hsphaven

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.