I'm thinking about using French knots to fill the roundels under the wave crests. I have no good ideas for the hearts. The triskelion in the center will remain as is. I believe that the white space between the design elements will remain as is. That, however, is not a fixed decision.
I've completely changed my wardrobe around. I still have color but the primary feature is black because I've always wanted to wear goth styles. Again, I didn't do it because of fear of parental retribution. Shortly after I got home after getting errands done and such, yesterday, I could almost hear my father scornfully saying that I looked like a 'bull dyke.' This has been his position on women with haircuts like this and his opinion of people who don't dress 'normally' is that we're all freaks and on the 'outside' of society.
The collar is where he'd really lose it. But I have hit a point in my life where wearing this thing is a comfort item. It helps calm my anxiety and increases my sense of safety. It's why I have two now. Beloved spoiled me and purchased that one I'm wearing that incorporated my favorite color with my goth aesthetic. Mom would lose her crap over the septum ring, regardless of the fact that it is a faux one. She repeatedly threatened me that if I had gotten my nose pierced that she'd rip it out. So, it took me a long while before I felt safe enough to even wear a faux one.
One may wonder why I'm bringing this stuff up. Well, my brain hasn't been that great over the last two months. I've been having problems sleeping. Then I put my back out picking up a damn scrap of paper. The same day, I had an epic fight with my eldest son, who said some stuff that seriously triggered my c-ptsd. That was three weeks ago. My sleep problems have gotten worse and I've been pretty regularly having emotional and vivid flashbacks where I just sit and stare but I'm not here.
All of this stuff is making it hard to write or do much of anything. I'm working with my doctor to get a better handle on the c-ptsd stuff. He's got a plan and I'm hoping it works. He thinks that if we can get the c-ptsd symptoms under control, my sleep will settle back into a correct cycle. And maybe, just maybe, I can get stuff done again. I just want this shit out of my head. I've been journaling but it's not going so great. But, my brain's decided that it's safe enough for me to do what I've wanted to and it's time for me to start processing things. We just have to get the flashbacks under control so I can do that more effectively.
Born unwanted
Beaten but unbroken
Orphan by choice
Survivor by fate
The past casts long shadows
The wounds still bleed
Grimly, I move forward
The attacks that happened twenty years ago are still fresh in my memory and in the memories of many other people. They remain a horrendous tragedy. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan should never have happened. It was entered into in a fit of collective rage. The way the issue of Al-Queda should have been handled was the way campaigns against unsavory people or people who are out of favor with the government have been traditionally handled. Putting money out there for the mercenaries to clean up the mess.
I was against the war in Afghanistan from the day it was declared. I had people spit on me. I had people tell me that I was a traitor. I had people tell me that I was a terrorist sympathizer. I had people tell me that I hated America. My position has always been we never should have gone to war with Afghanistan, regardless of the fact that Al-Queda was hiding in their mountains. It would be like a country declaring war on us because of the Proud Boys or the KKK are tolerated by people in our country.
The few thousand who died this day does not justify the many more who have died over the last twenty years. Don't tell me that the dead wanted this. They wanted to just go about their day and go home to their families. The dead on both sides of the conflict were human beings with simple desires. And now they're corpses.
People accuse President Biden of 'failing' in Afghanistan when he was following up on what President Trump negotiated. The fault of the unfurling fiasco lies on the shoulders of multiple presidents. Al-Queda was trained by the United States to carry out terrorist activities against the Russian forces in Afghanistan and the immediate region. They eventually drove the Russians out. At which point they turned on the United States because they wanted autonomy. They had a taste of it after driving the Russians out of Afghanistan and they wanted more.
So, Al-Queda did what they were trained to do. They carried out a terrorist attack against a larger opponent. As for the Taliban, we should have stayed the hell away from them as well. I'm not sure if the Taliban developed under the same influences as Al-Queda. I suspect that is the case. Now that Afghanistan is back in their hands, I presume their regime will be especially punitive in an effort to force the people back into the state they were in prior to the war's beginning and the complete upheaval of that nation.
