id-on-parade

[id-on-parade]

It’s Done

I have an appointment, june 24th, for counseling/therapy, potential medication management. that was an interesting wake-up call.

[id-on-parade]

I’ve done what I can for now. I’ve selected an office from the approved list, and called them. their system said they’d call back within 24 hours. now its a waiting game. they close at five today, as does my insurance. worst case, it’ll be done tomorrow.

[id-on-parade]

A New Day

This will probably be a pretty long post. I’m gonna put the positives at the front, then i’m gonna exorcise some demons from my mind. This exorcism is to remove them from my head, not to put them into someone else’s, so i’ll go ahead and put an end to positives notice, and i guess read on at your own risk.

I am currently waiting on a list of approved Mental Health care providers in my area from my insurance company, I’ve just gotten off the phone with them and they said they would send it to me and I should pick one. After picking one and confirming they are accepting patients I should call the insurance folks back to get approval for a number of appointments. They close at five, so hopefully I’ll get the list soon so i can get this rolling - hopefully i’ll get this sorted today. Its funny that I feel this sense of almost giving up on doing it myself, this outdated cultural stigma at the same time that I feel a strong sense of hope that this will be a turning point in my mental health. I look back and wonder with a decent sense of awe how different my life might have been had I received mental health care as a teen when this all started.

I had a pretty heavy depressive episode yesterday, and am happy to report that today feels more like my standard levels of depression, i’m me again today - the me that most know, not the me that’s falling and can’t seem to catch hold. this information that today is a new day, i’ve survived, and the pit appears to have closed is the end of the positives for this post. here on in will be an unloading of a very stressful and difficult week, read on if you wish, but i gotta get these demons out somewhere, so here they go.

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I guess i should start at the start. I returned this last week from a week of sick leave wherein I had some Covid symptoms, my wife had some Covid symptoms and at the start of that sick week, that was majorly stressful.  I got tested, nasal swab, x-ray, and found to be negative for covid, or pneumonia. my wife’s insurance, however, had her do an online appointment, she answered some questions, the internet told her it was likely viral sinusitis, and wrote her a note to take the week off as well, no seeing a doctor, no actual tests. now, luckily, we both seem to have gotten better over that week - but boy was that frustrating.

When I returned to work, my boss and I had a bit of a disagreement about what a sick note through Saturday meant, he thought i should have come in Saturday, I thought i shouldn't. I even called Saturday and someone over the phone told me i was not scheduled Saturday. at the end of the conversation he had basically made it seem like i was dumb for thinking about it the way i did, that it didn’t matter about the call on Saturday, and that i might get in trouble. then he said “so, for next time, you know - come in on the day that’s listed.” So far, no trouble has come down the pipeline about that, but he’s been much less jovial with me of late.

That’s probably a decent bit of paranoia, we’ve all been less jovial of late, at my work. Providing mental health care to inpatient teens is hard. there’s a lot of secondhand trauma. (more on that later) there’s a lot of firsthand trauma. (more on that later). These kids are quite ill, and they are trying so hard, often put up against a life that’s honestly too difficult for even most adults, my whole heart goes to them. Right now, With the pandemic, and the rioting, they have more stress than ever, and less access to their loved ones, and anyone who knows anything about mental illness, knows what that means for their mental health. And with all of our patients having suddenly much worse mental health it means not only that my coworkers and I are dealing with more unsafe situations, and absorbing more trauma, but on the back-end we’re watching these kids backslide through months of progress, and sometimes that’s so heartbreaking. It’s normal, to backslide, and it doesn’t mean anything negative about the kids, but it doesn’t make it less heartbreaking. so yeah, coworkers are all in their stressed out, panic, survival modes, and its pretty visible right now - which means sometimes we are not as awesome to each other as we could be.

One of my coworkers was especially not awesome, to himself, this week. I really looked up to this  guy. takes heart to be openly flamboyantly queer with these kids, and he was, and he was always honest with them as far as accountability, a real no-sugar-coating type guy. when things got rough, it wasn’t unusual to hear him say “look at your life, look at your choices” to these kids, where other staff might handhold, and walk them through an analysis of what they’d been doing. Well, this week he must have finally snapped from the stress, as about 5 cop cars and a firetruck arrived at the neighboring cottage to retrieve him from the bathroom, where he had sequestered himself to huff aerosol mid shift. He won’t be returning, and he was damn good at this. he’ll be missed, and I hope away from the job he can recover.

