I've been having nightmares again. Or should I say, the nightmares never stopped. They just have broken through the barrier that was provided by the medication. I'm having surreal nightmares. Like one where my whole home smelled of urine and as much as I cleaned I couldn't make it go away. Or where I had to be on the ceiling before a timer ran out and the floor dropped out beneath me to give way to iron spikes in a pit. Gravity was a thing in that dream and I was not successful in levitation. I'm not sure what to do with these nightmares. My brain is trying to process something.
I'm pretty sure I've got a trauma memory struggling to come to the surface. It figures as I find away to get myself back to writing that it has to rear its ugly damn head. I don't know how I am going to handle it. I'm debating just writing all of the trauma memories down, fictionalizing elements of it, and publishing it under a pseudonym. Or publishing it under my own name. There's enough crap there that I could probably have a few books out of it.
The fetish scene confuses me. I see people getting hot and bothered over stuff that I had happen as punishments as a kid. I look at it and go "I don't get it. It's not such a big deal to kneel on rice for a half hour. I did that and had to pick up the spilled rice down to the last grain by hand. It was better than being beaten with a switch." Then I stop and remember, what I grew up with wasn't normal. For these people, it's exotic and exciting. For me, it's a case of been there, done that.
Speaking of switches, I have a darkly funny story. One time, my brothers and I got in trouble messing around outside. Dad handed us his pocked knife and told us to each go cut a switch. We respectively cut three different lengths of switches. The smallest one was put aside and the brother who got it was reprimanded for expecting Dad to use something the size of his hand. The other brother came back with a switch that was more of a small branch. Dad literally said "How the hell did you cut that with a pocket knife?" My brother explained that he didn't but picked it up off the ground. That one got disregarded. I, the one who was considered the weakling of the family and the coward, came back with one about as long as my forearm, what I had seen Dad last cut off of the willow tree. He looked between the switch I was holding and the branch my brother was holding. He demanded his pocket knife back and walked away with this look of disgust on his face. But yeah, great way to avoid a switching is if you carry back a branch and a twig. They'll blow the other person's mind so that the one that's the right length looks too small next to the branch.
I've got black out periods in my memory. I know stuff happened. I was gaslighted to fill in a story for those periods in my history but I know those false memories are completely wrong. Like the business with how we were the ones who beat the hell out of ourselves with car antennas one winter afternoon. Nope, I remember that incident. We were actually being real careful because we were standing on an icy slab of concrete attempting to sword fight like we had seen in the movie we watched the night before. (Movie swordplay has yet to return to the level of Errol Flynn. I'm waiting Hollywood.) Mom looked out the kitchen window and came out, screaming at us. We turned over the antennas and were then whipped with them for about five minutes each. Thank goodness we were wearing denim and heavy snow clothes. I remember one of the snowsuits got ripped from it. Of course, the ripped snowsuit was blamed on the child wearing it, not the woman wielding the erstaz cane made from a car antenna.
People tell me it's normal to forget things, but it's not normal to forget over a decade of time. I've got patches out of about a third of my life that I don't remember clearly. So when I have a memory come up it fills in some of the confusion but it also makes things tumult. I'm not sure what's going to happen over the next few weeks. I feel like things are gearing up to get interesting in an unfun way with my brain. I see the psychiatrist this week. I may be having a medication change due to test results. I'm a little scared of that. Medication changes have always been hard on me. I just want to be able to get through the day. I feel like that's too much to ask some times.
I used to be able to do a lot more as you can tell by the way blog posts go on here. I just want to get back to that level of productivity.
Monday, September 30, 2019
Friday, September 27, 2019
Science #$%@ Fiction
Angel wormed her way out of the suit and opened the repair kit. As she rifled through the contents of the kit, Aeolus said to her through the neuro-link, “Second gen units are non-combat. Are you sure those were combat units and not clones intended for service and support in the event of a cme breeching the system?”
“Aeolus, it was Dregan. With memories,” she answered flatly, her voice echoing in the empty hallway. She checked her plasma pistol. “I need to get back in there and take down the rest of the units before I can make the repairs. Is there something bigger than this thing that I can use?”
“There is heavy artillery but it is inadvisable given the plasma breech. The potential for more shearing of the protective exoskin of the ship is high if you go in there with anything higher than level three use,” the ship answered.
“Aeolus, they're here to drive us straight into the sun. They're sans-neuro-link. If they had one, then you'd pick up on them immediately as more than just a presence in the hold. The units trained with out neuro-links are explicitly wet works. They're here to kill all of us and plunge you into the sun. That was the goal of this ship, to destroy everyone on board, broadcast final data, and get rid of the evidence of whatever the hell they're working on. Now where's the rifles at?”
