So I Wrote

Well, damn.

I am a terrible blogger etc etc yawn etc.

There's not much to say in a blog that I guess I've sort of geared toward my mental issues when there's nothing really going on in my life on that front. Good lord that was a long sentence.

Yesterday, I threw up. I got a bit of a concussion from hitting my head and a few hours later I had to cure myself, apparently, by throwing up. Then calling my mother in absolute panic and fear, going to the emergency room and getting checked out, and theeen getting drugged up.

Today I spent the day napping, pretty much. And having other people bring me things. My mother brought me groceries and cooked me food. My brother brought me a Jeeves and Wooster DVD. There's a lot to be said about my family dynamics and the woe it has brought me in the past... but I know that if I have to be taken care of, I am.

The vomitting wasn't bad, my friends. That's the second time in three weeks I've thrown up (my stomach does not agree with coffee). I'm not fearful of it now. When I realized that my God, I will be seeing my dinner again, I didn't get so much as an increased heartrate. Just acceptance, and waiting. It's so fascinating to me. So odd.


In other areas of my life... well. I've been working nights this whole summer. Making the moolah, serving the elderly etc. It's been great. I really loved working there - even though it's involved a lot of butts. Excrement comes out of butts. I feel kind of purposeless now that I don't have any scheduled work left. Considering calling them and just begging to come hang out so I at least get to know how all my elderly peeps are doing.

My husband is away in America. Again. The first three weeks it was like a bit of a holiday for me too. A time to cleanse myself with silence kind of thing. Well, I feel fully cleansed and lonely now. Daunting that it's only half the time has gone now. Hmm.

Well, last time I went to the evaluatory therapy meeting they said I should get a letter with a time in August. So theoretically, within thirteen days I should have it in my hands.

 

Hand me those boxing gloves, all this bare-knuckle hurts.

I am so annoyed with myself right now. I worked so hard to get rid of my emetophobia and now I am just slapping it in the face by sitting here feeling anxious about the fact that I went outside yesterday.

Emetophobia is fucking sneaky. I've been telling myself that it's a chronic disorder that I always have to work to keep at bay, but somewhere along the line I started giving myself passes to skip things that brought me anxiety and the result of that is more anxiety.

I am so SO SO SO nervous about the fact that in a few weeks I will be having to go to work every day, five days a week for four weeks. This during the time when the noro-virus is at its peak in this country. And I will be caring for the elderly - showering them, dealing with their poops etc. And to top it off, it's not in my city! I have to commute! The overwhelming urge is to run, run, run away. Even though my fear of vomitting has been reduced significantly I still feel that 'outside' is a huge risk to take, and I don't know how other people cope.

I feel like I may need to call my CBT guy but I also feel that would be a huge failure on my part, and also last time I tried to contact him he ignored/forgot to call me back.

I feel trapped in a box and there's anxiety being poured in and there is no where for it to go but all around me.

I'm also making a really big effort to make friends, and it is out of my comfort zone. I feel extremely anxious and all wrong when I reveal vulnerabilities about myself. I feel like I will be labeled as a unstable weakling that is no fun and one should stay away from incase I snap.

TL;DR: aaaaaaaaaaargh. Blaaaaaaaargh? Gargh.

One unfortunate event's consequences

My back is... eh... I'll give you the TL;DR version:

My back has an awesome knack for getting crooked and very inflamed in one spot. It halts everything because it's so painful. I end up sitting or laying down a lot. A lot meaning all the time. Movement is painful. Only thing that works to fix it is a chiropractor visit and lots of pills.

I couldn't afford either for 6 weeks. No gym. So I didn't have a reason to go outside. Well, I couldn't go outside because I could barely walk. So, I couldn't challenge my emetophobia every day. I need to do that to keep it at bay. The thoughts have been creeping in. Sloooowly but surely.

I'm not afraid like I used to be. I'm not obsessive in hand washing or checking my food. The only consistent fear has been going back to the gym now that my back is starting to improve. I guess it's a fairly easy target - I'm ashamed I got thrown off track AGAIN, I'm scared to see where my fitness level is at now (I suspect tear-status), and I'm so anxious that lifting weights or doing whatever cardio will aggravate the inflammation. It's like the anxiety is a cell with receptors for only other anxieties.  "You're so out of shape now!" becomes "the gym will make you vomit because you're so out of shape now."