Stream of consciousness, this brings us to kids and trauma. To avoid trauma, as the kids also care about that coworker, I ushered the kids I was outside with into the building. well, all but one. This is a fairly new patient, AFAB NB, spent a long time homeless before coming to us, family ain’t about the identity. As the cops rolled up, they were hurling insults, flipping them off, and generally saying things that I had to remind them to watch their language for. not that i reminded them very loud, because honestly, mood. But then they got silent as the cops sent to work, and they got real still. they stopped responding to me, and that was when i decided to walk around in front of them and force eye contact. they were on the verge of tears. I said “They aren’t here for you, you’re safe here, let’s go inside - it isn’t helping you to watch this.” they said It’s just --- the last time I saw the Cops they were hauling away my boyfriend”. - “that is extremely traumatic, if you come inside with me we can work on some coping, and help you to get the thoughts out, will you come inside with me?” -- “I wan’t to, But I just Can’t, I Can’t Make Myself.” - “Can you take my arm and we’ll walk together?” --”NO! I Can’t Have Anyone Touch Me Right Now, PLEASE” - “Absolutely, you’re safe here, how about if we take it slow, and I walk beside you instead?” -- “o-okay” it took us roughly 5 minutes to walk the 20 steps to the door. Once inside, they wept in a ball for some time, before beginning to work on coping skills with me. In processing, they let me know they were having such trouble because the boyfriend they were remembering had been very abusive, and the cops were hauling him off because of the beatings he had heaped upon them. that they hated the cops because they thought they loved him at the time, even though they now know he was not good for them, but knowing that hadn’t made them hate the cops less. And that seeing the cops had put their mind firmly into memories of being abused, and that they were having trouble breaking free of that thought trap. eventually we were able to get them involved in group activities and somewhat distracted, at least.

There’s a kid who reminds me of me as a teen, he’s depressed, and angry. unlike me as a teen he’s also very slow to process, and to avoid falling behind when he fails to process things he either makes cruel jokes, or explodes with anger. His dog is dying. His family barely sees him normally, but with the virus they don’t do much at all. His only contact is family therapy, and when he remembers to call them. he often doesn’t remember to call them until after phone time is over. then he wants to scream and shout and tear everything apart when he doesn’t get to make the call. This story though, is about a day he did remember to call. And his family let him know about the riots, all across the country. He’s trying hard to understand, but he doesn’t. He thinks, his being here, after drug and assault charges, has something to do with whats going on out there. that maybe his case is also unjust. but he also knows he needs this care. but he also sees himself backsliding and feels hopeless about progress, due to the depression. This is when he decides to try to recruit his peers to escape with him. All of his peers, to their credit, stayed the fuck out of it. but it did mean convincing him of the value of treatment, and the potential risk of breaking down a door - while he was trying to break down a door. he’s one of the few that I honestly don’t know, if i’m alone with him and he swings on me, if i could defend myself well enough until support arrived. he didn’t that day. but boy was that A Lot Of Stress.

