down with the sickness

Once again, I cannot go outside.

I have a chiropractor's appointment, and I need to get some shopping done. I really have things I need to take care of today. But instead I am sitting here with the door locked tight because it's happening once again.

First I start to shake, a tiny tremble that starts from deep inside... down in the stomach... it slowly builds, spreads through my limbs until they are trembling as well. My throat tightens up and it gets hard to breathe. The tears come, burning my eyelids. Nausea boils in my stomach. I try to control my breathing so I don't hyperventilate. My whole body seems to crunch in on itself, my spine aching, I double over. I hug myself in mute protection from my terrors.

I don't want to go outside.

Outside holds every danger and every terror imaginable. My mind races with it. Will someone hurt me? Will I hurt myself? What if I get stranded, sick, injured out there? What will happen to me? The dread mounts and mounts into flat-out panic.

This is the point where most people tell me I am over-reacting. Sure, bad things might happen out there, but hey! Someone would surely help you out! Really, there is nothing to be afraid of! Your fears are unfounded!

Except that they're not. I think back to the awful day, years ago, in New Jersey... when I had no car, no friends, no help... and my beloved cat Tiger went into diabetic shock... I hustled him into a carrier and started running down the street, trying to get him to a vet before I lost him. In a strange city, a strange state, a strange neighborhood, I had blocks and blocks to run but I kept going. The carrier was heavy, my lungs were giving out, and I started to go into the panic. Things got blurry. The world tilted. Still, I kept running on. A big crack in the sidewalk blindsided me and I tripped, slamming onto the ground... my pants ripped, knees shred... my head spinning, can't breathe. The carrier lying sideways on the ground next to me. I'm try to get up but I can't, I am paralyzed, it is all that I can do to breathe because my chest and throat are locked up.

This is the part where the good Samaritan is supposed to come along, right? Only, they didn't. As I lay broken, bleeding, and struggling for breath on a cracked sidewalk, a thousand cars whizzed by me 6 feet away on the street. Some even slowed down to gawk at me. I was mouthing wordlessly, breathlessly, for help. Not one single car stopped. Not one single pedestrian came to help. They just flowed around me, looking down at me before moving along. I must have laid there for about 10 minutes before I could get up and continue on. I knew then that I could have died right there on that street, and none of those people would have helped me, or even cared.

And I have had this experience countless in my life. Like the time when my truck broke down at a busy local intersection... smoke billowing out from under the hood... and dozens of cars passing me by, honking at me, and even angrily screaming at me for blocking traffic, throwing me the finger. Or the time when a guy got violently drunk one night and started choking me and pushing me down onto the hood of a car, right on the street, and I called out for help while countless people just walked by and did nothing. I have never been 'saved' or even helped. I have been taught the lesson by life, over and over, that if anything bad happens to me out there, I am completely on my own.

Those are the big scary things. Then there are the small agonies.

The agonies of random strangers out in the grocery store, at the bars, on the street who make fun of my physical scars.... pointing and laughing right in my face. The agonies of intimacy and betrayal, like the many, many, many 'friends' I have had who cheated with my boyfriends, turned on me, lied to me, or just abandoned me completely. The agonies of the bully squad here in El Paso, that group of 'popular' people who hang out at certain bars and events and who- even though we are far from high school days- still spread completely made-up rumors about me, make fun of me, and still send me messages threatening to beat me up if they see me anywhere.

And what about the other things... the intense fear I have that anyone I see out there, outside, in the random crowds, could be anyone... serial killer, maniac, someone out to do serious harm...? This is where they tell me, 'Oh you can't think that way, you're just being paranoid... do you know how rare the chance that you will randomly run into a maniacal killer are??" *scoff* Except... I have run into killers. I had a friend murdered by a serial killer when I was 13. My own sister was murdered in her own home by a guy she randomly met. I was once targeted by an alleged killer who was found by the FBI to have photos of me that he downloaded from the internet hanging in his torture trailer. And I have also been assaulted by strangers on the street, and in my own home.

In none of these instances have I ever had another human being come to my aid. I have been in situations where I literally screamed for help and nobody cared. Life has taught me, over and over by experience, that everything outside of my highly-controlled safety zone is, at best, ripe for dealing out the pain, and at worst, potentially life-threatening. And this was a lesson learned at a very young age. I will never forget the years of physical and mental abuse we endured at the hands of a violent, drunk stepfather, and how not one person in the family ever stepped in to help us... even though we children were crying for help.