“Compartment six, level twenty two, captain.” Angel turned and began to run down the corridors of the space ship until she came to the space where the gear she was looking for was stowed. “Checking on the status of the crew, they remain in stasis. The cat, however, is prowling and may approach you.” She ran up a flight of steps for the section she was in was typically under the influence of the gravity system. Moving from level twenty to twenty two was a rather straight forward affair, if it wasn't for the fact that the stairwell was massive.
“Aeolus, kick off the gravity in this stairwell,” she said, looking up at the landing a few hundred feet above her.
“Captain?”
“Don't quibble about it, just do it,” she snapped as a plan came together in her mind. The gravity system for that stairwell sector went off and Angel pushed off of the platform she was on. As she grabbed the base of the one above her, she pulled herself up and through it's railing. She reached the doors into the next corridor and pushed the button to open them. They hissed open partly. “Oh goddamn it,” she muttered. In the zero g situation, Angel could possibly push herself between the partly open doors but the corridor would drop her to the deck. Deciding that falling about eight feet wasn't ideal, she worked her way down to the correct orientation and maneuvered herself into the gap. On the left side, she felt the pull of gravity, on the right side she didn't. It was a strange sensation but she ignored it to push hard on the doors. Slowly, they opened farther. “Gravity in the stairwell goes back on as soon as I get through the door. Once she had forced the door open enough for her to worm her way through the system in the stairwell kicked on with a mechanical whine. “That didn't sound good,” she said.
Aeolus was doing his best to track the hostile party on board. With out the neural-link systems installed, he had to rely on thermal imaging. As of the moment they remained on the other side of the cargo bay bulkhead, moving through the area in something of a search pattern. “Captain,” Aeolus said tersely, “If these hostile units are as enhanced as you are, they may be able to force a bulkhead as a collective ...”
“I know, Aeolus,” Angel replied, “Which is why I need something stronger than this piss poor plasma pistol.”
“I'm not sure if I can handle a fire fight on that level,” the ship answered.
“Well, where the hell can I draw them off to so that I can put them down and get to work on repairs,” the cyborg snapped.
“Calculating, please stand by,” Aeolus answered.
Angel muttered to herself, “Fuck standing by, I need those rifles.” As she reached compartment six, she saw a sign that said 'Security only.' “Oh really?” Angel said at the keypad. She punched in her command code. The system blinked and then went red, denying her access. She punched in her code again and was denied again. “Aeolus, open up this door,” she said.
“I'm sorry, captain, the chief security officer on board has the only code to this door,” he answered.
“Override the stupid code,” she said.
“I can not do that, captain,” Aeolus answered with a tone of regret, knowing that the design flaw was a major problem at the moment.
“Fine, I'll override the code myself?”
“Captain?”
Angel took a step back and kicked the panel as hard as she could. The system wasn't designed for a cyborg to give it a direct hit with something blunt, though the plasma shielding remained in place as it dangled half off the corridor wall. Angel looked at the wires and where they connected with the control panel. She pulled out the knife she wore at her back and began twisting away screws that held a secondary control panel in place for the door behind the digital one. “Some motherfucker thought that redundancy was a nice touch here,” she muttered.
She dismantled the second control panel, following the tangled nest of wires into a control node for the door. “Captain, I advise caution, there are some very high voltage lines in that node,” Aeolus said. Angel looked at the wires in her hand and into the rat's nest of wires before her. She saw that a yellow wire lead from the two control panels into the heart of the tangle. With a mighty pull, Angel ripped not only the yellow wire but the small box it was connected to out of the mass of wires before her. A red and a green wire came off of it into the snarl.
“Aeolus, red or green?”
“Captain?”
“Pick a damn color,” she snapped.
“The red line is higher voltage than the green line...” he started when Angel muttered to her self, “Red it is.” As she disconnected the red wire, the door opened with a soft whooshing sound. “Whoever engineered this is fired,” she said as she walked into the security suite.
“That would be ship 362N, the one who did this run prior to me.”
“They have ships engineering ships?”
“Well, yes. Who knows the body better than the one inhabiting it?”
Angel shook her head and counted the lockers before her at the end of the security suite. She found the locker she was looking for and discovered it was empty. She started opening lockers and finding most of them empty. “Aeolus, we've got a big problem,” Angel said, “Security doesn't have shit in it.”
“Logical, 362N was a pacifist.”
Angel sat down in a chair at the chief security officer's desk. She looked at the desk and began to rifle through the drawers. As she turned in the chair to investigate the rest of the office, she found, bolted to the floor, an ancient style of chest with an antique key lock. Angel turned back to the desk. “Was this chest part of your manifest?”
