Month: December 2021

Posted in Mental Health, Minor Irritation, Relationships

Well Meaning but Exhausting

Posted on by rsfahrudeen

I don’t think there’s anything more emotionally exhausting than people who speak to you and accidentally reveal they don’t know anything about what you’re trying to talk to them about. Usually this involves my mental illness. I have depression and anxiety and sometimes they take over. Nice people who care about me often say the most frustrating things while trying to help me. Sometimes it ends up making me feel worse.

The first is the ‘keep a positive attitude’ crowd. I say I feel depressed. They tell me to think happy thoughts and remember the positive. I was recently told I’m “too bless to be stress or depress”. No I’m not. There’s a hell of a lot of shitty things in my life that I can’t do anything about that are perfectly valid things to be upset about. In fact there has been so many for so long that it fucking changed my brain chemistry into having miserable as it’s default state. I can’t ‘happy thought’ that away any more than so done who’s lactose intolerant can digest milk products better by thinking about how many yummy things have lactose in them.

The worst response to trying to talk to someone about it when I’m feeling bad is being asked, ‘have you discussed this with your therapist’? It always sounds like they’re just telling me to shut up so they don’t have to deal with me and my problems. Sometimes people try to get you to talk but there’s nothing to say. Sometimes the misery’s just there with no trigger you can think of, no problems that would explain it as far as you know and there’s just nothing you can say.

I used to get mad but I know they mean well and don’t understand and won’t understand. I know this because I tried explaining it to them and it never works. People want easy solutions and to think it’s within our control more than it is, so they convince themselves that’s how it is. They don’t want to understand half the time. It’s incredibly frustrating, but now I just feel immediately exhausted and know that I can’t talk to them about this stuff again.

I don’t think bad thoughts most of the time. I just feel bad feelings. Most of the time the feelings come first. Sometimes it feels like I think the thoughts in order to explain the feelings. That the feelings trigger the thoughts and not the other way around. Sometimes the thoughts or situation does trigger the feeling, but not always. These well meaning people are never helpful in either situation.

When I believed them it made things worse. I would feel guilty for feeling depressed when I had no reason to be. Or that I was specially defective because I couldn’t think happy thoughts and be okay. The implicaton that I should only discuss my problems with my therapist made me keep everything in and keeping everything in and not thinking about it for a week is not a great way to remember it all to talk about during a one hour appointment. It just gets buried and forgotten until it isn’t anymore. It rarely waited until my therapy appointment to come back to haunt me.

It’s depressing realizing the ways in which people you like who like you back can’t help you. Especially when you want to go to them and they want you to come to them, or they think they do at least. Everyone wants to think they can be there for people they care about but the truth is they probably can’t. Life gets in the way, experience or lack of it gets in the way, history, ability, mood, energy, resources. People don’t have enough of any of that to do what they want to do for everyone they want to do it for. That’s just how it is. Their hearts write checks that their minds can’t cash.

I don’t even want much. I want someone to listen to my problems and tell me I’m not crazy for being upset by them. Or if I am. But most of the time I just want to be near someone and be held by them and be miserable but with someone else beside me just letting me be miserable and loving me anyways. Telling me I’m wrong to feel how I feel or that I shouldn’t be talking to them just makes me feel unwanted and like they don’t really care. It kind of makes being alone alot more bearable.

Posted in Mental Health

Where’s the manual?

Posted on by rsfahrudeen

One of the weirdest things I’ve discovered about myself is that my BO changes based on what I eat and how I’m feeling. Specifically, if I’m eating what I need to and taking my meds properly it gets mild and musky, often smelling like when I put on unscented deodorant when I’m using nothing. When I’m eating badly, doing poorly on my meds and get sweaty it smells awful like skunk cabbage. Isn’t that just the weirdest damn thing? Its probably even weirder that I noticed it.

But there are all sorts of things that I notice about me and my body and the effects on it that are just plain weird. Drinking too much soda or eating too much sugar at once with nothing else with it gives me diarrhea. The same with milk if I hadn’t had any in a while. Taking probiotics gives me energy and completely changes my hunger and sugar cravings. But it’s so easy to forget and go starch happy with my food again. Especially when I’m tired or get ahold of something I crave like saltwater taffy. I freaking love saltwater taffy and I can only get it around now for some reason. I found watermelon and creamsicle ones that I ate in two days because I couldn’t help myself. Though probiotics help with those kind of cravings too when I remember to take them.

My mind and body are so freaking high maintenance.if I eat wrong, sleep wrong, do meds wrong, have too much or too little time alone, too much to do or too little to do they both refuse to function properly and screw up my ability to do other necessary maintenance tasks. My internal heating system is so out of whack that eating a hot meal makes me overheat even in a sixty degree house on a winter day. Do you know how weird that is? Its irritatingly weird. Its probably part of being so fat.

Tastes are changing now too. Pizza doesn’t taste so good anymore. I crave Mac n cheese lately I crave eggs too but at the same time I’m all ‘eh’ at the thought of actually eating eggs. But if I make Mac n cheese it doesn’t taste as good as my craving tells me it would. I don’t know what the hell is going on with my taste buds. Candy isn’t tasting as good anymore either. Maybe I’m just not getting what I need. Maybe I need a potato. Mmm potato. I don’t know. It’s frustrating feeling so restless and unsatisfied with everything.