All we did was make things worse. Why? Because we were mad and decided that somebody had to pay. It's the mentality of immature people that speak with their fists, if I'm going to call a spade a spade. We punished an entire nation for the actions of a few. And established a dangerous precedent. I'm watching and waiting for that to come back on us. There's a reason I and my family don't live in a major metropolitan center known for some national significance. The closest one is barely a shadow of what it was and only film and photography nerds would be able to identify the significance of it.
And we made things worse in this country. All y'all act like Donald Trump's presidency unmasked the ugliness in this nation. No, it was the zealous behavior in the time after the terrorist attacks that did it. And that level of zealotry is encouraged, even today. I know people who practice Islam and they have to hide their practices as to remain safe. I don't practice Islam but I do wear a head covering. The Islamophobia has spread and grown such that anyone who does so is assumed to be a 'towel head' and are harassed with relative impunity. President Trump's open support of racists, white supremacists, and literal neo-Nazis only made the situation more blatant and ugly. But this attitude has always been here.
The attitude that you're not really an American unless your white, Christian, and live in the right neighborhood. Don't believe me, go ask your black neighbors. Go ask your Asian neighbors. Oh, wait, if you're white you probably don't have neighbors of different ethnicity. Self-segregation is a thing that's only gotten worse as time goes on and economic disparity due to systemic racism and religious persecution persists. What religious persecution? Oh, any religion that isn't nominally Christian.
But, that's all in the past, right? We're mourning the dead again, as we do every so many years, in a form of ritualistic masturbation to justify the horrid deeds that this nation has committed. People die every day. But we don't mourn them. We don't build monuments to them. Not even the ones who've died due to Covid-19. (Which is still a fire raging out of control but everyone wants to desperately to go back to life before Covid-19 that they're willing to sacrifice children for their 'liberty'.)
Long story short, it was a tragedy. All of it. It still is a tragedy. It was also one of the most horrific failures of the modern United States that I have ever witnessed. The other being how all y'all are handling Covid-19. I don't think the Covid-19 situation will take 20 years to resolve itself, though.
I didn't fall or anything injurious like the last time. I bent over and picked up a stupid piece of paper. One single sheet of loose leaf paper was all it took for me to put my back out. I had a telehealth appointment yesterday with one of the doctors in the practice that my family doctor is part of. (He was out of the office yesterday.) She was a lovely person and the student who sat in for the conference was pleasant as well. I described what happened. She asked me a few questions and then prescribed a muscle relaxant and told me to continue the pain reliever that I had taken at the time. She recommended that I alternate between the Aleve and Tylenol to help with the pain.
The pain with out the Aleve is a 9. I don't hit that number typically. The last time that I was in pain that rated a 9 out of a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being damn near incapacitating pain, I was in labor with my son and my husband cracked a joke during a contraction. The time before that was when I was carrying said son and he kicked me in the spine. So, this was serious business discomfort that is dialed down to about a 5 with out the muscle relaxer. Sleeping Wednesday night was tricky. Sleeping last night was a lot easier because the medication stopped the spasm from cramping down so hard.
This morning, I could feel everything wearing off around 6 am. So, I took all my morning pills and the muscle relaxer before I ate breakfast. The end result was I wasn't just about crying in pain when ever I moved my back. It aches but it's not enough to put me out of commission, mostly. Standing up is uncomfortable. Walking is uncomfortable, so I've been using my cane for both. I've been spending most of my time sitting here in front of the computer bored half to death.
I have a solid half dozen writing projects sitting around me in various stages of completion but focusing on them is difficult. Because the muscle relaxer kinda has my brain a bit spaced out. I'm not to the point where I couldn't hold a conversation but doing serious writing is an entirely different story. Pardon the pun.
Multiple studies show that people who have bipolar disorder have problems with changes in the weather. Extreme shifts in the weather can bring on manic or depressive episodes. Minor shifts in the weather can effect the sensitive and bring on hypomania or mild depression. When it's raining, snowing, or just really cloudy, I get into a low mood. Throw on top of that the fact that I am in a low mood makes me more prone to having flashbacks (thanks ptsd) and it makes for a shitty day.
