The Next Version Of Me

[Hope67]

Hi Bach,
Going through belongings like that, I relate to what you're saying in many respects.    
Hope 

[Bach]

Thank you, Hope 

We're closing on the river house on Monday.  I've been doing a great job of staying on top of the business things I need to do with regard to buying the house, but my self-care is in the toilet.  Today I had to lock up the weed to force myself to stop smoking at least for a few days.  I'm burnt out from too much smoke and too much crap food.  I used to live like this pretty much 24/7/365 but I was younger and more resilient then. 

I've been enjoying giving things away on the neighbourhood Buy Nothing page on Facebook.  That's big for me.  Both My Person and I have hoarding tendencies, and we are challenging each other to get rid of as much as possible before we move.  I had been thinking about trying to make some money selling stuff at the consignment shop, but allowed myself to decide that would give me too little return on too much effort.  Giving stuff away on the Buy Nothing page is incredibly satisfying for me.  The part of me that is my mother doesn't want to let go of anything of value without getting something back for it, so the rest of me is rather enjoying feeling those impulses and rejecting them, then experiencing genuine joy from the thought of neighbours in this town that I have so loved being excited to get something good with no strings attached.  I have also been reminding myself that I don't have to keep or rehome absolutely everything, that although it's good to keep as much out of the waste stream as I can, it's also okay to just throw some things away.

I'm seeing a cardiologist next Wednesday, and I'm really nervous about that.  In 2009 I was having some weird symptoms that I thought were related to my GI issues that turned out to be from a minor heart defect that I've apparently had since birth that was never discovered before then.  I had a load of tests and was told that my heart was in good shape and that the defect was unlikely to be a problem, but that I should follow up if the symptoms recurred.  The symptoms had not recurred in all these years, but they are recurring now.  It's probably just stress, and nothing any more wrong with me than there ever has been, but between the unpleasant sensations in my chest, the extreme fatigue I experience, and the fact that I had Covid two years ago, I'm having trouble not worrying that there's something horribly wrong and I'll never get to enjoy a beautiful life in my beautiful new house. 

[CactusFlower]

  Best wishes for your cardio visit, Bach. I understand the anticipation can often end up worse than the visit itself.

I participate in my local Buy Nothing group also, it's just wonderful. You get the joy of knowing something is going to someone who really wants it. And honestly, it makes me feel like that it reciprocated. I've gotten both my forearm crutches and my weighted blanket from that group and I am so grateful, as they never would have been in my budget otherwise. I love the idea of a declutter challenge. I may have to try that.

[sanmagic7]

hey, bach,

good luck on all these projects you're pursuing, and especially with your cardio visit.  i hope it turns out well.  love and hugs

[Bach]

I was supposed to be with Other today but his flight last night was diverted because of the crazy weather in the Midwest and he couldn't make it here.  I was waiting and waiting and waiting to hear from him, and then just about the time that I realised that either he wasn't coming or he'd be arriving too late for me to go out, he called and told me in detail a harrowing tale of being unable to land the plane and starting to run out of fuel.  I know that telling me about it when stuff like that happens helps him calm down and shake it off, and usually the stories aren't as terrifying as that one, but I swear, that kind of story that makes me want to never get on a plane again, and makes me wish that my beloved wasn't an airline pilot.  I had trouble calming down to go to sleep and today all I want to do is cry because I so desperately need but can't have the comfort of being close to him.  I'm a mess right now, and I'm not allowed to be a mess, there's too much to do.  I'm sure I'm going to love the new house, but only if the move doesn't kill me    And God, I am so weak.  I wish I would stop WHINING.

[rainydiary]

Bach, that is really scary for you and your Other.  I hope the situation resolved as smoothly as possible.

[Armee]

I'm sorry you are missing your significant other. I would too. And I'd be scared too and I'd just want them home with me and to always stay. That doesn't seem weak to me.

[Bach]

This move is killing me. But major points to My Person, who is being wonderfully patient and cooperative with me as we both deal with the frustration of my current major physical limitations and he carries the whole operation on his strong and compassionately willing shoulders.

