Tag: recurrent major depression

paper where I wrote I’ll wait for you

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression, mood disorders, PTSD, recurrent major depressive disorder

Paper where I wrote I’ll wait for you

I am having a hard time sleeping. I am listening to Taylor to try and ease my heavy heart. Grief is hitting me hard. I am remembering stuff with my mother, mostly stuff from when I was little. The parties we used to have where we would have leftover chips and cake. It made a good breakfast while my mother was sleeping. She didn’t want us to eat that stuff but we did anyway. My mother was the one we did stuff with. My father never really had time for us because he was so selfish and narcissistic. My mother took us to church and to school. She also came to events at the school where we participated in. She didn’t come to my basketball games when I played my freshman year. It was not a good game usually as I sucked. Plus no one really gave me the ball to shoot it. I was bad at trying to take a shot under pressure. But I could do a layup pretty well.

I also remember the abuse my mother did to me. It happened when I was little and while I was in puberty. She saw changes and kept looking at me every time I showered or bathed. Even while I was an adult, living with her, I couldn’t be naked around her because she would look at my body. I felt so much shame and I think that is why I have a little of body dysmorphia. I hate the way my body is. I don’t like that I am overweight. Now that I don’t have breasts, I can clearly see my stomach that is huge and it bothers me. I am trying to lose weight. I haven’t the first clue how to actually do it. I am not a person that can eat salads and stuff like that. I am a meat eater. I will eat chicken and potatoes. I love making a chicken breast and roasting it. But getting back to the abuse, I was always criticized when I tried to go on a diet. My mother would not approve of it and be very snarky about it. My father called me fat and ugly all my life. It was very hard to lose weight when I felt like I had to live up my father calling me fat all the time. Every time we had dinner and I would fill my plate, he would say something about it. He was not a nice man.

So I had my parents give me an idea of what my body should or shouldn’t look like. I know I need to lose weight. But I don’t know how really. I have tried drinking Ensure during the days and then at night but I feel hungry. I need to have something solid in my stomach. I will usually have a turkey sandwich or just eat turkey breast or chicken breast and that will be my protein for the day. Sometimes I will make an egg. If I get up early later today I will try and make an egg sandwich.

I love how my chest is. I am still getting used to it as I really can’t believe the breasts are gone. I love it so much. I no longer have to wear baggy shirts to hide my chest. I can’t wait for the warmer weather so I can wear tank tops without worrying about whether my boobs are gonna show.

I feel sad about my mother’s passing. I feel like there should have been more time that she could have spent with us. But I guess it wasn’t meant to be. I feel cheated because my sisters had my mother at their birthdays and I didn’t. I got a phone call while she was in the hospital. A voicemail message, actually two of them. Then I didn’t get her card until two weeks after my birthday. I got no party with her. My sisters and nieces celebrated with me at the restaurant but it was so hard without my mother there on my birthday. I am upset about it. I never said anything about it before because I thought there would be another birthday with her. I was wrong. Cancer took her before we were ready to say goodbye to her. I am angry about this. I am sad and hurt, too. I got all these feelings rolled into one. I don’t know why the cancer showed up now. I knew it would eventually. She smoked a lot and I knew she caused damage to herself. I just wanted to have one more birthday with her. Now it is never going to happen.

I don’t know if I should stay up or go back to sleep. It’s almost 5am. It is usually the time I go back to sleep. The birds are chirping away, being annoying. They are cardinals. I think one of the is my father because he would be a pain in the ass in the morning especially if you didn’t answer his call right away. I am hungry and am thinking of making an egg sandwich. Haven’t decided if I want turkey or regular bacon in it. I have maple bacon that I haven’t opened yet. I love the smell of bacon. So good. My mother would make extra bacon when she made it. It was always too crispy for me and usually cold. I like eating the fat off the bacon. It is so good. I know it isn’t healthy but oh well. I don’t have it often. I usually like turkey bacon better than regular bacon. Less mess and easier clean up. I’ve been having turkey bacon with my burger that I make. It comes out so good. I love it.

