#my mental health is in the fucking garbage bc of covid

[dashiellqvverty]

anyway i have been feeling like garbage all day bc i vowed yesterday that i would take a mental health (+ period cramps) day after i cried during my shift yesterday and anyway i called when i woke up and the fucking new manager picked up and was like “okay well just bring a doctors note to your next shift :)” and like this is the second time i’ve called out ever since i started the job at the end of may which is maybe still too often but like he doesnt know me and my other managers LIKE me lmao like i am a person who is terrified of skipping things its not something i DO unless i need to. and i Needed this i know i did. did i say i was sick to my stomach? yes. am i having a bad stomach time for real today? also yes. am i going to GO TO THE DOCTOR FOR THAT? no. is it literally policy to stay home if we are throwing up or have diarrhea? yes. (did i have a job interview this morning and want to go home and rest? also yes.)

anyway it absolutely fucking ruined my mental health day so thats fucking karma i guess on top of the guilt i already had over screwing my coworkers over. also i spent all afternoon running errands for my mom who has covid so like. idk. would be great if the birth control im on to make my period symptoms less bad actually Did That.

#anyway i was like oh i wasnt planning on going to the doctor im just sick to my stomach but i will try :) #anyway i hope he gets food poisoning and has to get a fucking doctors note for it :) #theyre literally not allowed to require that #for one day off. #yes it was the day before my weekend but that wasnt by choice??? #every time i think about it my stomach drops i hate this guy. hes like barely 20 years old like shut up dude #like i techincally have earned sick time but i didnt. ask to use it?? idek how that works. the one other time i called out i didnt get paid #and thats what all the info about the policies is about #not being able to come to work bc youre sick just. happens. like dont pay me whatever you dont get screwed at all!!! #r.txt

[foolishfalls]

I've been kind of just chucking my feelings out into many a void today and I guess I'll do it here. Who knows where I'm likely to get a response??

below the cut i'll be discussing repeat injuries, chronic pain, how my mental health interacts with/contributes to them, and my growing rage and exasperation with the american healthcare system.

I feel like for much of my life I have been grappling with nebulous burgeoning health problems that were rarely serious enough for me to really seek out a doctor, plus, my parents are both notoriously bad at seeing doctors and taking care of themselves too, so living with them into adulthood definitely didn't help. (It's tough as hell being a PDA autistic up against all these very harsh hierarchical systems so full of barriers and demands amirite?)

given the autism with a pretty heavy PDA slant, making and keeping appointments has been a harrowing process for me for my whole entire life, as long as I can remember. It doesn't help that I am also terrible at advocating for myself and have been consistently dismissed by doctors over stuff that I experience... I've just kind of learned to take it lying down which is not a good habit but i get easily exasperated trying to explain myself to doctors. i struggle a ton with even talking to people i see as holding authority over me (i attribute this to ten years of catholic school kind of breaking me mentally and emotionally. if you have been to a religious or catholic school perhaps you have an understanding of this kind of mistreatment)

anyway, i just feel like the pandemic and the ongoing collapse of the healthcare system has just really brought this to a head for me recently. In the last 6 years or so, i've injured both of my ankles several times, rolls and sprains. honestly, the first few times, i was being dumb and not paying attention (i went through a terrible binge drinking period during my 21st year, hadn't yet discovered that i literally cannot wear most shoes besides flat-soled sneakers) but even when I tried to be careful after one or two bad sprains that went unchecked, mostly, I would end up hurting myself. Two of the subsequent times I hurt myself while moving between apartments (I've always lived in walk-ups and have usually moved everything myself with little help aside from friends) and bc of pretty bad cracks on sidewalks (big city infrastructure is total garbage, big surprise!)

like, as my repeated injuries got worse, my capacity for physical activity has too, and I already struggled for years as a kid and teen to develop a decent exercise/activity routine. I think I also have low muscle tone and really slow recovery time due to autism or some co-morbid condition (such as EDS or something. i have weird, weak, clicky joints, but i'm not really typically hypermobile?)

