Got some absolutely garbage news these past couple days. I feel like I’ve gone through a really bad breakup even though I haven’t. I’m badly in need of a distraction so I don’t spiral further. I’ll probably be watching my shows and/or working my ass off on my art and/or crying. -Allēna
Tag: mentalhealth
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As the lab results roll in, I’m hard at work on medical theories because that’s what we do..
It’s plausible that due to Hera‘s incredible (heavy sarcasm) DIY MKULTRA scheme she put us through in our late teens and early twenties, the high doses of lithium we were on damaged our pituitary gland, adrenals, and kidneys while our thyroid bounced back, aided by the Vitamin B100 experiment Laz started a few months ago. HRT has quite possibly made it worse because (hypothetically) nothing that’s supposed to process testosterone normally can or will.
Huzzah. I hate this existence sometimes. Fuck psychiatry. We didn’t even need to be on lithium anyway. But here we are, persevering through this existence by means of sheer fucking spite. I’ve written a note to our PCP about this theory already. I’ll see what he says.
-Theo, standing in for Allēna today because she fell asleep.
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Getting Back on Track
When we were younger, mid teens or so, our family would always accuse us of having a one track mind and say that we needed to “get off the track” when we hyperfocused on something a bit too hard for their taste or comfort.
I, Allēna, am particularly bad about that. I’m very tightly wound, and I feel like a compressed coil much of the time. If something releases pressure on that coil, I might just.. Erupt and spill everywhere. I know much of that pressure is self imposed now that I’m an adult and is the result of a life filled with trauma, and as a result I am slowly but surely learning that I can learn to relax and I’ll still be safe and not everything will go to shit. I don’t have to be this poised image of perfection, and nor does everyone else. Not all the time, anyway. I view my AuDHD/CPTSD pattern recognition as both a blessing and a curse in this respect. It makes me very anxious, but I also get a lot done and a lot done in a way that gets results.
That being said, I’ve been slowly learning now that life is becoming more stable to make time for my special interests, both old and new. That hyperfocus, that “track”, if you will, is what energizes me. I can’t switch mental trains of thought or tasks easily like a neurotypical or someone who has a different “flavor” of ADHD can. However, whatever I’m doing, if I care about it and enjoy it, I give it my all. I throw my entire soul into it, and gods, does it make me feel alive again.
It never hasn’t..
I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to relax through my burnout like a neurotypical will. However, I do know that engaging with people and things that make me feel alive again when I’m up for the task is the closest thing I feel to R&R.
And lately, I’ve been giving an old comfort show of mine a re-watch – Heroes. It’s an odd one. I don’t know many people who have seen it at all, but many actors I love are in it, and we watched most of it with our family back in 2011-12 or so, mostly on Wednesday nights.
It has been an odd experience. Very comforting, yet I only remember about half of it. I think it’s because while I loved it, I was likely severely dissociated at the time, largely focused on other things and people, and may not have been the only headmate in front, but didn’t realize it at the moment.
I don’t know. What I do know is this – it seems to have been a huge influence on my audio drama The Third Prophecy a little over a half decade later and one of the shows that made my system realize we were plural, but we couldn’t admit that to anyone for several more years.
I’ll need to keep watching. I’ll keep y’all posted.
-Allēna
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Valentine’s Day Thoughts
In all honesty, I never really think about that holiday??
My sweet Danish partner reminded me it existed today and I told him that due to my time blindness I’m likely to find myself in a situation out of a sitcom where someone who has a crush on me invites me over or something, I have no fucking clue what day it is, everyone else gets extremely upset with me, and I just end up rolling with it and they confess their love for me with flowers and chocolate and I’m like “I’m so sorry… what year is it again” 😭
I’ve forgotten my own birthday before. I’m not fucking kidding. I tend to forget Valentine’s Day exists especially hard because I wasn’t exactly…. Desirable until well into adulthood, and even now it’s still a mindfuck to me that people want to date me at all? So wheee. AuDHD is a helluva thing.
