Tag: country music

How Country Music Touches You

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, chronic physical pain, depression, suicidality, suicide

How Country Music Touches You

I have been listening to Pandora for most of the day. I have it on “Terri Clark” radio and I have been listening to all the “old” country that made me fall in love with country, not the rock/rap stuff they have today. A couple of songs in the morning really got to me. By the time my therapy appointment came around, I was very tearful. The songs they were playing was about relationships ending and I couldn’t feel like I was losing my therapist because of the current transportation issue. I was going to see my therapist today but my father interceded. Asshole had an urgent matter that had to be dealt with on his NOW terms. So my sister needed the car to take him where he needed to go. I was pissed that he didn’t call me, because what the hell do I take him to his medical appointments for?? He just is an ungrateful bastard.

So what would have been the last time I see my therapist turned into no trip out there after all. And the songs they were playing just had me thinking that maybe our relationship is over now. But then Faith Hill’s song, “You can’t lose me” came on. I cried harder and when I told my therapist, she said that is our song now. I was already bawling so cried some more. I swear I bawled the first 20 minutes or so of our session. I was just so weepy. I have been up since 0430 so already it has been a long day. I had coffee which gave me the ups but by 11, I calmed down and was just down. Then the songs played and I was weepy. And of course my therapist had to ask how I was doing. Doing awful. I told her the thoughts of suicide came into my head today, just out of the blue, like what if I killed myself. But the thoughts didn’t hang around. My mood just wasn’t “depressed enough”, I guess.

I don’t know what I am going to do about therapy. My therapist doesn’t know that I secretly want another therapist. I just don’t think she is good for me anymore and now that we are not going to be seeing each other face to face for a long time, I can’t help but wonder if the phone is really going to work. I so wanted to be in the same room with her just so she could possibly hold me while I was crying. Realizing that, just made me cry more. I have stuffed animals at her office, a 3 ft bear (Johnny) and two smaller bears (Bucky and Amelia). I miss seeing them, and obviously, my therapist. But finding a therapist, as I learned, is so difficult when you are chronically suicidal. It shouldn’t be like that, but sadly it is. I had called 10 therapists when she first moved to Framingham (the town she practices out of). I couldn’t find one to take me on. Then when I was in the hospital, they found me a center that I could go to. Well, the nitwit was downright scared of me. He was just so nervous. It didn’t work out and by session three, I said goodbye.

I am so drained. I could write about how it sucks not finding a therapist to expand their horizons and just take a chance but I am not in the damn mood. I am tired of trying to find someone that I can count on in the mental health field. Yet there is a therapist that piques my curiosity. Only trouble is, I love his tweets and if I become his patient, I lose him as my twitter buddy. His policy. And I like our relationship as it is right now, though he doesn’t know me from Adam. It’s just that I like his personality. And after reading his blogs, I think that he would be a good fit for me. But I don’t think I can ever cross that boundary. Besides, I am so terrified that he will find an excuse not to see me it prevents me from pursuing the matter. And all the while I was thinking this, I felt like I was cheating on my therapist.

I am at the stage where right now, I really can’t leave my therapist. We are in the middle of important work with dealing with my ex and all she put me through. We didn’t talk about it today. I was too emotional to get into it and she respected my space. Plus, I felt like I was crying over the grief of that relationship, which I never did before. I usually just drank her away, or tried to.

When I was in the kitchen, eating a brownie, I noticed my ankle and foot were swollen again. Pissed me off. My toes looked like Vienna sausages. So I just kept them up. Now they are hurting me. I hate being in pain every single day. Today I looked at a couple of doctors that specialized in the ankle. I couldn’t find a one that wasn’t a surgeon. And a surgeon just won’t deal with you if they can’t cut you. So I am back to square one. I am so frustrated having to find a therapist that is within a 5 mile radius of my house and a foot/ankle doctor that is the same. Why is it so hard when I live in the academic capital of the world??

cabin fever musings

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression

Today has been a rough day. I have been stuck inside because of the freezing temperatures outside and I just been having cabin fever. I really wanted a latte today but made a hot cocoa instead.

I have been wanting to write all day but nothing has been forming to actually write. It is so frustrating. It’s like the words are there but they just won’t come out. And having no idea what I am writing is not helping. I wanted to write a blog just about Aeschi but I need to get into that kind of mood and I am just not there.

Then I thought I would clear my bureau off with stuff I don’t need anymore but I got overwhelmed and had to stop. Plus I kept finding stuff to play with to distract me from the task so that wasn’t good. Also wanted to clean up my office a little bit but that didn’t happen. I just couldn’t get myself motivated to do it. I just have to pick up my jackets and hang them up in the closet. Not a huge deal. And junk my printers. I have decided that I am just going to throw away the printers that are useless to me. I don’t think I can the HP printer to work anyways and I don’t have the drivers for the other one. I don’t even know if it still works anymore as it hasn’t printed anything in years. I will get myself a good printer soon as I am able to afford it.

I’m feeling so shut in it’s not funny. I am going to go out tomorrow. I will take my Aeschi book and just write something. I also will get my latte that I have been wanting the last few days. I also need to go to a stationary store and get a calendar for the year. I don’t know if that will be tomorrow or not. Depends on what the streets look like. I am not going to risk falling just for a calendar.

