Month: April 2021

Posted in Mental Health

Homework

Posted on by rsfahrudeen

It’s Wednesday night and I haven’t done my homework for my therapy session tomorrow. I wanted to take this week and think about what I want and what my limitations are and what I can do and stuff, now that I’ve gi en up on independently functional. But all I’ve really done this week is write and play games and spend the last of my 600 stimulus check.

Right now my limitations seem to be pretty heavy. If you’re familiar with the spoon metaphor, I guess you can say I have next to no spoons right now. I may only really have one or two. Remembering my evening meds is hard. The thought of getting out of bed and doing anything is hard. Eating is hard. Eating well at least.

     I got a bunch of snacks when I went grocery shopping. But no candy. I did that on purpose to try to stop over eating. So now I’m desperately craving candy and sweet stuff like nobody’s business, but I don’t have the energy to get off my butt and walk down to the store to buy some. I haven’t had the energy to walk down to the store since the beginning of the pandemic.

      I have been trying to get myself to clean. I finally brought my laundry upstairs from the basement after two and a half weeks. I picked up trash a couple times. Tossed my dirty clothes into a pile once and finally took my new pillows out of the box they were shipped in and put them and the foam mattress back on my bed. I was letting the foam mattress recover from me laying on it all the time. And I also took a shower for the first time I. A while, but other than that, I haven’t done much of anything.

        I might sweep everything into a corner of the room tomorrow and leave it there for days until I get the energy to finish picking stuff up. I dont know when I’ll take the laundry out of the hamper and put the dirty ones in. I’d been waiting to bring it up to make my bed and use the new pillows because it had the pillow cases and clean sheets in it. Plus my head is still making my old pillows bluish from the hair dye I think, though my hair itself still just looks more black than anything.

       I got disney plus again because I heard so much about Falcon and the winter soldier on tiktok. I’m slightly disappointed, but its okay. I’ll probably keep it for when the Loki series comes out. And I might do an Avengers marathon while I’m writing. It’s hard writing without anything going on in the background except the fan. 

I should probably focus on taking my medication and sleeping right now. Cleaning my room too I guess. And eating well. That seems like such alot right now though.w it seems like such incredibly overwhelmingly much that I’m fairly sure I can’t manage it. I dunno. Maybe it’ll get easier soon.

     

Posted in Mental Health

Radical Acceptance: Facing Reality

Posted on by rsfahrudeen

       This year has been hard on me. It’s been hard on everyone, of course. I had some vague idea that I could use my homebound time productively, relearn the flute, get back to this site, maybe make some progress on my writing career, maybe work out and loose some weight. But that turned out to be unrealistic. Instead I spent it all in bed almost all day, binging and not purging, watching anime, reading manga, with no energy to do much of anything, even cook no matter how hard I try.

        I’m starting to feel a little better at the moment, though it’s unrealistic to expect it to last. My good days seem to come as frequently as mentally healthy people’s bad days, even with consistently taking my medication. Though the medication is probably what’s kept me from being suicidal, so it’s not exactly ineffective. I’ve been sleeping again recently and I’m starting to be able to think again, which is nice.

      One of the things that’s started to come to my mind is that it feels like I’ve just mentally and emotionally given up on ever being an independent functioning productive adult like everyone else. Being able to think again, I started thinking about that and surprised myself with both my conclusion and how I feel about it. I’ve realized that my unconscious depression induced fatalistic emotionally driven conclusion is right.

     I can’t be an independent functioning productive adult like everyone else. Maybe even not in a different way than everyone else, either. It’s not looking like that’s even a reasonable expectation myself. I can get to a certain point on my own, but everytime I reach that point, things fall apart. I kind of know what I need to be able to overcome this and get to functioning, but the truth is that the services needed to get me past where I can’t go any further on my own don’t exist. At least not unless I suddenly came into an extremely large amount of money.

      I can say if only I, or if only they, or if only this didn’t happen or if this was available or things were different, all day long, but it is, I am, they are, it did and it was. More importantly though, it all will continue to be. The truth is that unless there is a radical change in the world and society I live in at large, I will never be able to realize my full potential as a human being, much less as a contributing member of society. It’s just not going to happen.

       I will never be able to live independently and support myself with a full time job. I will never be able to be a custodial parent again. I will never be able to go back to college and I will never be able to regulate my physical and emotional state well enough not to need supportive living. It sounds ridiculous, I know. It sounds defeatist, and definitely sounds like an irrational conclusion foisted on me by depression. Maybe it is, but I think it might also be the truth. It may not always be, but it’s not really within my control to change my situation.

      Oddly enough, reaching this conclusion has not made me feel bad about myself or my life. I don’t feel hopeless. I don’t feel overwhelmed. I don’t feel guilty or ashamed of myself. Even more strangely, I don’t feel like this is making excuses, or a cop out, or me just not trying hard enough either. I usually beat myself up over everything all the time and am frequently told I’m too hard on myself, so the fact I don’t feel that way about this strikes me as a fairly significant thing. I actually feel unexpectedly at peace with it.

       I kind of feel, now that I can think again, that maybe I need to start taking a look at things in my life more realistically in general. I need to look at the immediate facts and truths of myself and my situation and see clearly who I am and where I am and how I am in relation to the world around me as it is, and not how things should be or Im supposed to think they are.

I need to acknowledge my limitations as I’ve learned them to be through effort and experience. Those are the only ones I need to acknowledge though. I need to discard the limitations set on me by others that I just blindly accepted. After I figure out what those are, at least. I mean if my limits are harsher than others in some places there have to at least be as many limits that are beyond where others have to stop.

I can’t live a normal functional independent life. I can’t be productive. I can’t fill the roles I want to the way they need to be filled, but that doesn’t mean I can’t live a life that’s better than what I am now. It doesn’t mean I’m worthless or have no purpose, and it doesn’t mean I have to punish myself for not being what society prepared a place for. It just means I have to stop wasting my time and energy trying to be and figure out where I can go and what I can be. Even if it’s less than what it should be , it has to be better than trying and failing over and over and over again.