“Yes, personal effects of Chief Security Officer Maeson,” he answered. Angel found a key inside the desk and tried the lock. When the lock opened, Angel threw back the lid. Inside, she found something unusual. A primitive weapon formed of a blade with dual edges and a handle. It lay upon a tartan patterned cloth. “Remind me to apologize to Maeson for taking this,” Angel said. Beneath the sword was a shape that felt familiar. Angel lifted up out of the chest the cloth and discovered a disassembled plasma rifle. “Oh Maeson, you tricksy bastard,” Angel said with a smile, “And you said that you didn't like plasma weapons. Calling them inelegant and yet you had one stowed away. I knew I liked you for a reason.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
An author I respect gave some really good advice to me years ago. If you're having trouble working on one project, switch to something else for a little bit. So, here's some cheezy science fiction. If this runs longer than a few posts, I am probably going to put the whole thing together into a single file and publish it as an e-book. Lemme know what y'all think.
“Aeolus, it was Dregan. With memories,” she answered flatly, her voice echoing in the empty hallway. She checked her plasma pistol. “I need to get back in there and take down the rest of the units before I can make the repairs. Is there something bigger than this thing that I can use?”
“There is heavy artillery but it is inadvisable given the plasma breech. The potential for more shearing of the protective exoskin of the ship is high if you go in there with anything higher than level three use,” the ship answered.
“Aeolus, they're here to drive us straight into the sun. They're sans-neuro-link. If they had one, then you'd pick up on them immediately as more than just a presence in the hold. The units trained with out neuro-links are explicitly wet works. They're here to kill all of us and plunge you into the sun. That was the goal of this ship, to destroy everyone on board, broadcast final data, and get rid of the evidence of whatever the hell they're working on. Now where's the rifles at?”
“Compartment six, level twenty two, captain.” Angel turned and began to run down the corridors of the space ship until she came to the space where the gear she was looking for was stowed. “Checking on the status of the crew, they remain in stasis. The cat, however, is prowling and may approach you.” She ran up a flight of steps for the section she was in was typically under the influence of the gravity system. Moving from level twenty to twenty two was a rather straight forward affair, if it wasn't for the fact that the stairwell was massive.
“Aeolus, kick off the gravity in this stairwell,” she said, looking up at the landing a few hundred feet above her.
“Captain?”
“Don't quibble about it, just do it,” she snapped as a plan came together in her mind. The gravity system for that stairwell sector went off and Angel pushed off of the platform she was on. As she grabbed the base of the one above her, she pulled herself up and through it's railing. She reached the doors into the next corridor and pushed the button to open them. They hissed open partly. “Oh goddamn it,” she muttered. In the zero g situation, Angel could possibly push herself between the partly open doors but the corridor would drop her to the deck. Deciding that falling about eight feet wasn't ideal, she worked her way down to the correct orientation and maneuvered herself into the gap. On the left side, she felt the pull of gravity, on the right side she didn't. It was a strange sensation but she ignored it to push hard on the doors. Slowly, they opened farther. “Gravity in the stairwell goes back on as soon as I get through the door. Once she had forced the door open enough for her to worm her way through the system in the stairwell kicked on with a mechanical whine. “That didn't sound good,” she said.
Aeolus was doing his best to track the hostile party on board. With out the neural-link systems installed, he had to rely on thermal imaging. As of the moment they remained on the other side of the cargo bay bulkhead, moving through the area in something of a search pattern. “Captain,” Aeolus said tersely, “If these hostile units are as enhanced as you are, they may be able to force a bulkhead as a collective ...”
“I know, Aeolus,” Angel replied, “Which is why I need something stronger than this piss poor plasma pistol.”
“I'm not sure if I can handle a fire fight on that level,” the ship answered.
“Well, where the hell can I draw them off to so that I can put them down and get to work on repairs,” the cyborg snapped.
“Calculating, please stand by,” Aeolus answered.
Angel muttered to herself, “Fuck standing by, I need those rifles.” As she reached compartment six, she saw a sign that said 'Security only.' “Oh really?” Angel said at the keypad. She punched in her command code. The system blinked and then went red, denying her access. She punched in her code again and was denied again. “Aeolus, open up this door,” she said.
“I'm sorry, captain, the chief security officer on board has the only code to this door,” he answered.
“Override the stupid code,” she said.
“I can not do that, captain,” Aeolus answered with a tone of regret, knowing that the design flaw was a major problem at the moment.
“Fine, I'll override the code myself?”
“Captain?”
Angel took a step back and kicked the panel as hard as she could. The system wasn't designed for a cyborg to give it a direct hit with something blunt, though the plasma shielding remained in place as it dangled half off the corridor wall. Angel looked at the wires and where they connected with the control panel. She pulled out the knife she wore at her back and began twisting away screws that held a secondary control panel in place for the door behind the digital one. “Some motherfucker thought that redundancy was a nice touch here,” she muttered.
She dismantled the second control panel, following the tangled nest of wires into a control node for the door. “Captain, I advise caution, there are some very high voltage lines in that node,” Aeolus said. Angel looked at the wires in her hand and into the rat's nest of wires before her. She saw that a yellow wire lead from the two control panels into the heart of the tangle. With a mighty pull, Angel ripped not only the yellow wire but the small box it was connected to out of the mass of wires before her. A red and a green wire came off of it into the snarl.