The gym and my eating habits are very much linked in my head too. Barely a week after my back gave out I stopped eating well. I ate stuff that made me feel sick, bloated and anxious. So much sugar. I was nauseas for weeks. My stomach hurt for weeks. I was disgusted with myself for weeks. What the hell is that kind of behaviour about? Punishment? For what? Having a weak back that no amount of core exercises seems to improve?

I really do not like getting somewhere and then something happening (see: getting very ill and bed-bound for months, father dying, getting foot run over, becoming severely depressed because of foot, and repetitive painful flare ups of my back) and losing all that progress.

If I can't go to the gym everything about me starts going downhill. I need it to feel good, to make progress in other parts of my life. And to make me less whiney and to give me some hope at maybe developing some self-esteem. I need that self esteem. I motivate myself through guilt and shame. Effective as it is... Maybe there's a gentler way.

I'm scared and limited. Not as scared and limited as I was, but still scared and limited. If I don't stop myself I'll become increasingly scared and limited. I'm jealous of the motivation and will I had this time last year. It was harder then, but easier to get on with.

Damn, writing that really made me feel a lot better. Maybe I shall actually give this bloggy thing a really good go. Maybe I'll start taking pictures of everything I eat to post on here as an extra little bit of motivation. Though, it will probably be rather boring as I am very repetitive in what I eat.

But fuck it, it's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

I am a tea kettle.

The pressure I build on myself is really ridiculous. "Oh you can't write anything for your blog today because you feel all shitty and it's not going to be funny, and when did you even try to write anything funny last? You're lame."

Nobody reads this blog so, in theory, I can write whatever I like because nobody is going to read it anyway. Sometimes I pretend I am just writing to a friend and I don't even know if this friend even reads my blog.

Today I cleaned my kitchen. I cleaned my kitchen after I had dinner. I had dinner after I went to the store to get cream and coke light. And brie cheese and slim jims. Before I went to the store I was asleep. I slept all day because I couldn't see the point of getting up.

During cleaning my kitchen I watched Grey's Anatomy and pretended it was as good as actually studying medicine. Which I am supposed to be doing. For two days I've not studied at all and it's the only two days in the past two weeks that I haven't had a headache.  

Now, instead of studying I am waiting for megavideo to let me back in. Usually I use megavideo's time-outs to study. Then I use Grey's Anatomy to surpress the panic that I am not smart enough to study. And surpress the panic about the exam that's in a couple weeks.

I am also surpressing panic about how I have no money and so many bills. So many bills. I am surpressing panic about how I messed up on my diet and I am terrified, completely illogically terrified, that two days of less than stellar eating will cause me to gain 20 pounds. I am also failing at surpressing panic about how my nerve damaged foot will not stop hurting again, two years after the accident. It does not want to bend and it is swollen. I am worried about this. Without my foot I can't go on walks or to the gym and without those two my back hurts all the time. I am scared about all this. I am scared about how I may get emetophobic again as we go deeper into winter and deeper into the pitch black darkness that covers this country during winter. I am scared what going on anti-anxiety medication could do to me. I am scared what not going on anti-anxiety medication  would do to me.

As usual, I am doubting and scared and fumbling about. I wish I had the eye-on-the-prize motivation I had when I was in therapy for my emetophobia. Without that therapy I don't know where to go. So I'm stuck. Stuck in PTSD land, stuck in daddy-issues land, stuck in sex-is-so-difficult land, stuck in not-good-enough land. I don't know where to go and the pressure that I'm building inside myself is scary.

Harden! - It's Super Effective!

I am likely to consider it a side effect of my CBT therapy. I had to be hard on myself and demand things from myself that were very difficult and even downright sadistic at times. It worked for me - I have started doing it in all areas of my life now. I am much less likely to find excuses to avoid cleaning or studying now than I was before  CBT. I cheat less on my diet. Actually I don't cheat at all on my diet.

The problem is that I expect the same of other people. If someone, like my husband, has a hard day I am more likely now to take the "suck it up and deal with it" stance than the "aww, poor little baby" one. I am less emotionally oriented and more solution focused. This is not entirely a good thing. While it takes away a lot of my Hysterical Woman moments, it adds to other people's bad times because I am not neccessarily making them feel better with my "pfft, that's nothing. Pick yourself up and go." attitude.

