#my brain feels like mush and my depression symptoms are coming back so

[cloudcountry]

my mental health just took a huge beating so i'll be slower to interact again!! might take a bit of a break tbh ^^ i think i wrote more than i should have in such a short period of time.

[newhologram]

I got an interesting transmission yesterday which has already helped shift my perspective. 

So just to be lazy and copypaste some of my spoonie whining from other social media: wow i'm like, fibro flaring, and period about to come, and oh yeah also colitis being a fuckhead, and now i'm so weak and coughing so i'm praying this sudden cold weather has not actually tanked my immune system bc idk if i can handle bronchitis rn aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I haven’t worked in a few weeks because I was still trying to bounce back after the vomiting spell that came before the colitis flare. And I just couldn’t do it. Even with all my supplements, meds, diets, rest, it was like I couldn’t recharge anymore. I was already low because I had just been adjusting to the hot weather change, which always triggers the narcolepsy. I went back to “perpetual feeling of not having slept in 3 days mode” but still made myself work various jobs and do a hell of a lot of errands and work around the house. I stuck to my mush diet as best as I could (cut to me being sick from cheating with 4 crackers) and thought I was at least keeping my energy up enough for cardio every day, even if only 20 minutes. It just snowballed and soon my 10 minute morning walk was making me sweat in 50 degree cloudy weather. 

I was still working in rest breaks and my mega pain management routine and everything. I still couldn’t shut down all the way and get charge. And the thing is, my spinal pain has been pretty manageable lately. I’ve been diligent about doing the rolled up towel traction trick and still soaking in hot water for like 45 minutes a day. The endorphins from cardio plus the California poppy tincture had made such a difference in my nerve pain that I was being super productive. I did not rest as much as I should have in April because without the intense pain that distracts me, I was just so focused. 

I felt so stupid when I realized that if my spine wasn’t giving me trouble, and I was suddenly having all of these intense flu-like symptoms again, then that meant it was the fibro. I hadn’t had a flare like this in a long, long time. Like, almost 2 years maybe? Just this overwhelming malaise. The intense brain fog, so soaked in my own fumes I can’t suck in air. 

And yeah, you dumbass, this is happening because you thought it was smart to go off the guaifenesin to save some money even though it was nowhere near the other more expensive supplements you drain your wallet on. My cells are full of gunk again. I’m a living garbage dump. Thanks to a donation I was able to order some guaifenesin and it’ll get here later this week. I will keep doing what I can until then. 

It’s hard not to be mad, like. I missed a really cool audition because I was literally too sick to handle possibly 2 hours each way in LA traffic. I would have had to wake up at 5am to ensure I could do my morning self-care, bottle-feed the kittens, eat, take supplements, do makeup, then drive 2 hours, spend 30 mins parking, walk all the way to the casting studio, sit in the lobby for anywhere from 7 minutes to 3 hours (not exaggerating, but I’ve also been at 1 audition for 6 hours before). Then perform in an audition for up to 20 minutes depending on if it’s a group thing, an actual scene, an interview, whatever. Then go all the way back home. I would probably honestly be shaking by the time I was back in my car. It happened to me when I worked at Anime Expo. I was shaking so hard I almost puked. 

So I emailed my agent about cancelling my audition, as usual feeling horribly guilty that I was letting my family and my agent and everyone else down by not being able to make it to this audition. I was missing out on a potential job. I was down to $12. Despite my efforts to stay chill, I was getting antsy. 

But I realized if I was desperate enough for that money that I would compromise my health for it, then that right there was a stupidly huge block in my way. So I sat up straight and honored my body’s need for taking it really, really easy right now. Lakshmi energy is “thank you for this blessing, please give me more”. You come from a place of more. You see la vie en or. Blissful jingling gold and fragrant, abundant flowers. Is it a magic cure for anxiety and depression? No, but everybody’s gotta cope (Shimada-san). The end.

[irisstory2021]

be pricked with a few shots. I assumed the parents approved any vaccinations that their child would eventually need anyway and that this would just save a doctor’s visit in the future. I assumed I was pricked like that when I was first born. It all seemed so mundane; any shifting looks at my father were shut down and I was shushed, told by his eyes to not only keep watching, but to pay attention.

I didn’t know how much harder I could pay attention, but I obeyed anyway, forgetting my carrot mush and pushing my chair out from underneath the table, fully facing the television. I hunched forward, leaned my elbows on my lap, and amused my father. 

