Documenting my journey through the mental health system

My feelings wheel is a guide to help me figure out what I’m feeling. Sometimes I just can’t tell.

The feelings wheel is not giving me much guidance today. I cannot tell what I feel. Nothing, there is nothing. The mood stabilizer is likely making me flat and blank. I am having flashbacks and stare off, dissociated into them, but I’m not exactly distressed. There is one feeling that isn’t on the feelings wheel – apathy.

So Dr Black told me to read a book called Apathy. It’s comedic but apparently also full of insight into mental illness and the human psyche. I’m not sure much more than that. I’ve decided to go into it blind. Maybe it will finally be the book that breaks my lack of concentration. I’ve pulled off watching a few movies, my restless anxiety allowed it after a strong joint and cleaning my whole apartment. Meet the Feebles is a 1989 nightmarish Sesame Street on acid fever dream by Peter Jackson. I liked it – but I’ve always liked puppets and puppeteering. Chucky and Tiffany, Child’s Play? The crypt keeper? All part of the same horror camp. Muppets and Sesame Street is the Jim Hensen crap, and I don’t like it.

I am slowly leaning into exposure – at my new job, there are triggers everywhere. The ambulance bay is just 100 feet from the entrance I use to get to my unit. The psychiatric unit is on the first floor, and I narrowly avoid walking by it on my way into the hospital. I get lost in my own mind, rethinking old memories and trying to come to terms with the fact I’ll deal with these triggers forever.

Glimmers – the opposite of a trigger. I am learning to more consciously be aware of them. There are often small moments in the day, even a bad day, that are pleasant. My cat, coffee, and chocolate are small glimmers for me. I try to make them. I try to find pleasant distraction, like some stand-up comedy or writing or walking around my downtown neighborhood, as much as I dislike the cold.

But sometimes there are those days in which I just can’t get out of my head. I wander through the world in a sort of apathetic haze, the opposite of the mindfulness I’ve been practicing. It is hard to stay present. The past calls to me all the time.