still looking. I’m branching out to non-hospital jobs but the one offer I’ve had so far paid less than I was making 10 years ago. So no. I could write a great deal about the experience of applying, and being denied unemployment benefits, but that may be for another day.

The other big development over the last year has been an increasing difficulty being out and about in the world. It seems that people with PTSD and other panic disorders are prone to develop symptoms of agoraphobia. Who knew?

My symptoms aren’t so bad that I can’t leave the house, but they do kick in when I’m around crowds, especially if I have to stand in a line and wait. The checkout line at a busy grocery store is just about guaranteed to make me go sideways.

I’m not sure what this means for the future. I’m not sure if this is a permanent thing. I do know that it’s kind of a pain in the ass.