Mixed episodes suck as much as depressive ones.

 That's my thought here and I'm sticking with it. It's been about a week now that I've been slogging through a mixed episode. The mood tends towards depressed but I'm finding myself ready for a fight. As such, I've been avoiding social media and not posting content on any of my blogs (mostly). I know that when I am mixed, I have the tendency to say stupid shit just as I do when I'm hypomanic. Throw in the irritability and it's just a bad time waiting to happen.

I'm still trying to figure out what the hell is going on with that report for Cuddle Bear after the meeting with the psychiatrist from Strong Hospital. Our family doctor doesn't have it. The autism center doesn't have it. I tried calling the chair of the CSE office for the middle/high school. First attempt, I got dumped into a full voicemail box. Second attempt, they hung up on me. I'm not pleased. I am at a bad headspace for people to be playing stupid games like this with me. It ratchets up the anxiety and the irritability. It sucks.

But, like I said in the title of this post, mixed episodes suck as much as depressive ones. I have this feeling that I must do ALL the things and none of the energy to do it. My brain is cranking away but on bad shit instead of on the 'I must clean EVERYTHING' that runs through my head when I am hypomanic. It's hard to focus but I feel like I have to do shit and I get frustrated because I can't focus well enough to do it. I don't quite know what to do with myself. My usual calming activities aren't working so great.

And, in the midst of all of this, the kids have spring break for the next week and a half. Then they're doing distance learning for the remainder of that week. I'm trying not to be surly and snappish but it's hard. I want to be alone but I don't want to be alone at the same time. And my head is still haywire, which is exhausting by itself. Fuck bipolar with a chainsaw.

Ugh. Arthritis can die in a fire.

 I wasn't feeling too hot yesterday. I had a migraine. So, I took some medicine for it and tried to rest. That didn't work out great because I was too uncomfortable to sleep it off and then the kids got home from school. By the end of the day, the worst of the migraine was gone and I was feeling marginally better. Cue this morning. 

I wake up and almost all of my old injuries and joints ache intensely. Why? Because of the weather and my arthritis. I'm hobbling around with a cane. The cane helps but the pressure on my knees from standing is pretty intense and makes it feel worse. So, I've been spending most of my morning sitting down doing just about nothing.

Why nothing? Because the pain is making it hard for me to think. And my mood is dropping because of the grey weather and the persistent pain. So, I don't know what to do with myself. I tried to nap a few times but couldn't do it because of the pain. I just feel awful and my scumbag brain is telling me that I'm an awful person because I'm not up and moving around doing stuff. After all, my arms and legs aren't broken. It sucks.

On the plus side, I haven't tripped over anything yet today. I ran my knee into the chair next to the kids's room but that spot hurts less than the internal grinding sensation of the arthritis. I took some pain medicine. I'm hoping it will start working soon. I don't know what to do with myself right now and I feel upset. I want to nap but I can't. It just sucks right now.

Ah, gods, wtf am I doing, again?

 This business of my sleep not being sufficient despite getting around 8 hours of sleep every night is really wearing on me. I'm not sure what the solution to it is. I'm pretty sure that I'm having nightmares and that's the problem. I have a lot of unresolved issues surrounding 2010-2011 and the experiences that went with my postpartum depression. I think they're popping up because the anxieties that I had during that year are running around at the back of my head. It's hard.

I'm afraid to write about it because I'm afraid that someone is going to use my words as evidence to try to take my kids from me. Not writing about it, I feel as though I'm going crazy because this anxiety is rattling around constantly. It's making it hard to sleep for reasons that I can't fully express. I've been struggling with fear of sleep again. Those two facts are the basis, aside from my deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion in the morning, that I conclude that I am not sleeping well or getting down in to deep and restorative sleep. I'm going to be bringing it up with my psychiatrist when I talk to him next week. I hate having complex post-traumatic stress disorder. It messes with everything.

There's a teacher at the school who is in the process of turning herself into a problem (as I mentioned in my previous posts). This is part of what is triggering my ptsd. At the same time, I am angry. I am concerned at the IEP meeting in April that they're going to try to use my disability as an argument to change the IEPs of both kids. I am equally concerned that they're going to use the findings from the psychiatric evaluation that was done of Cuddle Bear to change his IEP to mainstream him and kick out the academic supports he has in place right now. They're making noises about pulling Suggle Bug out of speech therapy. I don't fully understand why.