My shoulders break out every now and then, probably because I sleep on my sides and go sleeveless due to being so hot all the time. Every scrape and blemish heals four shades darker than the rest of my skin at least. Which is just weird. It’s like my body has forgotten that I’m white when it comes time to healing most wounds on my skin. And that just doesn’t make sense. It never used to do that when I was a child.

This is all so frustrating and confusing. I try to look up answers for some of these things and there isn’t one. I keep trying to work out the ratio of what I need to do for my body to function properly in it and I just can’t figure it out. Who the hell decided to give me this delicate rube Goldberg device to exist in? Because it isn’t funny right now. At least with all this nonsense it made me asexual instead of giving me a weird fetish. My life is confusing and inconvenient enough as it is without adding sexual desire to the mix. Granted asexuality just adds a different sort of confusion and inconvenience socially, but at least it makes being alone alot simpler.

Posted in Family, Mental Health

The Right to Exist

Posted on by rsfahrudeen

I struggle alot with feelings of worth. I don’t feel as if I contribute to society enough and often feel that my life is meaningless. I’m not enough. I’m not worthy. I don’t deserve. I haven’t earned. These thoughts and feelings come up alot. I even struggled with the idea that I deserved to be hit by my husband. I hate these feelings. I know they’re wrong. In general, but…

The thing that saved me from my husband was not the idea that I didn’t deserve it, but the knowledge that if I stayed my daughter might grow up thinking she might deserve it. No matter how I felt about myself I could not feel that way about her. Now I’m healed enough to know I didn’t deserve it. That he was an asshole , unreasonable, unfair and stupid. I’m doing my best to make sure my boys grow up understanding this, too.

Physical abuse is terrible, but it’s the mental abuse that does the most damage. I can’t stop their father from spanking them or using the belt to punish them for stupid unfair assuming reasons, but I can make sure they know that it’s not their fault. I can make sure they know that he’s an asshole and an idiot for doing it. I can make sure they know that it’s not their fault. I can let them know that yes their father loves them, because they’re loveable, but that doesn’t make what he’s doing right. B

I don’t tell them he loves them for his sake, I remind them of it for theirs. Yes he loves them, but he doesn’t know how to love them properly. He does stupid and assinine things like hitting them for crying and it’s wrong and unfair and loving them doesn’t make it okay. But the thought of being unloved and thus unwanted would be worse for them than just knowing their father is an idiot and an asshole.

I don’t ever want them to feel the way I’m feeling. Like their not good enough. That they have to earn the right to exist and be healthy and happy and be treated with love kindness and basic decency. How do you do that though when the world is saying otherwise? How do you do that when your own father is saying you’re not enough? How much can a mother’s love and acceptance do against all of this? Is it enough? Could it ever be? Am I enough?

Posted in Major Irritation, Mental Health

Brainwashed

Posted on by rsfahrudeen

I was playing this game with my boys the other day on Roblox called exposed. Where you basically answer questions about yourself. One was what would you change about yourself? My automatic answer was ‘My weight’ but I stopped as I realized wait that wouldn’t actually improve my life any. All it would do is attract more male attention that I really don’t want. Have I been so brainwashed that a minor annoyance is what I would choose to fix if I could fix anything when my executive dysfunction is what is really causing me problems? Apparently.

Posted in Mental Health

Yearning

Posted on by rsfahrudeen

Its hard sometimes being poor disabled and broke. Hardly a revolutionary statement but I so often find myself craving what other people have; my own place where my kids can come over, a source of income I can handle, a cat, to be allowed to raise my own children, money enough to open and maintain a savings account, the stamina and concentration to accomplish my goals, the sense of hope and possibility to actually make goals for myself, a disability that looks like a disability to other people. Not all small things, but plenty of those too.

I want to travel. I want to get a car. I want to get my license again (let it lapse before moving states). I want fucking teeth. Bulemis wrecked my bottom molars and I can’t afford dental care. I want to be able to afford to eat out. It costs twice as much to eat out now since I need delivery. I want to be able to take my kids to the movies, to the pool, to the park. I want to be able to get takeout with them without paying half my spending money, most of which I use to get to them in the first place.

I feel so envious when I see people similar to me with these things. I wonder what’s wrong with me that I can’t function with depression and anxiety and probably ADHD and all these other people can. I can’t shake this feeling that something is inherently deficient with me, something more than my recognized disabilities. Because somehow I’m just not enough.

I know I have it good. Better than most people. I have a safe steady place to live. I have assistance with my medication. I have a hundred dollars on spending money each month. I get to see my children, even if not as often as we wish. I have internet. I have a tablet and a smartphone. I have tons of free time, even if I struggle to know what to do with it. I have plenty of food. I have my own room and a back yard where I can garden. I even have a washer and dryer in the house.

I’m not ungrateful, I just wish I was more than a conduit with which government money gets passed onto public businesses. I wish I could rescue my children from their emotionally abusive father for more than a couple weekends a month. I wish I could be a productive member of society and feel as if I wasn’t just a burden or a leech or all around not good enough. I wish I could accomplish something significant and worthwhile and share it with everyone important to me.

The closest thing I’ve done to that so far is cross stitch Xmas stockings for my children. The most lasting thing I’ve done for my older boys is gift them fuzzy fleecy throw blankets when they were little that they’ve slept on every night for years. The best thing I’ve done for my daughter is leave her with her grandfather and the only thing I’ve done for my twins worthwhile is give birth to them. If I could I would have done more. I would do more. But I can’t. I hate Xmas most of all because of all the things I can’t do and haven’t done for my children.