“What if I wanted to break?
Laugh it all off in your face
What would you do?
What if I fell to the floor?
Couldn’t do this anymore
What would you do?”

– NO NAME FACES, THE KILL

My ear pain since the otoscope has not improved at all over the past few weeks, which I believe is why my shopping addiction and other dysfunctional coping mechanisms have got so bad. I’ve been spiralling out of control. Last night I was panicking. I had a little voice in me saying “help me help me” as I impulsively threw away $500 and then tried to take back what I had just done, begging the seller on ebay to cancel my order and refund me. I was having trouble contacting them as I was not logged in when I made the purchase. I discovered a super cool Japanese clothing brand (help!) and was on some international version of ebay and made the purchase as a “guest”.

I was trying to reduce my spending, asking myself do I really need all these expensive art supplies, but then I go and throw away $500 on more clothes. Somehow it always leads back to this. I feel like I’m possessed or something. I tried to go to bed earlier but I couldn’t sleep, even though I only got two hours sleep yesterday. I had the compulsion to go online again and buy the items I’d saved. I told myself I would then finally be at peace. Come sunrise I was still on the computer shopping. My eating disorder voice is cheering on the addiction and the hyperfixations as it means I’m not eating and am losing weight. It’s like a war within my own head. Addictions, eating disorders, and my other “disorders” are all just trying to deal with the daily trauma of being in this body and world in their own ways.

I guess one of the most distressing things about this is I’m realising the doctor who did the ear exam was actually medically negligent. This is not my fault or doing. After reading “Ear examination: A practical guide” by doctors Chang and Pedler, I realised my GP fucked up in a number of ways.

  1. He used the wrong sized speculum. A larger speculum should have been used, which is more comfortable as force is exerted around the entire circumference of the ear canal. “In contrast, a smaller speculum transmits force on only one point of the ear canal and is therefore more uncomfortable,” Chang and Pedler write.
  2. He examined my bad ear first, and then proceeded to examine my good ear. If I did have an ear infection in my bad ear, it may have then spread to my good ear.
  3. He inserted the speculum too quickly.

Now I am left to suffer at the hands of yet another negligent health professional. Yet another person who was meant to help me!

All my life people have blamed me, gaslit me, told me there’s something wrong with me, that I’m too sensitive, that I’m fucked up, that I’m the bad guy, that I’m irrational, that I can’t trust my feelings. I’ve heard it in abusive relationships. I’ve heard it from doctors. I’ve internalised that self-doubt. I went to the beach last night and, standing in the water, I felt something bite/sting me. I wondered for a minute whether I was imagining it, as for some reason I was anxious about swimming that night in the dark. But I got out and looked at my foot and found it was bleeding.

Last night tears welled in my eyes from what people have done to me. I’m saddened that I have to suffer so much every single day because of it. If I ever feel the full extent of my anger I feel like I could go on a killing spree or something. I felt like I was hanging on by a thread and I was terrified of my selfish neighbours starting up their machinery and waking me once I’d finally got to sleep. I am feeling incredibly vulnerable and I know this will just tip me over the edge. As someone who usually stuffs their emotions, it still feels a little unreal the time I went over there screaming in front of them. I told them I was sick, couldn’t sleep at night and needed to sleep during the day, and I couldn’t handle their noise. If they woke me again today I probably would have stormed over there and smashed their window or something (not the first time I’ve smashed a neighbour’s window) and we would have the cops round again. Once again I would be made out to be the villain while I continue to be abused. The psycho girl next door. This is actually a known technique used by abusers:

“Reactive abuse is an in-the-moment reaction to mistreatment from another person. When a victim reacts, the abuser uses this reaction to impart further abuse in the form of blame-shifting. The abuser will transform into a victim themselves in an attempt to make the victim view the situation in a different way, and believe a different reality from the one that’s actually being lived. In this way, reactive abuse is often seen as a form of gaslighting, which is the emotional manipulation of a victim.”

The law doesn’t protect people like me and the covert forms of abuse inflicted upon me.

I fear getting to the point where I start acting out and disrupting society, but I also crave it. Those times I’ve done it I’ve never felt both so far from myself and also so myself at the very same time. A couple of weeks ago I remember reading a post in my local community group about a woman who wandered in front of their car with a dead, empty look on her face. I wondered whether they were talking about me, or whether society is breaking down and there are more people like me out there who are losing it. I think the community needs to know what is going on behind closed doors for so many people.

Anyways, I guess the point I’d like to get across to all you other “highly sensitive” people out there is that you are not too sensitive. This world is too brutal. 

I’ve been having quite a lot of existential anxiety. I think my “mid life crisis” has come particularly early.

“Do you ever stop and realise how surreal it is to be alive experiencing all this, and how surreal it is to then just die?” I wrote to my therapist around 6am.

In fact everything felt surreal. I looked at things I’d said and done from a removed perspective, like how I imagine other people view me, or maybe how I’d view myself if I ever reached a place of being happy and “sane” and forget what it’s like to be in such a dark space. I didn’t know who that person was anymore. They seemed absurd, a poor player that struts and frets their time upon the stage and is heard no more, as Macbeth puts it. 

I fell into a deep, existential kind of depression, which my first psychologist told me was part of being a gifted adult (she sent me a great article: Dabrowski’s Theory and Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults).

“All my purchases, all my suffering, it is all meaningless,” I wrote to him. “All of it.”

I was going to die and it wouldn’t even matter anymore. 

I am gender fluid and my pronouns often shift. Last night, they changed to “it”.