In my years of cognitive behavioral therapy, my therapists encouraged me to get out of the house and to do the things that I feared. The point being that when I see that my fears are unfounded, they will start to fade away. Instead, every time I pushed myself to do just that, yet another terrible thing would happen to me to reinforce the opposite theory- that I was right to be afraid. It got to the point where even my therapists saw that this was only making things worse and they were helpless to change it.

So now I live on medication. The pills give me my breath back when I can't breathe, but they don't erase the horrors of the memories in my mind. The pills lower my blood pressure, but they don't stop the nightmares. The pills calm my panic attacks, but they do not make me feel safe.

Is it surprising that I have been living all these years with debilitating extreme social anxiety, clinical depression, panic attacks, and PTSD? My life experience pretty much guaranteed it.

And now I get to dwell with it for the rest of my life.

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I appreciate you guys reading this, and please do not take it as a total negative... I just needed to vent. Despite my disabilities I am always striving for a happy life and I won't ever stop doing that. Sometimes though, you just need to get stuff off of your chest. So thanks for listening.

Anyone else out there who is going through these issues, I promise that you are not alone. Hang in there...

sick and/or tired

Trying to wind down after a hardcore day (and night) of illness & convalescence. I had a rough day today. My body crapped out on me. I'm so tired of being sick & tired. I'm only 35 but my body sometimes behaves like it's 70... *grumble*

I've had various health problems most of my life, and I have always imagined that if I lived in the way-old days, I'd be one of those white-ruffly-nightdress-ed ladies that always got the vapors and spent most of their time lying abed, hand pressed to forehead dramatically. But since I do not live in olden times, I am instead just that chick who sometimes falls down in a faint, most usually not in a white ruffly nightdress. Fainting sucks!

Fainting has actually been a big problem of late. Right now I am sporting a nice, purply bruised lump at my hairline (and a lingering headache) from my head kissing floor during an early morning faint. I have a rather new scar above my eyebrow from a faint a few weeks ago (another one dammit, though it does kinda give me that fetching deadly assassin-ish type look) Also I have a little cut by my lip right now from yet another recent faint. I look like I've been brawling! The fact that my room- where the fainting has happened lately- has a superhard concrete floor doesn't help. Doh.

The fainting is happening because of my blood pressure issues, which are being exacerbated because of stress. And when it gets hot (like it has been lately with the crazy 105 degree temps) my blood pressure is even more apt to spike up easily, increasing faintage potential. I am in a stressful living situation right now (UNDERSTATEMENT), so decreasing the stress is not that easy right now. I'm sorta stuck here in a toxic (for me) environment- for the moment. Luckily, it looks like I will be moving out soon; we're just looking for the right mobile home now, as soon as we find it, I'm outta here!

In the meantime, I just hafta keep on keeping on and try to at least make light of things- I've long been known for finding humor in the grimmest situations so, lucky me.

And I could be doing better in terms of taking care of myself lately. There- I admit it.
I've been eating a crappy diet (and not eating nearly enough), I've not been sleeping enough, I've been pushing myself physically on those days when I know I should cool it and give my body a rest. I have to realize that I can't bully my body into not being sick. I have to- like my very dear friend recently told me- ride out the rough patches like a sailor (or a pirate, yearrgh?!) on the deck of a ship at rough seas.... roll with the swells while keeping focused on the horizon.

So, though I had a very shitty & discouraging day today, there's always tomorrow. That, and randomly stumbling across things like these brilliantly bizarre videos of Isabella Rosellini portraying the sex lives of various bugs in a sort of see-it-to-believe-it insane bug porn.
Now that shit made me laugh, and laugh and laugh. More, please!

diss function

This is what my MDD feels like:

I woke up today filled with dread, the worst, most crippling sick-to-my-stomach dread... unnamed dread... it had no source, but the feeling was very very very REAL, and that combination only amps up the anxiety... making me feel like something horrible is right around the corner and I don't even know what to expect, but it's coming, it's definitely coming, and it's very bad.

I knew it was gonna be a bad day right away, even after I popped an anti-anxiety med. The force of despair inside me was rising way too fast and furious for mere pills to curb the tide.