“Aeolus, red or green?”
“Captain?”
“Pick a damn color,” she snapped.
“The red line is higher voltage than the green line...” he started when Angel muttered to her self, “Red it is.” As she disconnected the red wire, the door opened with a soft whooshing sound. “Whoever engineered this is fired,” she said as she walked into the security suite.
“That would be ship 362N, the one who did this run prior to me.”
“They have ships engineering ships?”
“Well, yes. Who knows the body better than the one inhabiting it?”
Angel shook her head and counted the lockers before her at the end of the security suite. She found the locker she was looking for and discovered it was empty. She started opening lockers and finding most of them empty. “Aeolus, we've got a big problem,” Angel said, “Security doesn't have shit in it.”
“Logical, 362N was a pacifist.”
Angel sat down in a chair at the chief security officer's desk. She looked at the desk and began to rifle through the drawers. As she turned in the chair to investigate the rest of the office, she found, bolted to the floor, an ancient style of chest with an antique key lock. Angel turned back to the desk. “Was this chest part of your manifest?”
“Yes, personal effects of Chief Security Officer Maeson,” he answered. Angel found a key inside the desk and tried the lock. When the lock opened, Angel threw back the lid. Inside, she found something unusual. A primitive weapon formed of a blade with dual edges and a handle. It lay upon a tartan patterned cloth. “Remind me to apologize to Maeson for taking this,” Angel said. Beneath the sword was a shape that felt familiar. Angel lifted up out of the chest the cloth and discovered a disassembled plasma rifle. “Oh Maeson, you tricksy bastard,” Angel said with a smile, “And you said that you didn't like plasma weapons. Calling them inelegant and yet you had one stowed away. I knew I liked you for a reason.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
An author I respect gave some really good advice to me years ago. If you're having trouble working on one project, switch to something else for a little bit. So, here's some cheezy science fiction. If this runs longer than a few posts, I am probably going to put the whole thing together into a single file and publish it as an e-book. Lemme know what y'all think.
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
AW Morning blog: 26
I am disappointed with how spaced out these blog posts are. I am disgusted with myself for how much I am struggling to write anything more than a grocery list (and even those are hard because I stress out over what foods I can eat due to my diabetes). I feel like everything I have worked for is slipping through my fingers because I get so anxious and second guess everything I do. I just don't know what to do about it.
I love fiction. It has been a major stabilizing force in the chaos that regularly erupts in my life. I write it because it gets the worlds in my head out onto paper and makes it easier for me to breathe. I write it because it gives me a neutral playing field where I can examine, assess, and process the traumas that I have experienced in my life. I have been doing a good deal of non-fiction writing in my journals about those traumas.
It hurts. It hurts to open those wounds up and take the verbal curette to them so I can clean out the infected thought forms in my head. (By the way, infected thought forms is my new industrial band name.) It hurts to constantly hold myself back because I am afraid that I'm going to open my mouth and a thousand horrors are going to come out because I can't keep them inside anymore.
It's been several decade since some of these things happened but I remember them more clearly than what I ate for breakfast. (That makes keeping a food log really challenging, to be honest. What did I eat for breakfast? I know it wasn't Mom throwing cast iron pots and pans across the house. And I know it wasn't N- sexually assaulting me for the umpteenth time in a hidden room at his grandparent's house. The questions abound.)
I feel sometimes like my head is a surrealist hellscape that I'm trying to navigate. It is like my memories are a mash up of Dali's and Bosch's respective visions of hell with a bit of light and beauty thrown in that I have to excavate from the nightmare. I am told that this is all normal for someone with ptsd. That the chronic nightmares are just normal and they'll fade in time. It's been a real long time and they haven't stopped. I've been told that after a year of hard work and therapy, I'd be back to my self before the bipolar diagnosis, that didn't happen. I was in therapy for seven years and it didn't do much. I've been out of therapy for around three years and trying to do this on my own. It's not going so great.
I want my happy memories back. I want my energy and vivaciousness back. Yeah, I'm 40 and I'm not getting any younger. I'm not saying that I want to be twenty. I'm saying I want to be able to write and not feel afraid that someone is going to smite me for it. I want to be able to write and not be afraid that someone is going to take my work and use it to destroy my life. I'm saying I want to be able to listen to the sound of small children laughing and be able to smile, maybe even remember when my children were that age. But I can't smile, I get all cold inside and the world gets a little fuzzy as I have emotional flashbacks to being treated like I was a criminal all because I asked for help when I was struggling with postpartum depression.
