ysobel | in which ... things

A summary of my life over the last few months:

I've already covered some of this, but here it is all in one place.

Thing the first -- At some point before July 25, I stopped being able to use the mouse without serious awkwardness and pain in my increasingly crunchy right forearm. The old setup, left hand on left half of keyboard, right hand on mouse, using the onscreen keyboard instead of switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard (which doesn't work for me), was gradually becoming unusable. I developed a new setup, using the mouse with my left hand and doing all typing with either onscreen keyboard or voice dictation, and while that worked for most things -- typed input may have been slow and frustrating and error prone, but it was at least possible -- it didn't work for gaming at all.

Thing the second -- August 6th, my chair died. I did have a backup chair to use, but it wasn't entirely functional (partly because it was set up for my mobility levels 10 years ago, partly because it's older and so some things don't work anymore). I was in constant pain, ranging between discomfort and agony; I couldn't really go outside for fear of smashing my foot; and it took them more than seven weeks to get my proper chair back to me. Plus, because of positioning stuff, I had to rely entirely on the left-hand-on-mouse setup described above.

Thing the third -- because of the above two things, my mental state pretty much went down the toilet. In retrospect, that shouldn't have surprised me as much as did. The chair thing kept me in high-stress house arrest, the arm thing made it hard to keep up online social connections and also took away the stress relief (and, to be honest, feeling of accomplishment and productivity) of gaming, and the two happening at the same time had a profound impact on my (already limited) life.

I've spoken about the above things, although I can't remember how much was posted here, how much to Facebook, how much in other places online, etc. The next bit, though, is new.

Thing the fourth -- my mental state hasn't gotten any better since getting the chair back. I can go places, I have less pain (but never pain-free), I am trying to find a mouse solution that will let me go back to gaming, things should be improving, but they're not. If anything even hints at going wrong, I go into panic / avoidance mode; I have absolutely zero ability to cope with anything; I'm very quick to cry, even in public, and sometimes I can identify the trigger but sometimes I can't; I slip very easily, way too easily, into self-hate and suicidal ideation; and at the best of times, it feels like what I do while awake is just killing time until I can sleep again.

My therapist thinks that something changed in my brain chemistry during that seven weeks. I tend to agree. At any rate, it is obvious to both of us (and even to other people) that the medications I'm taking aren't really doing their job. (I'm not really convinced that they were even before -- I think there may have been a gradual slipping that only really got noticeable when circumstances tipped it to a greater rate of change -- but that's not really relevant.) We're working on finding me a good psychiatrist to reevaluate me and my med situation.

In the meantime, though, I get to cope with not being able to cope. With no actual objective reason for it. (In some ways, the pseudo house arrest had an advantage: there was a concrete, and totally out of my control, reason that I could point to and say "this is why I'm not able to do anything". I don't have that anymore, but I haven't bounced back to where I "should" be.)