Tag: mental illness

Not a good day

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

This has been a massive mess of a mental health day. It started off absolutely wonderfully, with the literal first thing I was greeted with upon turning my phone on being that Dick Cheney had died, but then featured a lunchtime panic attack that led to me calling off for the rest of the afternoon (it was all meetings, not teaching, but still,) getting home all full of piss and vinegar about getting a couple of things done while everyone else was out of the house, then doing none of that, and ending with one of my more unshakable depressive episodes lately, as I sit here watching election returns and dealing with a shitton of possibly-misplaced family and work-related guilt.

Part of me is blaming DST again. It was pitch-black before 6 PM and my mood just fell apart. Seasonal affective disorder is not usually a problem I have, and it’s worth pointing out that my day was shit when the sun was out too, but I’ve had a hard time this week for some reason.

Heh. “This week.”

It’s only fucking Tuesday.

In which I’m getting dumber

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Man, I don’t know if I should blame my phone or the Current Unpleasantness or what, but my powers of concentration have been significantly diminished lately. I may deliberately abandon the “20% of my books this year should be nonfiction” goal because I keep bailing on nonfiction books halfway through, and the novel whose cover up there and whose title I am deliberately not going to use anywhere in this post is an objectively good book— shut up, that’s a thing– and I’m halfway through it and I am suffering, y’all. And it is 100% because this book demands you pay attention to it and I am currently not capable of paying sufficient attention to complicated texts to have any real idea of what’s going on. It’s making me nuts.

I dunno, man. I don’t want to quit this book but I also don’t want to be miserable when I’m reading and it’s not like I can’t pick it up again later. That’s the good thing about books; you put them on the shelf and they stay there for as long as you want them to. They don’t grow legs and walk away. If you have even the slightest interest in juuuuust barely pre-Christian Britain and aren’t currently brain-rotted like me, you should check this book out because you’ll like it. But right now I just don’t have my shit together enough to properly appreciate it. I’m giving it one more day and if something doesn’t click I’m going to put it away and pretend it’s a temporary choice. Again, this is completely on me. I want my brain back, dammit.

In which my day is expensive and needley

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I managed to hit a parked car in my own fucking driveway this morning.

We have, for lack of a better word and in the interest of not telling a long story, a Tenant in our house. She’s been here for several months. She parks her car in the driveway every single morning. Because our garage is currently packed full with bullshit, my wife has also been parking in the driveway. I am on Fall Break, as all of you know, and for some reason when I left my house for a doctor’s appointment at 7:50 this morning, the fact that my wife’s car was not in the driveway made my fucking brain short-circuit and I assumed that that meant the other car was not in the driveway either. I realized my terrible mistake about half a second too late, and I don’t know yet how much my fucking idiocy is going to cost me.

To the doctor’s! Where I received a hepatitis B shot (needle #1) and had blood drawn (needle #2) so that my A1C could be tested. It’s 5.7! The diabeetus is officially Controlled! I can go off one of my many medications now!

Seriously, one of these days I’m going to take a picture of the pile of fucking pills I ingest every night. It’s ludicrous.

I also had to fill out the questionnaire about my mental health that I have to fill out every time I go to the doctor since I’m on brain meds. I was honest on the depression scale, but I handed the anxiety scale over to the doctor and told her flat-out that I was lying on it. Why? There’s a fucking election in two weeks, and my anxiety is off the scale but not in a way that adjusting my meds is going to help. We’re gonna leave those alone, and in about two weeks I’m either gonna be fine or I’m gonna need a prescription for fucking strychnine.

I mailed the postcards.

And then I went and got my second tattoo (Needles #3- God, who knows) in two months. My appointment started at 11:00 in the morning and I wasn’t finished until 4:15. My arm fucking hurts— this was easily the most painful tattoo (and the biggest, and the most colorful) I’ve ever had, and you can see from all the open pores at the bottom of the image that my arm isn’t terribly happy with me. Hummingbirds were my mom’s favorites, though, and I absolutely love the design. Griffin Freehling at Enamored Arts, LLC does great work. But holy shit, I need to not spend any more money at all for the rest of my break.

Can’t do it tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Having a weird and kind of upsetting mental health day, so I’m taking the day off from the blog. Go do something fun.

Snarl

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I am In a Mood tonight, and not especially fit for human company.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

On last year and next year

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I went back and looked at the post I wrote at the end of 2022, and while I was willing to admit that 2022 had been a good year, I was clearly feeling pretty gun-shy about the idea. The notion that after the utter carnage that 2016 through 2021 had been, an actual good year had finally happened really seemed to beggar belief. I can’t justify any such hesitation about 2023; last year was a good year by nearly all personal metrics other than my own health, and even that wasn’t all that bad. In a lot of ways, I really don’t have anything to complain about, and I’m tantalizingly close to a major, major milestone in my life, one that ten years ago I didn’t think was ever going to happen: assuming no disasters occur (hah!), I am on track to be completely debt-free other than my house by the end of this school year. That’s entirely due to trends that started in 2022 and accelerated in 2023.

(I just took a few minutes to look, and I was officially diagnosed with sleep apnea in November of 2022, so that’s not 2023’s fault. I can’t even get mad at 2023 about that.)