anyway, every time i went in for an x-ray or to see a doctor, i basically got told just to RICE and take care of it at home, so I didn't seek further help. the one time i did was last year, and it took a lot of advocating and was quite hard for me, and then it took months of waiting to even get an appointment with an ortho. This is after 5-6 sprains on my right ankle, and 2 on my left. when i sprained my left ankle the last time, i landed quite hard on my right knee and definitely hurt that too, because it still clicks and acts up.

of course, last august, my ortho appt finally approaches, and i get fucking covid literally the day before. i was so sick and tired i just no-showed and honestly forgot about it. if I miss an appointment and dont reschedule immediately, the likelihood that I will do that is very low. once again, PDA is a bitch.

but, at least since then I haven't actually injured my ankle. However, who knows what the effects of covid were on my body, my joints, who tf knows?? we know it causes and exacerbates all kind of conditions in people. I barely have been able to get doctors to take me seriously about the stuff I'm chronically experiencing, so even bringing up long-covid has felt kind of scary and pointless, tbh.

Fast forward to april of this year. after working in office jobs and sitting for two years straight, which caused me a ton of awful burnout, i end up working part-time at a cafe. while I'm working there, i injure/strain my hip and low back while slipping on a wet floor. this pain keeps me in bed consistently for about 3 weeks and I go to see my doctor about it. he diagnoses me with sciatic pain because it seems to be running and radiating down from my leg and hip. (mind you this is my right hip, which is attached to the knee i've hurt maybe twice, and the ankle i've injured 5-6 times!)

Up until then, I had been receiving some PT at my previous job to help stabilize and strengthen my hips, which my PT determined as the main cause for my ankle injuries. my hips shake when i walk and tend to cause a lot of instability. I made some progress, but I was receiving PT at my old job, and my insurance changed when I left it, so i was uninsured for like three months in the beginning of this year while trying to get new coverage. my hip pain was bad for about a month, after seeing my doctor, i got x-rays and they came back clean but the pain wasn't fully subsiding, so he writes me referrals for PT and pain management.

Because of my shit association with PT due to my old job, and the fact that the pain finally began to subside after the x rays came back (I kind of thought, oh, maybe it was lingering mostly due to my stress, guess im good) I dont make a PT appointment right away. I look into one place i'm referred to and it turns out they dont take my insurance which is bullshit. Then, I go to my last option, the hospital system I see my PCP out of. It's basically the lowest quality medical care you can access with medicaid which is what i currently have, and due to my experience working in a high-end PT office i know what the difference will be. this mental block kind of keeps me thinking it will be pointless so i took a while to make an appointment, trying to do exercises at home for now since i had a baseline from my old job.

While all this is happening, as my hip pain is subsiding, i get a weird lump/bump where my heel meets my right ankle, my bad ankle. it has been this way since about the end of May, now, and it has been the source of some of the most disarming, weird, confusing pain I've ever experienced in my life.

I also didn't talk yet about how realizing I'm autistic helped me make sense of my weird pain tolerance. on one hand, i've always been notably sensitive to even the slightest pain. would sob and sob over the smallest things as a kid. i think due to the reactions of adults around me, i gradually learned to dissociate in order to bury my pain. so, i feel like i both experience pain very strongly and intensely, and at times it can be so debilitating and distracting that i can focus on little else and it almost causes me brain fog and fatigue, while at other times, it is kind of distant and i tend to dissociate from it.

with this new pain in my heel, there's definitely some nerve shit involved, i think... i get twitches/spasms sometimes, numbness, tingling, sharp pain, dull pain. and it's seemingly unpredictable. i wear compression socks or a sleeve almost every single day because it's all that helps. it's past the point of icing helping it much because it's not swollen.

basically every time i have seen a doctor about my pain leading up to now, I have brought up the possibility of some underlying cause, but i always get dismissed. told I'm digging too deep or thinking too hard and just stressing myself out, despite the fact that I've always been clumsy and injury prone and had coordination issues. I guess bc those coordination issues haven't been well documented, and i am not officially diagnosed with autism or anything that could support my claims, i just don't get taken seriously, despite my experience being quite abnormal from what i understand when talking to others!!!

