Dear Reader,
I'm not sure what to write here. I did my morning pages and started writing up a plan for self-therapy to cope with my mental health issues. I know that my disability is getting in the way of my building a writing career for myself. I know that my disability is getting in the way of doing serious work on my c-PTSD issues because my anxiety has been telling me that everything I write is going to be used to harm my family. I don't like the fact that my mental health has an effect on everything.
It'd be easier if I had a bum leg or something. I can use a cane (and do on occasion because of arthritis) or find other ways to cope with my leg not working properly. My brain not working properly just messes everything else up. I have tried working with therapists to get myself to a neurotypical like state and I just can't quite reach it.
Social phobia has gotten worse over the last few years and I'm beginning to develop some measure of agorophobia. I start to panic over the thought of going to places I don't know well. Some of my panic is because I have diabetes and I don't know what I'd do if I had an emergency when I was out of the house and alone. Some of my panic is I'm afraid that something bad is going to happen to me when I am out. I get afraid that I am going to get lost. I get afraid that I am going to wind up in a 'bad' neighborhood and something awful is going to happen. And any neighborhood that I'm not intimately familiar with becomes a potential 'bad' neighborhood and I'm afraid to go there alone.
I have days where I don't leave the house because I'm fearful that someone is going to take one look at me and decide that I don't look mentally stable and call the police. I'm afraid that I'm going to relive the experiences from 2011 if I don't look and behave completely neurotypical. As such, I have been limiting my clothing expression to the frumpy looking 'mom' wardrobe and I just am quiet when I am out or overly cheerful.
Because if I have on the overly cheerful, bubbly persona mask on, people think I'm fine and that everything is ok. I do it after I've been triggered and after I have had some kind of bad flashback. Emotional flashbacks are happening pretty regularly and I know it is because my mood is off kilter. I get depressed and I have flashbacks to things that happened in the past that had me depressed.
It is hard for me to write about these things. It is hard for me to write at all when this happens. I struggle to write daily. Then I get imposter syndrome over it all and wonder if I even count as a real author because I'm not nose to the grindstone every day. Or because just about everything I write on a given day is not related to my novels but therapy oriented. Or because I haven't written poetry in years because I feel like it's just not good enough and that I must be a hack like [redacted] called me. I miss poetry. When I was younger I wrote tons of it and it helped me process a lot of ugly feelings. But now I'm afraid that someone is going to take my poems and use them to lock me away from my family and just destroy my life. Because they're just as intimate as my journals.
I'm sorry that this entry is all about this trauma stuff. It's been hammering on my mind for weeks now. This is kinda what my daily morning pages have been looking like. It makes me sad. I feel like I'm doing all of this wrong. I don't know if I should be grabbing a prompt from the prompt box and writing for fifteen minutes on that prompt or if I should just wing it and go with what's in my head right now.
I feel very saddened by this post. A part of me says I should delete it and forget all about this. I'm not going to because I told myself that this is part of doing the AW reboot and that it is part of my rebuilding my writing discipline. But it doesn't change the fact that this post hurts to type. I ask myself if other writers go through this or if I'm just special in that decidedly unpleasant way because I am disabled due to multiple traumas and bipolar. I know that because my readership on this blog is low, I can post this kind of stuff with out too much hate coming at me. I don't know if I'm going to be finding that changes as I go forward with this.
I am running out of things to post right now. It hasn't been the full fifteen minutes and I just want to delete this whole post. I have my inner critic telling me that this is terrible. I have my past trauma telling me that this is all drama seeking attention whore behavior and that no one wants to read this kind of 'garbage'. It is hard when you have that kind of static going on in your head to create anything. But, I'm going to do my best to write and make art.
I'm going to be posting pictures of the artwork that I'm going to start making in my art journal. Right now it is really bare bones and simple. I just hadn't had the heart to make artwork in it. I did my artist's date yesterday in the course of my running around. I picked up a set of brush style markers. I'm going to use them in my art journal to make some abstract pictures. Abstract pictures work a bit better for me to get the feelings out on the page than traditional landscapes and such.
Oh thank gods, the fifteen minutes is up. I'm sorry for putting you all through that rambling. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll have something that is less depressing.
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