I keep getting told I shouldn’t just stay inside and read a book when I don’t feel I can face the world. I keep getting told I need to face my fears to figure out how everyone else deals with day to day issues–that once I do it, I’ll see that it’s easy and won’t hurt me. As if I never have tried this before.

I keep getting told I need to “get better.” I hate that phrase. Like if I work hard enough, all my mental issues will just go away, and the fact that they haven’t is proof I haven’t worked hard enough at overcoming these obstacles that everyone else seems to have no problem dealing with.

There are people around me who want to help me but are subscribing to popular culture models of how people with mental issues “get better,” where it all wraps up at the end of the hourlong drama with important life lessons learned. There are people around me who tell me that what I have gone through is not enough to have caused me to become someone who is occasionally unable to function outside her bedroom, and I am just lazy, just discinlined to live my own life.

Thank you for echoing what’s inside my head when today I’m supposed to go to the wedding of a thin blood relation who was also one of my chief tormenters when we were in high school. Because we are “family” and apparently that means I need to “forgive and forget” rather than actualize my own desires to not have anything to do with a person who previously caused me so much pain. I’m not doing it for her–she has likely forgotten me. I’m not doing it for me–I don’t feel I have anything to prove but a lot of comfort to lose. I’m doing it for blood relations who want me to conform to their model of how life is supposed to be lived, and will not accept my desire to find the place most comfortable for me as anything other than the words of a lazy girl who doesn’t want to actually live her life.

When I finally got the right meds for the GAD, I realized the last time I felt so normal was before/around puberty.

Feeding even more into the bad self-talk was that I had these issues while living with at least one if not both parents having OCD, and quite possibly my siblings as well. So not only was I frustrated with my inability to “meet expectations,” my parents were right there reinforcing those same messages. “We know you’re smart, so why are you failing this class?” I never had an answer that seemed “good enough,” so I wouldn’t answer at all.

I’m almost 32 years old, and only in the past two years or so has my relationship with my parents, especially my mother, improved. And that, I am convinced, is only because I was diagnosed with GAD, and she was diagnosed with OCD. It explains so much of my childhood, and it makes it a lot easier to both understand her behaviors that used to feel so pointed and personal, and to explain to her “this thing you do is triggering this kind of anxiety response in me, please stop.” I can finally give a “good enough,” in my own mind, answer to questions (usually of the “why do/don’t you?” type) that used to be unanswerable.

Self, what are you doing? Besides doing it all wrong, of course.

This.
.-= Ruth Moss´s last blog ..Transgender Day of Remembrance, and an appeal to fellow Mummy bloggers =-.

Only really one of the things I deal with is diagnosed and the others are only suspected, but they all impact my life really hard. And I tend towards the idea that I just suck at handling all this. It doesn’t help that I have this distorted golden age view of the past, where I keep thinking I could handle all my issues better (in reality, as I drank away my bodily dissonance, I also drank away the anxiety, depression, and the stress from the ADD). I was also medicated for the ADD back then (although the meds were a major IBS trigger). But it still doesn’t stop my brain from setting up that golden age bullshit of, “but you could handle it all back then! Why are you so broken now?”

I’m not even sure if it’s all society depiction either. I think I’ve still got some denial steeping in me, regarding me being PWD and having the mental health troubles I do, that tries to crawl up out of the deep abyss of the self hating parts of my brain and proverbially whispers these awful things into my metaphorical ear in an effort to convince me that no, I’m not PWD, I’m just useless.

This nasty little worm of denial pulled this crap with being trans too, so you’d think I’d be familiar with its tricks by now. x_x
.-= genderbitch´s last blog ..Murphy’s Law And Disability: The Week From Hell =-.

Your difficulties are no doubt real regardless of their name.

My sympathies with being a lost-generation verbal autistic. Those of us who were adults before autism-diagnoses without speech delays were invented seem to get a lot of this “you are making up your neurological condition” stuff unloaded on us, along with a bunch of belittling “aspergers syndrome is contracted by reading the wikipedia page on aspergers syndrome” type crap.

Autism experts who are actually doing research and counting things say that people who self-diagnose are usually correct. Knowing that won’t help you find somebody who’s willing to help you as an adult and will do an assessment for anything like an affordable sum, but maybe it’ll make it easier to remember that you are not making this up.

I’m so glad you went to the doctor’s, Anna. I wish I could be there for everyone who isn’t able to go or needs support, and offer a hand to hold if they wanted it.

I personally am finding, strangely enough, that being out of school for the first time ever – for longer than summer break – is helping a lot with my anxiety. I have other issues, but not having to worry about all of my classes and all of my commitments and all of the ways I was failing at everything is… it’s amazing. At my job I am the lowest person on the totem pole. I show up, someone tells me what to do, and 99% of the time it is just “Do the best you can.” I do well. I go home and I don’t have homework and I can just – breathe.

I have a terrible time with thinking that everyone is coping better than me, that I *should* be able to do more, to work myself into the ground without complaint, blah blah blah.

It’s hard not to be able to do it, and it’s even harder to be totally convinced that I SHOULD.

This. It *might* be possible for someone to be worse than the things I say about me, but it’s not possible to be worse than what goes on in my head. (I’m many, it isn’t just me that beats up me) (And one of the main themes of beat-up-on-shi is ‘you’re just inventing being many for attention’. which is kind of funny when it’s coming from someone else inside. ) (The argument for not making it up is also strengthened by the fact that there’s an alter missing right now and I miss her terribly and if I was making up I’d be able to bring her back by force of will wouldn’t I ) (Many also means I can *know* the message is bullshit, but I can’t shut it up, because it isn’t me saying it.) (Yay parenthesis!)

Really, the best thing I ever did for me was dropping out of high school. The panic attacks and the depressive episodes over assignments and grades and I should be able to remember it normal people can remember that they have homework and etc – was not worth it. I don’t *like* school, and I have given myself permission for this to be okay. it only took ten years (thirteen if you count kindergarten and preschool, which I don’t because I don’t remember them and thus don’t know if we hated them.)
.-= Shiyiya´s last blog ..Boycott Method =-.