But, then again, I've always had a problem receiving other people's emotions as well as my own. My brain overloads very quickly and shuts down the empathy/sympathy/any-feeling-at-allthy. My family never expressed any emotion except angry ones. So any expressed feelings = trouble, oh shit I have to get out. Those times never turned out good in my family. When my dad got mad I sometimes had to protect myself by shoving heavy things infront of my door so he couldn't get in. Not that he would hurt me physically. He would just make me really afraid that he would. Sometimes he raised his fist and stopped himself just in time. Most of the time he would just yell in my face with those furious eyes and I would stand and glare right back, terrified of showing that I was scared at all. I think if I had shown myself weak he would have tried harder to dominate me just so I would be crushed and under his control... and then what would have happened? My poor daddy, he was so conflicted.

I had to shut off my feelings so I wasn't overwhelmed with fear in those moments. Maybe all that fear that I pushed down were channeled into the emetophobia. Or maybe they are still there. I know when someone very dear to me prodded those feelings a little and suggested I listened to music that I listened to back then that I have avoided because it reminds me... well. I had a very "pure" PTSD moment. I was back in my room, my father was drunk and angry and I wanted to die. My husband later said that the energy around me was so intense after that hour with my friend (who is a therapist) that he literally couldn't be near me because it was giving him bad anxiety. I couldn't believe the intensity of the emotion myself. It was like I was in a bubble and all the things I could suddenly remember were stuck in there with me and there was not a breath to be had and I didn't quite know if I was in my kitchen or my dad's apartment and if my husband was my father and was he drunk? Or just angry?
I never told my husband this (I don't want him to inherit my daddy-issues) but as I watched him sitting across from me his face kept morphing from his own to my dad's. Every time it did I felt like I was going to vomit. Or start screaming. Or have a heart attack from the fear.

My dear friend later told me it was all normal.

After that I have never gone back to exploring those feelings. That was a year and a half ago. It scared me. I know I have to go there sometimes and face it. But I guess I'm not hardened enough yet. And I don't have a therapist. And I'm scared.

Well this blog post took a turn that I wasn't expecting.

To get back to my original topic: I shut down easily when it comes to emotions because they overwhelm me so easily. If my family ever showed anything but anger you knew disaster was just around the corner. I can only remember a hand full of times that every happening. And each time it set off emetophobic reactions in me. It's a protective shell I have. I guess the strength I used for my CBT has translated into abrasiveness and hardness toward others.

And it's really not my place to tell other's how to deal with things.

Man. Everytime I write one of these I really make myself look worse and worse in my own and probably everyone else's eyes.

What am I so far? A fat, cold-hearted, terrified-of-everything, socially inept stripper in the making.

Constant Vigilance!

Tonight I am stricken with fear. My stomach is eh... uh... well, not at its best and I've found myself in the errrr bathroom once or twice.

I don't feel sick and my stomach doesn't hurt. Just cold from sitting in the unheated bathroom. But I am feeling something else. Something so familiar. When I sat down on the bed after the ummm second round, so to speak, I tapped my husband on the shoulder and said my stomach isn't well. Then my face disappeared behind creases. I wrinkled my forehead, I tensed my lips and I scrunched up my nose. Tension. Tension, anxiety and fear. All of them wanting to lose control and go into panic because I may be sick!  I wanted to start crying but I was to tense to cry. Instead I shook. My body shook from fear and my brain started begging. Begging for the fear to go away. Please don't let this be happening, please let me be somebody else!

But I am me, and that scared version of me isn't who I want to be anymore. So I forced my face to unclench itself, I took a deep breath and I told the emetophobia NO! No you can't have anymore of me. You've had enough. You've owned enough of my years and I won't let you have anymore. I worked too hard and for too long for you to come back and destroy it. NO.

And to help me wind down from the anxiety I decided to write a blog post. And here I am. Not anxious. I remember the days when it would take 5-6 hours to recover from anxiety like I just had. I just needed 15 minutes today.