As my children reach the age of puberty, I find myself pained because my memories of their earlier years are scrambled so hard that I can't tell them what they were like as infants. They ask me these questions and I can't remember to give them answers. Just like trauma and anxiety stole away my memories of my wedding day, trauma and anxiety stole away my memories of my children's early years.
I started scrapbooks for them. I can't update them because I literally don't remember what happened during those years where I was unable to function properly between medication changes on a monthly basis and my bipolar and ptsd not being treated. The therapist I had at the time asked me how I had gotten past the trauma of what happened when I had my breakdown. I told her I hadn't. She then just stared at me. No words of wisdom, no suggestions, no questions. That was when I stopped seeing her. I haven't been able to find a therapist since because no one will take my health insurance. So, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I guess suffer and write it out.
I love fiction. It has been a major stabilizing force in the chaos that regularly erupts in my life. I write it because it gets the worlds in my head out onto paper and makes it easier for me to breathe. I write it because it gives me a neutral playing field where I can examine, assess, and process the traumas that I have experienced in my life. I have been doing a good deal of non-fiction writing in my journals about those traumas.
It hurts. It hurts to open those wounds up and take the verbal curette to them so I can clean out the infected thought forms in my head. (By the way, infected thought forms is my new industrial band name.) It hurts to constantly hold myself back because I am afraid that I'm going to open my mouth and a thousand horrors are going to come out because I can't keep them inside anymore.
It's been several decade since some of these things happened but I remember them more clearly than what I ate for breakfast. (That makes keeping a food log really challenging, to be honest. What did I eat for breakfast? I know it wasn't Mom throwing cast iron pots and pans across the house. And I know it wasn't N- sexually assaulting me for the umpteenth time in a hidden room at his grandparent's house. The questions abound.)
I feel sometimes like my head is a surrealist hellscape that I'm trying to navigate. It is like my memories are a mash up of Dali's and Bosch's respective visions of hell with a bit of light and beauty thrown in that I have to excavate from the nightmare. I am told that this is all normal for someone with ptsd. That the chronic nightmares are just normal and they'll fade in time. It's been a real long time and they haven't stopped. I've been told that after a year of hard work and therapy, I'd be back to my self before the bipolar diagnosis, that didn't happen. I was in therapy for seven years and it didn't do much. I've been out of therapy for around three years and trying to do this on my own. It's not going so great.
I want my happy memories back. I want my energy and vivaciousness back. Yeah, I'm 40 and I'm not getting any younger. I'm not saying that I want to be twenty. I'm saying I want to be able to write and not feel afraid that someone is going to smite me for it. I want to be able to write and not be afraid that someone is going to take my work and use it to destroy my life. I'm saying I want to be able to listen to the sound of small children laughing and be able to smile, maybe even remember when my children were that age. But I can't smile, I get all cold inside and the world gets a little fuzzy as I have emotional flashbacks to being treated like I was a criminal all because I asked for help when I was struggling with postpartum depression.
As my children reach the age of puberty, I find myself pained because my memories of their earlier years are scrambled so hard that I can't tell them what they were like as infants. They ask me these questions and I can't remember to give them answers. Just like trauma and anxiety stole away my memories of my wedding day, trauma and anxiety stole away my memories of my children's early years.
I started scrapbooks for them. I can't update them because I literally don't remember what happened during those years where I was unable to function properly between medication changes on a monthly basis and my bipolar and ptsd not being treated. The therapist I had at the time asked me how I had gotten past the trauma of what happened when I had my breakdown. I told her I hadn't. She then just stared at me. No words of wisdom, no suggestions, no questions. That was when I stopped seeing her. I haven't been able to find a therapist since because no one will take my health insurance. So, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I guess suffer and write it out.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
AW Morning blog: 25
Recurrent flashbacks to things like when I was being gaslighted about how I was never going to be successful at anything have been a daily thing. It's exhausting and depressing. It is hard to time orient yourself when your heart is twenty to thirty years behind the game, stuck in a moment where you were savaged for expressing an opinion or daring to do something that made you different from the rest of the family. I was in that house for the better part of twenty years. Through all of it, there was some form of abuse going on most of the time.
The time I did get out, I was financially held captive to their whims. The threat that if I didn't do what they wanted that they'd pull my financial aid out from under me and kick me out of the house was always there. I hid my writing in my trunks that I carried my goods to college in. I still knew that they were going to read my daily journal. I still knew that they were going to try to find out what was going on in my life through things like denying me privacy, making me have 'conversations' where I was interrogated as to if I was taking drugs, and attempting to just straight up bully me into telling them what they wanted to know, regardless if it was the truth or not.
I finished college and my mother wandered around claiming that she was the reason why I did as well as I did. I remember my instructors looking at her in confusion. She was quick to change her tune when I didn't get a prestigious job as soon as I was home. She started telling me that my college degree was wasted. I knew that what she and my father wanted was for me to get a job with a fat paycheck that they could basically retire on at my expense. They pressured me hard to find work immediately and to start climbing the corporate ladder.