Trigger warning: Medical testing experience














I had some cardiac tests this morning following on from my exam and wearing a monitor for the past week. Horrifically unpleasant in a variety of petty ways that really added up. The usual troubles getting the IV in. A camera rig that restricted my breathing (especially distressing considering that recently breathing techniques have become the main way I self-soothe). An ultrasound that involved being gooped up and having to lie in awkward positions and hold and release my breaths as instructed by the tech while the weird spooky squelching sounds of my heartbeat rang out from a monitor near my head that I could sort of see. And lots of waiting around in a fairly crowded waiting room in between these things trying not to be paranoid about sitting too close to people. It really sucked, and wiped me right out. I kept thinking that surely it seemed worse than it really was but writing it out here makes me understand that it really was legitimately difficult and that's not just me being a whiner.

I've been texting with my mother probably too much lately. I've been feeling a little too safe with her, and I have to watch that. I have to remember that no matter how well we seem to be getting along or how genuinely objectively compassionate I feel towards her at times, she is fundamentally dangerous to me by her very nature whether she means to be or not. It's hard though because at the end of the day she IS my mother, and it's very difficult for me to stop myself from craving her attention like a sweet, sweet poison. That bloody woman. It's good that I'm calling myself out for this here, because these are facts of my existence of which I can't afford to lose sight.

[Armee]

Oh Bach. I wish those medical tests hadn't felt so awful. I relate. I've had awful truly awful experiences like that but also I've felt just way overwhelmed just by even an eye exam. Depending on how brusque people are, just having them close to my face and how they ask their questions...it can leave me feeling very very shaky for hours even when there are no triggers. Lots of gentleness to you as you recover from the procedures and the crowds.

I'm glad you have a compassionate person taking care of you. You deserve that.

And you are absolutely right both about how hard it is to keep distanced from our mothers and also to reconcile the damage being done with how they seem in discrete moments in time. In any given moment maybe things aren't too bad in terms of what's actually happening but the damage is cumulative and historic and that is what is triggered. You deserve to keep yourself safe first and foremost. 

[sanmagic7]

hey, bach,

so glad those tests are over.  i'm not a fan of medical procedures of any kind.  too many experiences with them.  ugh!  just happy you made it thru.

moms can be tricky, for sure.  there's a specific kind of bond there that's not like any other.  i hope you can hold your boundaries and keep yourself safe.  love and hugs

[rainydiary]

As another human in the moving process, I hope it goes as smoothly as it can.  I am sorry for the experiences you had with medical testing and it was a reminder for me how trauma unfriendly medical care often is.  I hope that you continue to find your way with your mother and the move and whatever else is coming.

[Bach]

Armee, san and rainy, thank you so much for your replies, for your understanding and support regarding all these difficult things I’m dealing with right now.  I’ve had the results from the stress test, and they said that it was fine and nothing unexpected was found.  I won’t get the results from the ultrasound until next week, but I guess I’m not really that worried.  The uncomfortable feelings in my chest have been joined in the last few days by a variety of other unpleasant physical symptoms that are so weird and random that I’m now feeling relatively emotionally comfortable assuming that this is all stress and that eventually it will pass if I can just continue to maintain some emotional equilibrium.

Once again, yesterday Other was supposed to be in town, and once again, the weather prevented it.  This time there was no scary story to go with it, thankfully, but I need his touch and it’s so painful and frustrating to expect it and then be denied.  It feels like being in distress as a child and having no one to turn to to seek comfort.  I want to cry but I can’t do it, which is also incredibly painful and frustrating.  I keep sort of almost crying, and the almost crying is almost comforting, but then totally not when I can’t actually do it.  I can whimper and blub, but that just makes me feel ugly and small and unwanted.  I need to cry real tears.  I read something somewhere a while back about how tear flow releases stress hormones.  Why can’t I just do it?

Last night I was texting with my mother, and got an example if I needed it of how she hurts me without even knowing she’s doing it.  We were talking about what we each believe or don’t believe regarding what happens after death, and in remarking that she wished she had a firm belief in an afterlife so she could see her husband again, she said “I think back on my life as interesting and happy, and if I had a chance to do my life over I would do it the same way.”  That’s really hard for me to hear, because in other conversations, she has talked about feeling that her attempts to please her husband and get her husband’s sons to like her often came at the expense myself and my brother.  When she said that, I didn’t take it particularly seriously, because my stepbrothers only spent a month every summer with us and any neglect that my brother and I suffered when they were around was pretty small potatoes compared to the execrable parenting we got from her the other eleven months of the year, but…She’d do it all over the same way?  What the everlovin’ blank blank blank?  I keep wanting to say “Oh, you’d do it all the same way again, would you?”  But that would be stupid and pointless.  She would backpedal and make excuses and say things that would just hurt and upset me even more.  I keep checking myself and reaffirming that I’m still less uncomfortable communicating with her than I am not communicating with her, but again I run up against the aggravating fact that there’s just no way to make her not a problem to me. 