Snuggle Bug has a difficult time using parts of speech correctly. It's a marked difference compared to others. We're regularly correcting him on pronouns and tenses for verbs. I'm going to ask them in the IEP meeting if this is something that he was supposed to be working on with his speech therapist or his teacher. And then, if it is a thing for the teacher, I'm going to ask why we're not seeing progress. Same question for the speech therapist if it is their wheelhouse. Beloved is talking about taking the day off to sit in on the meeting.

A lot of this is hurry up and wait for the write up from the psychological evaluation to arrive. When I signed the consent for Snuggle Bug to be evaluated, the form did not say that his teacher or any administrator was going to be present for the meeting. I'm questioning the ethics and legality of their presence in that zoom meeting last week. I have to ask some questions of my psychiatrist regarding the evaluation of minors and who is permitted to be present when it happens. Because, when the school requests a physical evaluation of a student's physical fitness for their gym classes or sports activities, the gym teacher isn't permitted to be present. I want to know who the person who was identified by the string of numbers on the screen during that zoom meeting was. If it was the school psychologist, that's not a problem. If it was the CSE chair for the middle/high school, I'm questioning it.

I don't even know if I am doing the right thing right now with all of this. There's a lot of questions up in the air and I don't have any good answers. I hate IEP season because as we get farther along in the schooling, things get more complicated. I feel like I don't know enough to be in these meetings and properly advocate for my kids. And I don't necessarily trust the rando parent representative who could get picked to help with the process because I can see them pressuring me to just agree with what the school says.

Beloved is optimistic that this whole situation is a case of the one teacher taking stuff out of context and creating a mess. I hope that he's right. And I hope that this mess doesn't screw over my kids. It all makes me wish that I had the spoons and brain power to home school the kids. Because it was exhausting and maddening, but we didn't have to deal with people being asinine over the kids having active imaginations.

Took all day but I'm making progress.

I am taking a brief break to type this up as the kids' dinner is finishing up cooling. April is Camp NaNoWriMo. I am torn. I want to participate but, at the same time, I am concerned that life's going to go sideways again and I won't be able to. You know, like last year? I am struggling to get back into my disciplined schedule of the last two months. This depressive episode and the stress of the last few weeks have thrown me completely off my feed. I just feel like things are going to keep getting harder. It's probably my depression talking. But, that's where my head is at right now.

I slept a lot today. I don't know why I was so exhausted but I just about slept all morning after the kids got on the bus and Beloved headed off to work. After I got up and had lunch, I started trying to catch up on my to-do list from the last few days. I am tired but I have a lot left to do. I've given up on having this place clean by Ostara. The kids' room looks like a train wreck and there's no way that can be solved in 48 hours short of lighting it on fire and scooping out the ashes. (No, I'm not contemplating burninating their stuff but I am exasperated.) The living room is marginally better, but it still needs a fair amount of work.

I have to figure out how to put together the damn vacuum cleaner. Then I have to convince the kids that it isn't a terrifying menace. Somehow, I have a feeling that's not happening this weekend either. And we won't talk about the cobwebs. Let's just say that I'm not completely cured of my arachnophobia but I've gotten to where I don't freak out over small spiders unless they're literally on me. But, there's a bunch of housework that didn't happen over the last two weeks because I didn't feel well and stuff happened. I'm not pleased but oh well.

It took me just about all day but I got to where most of the dishes are clean and the kitchen resembles being orderly. The kids are bickering. I'm pretty sure they're only going to eat their chips out of their entire dinner because they're picky about food. I just don't have the spoons to fight them over it. I don't know what I'm going to do if I'm still down like this in a few weeks when Spring break happens. Ugh.

When you're dealing with idiots...

Be prepared to need a stick to poke them with.

The big meeting regarding Cuddle Bear happened. I was not pleased with the fact that my son's teacher and the chair of the Special Education department for the middle/high school were sitting in on a psychological evaluation. I was not pleased at all but apparently this was how things were going to go. Cuddle Bear answered the questions asked of him politely and respectfully. He did a good job of paying attention. And got a little worried he was going to miss the bus (he didn't). According to theory, the specialist that he sees and our family doctor will be getting copies of the psychologist's findings. According to theory, I will be getting a copy as well. 

Initially, when this was brought up, I made a point of stating that this should be included in his IEP documentation just like any of the evaluations done by their staff psychologist. The doctor confirmed the autism diagnosis. The doctor said that Cuddle Bear is a boy with a very active imagination and he tends to hyperfocus on it (as I was saying at the outset of all of this alarm/panic). I am annoyed that the doctor took the opportunity to inquire as to my psychological welfare. Somehow, he was aware that I have a history of mental illness. 