The kid who has assaulted the most staff and peers, physically, verbally, sexually. started a plan that had him out of Low Stim and with peers in Close Attention this week, because we were receiving a new kid this week, at six foot, straight from juvie, a known fighter, and an off-meds psychopath. and, even though Low Stim has 2 rooms, we’re trying to get sexually assaultive kid out of there so there isn't risk in the dual occupancy. i’ll talk about new kid later, for now lets talk about the more long term patient. this patient has trouble with building relationships, an echo of the abuse he experienced in younger life, frequently he gets sexually explicit, physically assaultive and perhaps fecally oriented while doing so, especially when he is worried about relationships, or feels “too silly”. the trouble being of course, our counseling works best when we build strong relationships with patients, and even regular jokes can push him into the “too silly” category. He did well for the first bit. after about three days the back to back escalations began. a peer told a joke, he laughed too much, the staff pulled all the other kids inside and away from him to protect them. he whipped out his dick, pissed all over the place, tried showing it to staff, then began throwing sidewalk chalk everywhere, windows, doors, the roof, towards other buildings, whatnot. when the support staff arrived and 12 of us asked him to proceed to a quiet room, he did so of his own volition, rather than us taking him, and due to that, my coworker did not lock him there. no sooner had the extra staff gone than he came out banging around.we went hands on and locked him there. at the end of an hour and a half, my coworker deemed he had calmed enough to rejoin his peers. no sooner had he made his way back into the milieu than he began trying to hug and grope various staff.we again hauled him into a quiet room and locked him there. as the shift neared its end, we called security and had them help us get him back to his room in the LSA, not wanting to leave night shift with a kid in a QR. once back there, he tried to show staff his dick, again, and eventually settled into refusing to go to his room, when it was clear staff wouldn’t interact with him anymore for the night and expected him to go to bed, he went in his room, drug his mattress to being half down in the doorway, looked at me and said “is this in my room enough?” before laying down to try to sleep. he was scared, after everything he didnt want to be alone, and would rather not follow directions and potentially be in trouble, than be by himself in his room. I let him stay there. More of the same throughout the following day, and the day after that is when his story intersects with new kids in just about the most traumatic way.

New kid is over six feet, muscular, dead eyed, and arrived wearing a juvie orange jumper which he refuses to change from. developmentally, it is hard to distinguish this mustachioed individual from a fully grown man. in all of his dealings with staff, he was robotically polite. out of staffs sight he could be heard screaming angrilly, wailing in dispair, cursing out people who aren’t there, and then pleading “ oh no, no no no, NO NO NO NO” like you would expect to hear from a prone person while someone with a bloody knife walked towards them. I know because for a lot of the week i sat and listened to this. i listened to him strike himself after the pleading as well. and while I personally was not threatened in any way by his actions, it was still extremely stressful and distressing. Throughout the week, whenever the longer term patient overheard these things, he would should “would you stop, damn” to the new kid, and less polite versions. I tried to remind the long term patient that everyone struggled with different things, and that it would be better to ignore his peer, or at least make politer requests. no such luck. it seemed, throughout the week as though new kid simply did not hear long term patient.he proved that wrong on saturday afternoon, when he marched out of his room and began wailing on long term patient. after long term patient fell, new patient grabbed him by the hair and pulled him into a room, where the beating could be heard to continue. By the time we had enough staff to safely go in, new kid was standing one foot on long term kids throat, looking him in the eyes and repeating “i’m going to kill you” but, dispassionately.

I think thats it for work stress, I covered viral stress earlier. I am stressed by the riots. it makes me profoundly sad that it must come to this, but i also find myself firmly believe it HAD to come to this. that this rioting is righteous, and the only road to social change. I’ve been a punk since I was a teen, and I feel like i should do more for this movement, but honestly all of my energy is being spent keeping me going and treating these kids.