In the next clip, the baby slept soundly as the father sang to her; his voice drifted away in a matter of seconds and it looked as if he was about to turn the camera off when the baby began to shriek. She wasn’t fussing in a sleeping state; she was wide awake, shrieking as if about to lose her life and somehow aware of the consequences of that, and her complexion -- even in the dim light of the hospital nursery -- was, within a second, completely drained of its color. Her veins, however, which were shades of red and blue and purple, stood out so vividly, despite the age of the footage. They throbbed, resembling a fast-beating heart, as her father panicked inaudibly in the background.

“Hey, what the hell is going on?!” he demanded from the nurses, who were quick to whisk him away from his child. The camera was the last of his worries now, and yet he still held on, capturing every moment, even if it was all blurry and nonsensical. 

“Mr. Ruth, you’re going to have to leave the nursery and let us take care of your daughter. She’ll be fine.” The nurse’s consolation sparked more outrage from the father as he was shoved out of the nursery. In the big windows up front, a gaggle of people in lab coats -- the very same ones my father and I donned -- surrounded the baby’s bassinet. Her shrieking could be heard outside of the nursery. I wondered if any other newborns were in there with her. 

The father yelled, banging at the window. Unless it was completely soundproof there, I wondered if there were any other newborns in the nursery. And if there were, why hadn’t they begun crying, too, at all of the noise? As soon as someone noticed his banging, they shut the blinds, and shut the father out. 

“What, so the baby had a reaction to one of the shots?” I tried rationalizing it in some way in my head. Though I was far removed from having any maternal instincts, the event was bizarre -- what happened to the child was bizarre and concerning to say the least -- and yet I looked at it through a scientific lens, not letting my emotions cloud my judgment. What vaccination could have that reaction on a newborn? 

“Yes, it did. But think hard, Iris. What immunizations could cause a baby to practically die like that?” 

Hepatitis B, influenza, varicella, measles, mumps… Those had been used and administered for nearly a century and had as much time to be perfected. The only one in that list of vaccinations that could have a chance of malfunctioning and having such an abnormal reaction would be--

“The serum, Iris. The one you and I work on, every day.” My father must have noticed my brain going a thousand different directions, all trying to avoid the only answer in the middle. 

I wasn’t understanding. “So the baby died?” I asked. 

“No, the baby lived,” he said, shaking his head and removing the disc from the television. He placed it back in an unmarked case and set it down on the dinner table with a sigh. Our food had been forgotten and cold at this point. “They gave her an antidote and within 12 hours, the parents could see her again. I’m showing you this because--” he sighed, feeling very much defeated. I felt somewhat guilty for not following this string he’d put out, but even he should have recognized how difficult he was to keep track of. 

“If you look in the database, there are no known records of the serum failing on who it’s meant for, right? The babies.” He leaned close to me, and looked around the room before inching forward. His glasses hung over his nose and I could see his sunken, sleep-deprived eyes; they lost their warmth when his glasses didn’t cover them up. “There are records, sure, of it failing on the animals, but if you look, their symptoms or causes of death have nothing to do with whatever happened to Susie. They either die when they fall asleep for the first time since taking the dose, lose appetite to starvation, anything like that -- eventually. Susie’s case stuck out to me because it happened right away, and it’s nowhere to be found in our system.”

I pushed out a breath and looked at him. “So, how did you get this? How do you know that our serum did this?” 

He flipped the DVD case around and it turned out there had actually been something written on it: Susie’s birth, New Year’s Day, 2011. A silver stamp was smudged on the corner, reading Property of Plethora. That was the year that started off with him having longer days at work than usual, sometimes never even coming home, up until the point Plethora asked him to begin living at the lab. The extra money would pay for my college, he said -- now I knew they swindled him in for some damage control. 

It was then that I remembered the image of that infant. This wasn’t the first time I had seen footage of Susie’s shift. I remembered the first weekend of the new year; it was snowing, and my parents and I would take a walk through the neighborhood to watch the inaugural snowfall. When I tugged on my father’s sleeve to pull him out, ever excited despite being in my tween years at this point, he berated me for even setting foot in his office. He had paused whatever he’d been watching, and it froze in a frame of the baby, the cameraman pointing down into her bassinet, catching the exact moment as her veins sprawled out like roots all over her tiny body. 