[sanmagic7]

big hug to hopefully comfort some of the hurt, bach.   

[Bach]

Thank Goodness we’re back.

I’m extremely upset right now, strongly triggered because My Person is looking through his mother’s old papers, and came across notes from when she stayed with us for 17 days in the spring of 1996.  This is upsetting to me because I don’t remember it at all.  I have literally no memories that this ever happened.  I assume this is because spring of 1996 was early on in my adventures with psychopharmacology, five years of trying different meds and having each one make me sicker in some weird nasty way, until I finally called it quits for good after a med drove me closer to attempting suicide than I ever got without medication.  I don’t remember the sequence of horror very well but I do remember being at work having diarrhoea from lithium around the end of February, then having to quit what was to be my last ever steady job not long thereafter.  I don’t remember how long I was on lithium.  It wasn’t very long.  I don’t remember what came after lithium.  I remember the flat where we lived in 1996.  We lived there for a year and a half, the last place we lived before we bought the house that we are now in the process of leaving.  I remember time I spent in that flat by myself, lots and lots of time.  I remember what I did with most of that time.  I remember people I talked to, places I went, television shows I watched.  I remember other people who visited and stayed with us there.  I remember a lot of good things from there, and I remember a lot of lying around feeling zonked and crappy.  I mean, specific memories of that, like how there was a cable station that replayed L.A. Law in the afternoons, and I watched it because I used to love that show when I lived in LA and worked at a law firm.  I remember how that station also replayed The Golden Girls and The Commish, and how I loved The Golder Girls and never watched The Commish, but often would have that station on very softly in the background because if I had it on softly enough that I couldn’t quite hear it I could lie on the couch and close my eyes and sort of try to hear it, and trying to hear it would enable me to relax my mind enough to doze.  I remember the eventually deeply painful email-based love affair I had that summer, and I remember the beginnings of my relationship with Other.  But I have absolutely no memory of Mom staying with us there, and that is really bugging me.  17 days!  I REMEMBER stuff like that!  I remember her staying with us after we bought the house.  I remember those trips back to the Midwest to stay with her for varying lengths of time, first for visits and holidays, later to take care of her when she was sick.

My Person says I was probably still working during that time.  Maybe he’s right.  If I wasn’t there during the days, that might help explain why I can’t remember spending 17 freaking days closely sharing a not-very-big flat with a woman who was no small presence.  But I’m still totally freaked out.  It’s way past my bedtime.  I can’t imagine going to lie in bed now, blind behind my sleep mask, ignoring the distressed feelings, hoping for sleep to come.  I don’t know what to do.  I suppose I should take something to make me sleep.  But I don’t want to.  I want to cry.  I want to cry out my moving stress, my house-selling stress, my grief for the holes in my brain.  I read that stupid article somewhere a few months ago about how tears release stress hormones and ever since then I can’t get it out of my head that what I need is to shed tears, real liquid hot tears to wash out all the bad chemicals.  But those tears, as ever, elude me.  I’m sort of angry at every therapy and self-help thing I have access to, just because none of them seem to be able to help me figure out how to release my tears.

[Armee]

 I relate to a lot of this. Especially the knowing you need to cry and not being able to. I can't still. I get a tiny moist droplet in the corner of my eye and that's it. I also get so frustrated that therapy can't help me do this. I get annoyed that my therapist tells me about all the people who cry with him including the giant buff dude etc. It makes me feel even more broken. Like you, i want to experience the cleansing and relief that supposedly comes with a good cry. I have no answers but do have lots of sympathy. 

I've also experienced those disturbing lapses of time and know it is scary and upsetting. The only thing I can do is accept it. But usually I end up in a back and forth trying to convince myself I'm being melodramatic and then the opposite - freaking out that it means I'm more messed up than I thought.  The only modicum of relief I find is when I can hit a sweet spot of acceptance.

Sending you lots of support and wishes for some tears.