I just want to cry. But I can't because if I do that makes me 'weak' and subhuman, as per how I was raised. Now, that doesn't make other people weak or subhuman, just li'l ol' me. I've been having emotional flashbacks to being called a useless waste of flesh and a pathetic excuse for a human being during depressive episodes in the past. The verbal abuse heaped upon me by my parents when I was depressed was atrocious. And they didn't think/believe I was depressed. They were of the opinion that I was seeking attention and/or lazy.
Loki dropped a truth bomb last night as I was cuddling with Beloved and feeling bad. I've been having trouble wrapping my head around it. That truth bomb was that I've always had bipolar disorder. I was living with it untreated for about 32 years because I thought everyone had this happen. I was living with it untreated because I thought that it was my trauma that was the primary problem and the depression was symptomatic of that. I was living with it untreated because I never had the opportunity for legitimate care when I was a child.
I guess my bad brain day started with running out of spoons the day before trying to get everything done around here. Put that together with the exhausted fall out from being social on Sunday and a day of low spoons and high anxiety on Monday, the week has sucked. I haven't slept well in almost a month. It has me starting the day at a spoon deficit. I was literally stumbling over my feet after I woke up and almost face planted into the doorway, again.
I'm just past the middle of my day and I have absolutely zero chores done and only part of my morning routine complete. At least I remembered to take my medications as I needed. But, I'm not doing well. I'm really, really sad that I never got the help I needed because my fucking parents decided I was a drama queen.
I am exhausted because I haven't been sleeping well. I keep waking up at 2am and then I have to take melatonin to get back to sleep. Most of the time, I wake up at 5am when my alarm is set for 5:45. I just am frustrated because being tired makes my brain run slower. I don't do so great in the brain department anyways because of the bipolar and the ptsd. So any detriment becomes a real hinderance.
So, I'm sitting here with two pots of coffee in me, blinking owlishly as I try to update my blogs. I'm behind schedule but getting things done. I started working on my writing tasks at 7:30 instead of the scheduled 9am just because I had so much to get done. I've rebooted my therapy writing and I'm seriously considering taking some of that to digital. I've been keeping a time-log to check on how I'm doing about this whole 'losing time' thing.
It's creepy as fuck. I go through the whole day doing stuff and when I get to the end of the day, I can't remember about half of what I did. It's just as bad as when I have a conversation with someone and they are referencing something I said that I have zero recollection of saying. I still feel like my sense of self has some serious fault lines in it and I can't tell if they're getting worse or not.
I've suspected for a long time that there might be more than one 'me' in my head. When things got bad as a kid, I dissociated and let another part of myself handle the shit that went down. Now, I am safe but those different parts of me are still vocal. I'm not literally hallucinating but it's like having a random thought that doesn't belong to you go through your head. I've had therapists question this and suggest that I am just interpreting things wrong because I'm not dressing in different clothes, making rapid hairstyle changes, or doing things like switching from needing glasses to not needing glasses.
I'm sorry, but if you grow up in a household where mental illness is cause for a beating, you learn to stuff as much of that shit into a box and don't talk about it. The shifts that happen between these parts of me are subtle. But they're starting to happen again because of the long term stress of Covid-19 and the isolation of being in my home 98% of the time to avoid getting it. So, I've started that journaling exercise that the one therapist who found what I described curious and it basically doubles my time for journal work.
Blog posting is supposed to take an hour but because of other factors, I'm now a half hour into my book work time for the day. I just keep having little things come up to put me off schedule despite the fact I started early and I am getting frustrated. My hormones being all over the place doesn't help matters any. I just want to get stuff done so I can move on to other things, more pleasant things. But each task I complete, it seems like three more pop up that need done.
I'm going to try to blog on this one more frequently. I'm going to try to be more social on social media. I need to interact with people. It's part of the reason why I am doing tarot readings on Keen again. It's because I need to talk to people. It's like exposure therapy for social phobia from my own home. The social phobia has gotten pretty bad and has been running the show for the last few months. It's why on social media I have practically zero activity going on. So, I'm trying to force myself to be active. And I'm terrified to do it.