-Allēna
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Unraveling: A Zine
I made my first zine today because I was bored and needed a vent. If you want a copy of your own, it’s free to download over here!
I hope you enjoyed this zine! I had a lot of fun making it.
-Castor
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Sorry I don’t have more cat pictures or anything for y’all today.
The more I sit with the realization that what my system is dealing with is complex grief about the state of the world and life and things, the more it feels like I’m swimming in an ocean of just… Sadness. I’m safe, it’s just a lot to feel. Hence why I’m writing here. I don’t really know how else to begin deeply processing emotion beyond writing, and I’m feeling the grief so somatically that I don’t have the energy to talk to people individually about it. So I figure word vomiting here is a good place to start.
I have lost so much. We as a society could have had so much in this past election cycle (Kamala Harris wasn’t great but she sure as fuck wasn’t this) and while I’ve seen TRUE bone chilling right wing terror as an ex Mormon.. This is pretty fucking terrifying. Everyone was warned and they didn’t listen. My system actually foresaw much of this. So we’re just mourning what could have been while trying to do the work, trying to keep our heads above water… And I am tired, deep down in my soul.
And this realization has led me to sit with the grief and the pain of being chronically ill, psychologically tortured, and often isolated before the election, and I’m doing another round of processing that, too. It feels in a way like I’m falling down a bottomless well of pain and grief. Or maybe I never stopped falling down that fucking well.
I’m not sure. Either way, it seems to help me breathe a little easier to put words to it however I can. I want to cry. I feel like I need to cry. But I haven’t been able to yet. So I’m just gonna keep working through things in my mind until I’m able to open the floodgates, I suppose. Everything fucking physically hurts in the meantime.
I’m not going to give up the fight, though. I don’t see the situation here as hopeless. There’s a lot of good happening amidst the bad, and I’m not suicidal or anything. I’m just badly in need of rest and time to sit with this further, so that’s what I’m gonna do.
Signing off for now,
-Allēna
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HE’S JUST LIKE ME FOR REAL 🤣🤣🤣
One of my crushes sent me this and it basically hit me in the damn soul and I started crying laughing and had to share it here.
If I don’t know you or trust you, I would rather do ANYTHING ELSE than acknowledge that you’ve just flirted with me, but believe me, I know, and believe me, I’m Fucking Panicking. Often for YEARS. OOOPS 🤣
I do really like this guy, though…
-Lazarus
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The Art of Bitching
Well, this is an interesting prompt.
What do you complain about the most?
I tend to complain a lot about anything that’s difficult or exhausting for me while in the process of doing it. It helps me bypass my executive dysfunction and my deeply rooted perfectionism, which often makes it damn near physically painful to get out of my blanket lump, so cussing about having to do the task makes the task doable.
It’s one of the joys I have discovered in adulthood, as when I was a child and teen, I was often made to do things without showing a hint of displeasure. My parents insisted that I did everything they wanted “with a cheerful heart”. So I often did, but gave them hell the rest of the time and would find ways to maliciously comply with that rule while doing the task. They learned pretty early that the only way to get me to do anything that I didn’t really give a shit about well was to pay me a king’s ransom 🤣. But now that I am away from them and better for it, I bitch about damn near everything that I have to do that doesn’t involve being cocooned in a blanket lump while in the process of getting shit done.
I don’t mind being productive, for the record. I actually quite enjoy it. It just hurts a lot of the time. Bitching about the task at hand gets me to start the process of being productive, and I highly recommend it.
How do y’all get shit done?
-Allēna
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In all seriousness,
I was thinking about my post from earlier.
And I sort of wonder what would happen if we all decided to open our windows at a certain designated time (say, 1 PM local) and simply unleash a blood curdling screech. Would a collective Daily Scream make the world a better place? Would that improve people’s mental health? I don’t know. But it’s ideas like this that I think may be worth trying.
Food for thought, perhaps?
-Castor
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