I am still in the countryside, staying in a friend’s caravan/annex. It’s not the most luxurious accommodation. There is no toilet, so I have to pee and shit in the bush, though that doesn’t bother me. Animals get into the paint stripped walls and make an awful racket. The other week I heard something behind the curtain by the door. Whatever it was, it was big. I slowly pulled back the curtain and a fat rat leapt out and scurried across the room! Today I found a cockroach on the bench, though it probably doesn’t help that I don’t clean up. A bull ant landed on my puffer jacket while I was sitting on my bed. I have also had to remove two big huntsmen spiders from the place. I am becoming an expert at removing huntsmen, putting a plastic container over them, sliding cardboard underneath and taking them outside. Perhaps it was the same huntsman who found his way back into the caravan. Continue reading “Life in a rural area”
“He was a big character, chaotic, charismatic, and fun. With a big heart. He lived a big life, too short. And now he has left us with a big hole.” James Oliver, Revi Nair’s colleague and friend
Today I found out that my old psychiatrist, Revi, has died. First I was in shock, and then I cried. I watched his eulogy online. I don’t know why. But it’s a great eulogy and helped me understand him more and what draw him to psychiatry. He wasn’t just a great psychiatrist but a wonderful human being with a huge personality who cared for all living beings, from stray cats to humans, all his life. He said some things to me I’ve longed to hear all my life: “I want to take care of you”, “something has to be done, things can’t keep going like this” (in reference to how bad my mental health was). Well they can and they will. What a horrible end to yet another shit year. I didn’t actually have that many sessions with him. I was referred back to the public system as he, like most private psychiatrists, felt I was too bad for the private system. But the public system/case management service won’t take me back. I was going to get the GP to refer me back to Revi. I don’t actually feel psychiatry (or even psychology) has a lot to offer me but he was a kind person and I feel there is a place for some aspects of psychiatry, like short term benzo use. I don’t know what I would have done yesterday if I didn’t have any diazepam. I wouldn’t wish panic attacks on my worst enemy. Well the GP gave me twenty more tablets of diazepam today. I was hoping for more, but the drug is highly regulated and he worried the system might knock me into red if he gave me a pack of fifty. Hopefully I don’t keep having more panic attacks. I slept better last night.
I can’t believe Revi is gone. Everyone loved him. His office was always so warm and welcoming. And his laugh… omg his laugh. There are not many psychiatrists like him around.
I seem to lose everyone as the year comes to an end. I remember my very first therapist who I saw for two and a half years and was like a best friend to me terminated our relationship in December. I have never managed to get back on my feet and have remained in a deep depression for a decade now. My current therapist is about to go on holidays, and I don’t know if I will ever see my NDIS worker again. He told me he wanted to cut back our sessions as he felt I was too dependent on him. He then told my parents he couldn’t handle all the distressing messages I was apparently sending him and has now gone off on stress leave.
I will need to rely more on my friends this next month. I don’t like to lean on my friends too much as I don’t want to burden them with all my stuff. I will probably spend a lot of time on my own in nature this next month, which I feel I need to do.
I was discharged from PAPU, the four-bed, short stay psychiatric unit in the public hospital, two days ago. In total they gave me six days there, which is a lot longer than they usually give me, though still not enough. I was terrified I would be set up for more rejection when the private hospital sent me back to the public system. Usually the public hospitals just keep me overnight in the emergency department and send me home the next day, or give me a maximum of 48 hours.
During my fifth day there, I saw Dr Michael. He told me that management was putting pressure on them to discharge me.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I would tell the doctors. “I didn’t even want to be here. I wanted to stay at Delmont.” But Delmont wouldn’t take me back.
Michael told me that not talking made it hard for me to participate in the groups in private hospitals, which was total bullshit as there is not much interaction in the groups anyway.
“People need to stop discriminating against me,” I told him. “You don’t tell someone who doesn’t hear they can’t have a hospital stay. I’m fucking sick of it. Both public and private. There is ways around it like people who are deaf or blind.”
Continue reading “Self-esteem and standing on the edge of loss, again”
It’s been a bit over a week since I was discharged from hospital, and I’ve found myself on a bit of a slippery slope. I’m stuck in some bad patterns, particularly with my sleep which is all over the shop. As much as I want to sleep at night, I feel a compulsion to sit up. I’ve been awake many nights working on various creative projects: a new site for my photography, a new video for my YouTube channel, and even designing some sexy clothes such as onesies, singlets and underwear to sell with slogans such as “I am the hot in psychotic”, and “cute but psycho”. When I do go to bed earlier, I find I lie there and all these painful feelings which I usually block out hit me. I’ve still been feeling very touch starved, as I mentioned in my last post. I started searching the internet for “professional cuddlers”, and wrote a personal essay to one of them telling them all about my deprivation, my distress, my kundalini awakening and the buzzing sensation on my head. I haven’t heard back.