My writing partner and I have decided not to work on our book until February. That is fine with me as I have nothing to write about. I haven’t really thought what I am going to write. I know I need to add to the six pages I already wrote but I don’t know if I can add to it. The pages seem more like an introduction type and I don’t want to mess with it.

I requested a song today by my favorite DJ and she never played it. Now I am debating downloading the song because even though I have it (it’s in .WMA format), I can’t convert it to MP3 because of licensing rights. It sucks because the whole album is that way. I should have transferred it to CD when I had the chance. I am excited that my favorite artist, Terri Clark, is coming out with a new album in Feb. And my other favorite artist comes out in two weeks. I already pre-ordered her CD. Hers I have to order a CD because I know the instrumentals are not going to be good for MP3 playing.

I need to get back to my routine of leaving the house every day and getting to Starbucks to write or read or to do something! Even if I spend an hour or two there I think that will be better than spending 24 hours in my house. I will have to get out of my house next Friday because of a doctor’s appointment. But other than that, I don’t have any plans of leaving the house and because of the cold, I have been hibernating more. I know part of it is because I don’t want a flare up of pain. The other part is no motivation or energy to go out. Starbucks has lost its appeal to me. I have drank every drink they have and nothing really sticks. I create my own lattes or just have their Clover coffee. Right now they have a Mexican coffee I have been dying to try. But there is no information about it so I am afraid that it will be too bold. I like coffees that are mild, strong, but mild. And because of the anhedonia, I don’t enjoy anything anymore. I guess that is why I am afraid to try this new coffee. I am afraid it will just taste flat. I will be so disappointed. I am waiting for the anhedonia to lift before trying it. Though it doesn’t see like it is going to lift anytime soon.

Reflections on the Year

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, psychache, suicide, suicide attempt

Reflections on the year

This time last year I was deeply in physical pain and psychological pain and in the throws of a yet another nasty depression. I was asked to do a writing project for a friend and I didn’t think I would make it. I was sure by this time, on this date, I would be dead. And if I happened to be alive on Dec 17th, I would surely die by my own hand. I promised myself that if things were still the same, that this heaviness that I felt in my chest were not gone, that the pain in my ankle/leg/foot were not decreased, I was going to end things, permanently.

This year, things are still not a hundred percent better but things are less. My depressions are bearable when they hit. I have Wil Wheaton to thank for giving me the tidbit that my brain is not working right and that things will pass and be better tomorrow. My suicidality, though still a deep part of my soul, has decreased to the point where it is just thoughts I ruminate over and then give up. I figured out with the help of some books that this is always going to be a struggle for me, that my depression and pain are always going to be there. But like a former therapist said to me, you don’t always have to act on what you are feeling. These days, I am a little bit more hopeful about the future, though I don’t always see it. I still get hopeless every once in a while but it doesn’t last forever like it once did. I find that writing my blog has been a life saver for me. Mr. Hyde hasn’t come around in almost two months now and for that I am grateful. I have people in my life that have helped me see that I can succeed, even though I am disabled. It took a long time for me to accept my disability. Took longer to grieve it. But eventually, when I realized that part of the depression and suicidality was the grief I was not mourning, I took it apart piece by piece and wrote about it. There was nothing I could do about the pain except wait for the pain meds to work and for that I grateful that I have it. Also emailing my psychiatrist about the depth I was in helped as well. I don’t know if I am still going to have the same doc in 2014 and that scares me. I know that getting pain medication is going to be harder to get with new doctors and even harder as government rules will dictate the rules for prescribing rather than relying on clinical judgments. I don’t know what I will do then. But that is not my worry for today.

I don’t know what brought about the change. Maybe it was having a daily contact with someone miles away from me, urging me to continue my writing and work on a book. Maybe it was a little of owning the depression and taking charge of it, that it doesn’t have to rule my life like it would love to. I just know that I feel differently than I did a year ago. And though the impulses to kill myself are still a threat, I have a therapist that is behind me like a fungus that won’t go away. I really doubt without her countless sessions I would still be here. She really has been the one person that I can always rely on to be there when my mood is dark and gray. We might have our arguments about treatment but I know that she believes in me that things aren’t always going to be so bleak. I guess I have more people in my life now that believe that I can do things where last year I didn’t think I was going to survive my own lethality. I have been tested a few times this year to end my life. I have made several plans before today to end my life this year. My therapist can account for that. Though I have only had one psychotic break this year that required hospitalization. My hospitalizations have been fewer in recent years than they were in the past. I think that is more because I don’t think they help as they once did and that is a shame. You don’t get the care I once relied on.

Lastly, I have to thank country music for without listening to the same songs over and over for hours of despair, I doubt I would be able to make it though the horrible nights when I couldn’t sleep, either because of pain or despair or both. It is the one genre that I can relate to every song and let my brain do the escaping when I was writhing in agony. From songs like “water tower” by Jason Aldean to “Crash my party” by Luke Bryan, to Taylor’s endless songs and lastly to the other artists that I have followed but are not so popular, Casey James and Cassadee Pope. Without music, the heart just doesn’t heal from pain.