After a few months, I did find a job. They didn't like that I was working in a call center. Then I got sick and my position was made redundant/I was fired for being sick. I was having really bad asthma attacks on a regular basis. My mother claimed that I was over reacting one time when I was in the hospital getting a nebulizer treatment. If I had enough breath to scream at her that I wasn't over reacting when I can't literally breathe properly, I would have done it. She told me to envision/remember her making pickles when I was a small girl and get control over my breathing.
About a month after I lost that job, my parents threw me out of the house and moved me down to a duplex my grandparents owned in Wellsville, a town all the way by the Pennsylvania border and at least two hours away from their house, one way. I desperately tried to find work with my parents threatening things like not going to pay for my wedding if I was going to be a 'layabout'. Fortunately, my grandparents didn't ask for rent beyond my upkeep of the place and mowing the grass. And they covered things like utilities when it became clear that my part time job wouldn't provide enough income for me to get groceries.
Every time we spoke on the phone, I was told how I was a disappointment. I was told how I was taking advantage of my grandparents. I was criticized for how I wanted my wedding. In the end, everything got planned according to how my mother wanted it to be and the only consessions she made were the unity candle and my cake. I'm not going to go into how traumatic my wedding day turned into but there's a lot of pain on what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life. I literally have vast amounts of that day that I don't remember not because things were too busy but because my mother made a point of triggering my ptsd multiple times.
When I started blogging, my mother was scornful and said it was dangerous. She said that I was going to be doxxed and harassed for what I wrote. She said that I was going to embarrass the family. She said that I was going to have no audience. She said that blogging was for 'losers'. She had similar comments on my poetry. She had similar things to say about my novel that I was working on. My mother wanted to control my career and live through me. She wanted to be my manager and handle all of my finances, for a fee of course to ensure there was no nepotism.
When my first novel was finished but before I could edit it, I was a senior in high school. She insisted that it get sent off to a competition that promised a publishing contract, provided that I paid the entry fee. That turned into a fight to get the manuscript back. I never did get the whole thing back. I got half of it. They had 'lost' one hundred and fifty pages in the course of things. My mother deleted the manuscript off of her computer once it had gone out in the mail.
I had to rebuild the story under the cover of doing homework for college. Mom decided that the fact I didn't win the competition meant that I was writing in the wrong genre. She decided that I was terrible as a novelist and that I should be writing children's books. I took to hiding files on my computer so that she couldn't get into my book work and edit it. I took to writing out scenes in notebooks that I hid among my course notebooks.
Now that I have self published a few books, my parents came around sniffing for money. Apparently self publishing meant that I was on the road to a 'real' book. I haven't spoken to them in a few years since that incident. I'm still just this side of dirt broke. I have no idea what I'm doing marketing my books. I have to edit them myself because I can't afford to hire an editor. I have to design the covers and such myself because I don't have a publishing house working with me on that.
I have good days where the words come easily and I can write for hours. I have my bad days and it is all of the above hammering in my head to the point where I have vivid flashbacks to the ways that they hurt me when I was young. I don't know why I am writing this. I don't know why I am posting it. Perhaps it is because I'm done censoring myself and hiding. Perhaps it is because I am done keeping secrets.
As a wise person once told me, your history is your story. You're not obligated to keep quiet. You can tell all the horrible things that were done to you. If the people don't like it, they should have treated you better.
The time I did get out, I was financially held captive to their whims. The threat that if I didn't do what they wanted that they'd pull my financial aid out from under me and kick me out of the house was always there. I hid my writing in my trunks that I carried my goods to college in. I still knew that they were going to read my daily journal. I still knew that they were going to try to find out what was going on in my life through things like denying me privacy, making me have 'conversations' where I was interrogated as to if I was taking drugs, and attempting to just straight up bully me into telling them what they wanted to know, regardless if it was the truth or not.
I finished college and my mother wandered around claiming that she was the reason why I did as well as I did. I remember my instructors looking at her in confusion. She was quick to change her tune when I didn't get a prestigious job as soon as I was home. She started telling me that my college degree was wasted. I knew that what she and my father wanted was for me to get a job with a fat paycheck that they could basically retire on at my expense. They pressured me hard to find work immediately and to start climbing the corporate ladder.
After a few months, I did find a job. They didn't like that I was working in a call center. Then I got sick and my position was made redundant/I was fired for being sick. I was having really bad asthma attacks on a regular basis. My mother claimed that I was over reacting one time when I was in the hospital getting a nebulizer treatment. If I had enough breath to scream at her that I wasn't over reacting when I can't literally breathe properly, I would have done it. She told me to envision/remember her making pickles when I was a small girl and get control over my breathing.