I have not hidden my condition. At the same time, I do not believe that my mental illness is an influence upon my son's performance at school. I, however, kept that opinion to myself and answered rather bluntly the questions asked of me with the minimal of answers required of the questions. I would understand if the question was asked to establish familial history of such things. It was not presented as such for they didn't ask about his father. And, regarding Beloved, there was the implication that he is an absentee father that I took offense to as well. I made it plain that he is active in the lives of our family and the biggest thing to be a problem for us has been the impact of Covid-19 on our lives. They were, for some gods rotting reason, surprised by this information and possibly, mildly chagrined. 

I'm angry. It's been a day and I'm still angry. Their IEP meetings are scheduled for the same day as a Google meeting. This was a Zoom meeting. I'm not sure which platform is more secure but I know this is happening this way because of Covid-19. If I don't get my copy of this doctor's findings, I'll be talking to the specialist and requesting that a copy of the one that she is getting. We've got our next meeting via phone in about two weeks. If neither of my son's health providers have copies and I don't have a copy, it's going to be a bad day for the school.

They had been working with us so well. And then the teacher got a wild hair up their ass and decided that Cuddle Bear was delusional and excessively aggressive. That's what got this whole ball rolling. I am just letting that line run out and watching to see what the results are. The teacher may be looking for another line of work in a bad economy if this mess causes my son problems. And I will claw my way through the entire school food chain until the problems are resolved, because I know how those food chains work. Right now, I'm just going to simmer and watch. I am not happy. Not at all. 

As the kids said the other day: Screw Gravity!

 It has been a rough couple of weeks. I'm mild-moderately depressed. All of the cleaning I have done has fallen into disrepair in record time. And, to top it off, I fell up a flight of stairs today while I was getting the kids out to the bus this morning. My right side hurts but I don't think I injured much more than my pride. Seriously, who the hell falls up stairs? Me, apparently.

I'm trying to stay focused and get things done but it's been really hard. I haven't been sleeping well. I'm still getting 8 hours of sleep but it's not deep and restful sleep. As a result, I am a zombie in the morning and through about half of the day. Last week was particularly fun because Snuggle Bug had a misadventure over the weekend and scratched his eye. I got him in to see my new eye doctor. The prognosis was good, his eye was healing from a shallow scratch and the doctor was confident that he'd be fine by Friday. Then I had to schedule another eye exam for myself because the machine malfunctioned when I had the last exam. That ate up Thursday morning and then the afternoon hit and I was busy with the kids.

Monday was phone call day trying to make arrangements to get Snuggle Bug seen. Tuesday was his eye appointment and him spending the afternoon with me trying to screw around instead of doing school work. Wednesday I felt awful and barely had energy to get anything done. Thursday was, well, as I described it above. By Friday, I was just 10000 percent done with everything. I felt like I couldn't accomplish anything. I had watched pretty much all of the cleaning I had done fall apart before my eyes because I have kids. And the weekend was trying to get the kids to clean their room before juggling the groceries that Beloved had gotten before he had to leave and run more errands. Sunday was busy with family business. Then today happened.

I feel like garbage emotionally. I really stuck my foot in my mouth today when I was chatting with Beloved and that doesn't help much. He isn't mad at me, but I am mad at myself because I was an insensitive idiot in how I phrased things. I feel like I'm just not going to be successful in getting this place clean despite how hard I work. I feel like I am going to make zero progress on my personal projects because I am trying to juggle a ton of housework that the kids undo right behind me as I go along. (Legos, legos everywhere.) And my brain chemistry is telling me that everything's awful. At the same time, my trauma memories are popping up like mushrooms over a corpse because apparently some part of my brain decided that now is the time to process these things. This is probably why I am not getting good sleep right now, my brain is cranking overtime trying to process the horrors I grew up with.

And my Keen business is suffering because of this. I logged on only for an hour last week. My goal is 1pm to 4:30pm every Monday through Friday. I was on Monday. For an hour. That was it. My writing has been suffering because I just haven't been getting any of it done. It has me seriously questioning if I should even attempt Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I honestly don't know what to do. I keep expecting for everything to go sideways like it did last year as stuff is opening up around the country and people are putting pressure on Governor Cuomo. Sure, it looks like Beloved and I are eligible for the Moderna vaccine (that's the one being offered in our region) but I don't know if we're going to find time to do it. And I have a bit of panic over going out and doing stuff (even with the premise that being vaccinated will make it safer) because I've been stuck inside this damn apartment for functionally a year. This has not helped my social phobia. 

So, yeah, I'm not doing great right now. Here's hoping my brain chemistry will straighten itself out in the near future and that my right side will let me catch up on some of my housework this week.