I am on the watch though. I view this as a chronic disorder. I can keep it at bay but it's always lurking and ready to come back. So I have to keep it away every single day. Every single day I have to put one foot forward so it doesn't end up taking one step back. Sometimes it makes me feel sad and hopeless that I will battle this for a long, long time... but I quickly remind myself when I felt incapable of battling it at all. Of ever going out and challenging it. Of ever eating food and not counting the hours to make sure I didn't have food poisoning. Of ever falling asleep because I was simply tired and not completely exhausted from staying awake in terror all night.

I am capable now, and I don't do those things. There's not turning back to that life. There's nothing in that former life of anxiety, panic and constant- CONSTANT - fear that is worth not fighting this.

I really hope I can keep remember this. It's that time of year when I will constantly be challenged and I have to face it. I can't fail this. I can't let it win.

Suck it, emetophobia.

I almost deleted you, internet!

Internet, I got a wave of wanting To Go Public With My Awesome Blog Which I Post In So Often. I went through my posts and started Drafting those that I couldn't bear for my mother to see. However, I started noticing they were my favourite posts. My most naked posts. The posts I would have loved to have seen written by someone else because they would have encouraged me.

It didn't feel right removing them. It sounds horribly arrogant, but what if they are meant to help someone? That is worth more to me than being able to post photos with my face, my cats, my life even if it means I post less because there's only so much I can say without being more open about my life. Which is kind of ironic because I am so open about my life. To be open about one part I have to shut another. And I choose to open the hard part.

Maybe one day I won't be ashamed, or feel guilty or whatever else is keeping me from being honest with my family and the Internet At Large.

My emetophobia issues are slightly worrying at the moment. The darkness up in dis bitch of a country is getting to me - my anxiety levels have risen. But as I am so free of my emetophobia it's a general, constant, nagging anxiety focused at nothing - and sometimes it tries to focus on vomitting. I get a rush of a very familiar feeling and it takes me a second or two to get a handle of it.

But I'm scared I will lose control of it and spiral and lose everything I've worked for. And I simply don't want to. Reading my old posts reminded me what it felt like to be the un-CBTed version of myself. I forget how lucky I am not to be that way anymore. Panic attacks are so rare now that when they happen I genuinely don't know what the hell is happening and I think I'm dying, until I something clicks in me and I think "oh, right. That. Man this sucks. How did I do this so often?"

I have several goals right now. One being "do not work yourself up into such a state about Christmas that you walk around in a constant cloud of anxiety and RUIN EVERYTHING."

Another is "Don't flunk out. Don't flunk out. DON'T FLUNK OUT."

Another is "dude, you're losing so much weight. DON'T MESS IT UP."

People are always telling me to have positive goals and not "not" goals. So to revise:

- Be peaceful for the holiday of Santamas
- Ace shit in school like nobody's business (oh noez, there's a "no" in there!)
- Become skinny and wear lovely clothes.

I am considering spinning this blog into somewhat of a weightloss blog as well. Because this time last year I was all about emetophobia, and now I'm all about shrinking these child-bearing hips.

I don't want to want to give up.

Oh, internet.

The last couple weeks I feel like I've lost control. I'm not on top of my school work anymore, I'm more sideways of it. Sometimes I'm straight up being trampled by it (while Simba screams my name and weeps). I feel like I've lost grip of my weight management. My apartment is in shambles again. The real control and order I worked so bloody hard to get over my life seems to have slipped away and I seem to be slipping back into emetophobic thoughts to make up for it. If I can't control the rest of my life, I will try to control this part. And it's so stupid of me, internet.

I've been getting moments of horror and panic over stomach twinges and "oh god, what if I have to wake up to throw up tonight?" and tonight I had more than a moment. I had two hours of horror and mounting anxiety. Internet, I fucking hated it. I loathed it and myself simultaneously.

Tonight I just want to cry. I want to cry out all the disgusting thoughts I'm having about 'it' and myself and be free of it. I am so sick of this shit. I cannot describe to you, Internet, just how much it angers me. I want this to be an inspiring blog, a freeing blog, a 'oh god, she said it aloud and I don't feel as alonenow' blog, a "if she can do it, so can I!' blog - I don't want my miseries to bring misery to others, I don't want to have people think that you can't get through things and change. Because you can.