idk where I'm even going with this. today i was at a PT appointment for my hip and was on the verge of tears the whole time. I have to go back to my primary doctor in order for them to even begin attending to my heel despite that being the worst pain, and despite the fact that my hip/knee/heel/sciatica are all definitely related. I'm assuming this is because of insurance bullshit, i know it's pretty basic procedure, but it's exhausting that the american healthcare system is set up this way. it's really hard when you're autistic also and struggle with making and keeping appointments. it doesn't help that i've been dismissed by so many doctors that i just get intense anxiety about even having to go back again.

i'm also looking for a new PCP anyway because i don't like that mine doesn't take me very seriously and i am also transitioning and very scared/a bit paranoid about facing any transphobia or disclosing that fact to him if we have to run any blood tests. so maybe I'll have a better experience elsewhere, but this heel stuff has gone on for so long that i just have to bite the bullet and go back to the same place if it will be quicker to do so anyway.

and like, all procedural/red tape/insurance bullshit aside, bottom of the barrel PT treatment here is like. so dismal. once again maybe it's just bc i have the point of comparison from my old job, but i feel like the treatment is really just. so lackluster, doctors are seeing multiple patients at once, you're rushed through your visit, you don't have time to ask questions. the whole time i've been there no one has so much as taken a closer look at my heel. i know i'm there for my hip and you have to say that on paper for insurance, but like, damn, not even just a quick check??

I am afraid it's because I'm habitually downplaying the pain to cope and because i'm terrified of doctors. so maybe it's my fault.

still, the system is downright hostile to people who struggle with that stuff.

i don't have much else to say. just wanted to dump this somewhere and see if anyone else can understand or empathize with my experience. i don't talk about this super openly or readily because I don't even feel like i can call it chronic pain sometimes despite this being a several month long problem and really an issue that is about five years old, despite it being inconsistent... mostly because i just don't have the affirmation of a medical diagnosis. i have considered getting a cane/mobility aid very thoroughly recently because i know it would help me (and maybe even force doctors to take me seriously) but there's a part of me that feels like i can't or shouldn't. like i'm not valid enough for that, or i can function without it, but i know that's dismissive and so not the right way to think about mobility aids

i mean, it doesn't help that my dad has been limping and had chronic pain for years and has one and still refuses to use it... the internalized ableism runs deep. it's fucked. i'm trying hard to undo it but it's hard when you're already just hard on yourself.

anyway, just sorely needed to get this off my chest. thanks for reading if you do.

EDIT: i also wanted to say,, if you have gone through anything similar, just know you're not alone! so if you want to share your experience or talk about it with me pls know my asks and dms are open.

#personal #chronic pain #healthcare #idk #autism

[dankmemeuniversity]

#dmu #memes #dank memes #dank meme #meme #i will post this every month like clockwork #bc i have been in quarantine for a fucking year and a half #i haven’t seen my friends or family #i live in a red state where people protest masks #we’re doing 2000+ cases a day #my mental health is in the fucking garbage bc of covid #and i’m angry that i’ve suffered for a year and a half in isolation #and there are people that won’t get the vaccine won’t wear a mask won’t stay home #the months blend together and i barely have a concept of time

[endivinity]

theres only so many times i can go for a high-powered walk to get rid of absolute incandescent anger!!! i’ve only been in this house for two and a half months and it’s just, destroyed me utterly.

my dad is 65, white, british. he is also terminally online. he spends most of his time looking at memes, hanging out in /b/ offshoots for all his news, and watching opinion piece videos (which, surprise surprise, if he doesn’t agree with the opinion, he’ll mock it or close it before finding something that aligns with his views more).

i dont even know what his views ARE because he’s got so little critical thinking beyond ‘if i don’t agree with it, it’s wrong' and all he spouts are things he read somewhere and my god he’s repetitive. he says the same jokes and repeats the same memes frequently. spouted the ‘avocado toast millennials’ argument thats YEARS out of date. has such a shallow inane understanding on complex societal Stuff.