I’ve been feeling as emotional and sensitive as I do when I have PMS, but my period has just passed. I think maybe the sleep deprivation is messing with me. I’m having ginormous reactions to things most people would be able to get over. I had a break down over a carrot. Yes, a carrot. I was in the kitchen making some juice. My dad had just got home and I didn’t want to be around anyone, so I was trying to finish it as quickly as possible so I could return to my solitary life. I pulled out a carrot from the juicing carrot packet I bought. It was such a funny looking carrot. It was two carrots attached to the one. It looked like two sexy legs, with a wide hip and then narrow ankles. I wished I had of kept it or taken a photo of it for social media, but I was hyper focused on the task, cut it up and blended it. I immediately regretted it, and felt overwhelming sadness as I had given it human qualities. This triggered a break down in me, and while I usually implode quietly behind closed doors, it all came out in front of my dad. I cried and hit things and told him I couldn’t stand my life. My dad said it was just my autism. I get obsessed with the task before me, like he is obsessed with doing up his friend’s house right now so it can be put on the market, and I don’t like to be interrupted. Still, I couldn’t get over it. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “I feel like rubbish!” I screamed. I shut the door of my bedroom and took 10mg of diazepam and 10mg of olanzapine. I then called Lifeline as I felt like I might overdose again. While I’ve found most people at Lifeline to be great, I didn’t feel this lady really cared or got me. When I told her about my touch starvation she told me to hug a toy. She kept asking me to do something I enjoy, like painting. Quite frankly I was beyond it and it felt belittling of the crisis I was in. I started looking for some strong, codeine-containing painkillers. At this point she decided to end the call and hung up on me, leaving me very unsafe. Perhaps fortunately, I couldn’t find the medication I was after. My OCD kicked in and my focus quickly shifted from the carrot to finding the medication. I then had a break down over this. I got more and more agitated and felt like I was going to pass out. I couldn’t stand my life. The house is a mess and I never have it in me to clean it up. I couldn’t stand constantly losing things. I move and put things down mindlessly all the time. There was a thread about this in a dissociation group I’m part of and the person called it “micro losses of time”. A lot of people in the group had been misdiagnosed with ADD when really it was dissociation causing them to forget where they put things.
I finally found the medication under a pile of clothes on my floor. My dad suggested going to the beach to take my mind off the carrot, so at midnight we went to the beach. Nothing could make me feel better. As soon as we got there, I said I wanted to go home. I was feeling a bit sedated from all the medication I had taken. I went to bed when we got home and slept until 4:30pm the next day. When I woke up I felt depressed as shit, like I’d been run over by a truck.
I saw my disability worker yesterday and we went back to the beach. It took me a while to get going as I hadn’t sleep that night either. I was totally fucked. When we got to the beach I realised I’d picked up the wrong bag and didn’t have my sunscreen. The sun was strong and I could feel myself burning. My disability worker went to the shops over the road to buy some more, while I hid under a towel as seagulls swarmed on me, after the food I had bought. I was so tired I felt I could have a nap on the sand. It was a beautiful day at the beach. The water was still, clear and not too cold. No body was ruining the tranquility with music, as people often do. We didn’t have enough time there though. My disability worker told me I only had three minutes to swim before we had to leave. I should have told him to leave me there and caught a taxi home, but I was overwhelmed and couldn’t make any decisions. I was teary the entire trip home. It’s super annoying being dependent on other people to do things. I have very bad driving anxiety and am not able to drive to the beach myself.
I continued to forget things, leaving my dinner in the oven. I went to bed at 8pm last night fully clothed and then woke up at midnight. I then got up and sat on the computer for the rest of the night. Someone online told me I should kill myself. I have been bullied my entire life, and it seems like I will always be a target. I went back to bed at around 4am. I felt strangely relaxed and started slipping deeper and deeper. That is when I had another one of my terrifying, trippy dreams where I am not able to wake up. I was trapped in my subconscious mind, and though I was dead or stuck in some kind of purgatory. I was screaming at the top of my lungs but no sound made it through. In the dream I was struggling to hear too. I didn’t know if my dad was a hero or a villain. I didn’t feel my age in the dream, I felt like a child, and I was screaming “stop it daddy, please daddy, stop it”. But at the same time I was trying to make it to his end of the house so he could help me. Trying to alert him to something really bad that was happening. The atmosphere was incredibly dark, like always. It reminds me of the way I take photos and then edit them to make them monochrome, which completely changes the mood. No body could reach me and I couldn’t reach anyone. I was stuck in my bed. I tried to reach for my phone to call 000 but I couldn’t move or feel it and had no voice anyway. I was stuck behind a veil where I could see my familiar surroundings but I couldn’t interact with them. It was the loneliest, most awful feeling ever. “Help me, help me, help me”, like I was locked inside a cave and my echo was the only voice coming back. It was just like the night I took some strong marijuana oil and went psychotic, as I wrote about here. I think the marijuana oil really brought out the contents of my mind for everyone else to see. All that stuff is still there in my mind.