After I was sent to my room, the frame haunted me, and I’m sure my father didn’t want me to see it then. It looked as if it came out of a horror movie. At the time, I didn’t understand much about my father’s work, only knowing he could be protective of it at times when he felt severely under pressure. It was surely one of those times. He apologized to me the following day. 

“The girl is still alive to this day,” he said. “I’m not supposed to have a copy of this. Only one other copy might exist, and this one -- well, they probably meant to toss it years ago or forgot I had one with me. It’s proof that something could go wrong with the serum again if we’re not careful, and more importantly, it’s proof that Plethora knows how to hide anything they do wrong.”

❧

I didn’t realize I’d been focusing so hard until I heard the petri dish crack underneath my tool. I used a metal scalpel to mix it every morning, checking for irregularities -- I wondered how long I’d been swirling the scalpel in the plastic dish, lost in my thoughts, for me to have pressed down enough to crack it. “Ah, shit.”

Maybe my father was right. I cared more about this job than I was willing to admit, and more than the indifference I feigned. Or maybe he’d shown me that footage the other night to light a fire under my ass, send me down a spiral he knew would lead nowhere but at least would rejuvenate in me some dormant passion for the career again. The truth is, I had been feeling more unhinged about working as a biologist, working for Plethora, working in general. I felt I didn’t have much time -- if any time, at all -- to grieve my mother’s death and in the last six months, it had left me feeling off-kilter. From my father I inherited the grit to work through anything, and from my mother I inherited the ability to feel it all at the end of the day, when the work was done. I was probably depressed.

I transferred the sample into a brand new petri dish and sighed. I reached across the counter for a wire-bound booklet we kept on hand at all times of lab protocols, flipping through it haphazardly until a folded-up piece of paper fell out. It contained instructions on how to make the very first version of the serum, Serum Zero, written in the scrawl of its founding scientists almost three decades ago. Of course, it was a photocopied version of the actual written page, and the company’s logo -- along with the word “confidential” -- was printed on it in see-through ink. If the company had known it was there, it would likely get rid of it and suspend whoever stuck it in there. Of course, my father had done it. 

He told me he kept it in plain sight because no one would ever think to look for it in the protocols handbook, and no one would even suspect a want for the very first record of Serum Zero. After all, the alpha was the most recent, most improved upon, and therefore the best version of it -- why bother backtracking? To study its components, of course. 

I dumped the replaced petri dish into the biological disposables bin, along with the serum. There was no need for it; besides, when I cracked the dish, I might have accidentally contaminated it if it touched the counter. I wiped the counter again, grabbed an empty dish, and unfolded the piece of paper, holding it in place on the counter using a paperweight. I wasn’t sure what the alpha version of the serum contained now (it always seemed like valuable information to me, given that I would be experimenting on it and wouldn’t want to add the same components -- but with more thought, I wondered if Plethora kept it that way so as to preoccupy us scientists from poking our noses so much) but having the original formula for Serum Zero would be a start. I knew what the end result did and that was all that mattered in this new quest of mine. 

One by one, I pulled out the components -- all clear liquids, all minuscule samples -- and laid them out on the counter in a mise en place that my mother might be proud of, and went to work.

[strangerdarkerbetter]

Life Update

Hello lovely followers,

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been around much lately. I wanted to take a moment to explain what’s been going on and apologize for my absence.

It feels like life has been one struggle after another for a while now. Back in August, I had my first ever seizure. While doing the follow up for that, it was discovered that I have a pineal gland cyst. I remembered going for MRIs a lot as a kid because of a brain cyst, but I couldn’t remember if it was a pineal cyst. So, I began the adventure of trying to get a copy of my medical records that were over a decade old in another state.

In September, I got sick, very sick. When I finally sought medical attention, it was determined that I had urosepsis (a blood infection that had started in my urinary tract). I was given very strong antibiotics and sent home. I spent the next few days in a painful haze. Everything hurt. I couldn’t think straight.

I slowly recovered over the next month or so. It was weeks before I was able to stim again.

Then came October. As leaves drifted to earth leaving bare branches that signaled the coming hibernation and a cold chill settled into bones, I threw myself into Halloween. I worked tirelessly to craft a costume good enough to distract from the specters that hung in the air, painful remnants of Halloweens gone before.

The Saturday before Halloween, I broke. I spent most of the day sobbing. I huddled on the couch with my darling love. He held me as tears coated my face and distant ghosts shone through my eyes.