today he was saying how the will smith chris rock thing was staged, bc a slap is far too minor, tupac wouldve shot him, smith would never have slapped alec baldwin if he’d said it, rock braced before the impact, etc etc

all this garbage, for every topic. he delights in dark humor memes and anti-government rhetoric.

he’s an antivaxxer. he supported the freedom convoy. he blames biden specifically, for what putin is doing. he hates democrats (we are in new zealand, democrats shouldn’t even be on his radar. this is how i know he spends all his time on /b/ boards which are predominately White Americans). instead of the covid tracer sign-in he fills out the forms with his name as ‘jacinda hitler’ or ‘adolf ardern’. he thinks everyone should be infected with omicron to give them full covid immunity (conveniently glossing over health risks and long covid. he isn’t vaccinated bc of the .5% chance it might cause issues with his fucked up kidney). he is for some reason pro-police, despite the anti-government stance. he thinks that jkrowling is entitled to her opinion (conveniently glossing over her financial and cultural icon status granting her a massive platform, and how he refuses to acknowledge different opinions bc theyre Wrong and Stupid). he thinks trans people are wrong unless theyre fully transitioned and surgeried (conveniently ignoring all the things in the way of transitioning. nz’s mastectomy surgeon retired in 2012. our waitlist is 40+ YEARS long), and shouldn’t compete in sports, and how a rapist claimed to be a woman and was put in a women’s prison, and look what happened!! trans people dangerous!! he likes to watch car crash videos and people trying to pull insurance scams. he loves the concept of the darwin awards. he believes that capital punishment should be a thing. he likes posts Owning The Mentally Ill Snowflakes On The Internet. his favorite saying is ‘sacred cows make the best hamburgers’ as justification for punching down on minorities, an absolute bastardization of what the phrase was originally meant to be. i am a mentally ill trans person living in his house. i have a permanent chronic sleep disorder, possible undiagnosed adhd/autism. my brother who lived here before moving out to study, definitely has undiagnosed autism. DAD HIMSELF had to quit his job. his job he had for almost 30 years, because of chronic anxiety and depression. the meds he has to treat it are not insubstantial - they started him in on the big guns right away. he IS the mentally ill snowflake on the internet. he doesn’t know how to interact with anything any more unless it’s mocking and belittling.

he is a horrible person. and i am so angry

#bit of a vent #theres transphobia racism bad takes and /b/. all sorts of bad stuff in here #i am just. trapped. theres no houses rn bc the student boom is over for the year. i literally have nowhere else to go #(barring the... not so good wellington houses out there where my computer might get water damage. since it's all i got) #ill figure it out. it just really sucks and i have to yell about it or else i will catch on fire

[lol-jackles]

austinite opinion on the Ackles leaving this godforsaken city —

if I were jensen I would take my family and leave too. Austin has had its issues over several years and the infrastructure can’t take the strain of its population much longer, and then covid was added on top. their kids are getting older and even a rich kid’s school options suck. the traffic is just straight up dangerous w/ very high rates of drunk driving and weird aggressive stuff, its like a vehicular manslaughter competition even in nice residential areas. What’s the point in having a nanny take the kids for the day if you’re worrying they’ll get hit by a truck on a crosswalk on the way to the park????

the city’s terrible policies on homelessness mean even in upscale neighborhoods theres problems related to people camping or dumping trash and a lot of weird violence and mental health crises, and the city has resources for probably only 15% of its homeless population and the mayor and gov are eager to make decisions that make the problem worse like they’re hoping homeless people will just die off. in 2018 the entire county’s water supply was //full of rotting clams// and was unusable for a week, and then in the ice storm this year the state’s privatized power grid failed, and even the padaleckis had bursting pipes and dead animals.

6th St and Rainey St are garbage and violent and tbh I’m surprised it’s taken this long to trigger a mass shooting like the recent one on 6th, not to mention it’s more public that there are high rates of sexual assault downtown and at UT and the DA just…doesn’t attempt to prosecute at all.

