been a long time

It’s been a while. A few things happened – my parents came to visit and I had a lovely three weeks visiting places and swimming in the sea, almost like a normal person apart from the mobility aids and copious amounts of drugs.

I’m a little reluctant to write here because I don’t want to go back to overanalyzing every shift and flunctuation in mood. Ultimately it’s not too healthy. I also feel like this journal is a bit too exposed. But if I don’t write things down I forget them, and I did get a lot of use out of keeping this journal last year. It also helps others (R) keep track of things.

My sacroiliac problem has flared up again, and the most the doctors can say is that it’s some kind of inflammation of the sacroiliac joint. Arthritis. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve shifted to using a wheelchair part-time – for any journey outside the house that requires more standing/walking around than getting into a taxi and out at the other end. I’ve used it around the shops in the city centre, by the seaside yesterday, and around various supermarkets. It’s a bit rough on the shoulders, but a lot better for everything else. I should probably have done this last year. I wish my house and street were more accessible. I am trying to get into the habit of going out once a week, because the house is nice and all but being cooped up gets frustrating.

Here is the wheelchair. Her name is Ermyntrude and she is lovely.

Mentally, things have been a little… off since my parents went back to the UK and have been slowly deteriorating since. Life events haven’t helped. A family friend died of lung cancer last week. I’d been thinking about him a lot and it came as a shock, even though I hadn’t seen him for about five years.

I’ve been having some problems with time and the reality of the present and the past lately. I wrote this about a week ago, which explains it fairly well I think.

lately i’ve been more convinced than ever of the elasticity of time. it seems thinner in places than in others, and it occurred to me that if you position yourself exactly in the right spot you could somehow slip through time itself and find yourself where you were eight, nine, ten years ago.

i became increasingly wary about this because of the possibility that you might slip through time without even meaning to. like, if you catch yourself in the same mood or listening to the same music that you listened to a long time ago, you’re putting yourself in danger of slipping backwards in the stream. i started to worry that in actuality all this was fake, or a dream, and that i wasn’t separated from the past-me at all, and very soon i would snap out of this. i think now that that was me getting very close to slipping out of the present, which is actually quite dangerous.

the only way to guard against this is to keep yourself as grounded as possible in the here and now, and there are lots of tiny ways you can do that: small, repetitive things that don’t require much brain activity (because the power of thought is what really brings you close to the danger points, every time you hear something evocative or smell something evocative you’re closer to one of the thinner points in the stream).

But since then anxiety has become a bigger problem than time. I’ve had some horrible intrusive thoughts trying to convince me I’d done something awful (no details, sorry), and it’s been quite difficult to stop fucking obsessing over it. I tried all sorts of things, including going back on Seroquel in the evenings to try and calm things down. I did also consider going to hand myself into the police at one point but fortunately I can’t really get out of the house that well ha ha. I am doing all sorts of little repetitive things like playing spider solitaire or painting my nails ten times a day in order to stop thinking about the big thing, and I’ve also done stuff that’s a little more ~self-destructive. O so coy.

I don’t really want to say any of this to the psychiatrist. Or to anyone at all, really. Perhaps that’s another reason I’m writing this here. It lets people know without me having to tell them. Perhaps I could just post this entry to the psychiatrist and stay in bed instead?

posted by jeneli

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