Things just got worse as the day went on. My skin is crawling. I feel hollow inside. My hands won't stop shaking. My throat is closed up tight as a fist. It's hard to breathe. My torso hurts with every movement. My limbs feel numb and heavy and hard to manage. Nausea is burning in my stomach and I feel dizzy and weak. I feel faint every time I stand up. My blood pressure is soaring and I am covered in a cold sweat. And that feeling of creeping dread has grown 100 times more intense as the day goes on.

This is MDD. This is the illness that I am living with. It sucks monkey ass. At times like these I feel like a freak. It's embarrassing. It makes me hate my body; it's like my very being is sabotaging me. My brain is telling me to run, to hide, to be afraid for no valid reason. How retarded is that??

How do I even explain something like that to anyone? "Oh hi there, I'm Shady, and I'm freaking out for absolutely no reason right now! My brain is wrongly misfiring fight-or-flight chemicals into my system and making me panicky, but hey, I'm just peachy, I'm not an insane freak, wanna be pals?!" *facepalm*

It's hard to see the light of reality when everything is buried in this treacherous shit. I tell myself over & over- 'breathe, you're ok, nothing bad is happening'... but my body doesn't care. The dreadful paranoia just rolls on. It's scary to not be in control. It's scary not to be able to stop this. There are days when I can... sometimes the meds do help... well, mostly they do help. But some days they don't, nothing does. Today I thought about death, today I got into fights with people I love, today I sat on my bathroom floor in the dark and cried. Today is one of those days. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

And this is what my MDD feels like.
*flips MDD off*

sliding

I am in a downward swing on the never-ending arc of my depression right now.

Inside, I feel muted, cloaked. My thoughts become harder to separate and to concentrate on. Inside my head it's like trying to swim in a thick muddy lake as opposed to a crystal clear swimming pool... it's harder to move, to see, to relate to or even grasp what's surrounding me... mostly it's all looming thoughts that stay in shadows, peeking out to taunt me when I turn away from them, hiding again when I spin back around to catch them. My mind feels slowed down, frozen. My heartbeat even feels slower.

My body feels heavy and tired and it aches in every place it can. There is a dull throb at my temple that just beats, beats, beats like the bass on some faraway car that you can't even see but that you want to kick the shit out of for having their stupid bass so loud. That's going on in my head. Yeah.

The worst part about having MMD (Major Depressive Disorder) is that it's essentially an invisible disease. It totally fucks with your body and your mind, but from the outside it just makes you looks crazy and 'depressed'. I can't tell you how many times I have been told that I need to do more 'positive thinking' and 'appreciate life' as a 'cure' to my sickness. They just don't understand. The neurons inside my brain are physically misfiring, the chemicals being released into me are wrong wrong wrong, and no amount of happy thoughts are going to physically repair or change that. My brain malfunctions are not just going to magically be fixed by a positive outlook- trust me, I've already tried that... running around with a forced grin on your face trying to love life while your heart is pounding out your chest and skipping beats and your brain is firing serious PANIC NOW!! signals to your limbs... people just do not understand.

This is a disability that I will have to live with- somehow- for the rest of my life. To quote the Mayo Clinic: "Most health professionals today consider MDD a chronic illness that requires long-term treatment, much like diabetes or high blood pressure. Although some people experience only one episode of depression, most have repeated episodes of depression symptoms throughout their life."

And just thinking about how very much people misunderstand wtf is wrong with me, just makes me more depressed. So, I try not to dwell. Still, it's not easy when everyone has some well-meaning bit of advice to give to 'cheer' me up. It makes me feel damaged somehow that I can't just fix myself already dammit. I do love them for trying and I only wish it was that easy.

Anyway... I am sliding down the depression tunnel right now... I think it was hearing about Ron Duncan's (a very close friend of my family's, may he RIP) death yesterday that tipped me onto the downslide. I am so tired of death and sorrow. It seems that I have been to one funeral and memorial after another for the last year... watching wives hearts break and children's confusion grow, watching sibling's pain boil inside them and friend's faces show signs of weariness and age and sadness... ugh. I am so tired of all this sadness. I am tired of loss. But, what can I do.... nothing much. Just go on, like we humans do. It is what it is.

So I'll keep taking my meds and playing with my chihuahuababy and trying to push through the dark.

And you guys keep watching and reading and who knows, maybe getting some more insight into what goes on with us 'crazy people'.

And maybe throw me a rope or something, yeah?