Jared’s roofied scuffle on 6th looks shocking from an outside POV but if you’re local it’s mundane. And I do think he was roofied, I showed the videos to a family member with a law enforcement background and he agreed. whether he was or not, that kind of crap happens two or three dozen times a night downtown thurs-sat and there were extra cops downtown that night bc it was halloween and extra crazy. Local people mostly got a kick out of it happening to jared like it was a down to earth kinda thing.

I know it doesn’t seem like privileged people should gaf or be affected by most of this but it sucks the fun out of anywhere you go here unless you gtfo out of the city (which is why the brewery is actually in a great location, right on the main route to big day tripping attractions) like yeah, theres all this quirky stuff to do in Austin but when a gay couple is nearly beat to death on open popular Rainey St and a homeless guy throws himself off a restaurant on SoCo during lunch rush it’s a fucking bummer.

And then you add covid and police violence on top of all that, and all the tourism/SXSW/ACL revenue and entertainment is tanked and that definitely derailed some of the Ackles’ plans, like the B&B they bought. but even if 2020 was a normal year those events are so congested now they aren’t very enjoyable even if you’re VIP.

but property taxes are the main thing: before they sold the lake house, tax laws about lakeshore property changed— previously it was barely taxed if at all bc of an old law from when no one wanted to build on the lakeshore like 40 yrs ago. Suddenly that untapped property tax potential is under a political microscope and I was like, I bet the Ackles will move and the Padaleckis won’t bc their property isn’t on the lake…and within a year the Ackles sold the lake house. absolutely not a coincidence.

so regardless of the state of their marriage (I really don’t buy what’s said about their marriage) austin isn’t what it was 10-15 years ago. They probably shouldn’t come back lol

Colorado is not far behind being turned into a shithole thanks to the Democrats running the state.  Whenever Democrats control a city it always turns into a shithole.

"How Decades Of Democratic Rule Ruined Some Of Our Finest Cities" https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/how-decades-of-democratic-rule-ruined-some-of-our-finest-cities/

[sarasa-cat]

Life, Gaming, Fannish goodness & Cyberpunk 2077 anticipation thoughts:

@fereldanwench (one particular bit of good news may be of interest to you)

The days are starting to edge toward autumn and evening starting ever earlier, so outdoor exercise soon needs to move to the normal midday hours rather than late in the evening after dinner. Because after dinner is now either deep twilight or DARKNESS depending on how late dinner is.

And that means returning to evening gaming and watching things on TV too pretty soon!

I have So Many Unfinished Games that want my attention but the list of additional games that have caught my interest (thank you mutuals ;) has grown over recent years too.

Given the state of the world, I am not one to complain about the gaming gear I own — quite a lot actually bc I’ve kept and collected since the late 90s and I baby my electronics, new and vintage — but my systems no longer meet the requirements of modern AAA gaming.

But(!) I now have a modern-enough gaming machine on order that will supposedly arrive in early October(big improvement from the wait time of sometime in late Nov to mid Dec, which was what I saw just last week when shopping around for systems that more or less met my specs etc etc). So, Yay! And it should also run graphics programs (photoshop etc) blazingly fast too so that’s also a big win.

Thus (drum roll) — My Cyberpunk 2077 escapism will hopefully begin in Oct!

Still no luck on a PS5 but… shrug… someday that luck will win out. Having a windows based gaming machine that is of 2021 specs opens up a lot of goodness for the upcoming months of the Long Dark, especially since I am stuck for a second winter in a row in the US (thank you covid). Sure, there is ONE game that I very much want that is PS5 only but … I’m okay. Maybe by the time I finally get a PS5 they will have made a fancier model of it? Shrug.

The new gaming computer-on-order is entirely a mental health purchase.

Fwiw, some years back, long meanders in Dragon Age Inquisition’s sunny environments got me through a winter trapped in the Long Dark. I might need to revisit something of that style — if not DAI itself during the worst of winter.

Additionally, I have very recently gotten back into coding as a hobby (long long long after software dev as a 9-6 career or graphics & human computer interaction applied to Serious Things as an academic job). Except I am already thinking of actual software I might want to design so… it may stop being a true hobby if it becomes a side-hustle.

