#everything is more doom-filled rn bc i am also moving houses

[irrealisms]

having disabilities that are very sharply stress-triggered is....weird. i am hella privileged and so i can live my life basically entirely supported by others (cf #housecat arc) and when im doing this i can basically pass as normal and not have any serious mental breakdowns* . i hang out with friends and i watch videos and i read books both fiction and nonfiction and i play minecraft and i write stories and i go to church on sundays and it's a boring life and i don't always feel like i'm living it very much but i'm not really in crisis. i feel like, basically normal. like i am basically a regular person. i am no longer freaking out about being watched by a mysterious Them who are tormenting me; i can basically live my life as though it is real; my hallucinations are uncommon and not particularly distressing when they happen; i am not suicidal; outside of occasional episodes of speech loss, i am coherent--articulate, even!--in my speech and writing; it's been many years since my last violent meltdown; i eat three meals a day; i am able to get out of bed every day. and then i try to do productive things for like 3 hours and i start banging my head against the wall and crying because i Can't i just Can't. it's incredibly stark. it's a pretty good justification for being a housecat honestly because if i weren't then i would not only be "losing money to groceries rent etc" i would also be "losing money much more quickly to intensive treatments and/or bad decisions" and i think "losing money more quickly" is the opposite of the goal of "trying to have a job" but definitely uh if i were less privileged wrt Ability to housecat indefinitely i would be Fucked. i deteriorate Terrifyingly Fast under Literally Any Stress.

this isn't a new observation or anything--chat message from august of last year--

It’s kind of eternally astounding to me how much my issues are ~stress-mediated? I can basically be fine and normal-passing if I’m not expected to do anything ever; the amount of breakdown i have correlates pretty directly w how much is expected of me. This feels incredibly fake when I’ve been doing nothing for long enough and think i have gotten better but then i am expected to have pretty basic conversations with people irl for like two weekends in a row and i spend 20 minutes pacing my room and hyperventilating and self harming and i would not be surprised if i end up having a [I stop moving] episode before the weekend is up. and this is not very bad or anything on the scale of things but notably also i am not being expected to do very much!!! Idk it’s weird how like. When I am being a house cat I can be— not maximally fulfilled or anything but basically okay and normal. And then I do things for more than one day and it’s like Oh this is why I housecat. not even in a bad way fully just. huh yeah

and it doesn't even surprise me or feel fake to me at this point but it's weird and i don't like it. i don't like how fast i can go from "i am basically doing fine" to near-crisis when i am expected to do very basic everyday life things. it scares me. i'm getting better but it's hard to tell how much of that is just....redefining my goals and expectations, rather than actually having more abilities. even writing my "i'm basically a normal person when not expected to do things" i kept running up against. like. oh yeah. i don't actually shower/clean myself with any sort of regularly. i don't cook for myself. i spend long stretches of time only changing clothes or leaving the house for church on sundays. i could probably make life changes to do better at some of these things but it's all tradeoffs and idk if it'd be. worth it. i keep coming back to this post bc it really is how i feel. i run into my limits drastically less often than i used to and i am doing much much better. this is mostly because i am living my life so very very carefully within those limits. i am like a delicate orchid who does okay in Ideal Conditions but threatens to die at the slightest hint of overwatering. and i am very lucky to be carefully managed by people who love me immensely and have a lot of resources and many people do not have this and i really do not want to understate this!!! but being a very lucky orchid is still ... very different than being a mint plant

*ok in 2024 i did have a few months where i was actively suicidal and regularly self-harming and not really eating much and having nightmares all the time. um. i don't have a defense here that isn't "you should've seen me before i dropped out" or maybe "okay but it wasn't that long". i didn't have to go to IOP and....i would say "i didn't drop out/get fired from anything major" but that's because i already didn't have any responsibilities cf the rest of the post........ummmmmmmmmmmmmm anyway. i didn't do anything drastic (not exclusively a suicide euphemism) despite considering it. does that count for anything