I hate being disabled. My brain doesn't want to work right half the time. I'm tired because of my medications and the fact that I haven't slept well in years. (The sleep situation has been particularly bad for the last few months and I can't figure out why.) I've lived through so much traumatic crap that I've been told by a forensic psychologist that I read as a person who has come out of a warzone. It didn't do me much good to hear that. Especially considering that I was holding stuff back when I was doing some of the testing because I was afraid there were going to be problems.
Here I am, a little over a decade later, still disabled and still miserable. Sure, I've got medication to even out my bipolar and to control my panic attacks. Happy pills, however, is a misnomer for what this shit does. It just clamps down on the feelings and lets you get through the day. Sometimes people I used to be friends with made jokes about how I must be having a good time because I was on so many psychoactive medications. I smiled, I nodded, and restrained the urge to punch them in the face.
Then the diabetes hit because I was on the psychoactive drugs long enough that it popped up. Yeah, there was a genetic predisposition towards it but I wasn't on track for developing it until after I was on Seroquel and Geodon for almost seven years. Diabetes is a side effect of antipsychotic medications. Antipsychotic medications are what they use to stabilize the mood of people with bipolar disorder. I was fucked from the word go on this situation. So, now, I take handfuls of medication at various times of the day because of my brain chemistry being screwed up and my pancreas slowly degrading. It's scary and depressing because when ever I have to get my medications tweaked, I get afraid that there's going to be some kind of awful side effect.
My old psychologist was a "nice" person. Who didn't listen to me when I said that I was having problems because of the medications. The solution wasn't to investigate other options but to pump more of the antipsychotics into my system. By the time I had gotten to my current psychologist I was on a combo of the maximum dose of Seroquel and Geodon. I was a walking zombie barely able to function because of all the side effects. Fortunately, my current psychologist took one look at the situation and said "Hell no" and switched me over to a different medication regimen that really improved my quality of life. Unlike the last people I was seeking, this guy takes what I have to say about the situation going on and listens to me, then explains what options there are for solving the problem.
It's still hard living with invisible chronic illnesses. I have people who forget that I'm a social phobe and will randomly be like "Hey, let's go do something." at the drop of a hat. I have people who forget that I am diabetic and try to feed me stuff that I can't eat for fear of making my blood sugar run too high. It's really exasperating when people forget that my bipolar can incapacitate me with depression and they get kinda mad that I'm not 'better' yet. I've gradually moved away from the people who actively expect me to perform like I'm not disabled. I worry at times that my invisible illnesses coupled with my efforts here to write leads to the false impression that I'm lazy when I go radio silent.
I know that's my emotional baggage talking. Growing up in a trumatizing household where there's all kinds of fuckery going on, you come away with it with some challenges and emotional wounds. Writing these morning pages is flying in the face of the garbage that I had literally beaten into me. It's raw, it's scary, and it's honest. I try to just put down what I have on my mind and hope that my readership base doesn't get too annoyed with the regular sob stories. I've got a lot of trauma I am working through and it influences all of my writing. I just hope that these morning pages reaches someone who is struggling like I was, feeling like a freak and all alone in their misery. I hope that they bring someone some little piece of comfort.
Some of the reasons for the morning pages is selfish. It's to get this garbage out of my head so I can function for the day. But, the bigger reason, is the hope that it could help someone in some fashion. Because if I can help someone by describing the crap I lived through and how I'm doing my best to cope with it, maybe it makes all of that garbage worth something.
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