Remembering how relaxing and flow-state inducing programming can be — which it was when I was a tween and a teen, killing long evenings in my room “playing” (rather than grinding) at programming projects purely for fun. (Or gaming, ahaha, because some things never change.)

So….. given that (a) america, with all of its resources in medicine, is dragging its fucking heels at ending its own pandemic and literally tossing vaccines in the garbage while other nations are in need of vaccines and have ppl who desperately want the jabx2 (which raised my blood pressure just typing that); (b) politics have become so depressing and so regressive and so corrupt that I just need to step back (quit) after a couple of decades of on the ground organizing— honestly I cannot even read the news without wanting to scream and my partner of 2 decades is now incapable of discussing political-related things at any level; (c) at least until next summer (and just like life for the past 18 months), my entire physical world has pretty much shrunk to most of my time being in my house or being outside in my walkable urbanish hood, (d) I need a hobby that is actually just a hobby — one that cannot be side-hustled into a non-hobby, AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS: Fandom goodness.

Mmmmmmm.

Thinking about messing around with tumblr themes and fannish graphics.

Will definitely get back to fanfic writing v soon.

Will almost certainly rearrange my main blog (this one) and my side blogs.

Will also get back to that much threatened Dirgepalooza- ahahahaahah- bc ffvii is my original fandom.

Might finally start making fanart after threatening to do so for years?

[charlotte--lennox]

003.

I have “therapy,” kind of, every other Friday. I put therapy in quotes bc it’s sessions with my psychiatrist and it’s more of a kind of check-in thing than getting deep into real, like, DBT or something like that. I don’t have the emotional energy for anything more than that, tbh, so I’m good with it. 

The thing is, though, is that whenever the appointment comes around, I find myself dreading it bc I just feel like I have nothing to say. “How are the meds working?” “Fine.” “How is your anxiety?” “About the same.” “How is your depression?” “About the same.” “Anything in particular going on that’s stressful?” “Not really, just the general trash fire of life (politics, financial stress, fucking covid, etc).” And onward.  

(Cut for length and nonsense)

I guess the problem is that I have stagnated, and I’m aware that I have stagnated, but it’s like I don’t want to fix it? For example, I am lonely. I spend all of my time either at work or at home with my cat. I “socialize” with my coworkers during the workday and on facebook, and I talk to my mom every few days, and I have maybe three actual friends, none of whom live near me. Needless to say, I don’t really have a lot of opportunities to not be lonely. 

But at the same time, my alone time is so valuable to me bc I need it to recharge. I’m an introvert. My job requires me to be “on” all the time, whether it’s talking to students or engaging with coworkers or whatever the case may be, so by the time I go home, I don’t want to talk to anyone or be near anyone. It’s like I get sensory overload, but with people, and if I’m stretched beyond my limit I’ll spiral down into anxiety and frustration and just general not-happiness. I might even cry. 

On top of that, my social anxiety is pretty significant, still. So I don’t have friends/people to get together with, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to because it would cut into my precious, limited alone time, and even if I did decide to sacrifice a few hours, I have no idea what I’d even do. 

So I maintain the status quo and nothing changes and “about the same” is my response when my psychiatrist asks me how things are going and how I’m feeling. It’s a vicious cycle. 

That’s one barrier, but another barrier is that sometimes I think I use all of these excuses to not get out of my comfort zone because the idea of interacting with people and getting to know them and whatnot just feels excruciating bc I am weird. 

Like, it goes down like this: When I first meet someone, my demeanor is completely stiff and on-edge. I can’t help it. I don’t sound like myself, and I don’t say a lot of things I might otherwise say, and I fake-smile too much, and I just feel so awkward. Then I go home and overthink/roast myself for how awkward I was. 