My depression has picked my relationship with bestie to fixate on in these trying times, and I fear I may have damaged that relationship because of it this weekend. bestie has just started a new schedule which is excellent for her. I’m so happy that she is now on a schedule that works for her needs, and will allow a healthy amount of sleep, and time at home, and for her to sleep close to the hours she’d prefer to be sleeping. I had been very lucky in that her last schedule was very close to my own schedule, and so our time at home nearly entirely overlapped. she chose to spend a number of mornings, and late evenings after the rest of the house just hanging out, her and I, and I absolutely love that time. I don’t want to sound entitled to it, at all. it is a gift she gives to me, that I am so happy to receive and which i am so glad she wants to give to me. With the new schedule she will have to leave early enough that the morning hangouts will not be an option, and because of this likely ought to go to bed early enough that the hangouts while the house slumbers aren’t a healthy choice. My depression tried hard to have me believing that this meant those times were just gone. After work saturday, bestie and wifey were listening to an excellent, but extremely despairing/sad audio drama.It was very enjoyable. It was probably not a mentally healthy choice for me to partake in that, and had I requested a different hangouts activity, they might have been a little sad, but probably would have swapped. instead, rather than be an even minor inconvenience I joined because i wanted the hangouts, and had a great time listening to a great story and felt like while the despair was growing in me, in resonance with the story, i’d sleep on it and it’d be alright sunday. I woke up sunday honestly too depressed to get out of bed. just laying in spiral. I asked bestie to join us in bed, when i heard her going to get her phone charger, hoping extra cuddles would help me get through, i don’t know why i couldn’t ask for what I wanted, I had the opportunity and I’m sure it would have been fine, now, in hindsight. I felt like at the time I was so certain something would go wrong. eventually everyone came to the bed and there was a semi-cudllepuddle. people didn't want to fall back asleep, it makes sense not to full cuddle puddle for that. as people set in on their various phone activities I started to get that feeling like i wasn’t part of what was happening (despite being there. I know, I don’t know why, but when the depression gets going it gets harder to fight.) and rather than grab my phone and to the separate activities together thing I just withdrew. i recall someone commenting on it, and I thought i said something confirmatory about it. The blondes (wifey and besties husband) went to the store, and I could tell bestie might fall asleep, so i tried to get her to stay awake, she needed to for the new schedule. in interacting i’d asked to hold her hand, and she observed i was sad to relinquish it when she wanted it back. admitting that made me sad, led to just an outpouring of all of this stuff sans work stuff. and the worry about time to spend. I shouldn’t have dumped all of that on her, she didn’t consent to listening to that, and she certainly had a stressful enough time. I hate that when I’m in the throws of this damn disease I can’t seem to stop this. I don’t want to hurt the people I love. I don’t want to push them away. She reminded me I ought to go to therapy. I worry I may have offended her by talking about worrying about time we’d get to spend together. That voice in my brain is trying to convince me that her response means that those times mean so much more to me than to her. thats a damn lie. its a damn lie and it needs to get out. I’m exorcising it with the lot.

I’ve just received the list. I’m ending this here, and moving forward with that productive enterprise

[id-on-parade]

Trying to hold it all together can be very difficult.

It seems like whenever I start to get back up off the ground financially, the ground rises to the challenge and meets me. I live in debt, that’s just the facts of my life - student debt will keep me feeling like I owe more than i’m worth for probably a few more years now. But there’s a weird space to play in, where you build liquid assets that you haven’t paid directly into your debts. its that which keeps swelling and then being dashed out from under me. but more than that - each time it gets dashed out from under me i get more debt, and I must pay off that debt before I start build liquid assets again.

I’m doing better than a lot of other folks here in these fuck-off scary capitalist hellscape, and I can recognize that, but boy does a surprise $5,000 expense suck ass.

The other half of the polycule also had a surprise expense, everybody here is not great, feels-wise when it comes to money.

My Wifey found out about it first, while i was still dozing this morning. i was brought out of semi-consciousness by the sounds of her concernedly talking on the phone, then sobbing in the other room. After a good cry she told me, and we looked into options. Bestie arrived during that time, home from work, for an after-work invite into the bottom half of the house to socialize. its been a frequent invite of late, lots of cuddles and affirmation, the kink compatibilities drawing up next to each other. that situation is waiting on word to be had between her and her hubby, and me and her hubby before it goes too far - but it’s been amazing thusfar.

Felt like I had to hold myself together for my wifey’s sake, at least until she left for work. Seemed wrong to burden her with that on her way to her job, with all the other stresses there. I wanted to cry, I felt powerless to an uncaring world, but I was able to push on.

Bestie and I both wanted escapism this morning, we both could use it. we’d been talking about OC’s and things of that nature before i fell asleep the night before, and she was really digging it. So was I, my emotional state just made it hard to engage with that. I wanted to escape into subspace. if I was going to be powerless, I wanted to give my power to her. I laid my head in her lap and I think my emotions got the best of me. she seemed so disinterested? disheartened? that I would want to engage in that physical comforting while she was valiantly engaging me in intellectual Delicious OC escapism. but that read is suspect. was it my emotional state coloring that read? was she just tired? or thinking about her own troubles?

