An awful lot of slime and shame - 11 June 2019
Note: I wrote this a whole month ago and a lot of things have happened since then but I still want to post this because my words deserve to be heard and I deserve to have a voice.
Hiiiiiiiiiiii I’m slinking back fully covered in the slime of my shame of having nothing to show for the last two months. I want very badly to keep having this blog and website because it is important to me but it falls very far back the list of priorities when my brain has a breakdown.
Today I am okay, if a little restless. Life has been turbulent. I’m feeling unstable in every aspect of everything. I’m trying to get a grip but I feel like I’ve been dipped in oil. I wish that someone could slap me across the face and that it would work like in the movies, and suddenly I would be capable of holding things together again – and what I REALLY truly mean by that, is I wish I had a better grasp over my emotions and how I react to situations in my life. I hold things together remarkably well for someone so riddled with trauma – my psych even said so. Thanks lady, it’s nice that someone else can tell me I’m doing fine even when I feel like I am crumbling inwardly. I guess you were good for one thing, and that’s reminding me that I have survived a lot of bullshit and I will continue to do so because that is my ~only personality trait~.
Anyway. The annoying thing is that I don’t really have control over the way I react to things that happen to me while I’m trying to stay alive. It’s bizarre to me that I can be absolutely fine joking about all manner of morbidity, I can listen to podcasts about death and all the bad things, and I don’t bat an eyelid. I don’t even shudder anymore. But I can’t handle a change in tone of voice, I can’t handle any sort of implied meaning that doesn’t completely match up to what I want. I can’t enter into any sort of debate or “discussion” on a cOnTrOvErSiAl topic without wanting to tear my own entire face off because I feel like my voice is not heard. There’s this track that underlies every moment of my life and it just says “is this normal?” to every single thing that happens to me and I never know the answer.
I have been having a time, obviously. In my last post I was very excited about finally seeing a psych and having a psych who seemed good but damn, that didn’t last long. I guess I was only two sessions in last time and all we had covered was part of my history so there was not really room for error yet. Two sessions later and I am reeling because I want to dump my psych and I don’t know how to. We are not a good fit for each other, and I don’t doubt she is great and has been great for other patients in the past, but my last appointment with her sealed up any cracks in the doubt I was having about her.
Look, it sucks for her, it’s not every day you get someone who comes in with the expectation that they will get a proper and well-thought out diagnosis and plan when you say “Let’s talk about a diagnosis next session” even though we’re only three sessions in and you skipped half the life-of-slime history lesson. That’s a pretty big deal and I imagine she just got a little bit stressed and blanked.
Seriously though. The first two sessions were fine, relieving even, because I was finally doing something about this feeling that had been burrowing a hole into the very centre of me for the last 5 years. I was finally telling a ~professional~ all the bad things that have ever happened to me and she was listening. What more can you ask for from your psychologist, right? Listening is a good first step. The third session is where things got a little bit… muddier. So we’d only covered roughly up to 2011 in terms of my history and that leaves a very big gap (like 8 yrs in case ur bad at maths) so when she was like okay let’s talk about your relationships and friendships this session I was like ????? We’re not up to that yet what do you mean? I steered the conversation back as much as I could but we definitely skipped a lot of stuff which I feel like is VERY important in the scheme of my entire fucking brain.
Maybe it’s my own fault for not being like “excuse me you’re not following the timeline” but I fully expect that when you’re going through a timeline with a patient that you don’t skip out on it when ur 8 yrs in the past still. You know????? But when you’re telling someone about your ex and how you used to keep a self-harm blog to intrigue and impress him you kind of forget to be assertive and be like oh ye btw I wanna go back to the timeline of my life which we didn’t fully talk through. I feel like in this room where I am the patient and there is a professional who is there to assess me, I should less be the one steering and more the one just filling in the framework that is being set for me. Is that wrong?????
I don’t really know how this is supposed to work to be entirely honest. Like I feel like my history is the most important thing in assessing my present and that my current reactions and situations don’t make sense if you don’t have the full picture. When you’ve got everything laid out in front of you, it’s far easier to go OH so that’s why you’re so unstable in your trust of other people, it’s because every time you trust someone they throw a rock at you and you let it hit you because you love them and why would they ever do anything to hurt you? They love you, they wouldn’t hurt you. But they did and that’s why you’re here now. That’s easier than looking at my current abandonment issues and not trusting any of my friends and being like “why do you feel that way?” IDK maybe because everyone I’ve ever trusted has let me down (do you even listen? Ur not doing ur job)
I acknowledge that I have been going through a difficult thing of trying to get a diagnosis that feels more snug than my regular old depresso/anxiety combo. It has been heartbreaking and disappointing so far. I don’t think I like my psych and this is causing me a lot of stress. I feel there have been very few times in my adult life where I have done more than just keep myself afloat and I resent that I feel this way. I resent that the amount of work I put in to keep above the waterline and I resent that it feels like as keeping myself afloat.