About a month after I lost that job, my parents threw me out of the house and moved me down to a duplex my grandparents owned in Wellsville, a town all the way by the Pennsylvania border and at least two hours away from their house, one way. I desperately tried to find work with my parents threatening things like not going to pay for my wedding if I was going to be a 'layabout'. Fortunately, my grandparents didn't ask for rent beyond my upkeep of the place and mowing the grass. And they covered things like utilities when it became clear that my part time job wouldn't provide enough income for me to get groceries.
Every time we spoke on the phone, I was told how I was a disappointment. I was told how I was taking advantage of my grandparents. I was criticized for how I wanted my wedding. In the end, everything got planned according to how my mother wanted it to be and the only consessions she made were the unity candle and my cake. I'm not going to go into how traumatic my wedding day turned into but there's a lot of pain on what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life. I literally have vast amounts of that day that I don't remember not because things were too busy but because my mother made a point of triggering my ptsd multiple times.
When I started blogging, my mother was scornful and said it was dangerous. She said that I was going to be doxxed and harassed for what I wrote. She said that I was going to embarrass the family. She said that I was going to have no audience. She said that blogging was for 'losers'. She had similar comments on my poetry. She had similar things to say about my novel that I was working on. My mother wanted to control my career and live through me. She wanted to be my manager and handle all of my finances, for a fee of course to ensure there was no nepotism.
When my first novel was finished but before I could edit it, I was a senior in high school. She insisted that it get sent off to a competition that promised a publishing contract, provided that I paid the entry fee. That turned into a fight to get the manuscript back. I never did get the whole thing back. I got half of it. They had 'lost' one hundred and fifty pages in the course of things. My mother deleted the manuscript off of her computer once it had gone out in the mail.
I had to rebuild the story under the cover of doing homework for college. Mom decided that the fact I didn't win the competition meant that I was writing in the wrong genre. She decided that I was terrible as a novelist and that I should be writing children's books. I took to hiding files on my computer so that she couldn't get into my book work and edit it. I took to writing out scenes in notebooks that I hid among my course notebooks.
Now that I have self published a few books, my parents came around sniffing for money. Apparently self publishing meant that I was on the road to a 'real' book. I haven't spoken to them in a few years since that incident. I'm still just this side of dirt broke. I have no idea what I'm doing marketing my books. I have to edit them myself because I can't afford to hire an editor. I have to design the covers and such myself because I don't have a publishing house working with me on that.
I have good days where the words come easily and I can write for hours. I have my bad days and it is all of the above hammering in my head to the point where I have vivid flashbacks to the ways that they hurt me when I was young. I don't know why I am writing this. I don't know why I am posting it. Perhaps it is because I'm done censoring myself and hiding. Perhaps it is because I am done keeping secrets.
As a wise person once told me, your history is your story. You're not obligated to keep quiet. You can tell all the horrible things that were done to you. If the people don't like it, they should have treated you better.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Bipolar vs Seasonal Affective Disorder vs C-PTSD: GO!
Dear Reader,
We've got the cage match of the season going on ... in my head. My lack of posting hasn't been because I have forgotten about you. It has been due to my having some difficulties with executive functioning because of that list up in the title line of this post. Depression due to my bipolar has been kicking my butt. My seasonal affective disorder has started curb stomping my motivation and organizational skills early this year. And now my complex post-traumatic stress disorder has decided to join the fun with emotional flashbacks and now 'normal' flashbacks to ugly shit that happened in the past.
I've been trying to channel it into something, anything that will work to get it out of my head. As a result, I have about half of a novella written on something entirely different than stuff for this blog. I have a backlog of half started blog posts for my other blogs which I keep deleting and then writing over again (thanks, anxiety, you're an asshole editor). And I have been journal writing when I have the focus.
My problem is, focusing is really hard right now. Throw in a few migraines and some stomach troubles, and it's just been a great time. I had hoped that once the kids went back to school, my mood would improve. I had hoped that once I had more time for writing, I would be more productive. Instead, I have been struggling just to get the bare minimum of household chores done and ... Well, let's just say I'm not doing so great.
On the plus side, I didn't pay any bills too late. I still manage to get dinner on the table for the family. And we're well supplied with clean laundry (thanks Beloved for tackling that one). I know that this will pass. I'm still waiting to see if there's going to be a medication change because of this psychological shit storm I'm dealing with. I know the big issue right now is my c-ptsd. A lot of traumatic stuff happened around this time of year when I was younger. I'm just at wits end on how to put it aside and get work done.
I used to be able to do more. These last few months, I have been running smack into my disability headlong and it sucks. I remember being able to do more than this. I keep trying to get back to that level of ability but it's getting harder each year just to keep up. Hopefully, my doctor can help.