But I also want to say that WHAT.THE. FUCK. I've been doing my CBT for 5 months now and holy shit fucking ballsacks I am still emetophobic. GAHGAHGAHGAHGAHGAH FRUSTRATION. I WANT TO GIVE UP. FUCK THIS SHIT. GODDAMNIT. WTF. *VIRTUAL GIVING OF THE FINGER*

Buuuuuuuuuuuut. I am so, so, so, so much better than I used to be. I let my husband drink expired milk after smell/taste test. I even drink expired milk after smell/taste test. I don't get many panic attacks anymore (which is why the anxiety I've had the lately has hit me so hard and rocked my world) and when I do I can successfully talk myself off the ledge in a matter of minutes (except for tonight, obviously).

My therapist said to give this deep-rooted phobia at least 6 months to be resolved. I am getting there. So fast sometimes, slower others. It's worth it. Every victory feels like freedom. Every victory leaves me giddy because I thought the last one left me feeling so very very free, but my God this new sense of freedom! It is so free! Oh my!

I wish I knew how to cut myself a little slack and give myself a pat on the back. And chill out. I am always 0% or 100%, no inbetweens. I am racing through emetophobia recovery and PTSD recovery and everything-else recovery as fast as I possibly can. I am not happy being just me the way I currently am. I don't think anyone is happy with me being the way I am now. I want to be the ULTIMATE CHAMPION me. Now. Yesterday. Always & Forever. It brings me so much shame that I am not Master Queen of the Universe and Whatever Else That May Lay Beyond of everything. It frustrates me because I know how hard I work, and yet I still get chastised for not being Master Queen of Everything Everywhere Right This Minute OMG Why Are You Not Perfect?

Internet. Tonight I am not perfect, I am not a ULTIMATE CHAMPION Master Queen. I have come far, but not all the way far... So my disgust with myself for being human, for having been broken, is climbing steadily higher, making me lose control of the simple things, making me trying to grasp control by freaking out over a bodily function which exists to keep me healthy and alive... making me want to flip the bird and just give up omgIamsotired.

But I can't give up.

BECAUSE THEN I WILL NEVER BE MASTER CHAMPION QUEEN OF EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME FOREVER ALWAYS AND EVER AND EVER.

 

Searching for people like me (or: Forever Alone!)

I don't know many people like me. Until a few weeks ago I didn't think there was anyone with a similar set of issues to mine. Then suddenly people started popping up. Pop pop pop poppity pop. They made me feel giddy. High. I became so eager to talk to them, to relate, to know their perspective that I overwhelmed and probably frightened them. I was acutely excited. Totez sry, lulllzz etc.

I know the following is a roll-eye worthy bunch of cliches but I'm nothing if not honest. So.

I've always felt seperate from everyone else. So much older than everyone because I've experienced (hideous, mind melting, crotch kicking) trauma, but still a baby because my brain is stuck in the (hideous, mind melting, crotch kicking, eye gouging) trauma. I've felt seperate from people my age because, goddamn! Do I have issues or what!? They all seem so happy and care-free. Adventurous and alive. Most of the time I've been cowering under my blanket, quite busy even if I wasn't going out, thanks.

Buuuut I can't escape the fact that I was busy being pelted with crapstorms and cases of the boo-hoos, instead of busy with school, friends and I dunno... what do kids do these days? Smoke week? Play SNES? Skip through fields of flowers hand in hand with their BFFs and special sexy friends? Go to bars and give blowies to people in bathroom stalls? The same thing we do every night, Pinkie, try to take over the world?

I don't know what people do! I'm an anti-social hermitty freak! I stay inside and read about life in books or blogs. I get my social interraction from my husband, from forums and msn (where I talk to people I met on forums, not IRL). I get my sense of adventure and thrills by tweeting famous people I like (Stephen Fry is dreamy), and picking up my cat when she is in a bad mood and may just take a swing at my face.

My hermit-like existence and my emetophobia is my own personal evolutionary case of Which came first? Chicken or the egg? Was I always a bit reclusive and lone-wolfy or did I become so because of my emetophobia? I was always very determined that I'm just not that sociable. Therapy has me, however, pulling my hair and dramatically flailing on the floor screaming "Oh Em Gee who am I?".