Shield up and push forward.

 When I was a young child, I had an active interest in medieval things and was (almost) a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. My aunts were members and among the things that they had taught me was the subject line of this post. I had asked what knights did when dismounted. I mistakenly assumed that they were functionally helpless on foot. My aunt who was a fighter laughed and said "Keep your shield up and push forward."

That became a motto of mine. Keep the shield up and push forward. It's been a rough week. I've a tired shield arm. Because of the business of the school being confused by Cuddle Bear's presentation of his autism (which Beloved and I are absolutely at the root of the behavioral issues), I have been having emotional flashbacks. They're talking about having an expert in child psychology evaluate him. As this is on their dime, I'm alright with this because all information is worth having, especially in the case of trying to help Cuddle Bear develop, mature, and succeed in life.

It is, however, especially difficult for me to handle all of this right now because I keep having flashbacks to when CPS was in the picture and we were living under the threat of having our children taken from us for arbitrary bullshit reasons. That year was hell. Yes, some good things came out of it, but that is just proof that we're stronger than what tried to break us and there were some actually decent people in the midst of the parade running through our home on a regular basis. I got through that year by taking each day as it came. I dissociated heavily and put on my mask (mental armor) every day to get through with out melting down in terror.

All of the unresolved things are coming back up now. It's been triggered by the school's psychologist referring Cuddle Bear to the consulting child psychologist from Strong Hospital. This brought up all the memories of my going to a forensic psychologist and doing my best to toe the line of 'normal' and yet still be truthful. As Loki calls it, I used strategic deployment of truth on his tests. I know how to throw psych evaulation tests. I did it regularly in psych classes, much to the vexation of the instructor. There was a lot of things I held back when I did that test because I was terrified of the consequences if I laid all my cards on the table. 

CPS had already screwed me by way of false presentation of being there to help when I was in the hospital. I wasn't about to give them any more ammunition. Playing things as conservatively as I did, the doctor didn't hesitate to say that I clearly had complex post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II (with psychotic features). The doctor voiced amazement that I was as glued together as I was and that I had a very rare capacity to identify that my hallucinations were not real. He declared that I had suffered trauma equivalent to going through a warzone. He eyed me and suspected that there was more to the story but worked only with the information he had at hand. I think he had a feeling that I threw the test a curve ball and held back information.

If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I would do the same damn thing. Because, I have zero doubts that if I presented as severely in distress as I actually was at the time the court would have ordered our kids into protective custody with somebody else. The judge was all set to do that when we went to court and my lawyer had to get into a screaming match with him over the fact that I was the one who called for help and my children were perfectly safe when help arrived. They were terrified of me and the fact that I was hearing my mother in my head telling me to do awful things and screaming awful things at me. 

The one thing I would change if I could, I wouldn't have shown that damn woman my journal. They took my words and used them against me in court. If I ever am in a position where someone of some official capacity asks to see my journal, I'm going to ask them if they have a warrant. Otherwise, the answer is no. Or I may burn all the damn books. I don't know. I have flashbacks to that day too. Beloved postulates that my trouble sleeping these last few months have been due to stress and to my brain getting ready to unpack more trauma. He's quite likely correct. 

I've been trying to find a therapist to work through this stuff with. At the same time, I find myself concerned not that the health insurance won't cover. I already know the health insurance are dicks and I'm pretty  much on my own financially because of it. My concern is that my therapist can't handle what I'm attempting to process. I've gone through a number of therapists in the past and I've had several of them NOPE out of working with me because it was too traumatizing for them. It's vexing to know that.

I am exhausted.

 First, the good news. My old meter was reading approximately 11 points off. I did my first test this morning with the old meter. That read 126. Not a horrible number, but higher than I wanted to see. I did my second fasting test with the new meter. That read 115. A much better number and made me rethink what I had planned for breakfast. (Breakfast was diet yogurt, biscotti, and coffee. Total carb load was 35 carbs. I still have to establish if I am doing my math right on total carbs vs. net carbs. Because the net carb load would be lower.)

Next, the meh news. I just haven't been sleeping well for the last month. The bags under my eyes have bags. I'm not sleeping so poorly that I am putting my mental well being into danger. It's been things like the rapid shifts in the weather causing migraines and my arthritis to act up and make it hard to sleep. Or in the case of last night, hard cramping due to my period making it hard to sleep. Mainly, I'm finding it difficult to remain asleep. My prazosin (aka anti-nightmare pill) wears off around 3 am. That's been about when I've been waking up. I don't know if I'm having nightmares too because I don't remember them. It's a surreal experience still to have gone all my life able to remember my dreams and now because of a little pink pill, I don't recall them unless they're especially horrific.