That night we went to our friend’s Halloween party. I was determined. We Would go.

I spent most of the evening in the bathroom desperately scrubbing off the makeup that had turned out so poorly. My skin grew sore, a rosy hue shining through the remaining blue.

Sean found me and brought me home.

I don’t really remember the next few days. I spent them altering between dissociation and desperate, wracking sobs.

November, I fought to find myself again. I started new meds. Changed meds. Changed meds again. I wrote out my feelings and tried to process through trauma. I fought and kept fighting.

December was, quite frankly, a shitshow.

Just as I was starting to do better, Sean had a mental break of his own, one of the worst of his life. We got into a car accident. We were fine, but our car had a fair bit of damage. This meant that I had to find people to drive me to work as that is our only car.

On top of this, something was wrong with me. I couldn’t place it. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t upset. I just couldn’t think right. Thinking was hard. I was getting confused easily. My memory was getting worse than usual (which is pretty bad).

Then, I stopped sleeping.

At first, I wouldn’t fall asleep until two or two thirty. Then three. Then four. Then five. This wasn’t working so well with my work schedule which requires me to be up by seven.

Oddly, though, I wasn’t tired. Staying up all night was kind of enjoyable. I didn’t feel bad. I just wasn’t tired and couldn’t sleep. But I wasn’t tired during the day either. I was sleeping two to three hours a night but I was more awake than when I had been sleeping six or more hours a night.

One day, as I tried to calculate how much more was needed for rent, I found that I couldn’t do basic math in my head. Math I could easily do by the age of seven was now a struggle for me. It finally clicked what was wrong. Difficulty thinking. Difficulty doing basic math in my head. Difficulty finding simple words. I was having cognitive difficulties.

Insomnia. Cognitive difficulties. Memory problems. I started to search for answers. I called my psychiatrist wondering if this was all related to my new antipsychotic. She didn’t think it was but lowered my dose and had me start taking it in the morning. It didn’t help.

Suddenly, it clicked. The pineal gland produces melatonin, the hormone responsible for sleep.

A few weeks prior, I had finally gotten a hold of my old medical records. The old MRI reports showed that this was the same cyst we had followed up on when I was a kid.

The pineal gland is typically 7mm. When I was a kid, my cyst was 14mm. Now, it’s 21mm. It has grown by 7mm and is now three times larger than the pineal gland itself should be.

Pineal gland cysts are pretty common and are often found incidentally or as part of an autopsy. Generally, these cysts are asymptomatic and of little concern.

However, over 80% of these cysts are less than 5mm. Anything over that is likely to cause symptoms, including the ones I’ve been experiencing.

So, it’s looking like, in the coming months, I am going to need brain surgery to remove the cyst.

Friday, I finally got some sleep meds so I’ve started sleeping again. My brain still feels like mush. My executive dysfunction has gotten pretty terrible. It’s still hard to think clearly. I’m getting overwhelmed easily.

To everyone who has sent in an ask or sent me a message, I’m sorry if I haven’t responded to you yet. Talking to people, whether in person or online, has gotten really hard and overwhelming. I’m going to try to do better at responding to people.

TLDR:

August- first ever seizure

September- sepsis

October- mental breakdown

December- car accident, husband’s mental breakdown, discovery that I’ll need brain surgery

Basically, life has been really tough and I’m sorry to everyone I haven’t responded to

You are all so wonderful. Thank you for all the support you’ve given me. I hope to become more active soon. For now, know that I’m thinking of y’all and I’m doing my best to get back to people as I’m able to.

[allthatwehear]

it’s time for another blog post

Grief this season has been like,

laying on my floor and time is passing - I often don’t know how much time, but after a little while I become self-conscious of what I’m doing/the nothingness I’m doing, and I get angry at myself and wonder if anyone else just lays on their floor & wastes time.