My sister bought coffee creamer which is ok but it is sweet. I have to remember not to put sugar in the cup when I make my coffee. I am thinking of going downstairs to make something to eat and to have coffee.

I have decided that my trans memoir book is going to be in comic sans font. I find it more personal that way, though I keep going back to typewriter font, which I think is times new roman. I am not sure though. I don’t know. I need to write more about it and see what I have written so I don’t repeat myself. I will need to get an editor for the book. But I will worry about that when I have at least a hundred pages written. I want to have at least 200 pages with also resources for trans like the lifeline and other stuff. I think it will be important.

about my hiatus

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

About my hiatus

I have been in the hospital the past three months. I was not in a state where I could write a blog. I was doped up most of the time and barely knew what was going on around me. I was sick with renal failure, covid, and infection called C diff. I was barely eating so they had place an nasogastric tube down in my stomach for a bit. I don’t know how long this tube was place. I had taken a pic of it sometime in Sept. I missed how the season ended for my Sox. When I came home for a bit, I thought it was the end of Aug but it was the beginning of Oct. I was home for a week or so before going back to the hospital for psych. I spent four weeks in the hospital on the psych unit. I got really good care there. I learned my top surgery was postponed and I was very, very devastated. It was good that I was in the hospital because if I wasn’t, I probably would have ended my life right then. I was so angry and frustrated as I didn’t have answers and had to wait for them. I had no access to my phone so I didn’t have the usual supports I have when I am home. It was extremely frustrating. The staff tried to help me but all they could do was sympathize with me. There was only one LGBTIQQ staff person on the unit and even she couldn’t really understand my predicament.

I have an appointment next week with my pcp to get medically cleared for top surgery. I really hope this conversation goes well. It will be the first time meeting my new pcp as a fully conscious being. The first two times I met her, I was still in the confused, delusional state. All I could do when I met her was blink my eyes and nod yes or no.

I am having difficulty writing in a constant stream of consciousness. It has taken me two days to write three hundred words for this blog. My thoughts are still hard to write with everything that I have been through. It was really difficult in the hospital as I really lost the ability to write. Writing has always been a coping mechanism for me and when I couldn’t think to write, it hurt, literally. I would get these headaches that felt like my brain was being crushed. It literally hurt to think. I got several migraines while in the hospital. I would wake up around 0330-430 every morning with severe migraines. It was terrible. The trauma of everything I went through was very difficult to process. I had become catatonic at one point.

I am still feeling wicked depressed and anxious at times. I am off all pain meds and off my Ativan. It is weird not taking meds around the clock like I once did for years. Now I just take it a few times a day as I am taking my blood pressure med three times a day and take the Latuda at dinner time. It makes me tired and I often find that by 1900 I am sleepy. But that could be because I have been waking up before 0500 most mornings. I find it hard to get back to sleep with these early morning awakenings. I am so much clear headed now than I was in the middle of October. My memory is still not there on what transpired the six weeks I was on the medical floor of the hospital. I just have these weird dreams/delusions that sometimes intrude in my head. One day while in the psych ward, I was flooded with memories and couldn’t make sense of things at all. The anxiety it produced was terrifying. I was convinced I killed my mother and a bunch of weird shit around my house. Taylor Swift music got me through a lot of the anxiety but while in the psych ward, I didn’t have my music to calm me so it was very difficult to cope. Now that I am home and have music again and my laptop, I am coping so much better. I am reunited with my online friends again and it feels so good because I was missed so much. I have missed blogging so much. I regret that I didn’t write before now but it has been hard finding my writing voice again. It has been a real struggle.

In closing, I am going to try and write a blog a day like before, even if it is less than 500 words.

thirty years of therapy and what I have learned

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, Chronic pain, CRPS, depression, mood disorders, suicide

Thirty years of therapy and what I learned

I’ve been in therapy since I was 15. After 30 years and 15 therapists, I’ve called it quits. Not because I was cured because I couldn’t get the care I needed. Not all therapists are the same. And even if someone has the credentials I am looking for, doesn’t mean it will work out. I have seen social workers, psychologists (PhDs and PsyD), psychiatrists, and psych RN. The first 10 I saw within the first 10 years of starting therapy. Each therapist I saw didn’t last more than a year. One resident I saw lasted three years, till the end of her residency, but she moved on and I didn’t see her again. I tried DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), and the various psychodynamic therapies out there.