Finally, the wtf news. Cuddle Bear (I'm going to have to come up with a new nickname for him soon, he is 13.) is having some difficulty at school. He's been perseverating on his fantasy life to the point that it is impacting his dealings with peers, teachers, and his performance at school. The teacher is concerned that there's a disconnect with reality here. Beloved and I don't think that he's delusional but that there's something going on that needs to be addressed. I suspect that he is diving into his fantasy life to escape some sort of stressor. It's become more prevalent over the last three weeks. 

At first, I thought it was just a thing happening at home because school had stressed him out. It was the time when classes for that semester were doing final exams and such. I figured that was what had him going. But the teacher called me today to explain that he's having these difficulties. She voiced concern that he was not as grounded in reality as he should be. I didn't dismiss that outright, but noted that he tends to do it more when he is stressed out and as an escape from a situation.

I've no idea what situation he's trying to escape. We've been strict and not allowing boundaries to get pushed, but we're not traumatizing the kid. Beloved and I work very, very hard not to use the parenting skill set that we were handed by our respective parents. I don't know if the stress of Covid-19 is getting to him. I don't know if he is having difficulty with someone at school. I don't know if he is having difficulty with a subject at school. I don't know where the stressor is. If I could track it down, I'd be able to provide him with some guidance on how to handle it.

I allow him free reign to play how he chooses through the afternoon. I figure it lets him let off stress from school. But, I think I am going to have to put my foot down on some of his imaginative play and tell him that his desire to express his fantasy world is going to have to be via some medium other than spoken word and performative action. That's going to suck. And I am going to have to police his dress code for school because he is sneaking to school garments that he uses for imaginative play again. I'll be calling the autism center to ask for guidance on this. I'll be talking to my psychiatrist for guidance on this. And I'm going to probably be trying to find him some manner of therapist that isn't affiliated with the county clinic (who are sufficiently infamous that the school is telling people DON'T go there). 

This is just a huge headache and a mess that I don't know how to sort out. I know that my son is not disconnected from reality. He's not demanding extra plates be set out for his wives or smuggling food into his room for them. He isn't behaving in a delusional manner. He just gets very angry when you confront him when he is hyper focused on his imagination versus reality. (I.e. when he wants to play firefighter and has been directed to clean his room.) I don't want to remove things like the toys he associates with this stuff, but it might be a necessary step to box them up until he can play appropriately with them. I don't know.

untitled no. ??^n+1

 I'm not sure where to begin. Technically, today has been a typical to good Monday. The tarot decks that I ordered arrived ridiculously early. I got about half of my chore list done. I made around $20 reading cards this afternoon and the kids were reasonably well behaved.

My brain, however, is not at a great place. I now know that the problem over the last year wasn't me but the fact that my glucometer was over 2 years old. Apparently the things last for a year to two years at best. I have adjusted my diet back to what it was at the beginning of last year. My A1C might bump up a few tenths of a point because of that. Or, it may stay where it is, I don't know. But the doctor was dismayed and disturbed that I had curtailed my diet as severely as I did. He assured me that I didn't need to do so and all but ordered me to go back to the initial diet I was prescribed.

He also prescribed a new meter. He was surprised (and perhaps embarrassed) that he hadn't prescribed one to me to begin with three years ago. I still have the old meter. I am using it because it's sort of working (it is off somewhere between 10 and 20 points high) as a stop gap measure until all the testing supplies are here. The weather today was such that I didn't want Beloved driving over the hill to the next town over to get prescriptions (when not everything was ready) in the middle of a windstorm.

The winds were enough that they blew over the kids' play house and then blew it apart in the lawn. It's been screaming around the corners of the building and making an eerie sound. It snowed a little bit but the winds have been whipping so hard that it didn't really settle on the yard. There's a bit of drifting up against the tree line along the property line to the east of us but not much.

I started today out feeling alright enough. But as the day has progressed, my mood has been dropping. I think it is no small coincidence that I am due to start my menses anytime this week. I had the beginnings of a migraine but I narrowly avoided it through a liberal application of caffeine and naps in the morning. That, however, threw off my schedule for the day and left me in a bad headspace for the rest of the day.

I still have a half dozen books to port over to KDP. I still have a manuscript to finish editing. I thought I was going to get that done last week but it didn't happen. Because I was so anxious over the appointment I had on Friday. The anticlimactic quality of the end results of the appointment should have been a source of relief, but my anxiety brain is still spinning. I am mightily vexed.