i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

Feeling very Not Myself today... partly a migraine hangover from yesterday, partly one of those days where little things kept going wrong, partly I don't even know what. Very crappy mood, sort of angrily despair-hate for no reason. Stuff that's similar to brainweasels I get but on steroids and just kind of Off. Spent the day half crying half reading (books not Twitter for a change). I wanted to just turn myself off until tomorrow. Like I'd gotten up wrong somehow. (The fact that 2/3 of today's shifts were a caregiver I don't particularly like and find annoying but can't afford to not have her, didn't help.)

Are there, like, medical reasons why moods can tank abruptly? Like, I know utis in old people can present like dementia. Or maybe it's just migraine exhaustion idk. Bet if I checked WebMD it'd suggest brain bleed and/or hangnail...

I'm actually in a good mood.

Not just coping, not just okay-ish, but actually good.

I'd almost forgotten what that was like,

(I strongly suspect that getting Reiki today -- first time since march 2020 -- helped a lot. Like, by 'a lot', I mean holy fucking crap I actually feel halfway human again *and I didn't this morning*.)

(...Cookies helped too. Also getting Fallout 4 GOTY for $10 on Steam. But those weren't desperation retail therapy, like some of my pandemic-era purchases have been, a hollow attempt to fill an infinite void within.)

I knew Reiki worked (for me) but. Wow.

why today is exciting, part 27: sat on toilet in a way that had the hip/thigh bone growth twanging my sciatic nerve like a banjo string

there may have been Language

(part 26 involved finding out one of the caregivers I'm training just had her housemate test positive for covid)

(part 25 is the PA political shitfuckery)

(I just kinda ... can't)

A) last night I wrote a breakup letter to rav, just to get my feelings out. My feelings are less intense today, possibly in part because of the third thing, but I went ahead and made it public anyway: https://ysobel.dreamwidth.org/600530.html (sorry, too lazy to bother with html right now)

B) I have updated the post before that with text of the terrible horrible no good very bad missive that triggered the latest round of firestorm, in case anyone needs it. I'm sorry it took me so long to do that.

C) Jess (aka mama rav) has posted a letter on Ravelry that is an actual fucking apology. It's not perfect (seizures and migraines are not "anxiety") and I wish it had come five weeks sooner, but it's a good start. I remain skeptical that there will be enough useful changes to let me keep using rav once Classic goes away, but I'm also feeling hurt and cynical right now. (Rav as a whole does not have a good track record with access and visual issues.)

D) I'm not going to delete my account. There is too much of my life there, and too much of my knitting knowledge. But as I have the time and energy for it, I will be writing blog posts with some of my various knitting knowledges -- things like stitch mount and decreases, charts, lace charts and decreases and markers, möbius structures, my pet peeves in pattern writing (things like "each end" and "knit to X stitch" and whatever else), why yarnover video tutorials are misleading, etc etc etc -- so that it's not just on rav.

E) for that matter, I'm not abandoning rav. Yet. I have too many friends there, too many important people that I don't really have other ways of engaging with. But I feel seriously burned by this whole thing. (I'm sure rav tptb are ... more than burned, probably; charred? ... for different reasons.) Jess taking the wheel is a good start, and to some level my heart hurts for her (having to put out fires and keep rav from imploding and also support her wife through what's probably some serious shit) and I really hope she and Cassidy both have a good support network in place right now. But my heart hurts more for all the people who can't use rav because of NuRav, especially the people who had fucking seizures, who were then called liars; and it hurts for the designers who relied on rav as a central selling platform and now in some cases don't know whether they can or should.

F) I breathe in other peoples' pain; I breathe out a sense of comfort for them. Pain in, comfort out. It's a form of meditation (tonglen, I think, is the name in Buddhist traditions). I don't know if it works but it makes me feel less helpless, and also makes my heartache (and physical pain) more meaningful if part of it is a shared burden from other people.

G) what am I doing up, it's after midnight argh. Go to sleep, self.

February is sucking so hard, so far.

Sunday night: aide called in sick. I got her shifts covered.