(I talked to my sister the other day & told her that I watch the clouds pass, and she said she did it too -- “wait you do that too??”)

it’s been like, listening to a lot of music at night because it’s loud outside my house (actually quite noisy neighbors) and they irritate me & I lose my patience. and the music helps bring me to a different state of mind, because i need to stop ruminating on certain things/be brought to a new headspace. it’s been me dodging rooms when people walk in. physically gathering my things & looking like some antisocial jerk & running to my room, closing the door when I’m having phonecalls, even getting pissy with unexpected visits & when people take up my space. 

it’s been like, when people are speaking to me, i find I’ve been dissociating (don’t normally do this) and I’m nod my head routinely “yeah” so they think that i am listening, but truthfully my head is so full of strain & mush that not a lot is getting through. I can’t take a whole lot of information at once, and I can only take so much information about you, unfortunately. if people are just talking at me, and not with me, I am having a hard time.

even time itself, is a freakin’ blur - i had a close friend admit to me the other day, that they were sad i hadn’t visited their house (outside of school) during the three plus years I’d known them. & how on earth was I supposed to describe that for me, time is such a blur and I lost track of how much actually went by, and always intended to visit but I didn’t have the thoughts to make it happen? time is such a blur... and motivation. augh that motivation is a bitch.

it’s been drastically dropping people, communication-wise; people who I was previously making a set-goal to see on a regular basis (usual girl-dates), to new friendships I was fostering & then suddenly I disappear - though they are great people and great for me. I spoke to a close one of these people, on the phone (unheard of for me), and he so kindly asked what I needed of him. It all sort of rushed out, but I ended up explaining that I needed people not to be offended with me if I disappear for weeks sometimes, or just can’t answer that right now, or am able to talk on the phone one week but am not feeling up to it the next. if i have periods where I don’t want to go out. that legitimately, my needs and what I feel I can handle changes from minute to minute, sometimes. I had the strength & motivation to call my own sister & that took a lot, & when she didn’t pick up, I wasn’t ready to talk when she called back. I explained that I just sort of have to do things at whatever pace it comes at, but a lot of people will take that offensively or that I don’t love them -- and I totally get it. because who wants a friend who is so unreliable? who is there one moment, but gone the next? well unfortunately - that is just who I am at the moment. & he told me he’d never be upset for those tumultuous, unpredictable needs. and I said, “that’s what I need”. 

grief has been someone asking me if I’m going to look for jobs, since I just recently discovered I lost mine (that I intended to return to this month), and me thinking right back that I don’t even know what I’m going to do to get through the next day -- or going to do the next few hours. I’ve let go, currently, of quite a few things I was working really hard for: a cool leadership position at a young adult youth group I got, the youth group itself, my faith, itself... 

sometimes I feel like I’m going to melt through the floor. I feel my body & its weight and I think I’ll just sink; i’ll just sink. with every normal expectation people ask of me -- the “what did you do today’s?” and “what’re your summer plans?” to “what jobs do you want?”. they don’t realize that I crawl to bed at the sound, the overwhelm of those things. that they are asking almost impossible tasks of me, as I mourn the death of my second sibling, and their upcoming birthday (the 23rd, mind you). what I crave is something strange - but it’s actually a person to hold me, like, spoon me like a baby, because psychologically I feel like nothing can get me in that place and their body is essentially a “shield” from all evil -- or they’re “squeezing” all the “bad” out of me and replacing it with safety. because in my grieving head, I am 22 years-old, and that means I may have 60+ more years of traumatic, life-altering, heartbreaking, shattering events & sometimes I don’t know how to not let that just crumble & kill me inside. that I have all these years left - open, vulnerable, to be hit with suffering. 

grief, is unexplainable, though I like to try. I like to try because I want it to be understandable. because if people don’t understand grief they won’t understand how to support those grieving; because, inevitably, we’re all going to grieve something, it’s going to happen to all of us. 

I heard something -- to go back to time -- about grief the other day. it was by Dr. Zoe Donaldson, and she spoke in this profound TedTalk that I had to share with my mom, to my sister, to my instagram. “Hear this”, I thought. She said, so truthfully, “We have a tendency to talk about grief in terms of time. We say things like “time heals all wounds”, or “they are just moving through the stages of grief”, but I think this fails to give credit where credit is due. And that’s because time isn’t doing anything. Time is passing; and while it’s passing, your brain is working really hard to heal itself.”

“You brain has to take all of the moments of joy from that [lost] relationship --- everything that was good about it -- and it has to separate it just enough from the pain of the loss until you can get to the point of describing it as bittersweet. And this is crucial. You need to do this to move on, and reengage with a meaningful life.” 

“Despite the fact that we tend to conflate grief and depression, they’re actually different things. If you give someone who is grieving antidepressants, it won’t do anything to alleviate the core symptoms of grief. When we talk about those core symptoms of grief, we use terms that talk about the heart. We talk about a broken heart, a hole in our heart, words that give us a sense of yearning for that individual. And yearning, quite frankly, is not part of depression.” 