I found a whole lot of people online here who experience this same thing. They talk about the “false awakenings”, one of the worst parts of the dream. Just when you think you have woken up and are back in your normal surroundings, you realise something is off and you are still stuck in the dream. It reminds me of Stranger Things where Dr Brenna got Eleven to go into her trauma at the lab with “One” (Stranger Things 4, Chapter 5: The Nina Project). She couldn’t get away, and just when she thought she had, it all started again. It was a loop that repeated over and over.
Finally I managed to wake up, and I wrote a few emails to my GP and psychotherapist. I read about other people’s experiences of getting stuck in a dream and it seems to happen more often during naps, or when we are sleep deprived. I had also started taking magnesium glycinate yesterday, which I am wondering had something to do with it.
I managed to fall back to sleep and got up at 3:30pm today. I got a call from my mum saying my GP had contacted her and wanted me admitted to a private hospital today to fix my sleep. I appreciate her concern, but I don’t want to go to hospital just yet. I’m still getting over that horrific trip to the public hospital.
On top of all this, I still have all my nervous system issues. The buzzing sensation on my head continues to torment me, and my body remains rattled from my overdose earlier in the year. My heart races when I change position and I have a tremor, which gets worse when I am anxious and makes it hard to draw. My nails are breaking all the time, probably indicative of my deteriorating health, and I have bruises all over my legs. Overall, life is pretty horrific on all fronts.
After a bit of a rough start, I am finally getting the respite that I need. I am staying in a motel set in a quaint garden. People often have weddings here. I have been the only one staying here the past few days which has been lovely. Below is a view from my window. Small birds with long, thin beaks often stop by and suck nectar from the flowers on the bush.
Continue reading “Loss, home, space, solitude and developmental trauma”
When we lose someone we love, it can be hard to know what to do with the things that remind us of them. When I lost my case worker a bit over a year ago, I never touched my soft lion and elephant again. I had brought them into an appointment not long before my case worker was taken from me. Suddenly they felt tainted. They no longer brought me comfort, but sadness, so I kept them out of sight. I only just feel ready to dig them out again now, after seeing this picture of them which reminded me of how sweet and special they are.
I realised that they are mine, they are whole, and no body can take the joy they bring me away from me anymore.
It is not an easy night. It is 4AM and my grief is keeping me up like a little child. In fact, I believe it literally is a little child. My psychologist introduced me to Internal Family Systems and the idea that we have different “parts”. Within me are parts stuck at different ages. I didn’t always interact with my psychologist as a 31-year-old adult. I attached to her like a child attaches herself to a mother. Sometimes my young part(s) would not only hijack my emotions but they would hijack my behaviour. There was one session I spent on the floor playing with the toys in her office. I put some of her little soft animals in her plastic expandable ball (there is one for sale on Ebay here for reference) and rolled them around. I built block towers out of dominos, and then balanced my psychologist’s little toy hedgehog on top, very impressed that it did not collapse. My psychologist had two crochet otters called “Harry” and “Ginny”. One day when she took leave she let me keep one of them. She kept “Harry” and said she would carry him in her handbag wherever she went so that she wouldn’t forget me. They were like friendship charms. She said it was normally what she’d do for her children, but she trusted me and thought it might help. It did help. I kept “Ginny” by my bed and she was of great comfort, so much so that I had trouble relinquishing her when my psychologist returned. I gave “Ginny” back to her crying and then left abruptly. Continue reading “Sad”
““I thought this was more,” I whispered low,
Hoping he’d stay, hoping he’d show.
But his response, like a dagger, cut deep,
“No one stays, my dear, not in this world .”
With those words, reality crashed in,
My heart shattered, my hopes pinned.
For what we shared was just a game,
A situationship, without a name.”
Poestoryporium, ‘Whispers of Love’
I don’t know if it’s fully sunk in that my psychologist, my confident, has left me. Whenever something happens in my life- good or bad- I automatically turn to her. I go to write her an email, or I store it in a little bottle in my mind for our next session, only to remember that she is gone. It really does feel like a nightmare I keep expecting to wake up from. I never thought she would leave me and I’d have to go through this hell all over again. I thought she was different. I trusted her. Now she has left me with what I can only liken to phantom limb syndrome. Continue reading “Grief: a rollercoaster”
hsphaven 