Monday: *deep breath* lessee. A different aide let me know she can't do Thursday nights any more. I had the *stupidest ever* appointment that required an hour total of driving, and fifteen minutes of waiting, just so that they could confirm that my cpap machine, which has been giving "motor life exceeded" errors, had in fact exceeded the recommended motor life. (It's normally replaced every five years, and I'm 9 months short of that, but I'm in bed 14-16 hours most days, and the cpap is running the whole time.) They didn't replace it (this was one step in the process of getting an early replacement) but it was complete BS.

And then there's the Chess saga, wherein he had to go in for surgery for intestinal blockage that turned out to be a *foot long stick* wtf I can't even fathom how he got that down. And while they were doing the surgery they discovered that it had rotated in a bad direction and punctured his stomach. So ... not good. He stayed in ICU overnight, and will be in the hospital a few more days, but full recovery will take longer. He IS doing better now, eating and wagging his tail and rolling over for belly rubs and generally charming everyone there.

(The trainer feels horrible about this, which on the one hand I can completely understand, and puppies will puppy and things happen and she didn't do this on purpose, but there's also a part of me that's like "(grumpycat) GOOD", because augh. SHE BROKE MY DOG, only not really, and he IS healing and it will be okay, but... yeah. And of course this is not going to be cheap (per the contract, she covers basic vet stuff and wellness checks and shots, but we cover any emergency issues) but more I'm just ... flaaaaail.

And Monkey has a UTI and has to get oral antibiotics, which means she's spending lots of time in impossible-to-reach places; and Yahtzee has something going on with his eye that needs him to go to an animal ophthalmologist. Both of which are technically January things but they're affecting February. And the ophthalmology guy my vet recommended had an appointment at 9:30 Friday morning, and is otherwise booked for a month out (the Friday thing was a cancellation), but he's half an hour away WITHOUT factoring in traffic, so I'm going to have to get up hella early compared to my usual.

Today: Got an email from Netflix that was all "we have changed your email as requested; you will no longer be able to use (email) to sign in. If you didn’t request this, click here to contact us". Felt very phishing-y, so I didn’t click on anything in the email. But I did go to sign in just to make sure I still could. And ... "we couldn't find an account with that email address". So I had to call them (still not clicking the email link because paranoid, but found their contact info a different way) and after confirming the last 4 digits of credit card to prove it was me, they changed my email back and sent me a reset-password link. Did that and also linked up my phone as a secondary source of authentication. But fuck, have no idea how someone got into my Netflix account...

...

I ... may be consuming rather a lot of sugar and carbs, the last few days. Stress eating. Not good for my body probably, but good for my mental health.

I'd really like things to *stop sucking*.

This is kind of stupid, but

I'm watching a movie with James Macavoy

and getting super nostalgic about, like, early xmfc fandom and all the feels and stuff

and, like, I can't get back to that -- for one thing the follow up movies, half of which I haven't even seen, changed the landscape of the fandom; for another, there isn't the same enthusiasm that there was; for a third I can't fucking write any more -- and it just

I can't tell how much of my heartache right now is because of the Doomed Romance Of Charles And Erik (and how very pretty James looks when his character is Having Feelings) and how much is because I used to be so much better

Ugh.

Too much shit going down right now.

CW: pet death (not mine)

( Read more... )

and on top of all the aide shit (for those not on my access list, short version = getting into a screaming fight sunday that included lies and gaslighting and emotional manipulation (incl textbook DARVO) on my aide's part, subsequently firing said aide and changing locks and dealing with emotional rollercoaster aftereffects) I'm just

a complete mess

(understatement)

Network page linkhopping led me to http://musingsofanaspie.com/2013/01/31/emotional-dysfunction-alexithymia-and-asd/ and, uh.

Because, I recently realized, I don’t discriminate between anger that is aimed at me and anger in general. When someone is angry, I invariably feel like I’m the cause or the target, even when I rationally know that I’m not.

If The Scientist calls me after a bad day, I hear how upset he is and immediately feel distressed. Not distressed as in “I should console my husband because he’s had a bad day.” I feel distressed in a “this is incredibly stressful and I want it to stop” kind of way. My brain immediately goes into “fix it” mode, searching for a way to make the other person feel better so I can also relieve my own distress.

...

...and I am sitting here going "wait, what, you mean everyone's not like that"

and, like, except for the 'impoverished imagination and fantasy life' bit I would totally be labeling myself alexithymic

because *there is a word for that*