My suicidal career took up talk for the last 10 years of therapy, maybe more as it got more serious and I didn’t want to live anymore. I started researching into the different treatment options and found very little to help myself. The therapist I was seeing at the time was stuck in her ways didn’t want to adapt to what I wanted her to do in therapy to help me. It was frustrating. Then I saw a PsyD with the credentials and I thought yes! This is going to work out finally. But it didn’t because she didn’t have empathy and couldn’t give me validation when I needed it the most.

What I learned from my research into suicidology is that the person needs to tell their story of why they are suicidal. It needs to be heard by an empathic person who validates why they are suicidal. They also should appear eager to listen and to know more about the person, their pain and suffering. To find out where it hurts and to try and heal it the best they can. I can go on about things like perturbation, lethality, constriction, and psychache but those are just words no one uses anymore.

Living with pain— physical or emotional— for years is a traumatic stressor. The experience of living with pain evokes many of the same responses that being subjected to abuse or neglect does. — Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle

I came across this quote while scrolling through Twitter. Dammit this guy always posts something when I am in the feels. He is correct. Pain does have the same responses as being abused or neglected. I have suffered physical pain consistently 24/7/365 for the past twelve years. Each time my foot or ankle flared up, I had flashbacks of when my back gave out ten years prior. I had to go through a series of checklists to make sure it wasn’t happening again, each time, nearly every single day. Once I had a diagnosis for the pain the checklist checking stopped but the feelings of the trauma didn’t.

My therapist who I just stopped seeing, asked me what I was looking for in therapy. But I didn’t have the words. As I am reading the book Building a Therapeutic Alliance with the suicidal Patient, I am figuring out what I need in therapy. I knew she wasn’t able to give me what I need. I am not really sure what I need. I know I want someone to talk to tell my story to. For them to listen, empathically and compassionately to what I have to say about why I am suicidal and why it has become my only option left to me.

tiring day of appointments

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, CRPS, depression, mood disorders

Tiring day of appointments

I reluctantly got up this morning and didn’t want to leave the house. I had slept through the night but was still exhausted. I had coffee and then counted down the minutes to when I had to get ready to catch the bus. My legs were so heavy today as I walked to the bus stop. I knew it was going to be a challenging day for me as I had a lot of walking to do today.

I saw my PCP and we discussed my fatigue. He thinks it is multifactorial so he is sending a message to my psych team to try and find ways for me to sleep better. I told him my blood pressure has been high lately and he checked it. It was high so he is adding a new blood pressure medicine. Yay a new medicine. Not. I see him in three months.

I then went to my second appointment at the other end of the hospital for the covid blood draw. He couldn’t get me so asked one of the other medical assistants. She got me right away. After the blood draw I went to get my haircut. I slept on the train ride back home. I was so tired. I had to stop a few times.

I came home and was hungry. I didn’t feel like cooking so I had some cereal. I made a cup of coffee to try and avoid a nap. While I was eating, I did my shoulder exercises. I had worn the sling all morning so it was good to move it about. It still hurts. When I went to my room, I took off my sneakers and socks. Soon as I got into bed my ankle flared up and I had to take a BT med. I also took some ibuprofen for the shoulder pain. I don’t know why the CRPS is flaring lately. I started to hurt on the walk home from the bus stop. Each step I took was more painful than the last. I was dreading the last block home.

I am doing nothing tomorrow and if I sleep all day so be it. I am just going to have a down day. Might order pizza again. Actually, might order it tonight. I am a pizza junkie. I can eat pizza every day if I am able.

I need to schedule an eye exam so I can get new glasses. I haven’t had an exam in almost two years. I tried reading from my sunglasses today and it was difficult so I know my prescription has changed. I just don’t like the eye doctor I see. It is hard to see someone else because of my insurance. I’ll probably see someone by the end of the year though.