We've got the cage match of the season going on ... in my head. My lack of posting hasn't been because I have forgotten about you. It has been due to my having some difficulties with executive functioning because of that list up in the title line of this post. Depression due to my bipolar has been kicking my butt. My seasonal affective disorder has started curb stomping my motivation and organizational skills early this year. And now my complex post-traumatic stress disorder has decided to join the fun with emotional flashbacks and now 'normal' flashbacks to ugly shit that happened in the past.
I've been trying to channel it into something, anything that will work to get it out of my head. As a result, I have about half of a novella written on something entirely different than stuff for this blog. I have a backlog of half started blog posts for my other blogs which I keep deleting and then writing over again (thanks, anxiety, you're an asshole editor). And I have been journal writing when I have the focus.
My problem is, focusing is really hard right now. Throw in a few migraines and some stomach troubles, and it's just been a great time. I had hoped that once the kids went back to school, my mood would improve. I had hoped that once I had more time for writing, I would be more productive. Instead, I have been struggling just to get the bare minimum of household chores done and ... Well, let's just say I'm not doing so great.
On the plus side, I didn't pay any bills too late. I still manage to get dinner on the table for the family. And we're well supplied with clean laundry (thanks Beloved for tackling that one). I know that this will pass. I'm still waiting to see if there's going to be a medication change because of this psychological shit storm I'm dealing with. I know the big issue right now is my c-ptsd. A lot of traumatic stuff happened around this time of year when I was younger. I'm just at wits end on how to put it aside and get work done.
I used to be able to do more. These last few months, I have been running smack into my disability headlong and it sucks. I remember being able to do more than this. I keep trying to get back to that level of ability but it's getting harder each year just to keep up. Hopefully, my doctor can help.
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
Here but not all the way.
Dear Reader,
You may have noticed my struggle in producing content and such. For the last several months (if not a little longer) I've been struggling with mild to moderate depression. It's really hard to write when everything you have written looks like garbage to you and you feel like the entire endeavor is pointless and why bother. I have an appointment with my doctor to discuss the results of the test that was done to figure out what medications actually will metabolize properly for me and what ones won't. I'm nervous about this test and the impending medication change that is going to happen with the results.
I will confess, I have made plans to blog and have had them go to pot because my kids needed me. Or I'm just too tired at the end of the day to work on anything. I have a stack of notebooks which I use for therapy journal work. They're pretty empty right now too. I feel like I'm broken to the point that there is no hope of my recovering anything of who I was before the bipolar diagnosis and the trauma of that period of time. I had this plan to just write everything down. The pain of that is prohibitive right now. There's so much trauma in my past, I was told that my symptoms resembled someone who came out of a combat zone by a forensic psychologist.
It's hard to remember that other people don't carry this around. And I berate myself for being lazy and not doing 'enough' because I forget that I am disabled. Right now, I'm struggling with this urge.This is the most I have posted in any format in weeks. It's exhausting and depressing. I don't want the horror of my past to be here, I want to write something fantastic and put the horror into that story. It's why I have a hard time with my Artist's Way exercises. Because in my Morning Pages, I am writing about a lot of trauma and depression stuff. I don't want to bring it here and drive away readers.
And yet, here I am writing this confessional. If you are repulsed or disgusted by my 'weakness' please kindly go to Hel where I'm sure that the Dark Goddess will welcome you with some words about others who have come there by way of the complications of ptsd and bipolar.
You may have noticed my struggle in producing content and such. For the last several months (if not a little longer) I've been struggling with mild to moderate depression. It's really hard to write when everything you have written looks like garbage to you and you feel like the entire endeavor is pointless and why bother. I have an appointment with my doctor to discuss the results of the test that was done to figure out what medications actually will metabolize properly for me and what ones won't. I'm nervous about this test and the impending medication change that is going to happen with the results.
I will confess, I have made plans to blog and have had them go to pot because my kids needed me. Or I'm just too tired at the end of the day to work on anything. I have a stack of notebooks which I use for therapy journal work. They're pretty empty right now too. I feel like I'm broken to the point that there is no hope of my recovering anything of who I was before the bipolar diagnosis and the trauma of that period of time. I had this plan to just write everything down. The pain of that is prohibitive right now. There's so much trauma in my past, I was told that my symptoms resembled someone who came out of a combat zone by a forensic psychologist.
It's hard to remember that other people don't carry this around. And I berate myself for being lazy and not doing 'enough' because I forget that I am disabled. Right now, I'm struggling with this urge.This is the most I have posted in any format in weeks. It's exhausting and depressing. I don't want the horror of my past to be here, I want to write something fantastic and put the horror into that story. It's why I have a hard time with my Artist's Way exercises. Because in my Morning Pages, I am writing about a lot of trauma and depression stuff. I don't want to bring it here and drive away readers.
And yet, here I am writing this confessional. If you are repulsed or disgusted by my 'weakness' please kindly go to Hel where I'm sure that the Dark Goddess will welcome you with some words about others who have come there by way of the complications of ptsd and bipolar.
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