I think it bothered her quite a lot that I wanted to engage in one, and was having trouble connecting with the other. Because (i think) that pulled her out of her own escapism to focusing on the money issues. I’m sorry for that. I asked her, as it neared her bedtime if she was sad, or just tired and she confirmed it was not just tired, due to my talking about money things. I stopped talking all together then. I didn’t want to make her mental health worse trying to navigate my own.

She Cares about me so many, her and her husband both. as she went to bed, each cautioned me “no spiraling”... they know me. I held it together until I made it back to my bed, and collapsed and wept deeply. The urge was there to harm myself. I did not. The urge was there to just literally eat everything in the house. I did not. I was surprised to find the episode only lasted about 20 minutes. I feel numb now, I did some productive things, so I don’t feel completely powerless at the moment.

[id-on-parade]

I should be sleeping

But I cannot.

 I want too much. 

I feel empty, and alone. 

I Probably shouldn’t. (But knowing that doesn’t make it stop, does it.)

I worked a surprise double last night, and though exhausted - as I left work I had a thirst in my skin. I wanted to be held, to be comforted, to be destroyed. I hauled in the Valentines Gift I had purchased for my wife a week ago, from the trunk of my car, and set it up on her desk. I saw she left me one on my desk as well, I was the wrong type of hungry to investigate it. As I made my way to bed, I messaged my Bestie, about my wants - as, of late our kink compatibility has been allowed to circle closer than it had before.(It occurs to me that my semi-poly? near-poly? poly? situation should be explained, perhaps i’ll get to that later.) It’s valentines day and her husband is upstairs, so I know the invite to bed is nothing more than a mild temptation, but I send it anyways. Time was I wouldn’t have, but I think i’m just done not at least asking for what I want. She suggests cuddling with my wife, as wifey will be in bed for at least a couple hours before work, and I’ll get to sleep by then.

I ask to Cuddle, she grumbles before sliding into little spoon position. She wants me to envelope her, but not too hard. I squeeze her to me, hoping to push her through all the fat into that hole, that hunger inside.It doesn’t work, she makes uncomfortable sounds when I squeeze too tight. Just yesterday, cuddling her, just my arm was too heavy to rest on her side, is it too heavy now, I wonder? Will I always be too heavy?

She’s gone to work now, as expected, and I’ve awoken. I can’t get comfortable in my bed, I want too much for a person to grab me. To pull me close. To tell me they want me. To express comfort in my body by idly exploring it. to touch those fat places, the ones that sometimes generate dysphoria when I touch them, even though i carry them with me always. the ones that make me so happy when someone else touches them, not to move them out of the way, but because they are a part of me, touches them to touch them.

I want someone to Dig their claws into me. a dual desire, for someone to Rend me from this shell, Tear the extra off of me -- AND because with the pain, I can lose myself, and my body stops feeling like its a core, then covered in debilitating fatness, when I lose myself in the pain, that fat touches the core, and its a part of this beautiful, excruciating ecstasy of the moment.

I can’t have that right now, and it feels gross, though it shouldn’t. just a few days ago my relationship with my Bestie Started to include her exploring giving me pain, and it was in all honesty, probably the most fulfilled my masochistic half has been in well over a decade.I think, what’s happening is that like a person dying of thirst, I was offered a drink, and I’m experiencing that very unhealthy urge to gulp down as much liquid as I can get.

I investigated the gift, before typing this up., a heart-shaped to-go container of red-lobster biscuits. I love these, they’re an excellent gift. I wish I could eat one without crying right now, but with how I am feeling about my fat right now I can’t bring myself to consume more than my diet soda. This is ridiculous, when I’m emotional about literally anything else I gorge myself to try to feel better. when I feel like this, I want to not eat forever, I wish I could vomit years of excess calories in some cathartic transformation. I want to dig my nails down through my fat and rend until the real me is at the surface. I’ve gone there before. There is no pleasure in that pain. Neither my Sadist, nor my Masochist will own that. Instead, it feels like the desperation of a trapped animal.

 I won’t go there today.

When I started this post, my intent was to share this with my close ones. my intent was for this to be an expression of desires. now I’m not sure if I should. Bestie has her own weight-demons living in her head. I don’t think I’ve been this explicitly descriptive with anyone about these feelings.