I have defined myself with many words and quite suddenly a great chunk of those words have been wittled away through my therapy as they were only responses to my emetophobia, my father's alcoholism and crappy family dynamics. What am I left with? Who am I left with? I don't like this feeling. I liked it better when upon command I could list ten things that I Most Certainly Am. Now I have trouble coming up with just one.

Uhh. I... Most Certainly got married so I am a wife.

Oh, God. If I don't watch out I will become one of those people who define themselves through their relationships with other people. I am a wife/daughter/cat-mama/friend, therefore I am.

Anyway, what I was aiming at with this blog was to say: Homies out there who relate, please let yourselves be known to me. We can relate and be awesome together.

(And I promise I've learned my lesson about overwhelming people)

  

I'm cured!!! (Sort of) (haha) (not really)

I went to my bi-weekly therapy appointment last Friday. As usual my head has been spinning a mile a minute afterwards with emotions and little flashes of painful memories. We begun our conversation with discussing my emetophobia - apparently I am quite close to being rid of it. I've definitely felt that it's under my control, rather than the other way round. I have my hard days with the big challenges (like the airport one) but I don't have panic attacks every night anymore. It's unreal just typing that. Just a few short months ago I had horrid panic attacks each night until I fell asleep out of pure exhaustion. Unreal.

We moved on to... more difficult things. Things that I've been able to largely ignore for a long time thanks to my emetophobia taking up so much of my brain power. But now that my emetophobia is going bye-bye more and more, I can deny these things less and less. I've touched upon the subjects here on my blog, and it seems to have sparked a new crapstorm within me. And it's the most cliche kind so it makes it really, really hard not to roll my eyes at myself. But perhaps that is another form of my denial. It wasn't so bad, get over yourself. Or become a stripper, you loser.

My therapist asked me to go to an al-anon meeting. A meeting for family of alcoholics. To that I simply replied "My father is dead, he isn't an alcoholic anymore", and my therapist sort of smirked and said that I am still here, his death hasn't erased any of my past. He suggested that maybe his death has made me free of The Family Secret that I held on to so tightly.

No.

I didn't tell people my father was an alcoholic. I don't know if people would believe it. He had a very prestigious, well paying job that he never took one sick day from (until he got cancer, that is). We were all provided for and we lived in a enormous apartment in the middle of our city. He only smelled of alcohol on the weekends. I never told anyone how much he drank. I never told anyone how angry and violent he got when he was drunk. I never told anyone how scared I was. I never told anyone the reason why I didn't sleep at night.

And I still don't want to. I feel like I'm spitting on the memory of my father by telling this particular truth. I feel like I'm betraying my family. Why do I bother feeling this way? They've betrayed me.

This weekend I was so angry. Furious. Why don't my parents love me?! Why, why, why, why, why did they not do more for me? Try harder? Why was I left to fend for myself when everyone else (my siblings, friends, friggin strangers) they would go out of their way for. Why was I left out? And, in my mother's case, I still am. I cannot for the life of me get attention from her. I've never really reached out to her - due to the guilt, due to feeling like taking care of their feelings was my responsibility etc - but she's always asked me to, and I always assumed that if I ever did she would take super duper awesome amazing care of me.

No.

I was at my lowest in my autumn depression. I was crying left and right, becoming very desperate for it to just stop. I called her. I sobbed so hard I couldn't speak. She asked me to come over for "some tea and a chat", and I went. I arrived, got a hug, a cup of tea and then spent the following two hours listening to how much her job sucks. All the while I felt like I was herp derping with my face out of desperate desperation mingled with why are you talking? What about me, ma?! 

And that feeling stuck in me, internet. What about me? Hello? Is this thing on? 1-2-1-2 testing. Hello?

This weekend I realized: Oh, It's not the microphone. It's you.

I've cried out for help, as they say, many times. Perhaps not always in words. Blasting the same song that I felt depicted exactly what I was feeling over and over (once I actually blasted on repeat, while shouting the lyrics, For You by Staind), hoping someone would hear it, or dressing in all black with torn up pants because that's like, totally how I felt inside omgz, or not going to school, or not getting out of bed, or not eating, or eating all the time, or accidentally revealing wounds that I had 'I fell down the stairs' and 'I walked into a cupboard! I swear!' type explanations for. But they weren't capable of dealing with me.

Why.