Here’s the thing, though: 2024 fucking terrifies me. Like, bone-deep. Like, I don’t know how you diagnose someone with anxiety when the world is actually like this terrified. Why? Notice how I said “personal metric” up there? By that I mean, like, my life, my health, my family, my job, my finances. That sort of stuff. That’s all good right now, although I know how fast shit can change. Anything other than that? Fucked. Fucked. This was the hottest year in the history of humanity and nothing’s going to change. I have brought a child into this bullshit and he has to somehow survive for several decades after I’m gone while the world is busy being on fire. Israel is committing genocide in plain fucking sight of the entire world and no one is doing anything about it and there is literally nothing I can do to change anything about it. There’s a fucking presidential election this year. The state legislature is about to go back into session and who the fuck only knows what sort of bullshit they’re going to put on us this year.

(The pronoun bill? Sorta fizzled. Everybody just sort of mutually decided that we weren’t going to pay any attention to it, and nothing happened. I violate the pronoun law a hundred times a day and nothing is going to happen to me.).

I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to survive ten fucking months until the election. And the level of panic that sets in any time I try to seriously contemplate what I should do if things don’t go our way is indescribable. 

So. Yeah. Last year was the last good year. Even if we win 400 electoral votes this fall I still have to make it to November before that happens. I just don’t see anything coming this year that I can look forward to, other than that whole “no debt” thing, which isn’t going to work out for me all that well when I have to sell everything and move to Canada on no notice. Or, y’know, not, since the fascists taking over could pretty much result in anything. Who the fuck knows.

Also, so far it’s been 2024 for two days, and I was woozy and sickish all day yesterday– I have never been hung over even once in my entire life, but based on how people have described it to me, I may as well have been– and last night I managed to throw out my back in my sleep because I’m 47 and that shit can happen now. So, yeah, fuck this year.

Anybody have the number for a good therapist? Maybe that’s where all my money can go.

Mental health note

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I alluded the other day to realizing that you’ve grown tired of a long-term hobby, and it’s floated through my head several times recently (and, I think, was also suggested by someone here, although I’m not about to go looking through comments) that if I described what I’ve been like lately to a third party and especially if I didn’t tell them I was talking about myself, they’d describe me as clinically depressed. My anhedonia is through the roof lately; I don’t enjoy much of anything that I used to enjoy, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

I’ve effectively stopped watching all things that can be watched. I have a probably month-high stack of comic books sitting next to me that I bought and actively don’t want to read. I’m ready to clear all of my superhero memorabilia out of the house, and that’s a lot of stuff. Even video games have been sources of more stress than stress relief yesterday; I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate III pretty consistently for a few weeks and I had a moment the other day where I realized I was getting tired of it. I’m … maybe a third of the way in? And my backlog is like six or seven games deep right now. If I hadn’t already shut down the YouTube channel (which is another thing I used to enjoy that I’ve stopped doing) I’d have to at this point, just because I can’t fucking finish anything.

I’m still reading, but nothing’s set the world on fire recently. I don’t know what the shit I’m going to do if I lose interest in reading. It’s unimaginable. And, well, y’all can bear witness to the amount of time I’ve spent writing recently. The weird thing is that I don’t feel like I’m unhappy; I just … feel like I don’t really enjoy anything lately. A bunch of perfectly cromulent geek hobbies have been tossed aside in favor of the fucking NYT crossword and Spelling Bee and I refuse to be that person.

I’ve been on brain meds long enough that I’m used to sort of monitoring my mental status from a distance. I’ll get in touch with my doctor if I start feeling like this is getting genuinely alarming, or if my wife comes to me after reading this and says she’s noticed something different. It may just be that I’m finally aging out of my juvenile bullshit; who knows. I just … really miss liking things, that’s all, and I don’t feel like that’s something I do any longer.

Blech.

Mental health check

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

We’re at … three weeks? A month? Let’s say three weeks– on the Effexor, and other than the nightmare week of constant sleep and side effects, I gotta say I’m feeling like I’m for it, all told. My wife remarked yesterday that she felt like I’ve been in a much better mood lately, and while I’m not going to pretend that the occasional urge to quit my job and go live in the woods doesn’t continue to strike me, I think that the fact that I teach middle school means that it’s perfectly reasonable that the occasional urge to quit my job and go live in the woods strikes me.

A couple of things that may or may not be side effects: I feel like my appetite has been suppressed a bit, although given my weight problem that’s not something I’m complaining about, and I think I’ve dropped some pounds since I started the drug but I’m not about to ruin it by weighing myself to check. I’m also sleeping better, which is good and bad, because getting up in the morning has been more difficult lately– and while that’s also a typical reaction to cooler weather setting in, the drive to work has been brutal, and I’ve needed caffeine to reach basic humanity more in the last few weeks than I ever have before. In other words, it being harder to get up isn’t atypical for fall, but this is worse than it usually is, which may or may not be the drug. I’m convinced about the appetite suppression. I’m less so about the sleepiness.

But one way or another, I feel like I’m experiencing more or less normal moods given my lifestyle and circumstances– I don’t feel like the drug has me in a haze or locked in a box, and I’m also not having to keep close tabs on my mood to note when it just might be anxiety and depression fucking me up worse than normal. Things have been better for the last couple of weeks, which is what this shit is supposed to be for. And I’m pretty sure it’s not fully kicked in yet, so hopefully I’m leading to more improvement and not overmedication. We’ll see, I guess? Sure.