As I get to know the person, I tend to relax bit by bit, but it’s a slow process and I never entirely feel 100% comfortable and myself. It’s like - I can’t believe I’m going to do this lmfaooo - it’s like I’m an artichoke, and the layers are being pulled away one at a time, very slowly, and the real, genuine me is at the core but most people get frustrated and give up before reaching it bc it’s so much easier to just peel an orange. And I get frustrated, too, with myself. And then maybe someone else comes along, and the process starts all over again. 

Very few people ever reach the core, for the record. 

And the thing is that I keep all of those frustrating, awkward layers in place bc at the core, I just genuinely do not like myself. I don’t like how I look, I don’t like how I sound, I don’t like how I think, I don’t like what I say, I don’t like anything. It’s like it’s embarrassing to exist, and at least if I’m isolated by “choice,” that’s less people I’m embarrassing myself around just by virtue of being a person. 

^^ and this is the kinda thing I should probably tell my psychiatrist, but she’s only like one layer in and, like, she don’t know me like that. 

I think this is why I take so much to tumblr - not just the anonymity of it, but bc I get to skip all of those layers and just be myself, for the most part. This awkward, weird, flaily, kinda stupid, rambly, occasionally funny, Loki obsessed garbage can of a person is the core, baby. And I can walk away from it at any time. 

So, yeah. In conclusion, I like to think that I am doing well with my mental health but, while I am doing better than I have been in the past (I’ve been way worse than this; like, on a scale of 1-10, I know what a 9 looks like and all of this is like a 4.5, tops), I’m still not doing that great and it’s like I am my own biggest obstacle to fixing that. And idk how to work around that obstacle so, yknow, fuck me I guess. 

#the charlotte lennox diaries #please do not reblog #delete later #tw depression #two mental health #tw anxiety #tw social anxiety #tw i exist here

[adahlenan]

its been 2 and a half months without my mom. she went to the mainland to see my grandpa before the quarantines started and she didn’t wanna leave him alone, so she’s been there the entire time, so i’m stuck with my pos dad.

im so tired of just fending off his bullshit all the time, and getting all the chores and duties shoved onto me, nobody else is doing anything in the house. nobody cooks, or offers to help, we have no vegetables in the entire house, or fruit. nobody cleans, or does dishes or laundry or washes the dogs food bowls or trims their fur so they can see, nobody takes the garbage out or empties the recycling bins, the counters are always sopping wet and filthy bcs dad hates towel drying his hands after washing them so he just drips everywhere. 

its my birthday on the 1st and my mom can’t even be there for that. my brothers birthday already came and went and dad just said “im not a card guy, also i didnt get you anything”. not that im surprised by that.

i start work on monday and its just kinda the straw that broke my back. im scared, the island doesnt have many cases at all, neither does bc (sorta) so everyones super gung-ho about everything. getting all up in each others space, no masks, large groups. nobody cares anymore. and im fat, like im not gonna sugar coat that, and my immune system isn’t stellar at times i think. i dont get sick super often seriously, i have colds a lot, i think its allergies. but either way. when i get sick i get hit super hard. one year i got so sick they were considering a brain tumor as the cause. it was super scary. also my family has a lot of asthma, my brother and i had inhalers in grade school. im just super anxious about working in general again, my mental health is in hell - particularly right now - and to top it off, i work in a small barber shop. so thats lots of close quarters despite the store rules for covid already.

i dunno im just rly anxious and scared and overreacting but fuck. everythings awful rn. ive barely even left my bed all day i just dont wanna leave my room at all. i hate this

[flyingcookierambles]

hhh

got afab’d at the eye doctor today arrgh

i wouldve corrected him but like. i doubt that ill go there again since it was like a super quick kinda-non emergency thing and i have a regular eye doctor i go to. also my mom was in the room and like. i didnt wanna bring it up with her there and all but like. uugh.

he just like immediately picked female on the gender option even tho there was an other option and everything wtf?????????????