Yearning. Time passing. All of this struck such an intimate cord in my heart - because this was true. We are yearning for those people, that person. I yearn for the dimple on Caroline’s cheek and to watch Miyazaki with her while she doodles on the whiteboard perched on her lap. I yearn to hold Juge’s hands again, in the hospital room, and listen to that chipper, rising-high-pitched laugh of theirs to well-up the room.

Time passing. All I want, some days, is for this obnoxious life to be over with. For the time to pass -- because sometimes I actually want it to go away. Other days the desire for time to pass is for the deep, gut-wrenching emotions to pass - I utter “just get through another day”. In a sense we’re waiting for the “grief” to pass - though it won’t, but maybe it’s a hope.

ENDING????????

Do I include the job part??

here is a big grief thing I am experiencing, as a slight side-note, but I think significant to what’s going on in my life. significant to mention, because it was significant/heartbreaking enough, to me. I lost my job that was really important to me. I went through heartbreak while I was there. I persevered & pushed the management until I was a busser/server’s assistant, a job ordinarily readily offered to men - yet I had to jump through two interviews with two manager’s & demand pants. I went through the death of my second sibling there, & received an outpouring of love. I met some UW basketball celebrities & pushed myself til the point of almost crying in the back multiple times. I ate some really good desserts. And I made some very sweet, very humorous friends. and it became quickly like a family, a fish family, and I lost a little fish family of mine. I won’t forget the sunsets glistening in the water when I worked in the summer evenings, or the sports shows on as i swept the bar-floors riddled with fish n’ chips. it was a place I felt so comfortable in, after so much discomfort, & to have it ripped has been gruesome. a thing with grief is, once you have become accustomed & happy in a place, those places suddenly mean a whole lot more then usual. they mean that you don’t have to be thrown off with surprises; you know the ins & outs, they are yours now & you can breathe easy. well I lost one of those places. and I am upset and grief-ridden in another way. 

so friends - don’t forget, grieving doesn’t always occur after you’ve lost a physical being. it can also happen when you’ve lost that space where you perched outside your window in the apartment room with your morning coffee; your favorite first house after college, the tastes of a beloved restaurant, moving away from a family home, a pet’s caress, and more. don’t forget the “little” big things. and remember you can essentially grieve for it all - because inevitably change is a part of life, thus grieving those changes should be a part of life, too. 

I hope you give yourself space to remember the people/places/things you love, & talk about them constantly with your beloveds so they never go away from memory. I’d love to hear about them sometime. tell me about what you’ve lost - and recount the love/memories you gained before they were gone. 

END??

Draft

Grief has been like -- 

sometimes i am laying on my floor for actual hours, and I can’t do much more but watch the clouds pass. And i get angry at myself for doing that/feeling that, and I wonder if anyone else just lays on their floor & wastes time.

it’s been like -

putting headphones in at night because I need a different noise to lull me into a different state of mind. it’s been messages from people I was once making a firm habit to be talking to - or meet - & staring as their needs pile up & I quickly lose my will to continue connecting. because there come too many messages. and i get overwhelmed, and i just shut down.

even phone calls to my sister in Colorado - have narrowed & grown seldom. however for this, Maddie validates me by admitting “it’s a terrible month Sarah, and i kind of just had to cut off for a bit”. these words i understand like breath in my lungs.

it’s been people asking me if i’m looking for jobs and me even wondering what I can do to get through the next day - or the next few hours; what’s going to benefit me enough to bring me some sort of rest. it’s been letting go of several feats I conquered, interviews i had, and a church position I was in the past, proud to attain.

now it’s me letting go of the church, and sometimes meditating, or learning sanskrit. it’s been me /not/ doing things. not. doing. anything. it feels like any day now i’m going to melt through the floor.

sometimes I feel like a solid wall that nothing will get through. sometimes all, actually, constantly, all I crave is a human body behind me holding, tightly. to squeeze all the past & future attacks right out of me. deflect them. because i fear the other 60+ years of life i have still to live, because that just means 60+ possible more years of horror and hurt. and yes, i suppose that could be a form of ptsd. 60+ years of pain I may experience as a young 22 year old.

Fleetwood Mac speaks to me. my language has gotten coarser. and I’m starting to fear that the people who knew me back then, surrounded in school, won’t recognize me/will give me backlash for the changes that are happening inside.