hmmm also i had to go to the doctors for a quick check up/physical thing since im/my mom is going to make me get my drivers license and you have to have a doctors note and all and i went to my moms doctor or the first time since i aged out of my pediatrician. and like? they had me and my mom in the same room which was kinda weird???? like for the whole patient confidentiality thing (which wouldve been useless since like my mom knows more abt my medical history than me) and like also the whole. pandemic thing??? like?? it was me, my mom, and the nurse practitioner crammed into a tiny basic exam room?? maybe bc my mom has been going to this doctors’ office for a long time and also since we’re family, they must’ve figured taht we both dont have covid and couldnt spread it to each otehr like other random patients who are strangers to each other but still. it was. annoying.

the nurse asked me some questions about like my medical history. and all and i couldnt answer some of it bc i dont remember exact dates/times and stuff. but also she asked if i had been diagnosed with depression or anything and like if my mom wasnt in the room, i wanted to say that my mom wont let me see a therapist and/or be diagnosed. 

so like when i turned 18 i had a final check up at my former pediatrician before they kicked me out of the system lol. i am p sure that it was for shots and stuff that i needed for college???

anyways despite being 18, they had my mom in the room with me the whole time. and then they gave me a worksheet that was a basic “do you have depression” test. and the doctor left, but my mom was allowed to stay??? 

and like. since i was starting college and stuff at the time, and also was/am causing my lower middle class family great financial hardship in the form of college tuition and student loans with predatory interest rates and increasing the chances of losing our house bc, with the combo of my dad dying and the recession of the early 2000′s and general declining quality ever since earlier mentioned death, our family business sucks and we barely make any money. also my mom keeps complaining about this to me and it constantly hangs over my head and i feel guilty about being a dumbass who cant get a job and repay the stupid loans (how tf is interest rates on student loans legal??? fuck capitalism????) (uuughghgh i feel like my mom should get herself a therapist or smth instead of constantly complaining to her eldest agab child uuuhghghghgh. id make one of those eldest d*ughter jokes but im not a g*rl so eldest child lol)

anyways yeah so like 4 years ago when i was starting college and also today to a degree i felt like a massive piece of shit and had social anxiety and also probably depression that is only kept at bay by constantly distracting myself with anime and video game. and like. maybe??? i couldve benefited from talking to a therapist or counselor or getting medication????? instead of?? like?? whatever my obsession with anime and video games is???

buuuuuuut since the pediatrician let my mom stay in the room for some reason, my mom, a boomer who knows nothing of mental health and is kinda insensitive about it so its super cringe to talk to her abt stuff, was like “you’re not depressed. youre a middle class kid who’s never like starved or whatever. just answer 1 on everything.” (the scale of depression was like 1 - not feeling depressed much to 5 - i feel like this everyday.)

so yeah????? 

wow sorry doctor i cant answer half your questions about my medical history bc im either adopted and dont know my own genetics or my mom wont let me get tested for mental illness?????????????

once at 2018 or 19 tekko, i wanted to go into the dnd room and like i got so socially anxious i had a crying breakdown in the freaking hallway and had to like. sit down alone and try to look normal by playing my 3ds on the floor. like i hovered outside the door to the dnd room for a whole hour just like staring in and wanting to go in really badly but i couldnt???? i just???? cried????? in public????????? had a breakdown or something at an anime convention??????????????? i like dont even know what the heck happened 2 years ago or if that’s what it would be called but like????????? im pretty sure that mentally healthy people with no social anxiety problems dont stand outside a room for half an hour and then start crying bc you cant bring yourself to go into the room even tho the door is like wide open?????????? thankfully i finally just like went in and joined a the last game session of the day, but it was still like surreal to me?????? i just??? extremely loathed myself for like an hour for crying and not being able to walk thru a doorway it was so weird i felt like absolute garbage and im p sure that normal ppl dont go thru that??????

since i only make like. $11 an hour at a retail job im not really sure if i can even afford a therapist, and then theres also transportation and also the whole pandemic thing. but ive been thinking about like 7cups or something. there was also this other website that showed you therapists that were uniquely qualified for treating poc/queer/neurodivergent/etc., ppl in your area and there was surprisingly a few in the pittsburgh area that i could probs get to by bus, so maybe ill save money and go like. next year or something. or like. whenever the pandemic is over.

#idk man #rambles