voices
-
The publisher just let me know I’ll receive the whole book, edits and formatting and corrections complete, for my final review. It includes the cover design by my friend Mike, and the acknowledgment and dedication. I’m amazed it’s happening. Makes me motivated to keep writing, I suppose. I’m absolutely flat as a pancake. I have…
-
I forced myself to engage in the DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) skill: building positive experiences – and got up early to go to a comedy show with Ceila. I’m hammered with triggers at work. Currently my formerly catatonic patient is back in restraints for violence, and I have a patient almost identical to me in…
-
I haven’t been eating or sleeping that much. I feel like I don’t need as much sleep as other people and my energy levels stay high. I take my meds for sleep, but they only work for a few hours. I wake up bleary but unable to get back to sleep. I still have unsettling…
-
Sometimes all I feel is dragging ennui. A thousand memories, fighting for space as though trapped in a compressor. I have terrible memories and I remember everything. It’s not photographic, it’s just graphic. I remember so much, and sometimes my mind just won’t shut up. I scream at them, please! I’m not that person anymore!…
-
A polar vortex is moving through Washington, specifically, Eastern Washington and Idaho. It has been so bitterly cold, down to 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit. I constantly worry about the pipes freezing at either of my two properties when the weather gets this absurdly cold. I sound like a broken record reminding my tenants to…
-
It’s Monday and feels so strange because it’s the first Monday in three months I don’t have IOP or an appointment with Dr Black. I’ve been working on – at least in my mind – my house. In my mind I plan all kinds of plans and on my phone I do all kinds of…
-
For now, my “journey” through both civilian and veteran mental health systems is at the maintenance phase. I have graduated IOP as of the end of the year. I could have done more time and the VA likely would have paid for it, but I felt ready, and I also liked how it closed out…
-
During IOP process hour yesterday morning, I was more forthcoming about my difficulty with depersonalization and dissociation. I go back in time to painful memories, past traumas, the things that give me PTSD and sometimes keep me up at night. I’ve tried to use the coping skills I’ve learned to get through it – grounding,…
-
The core of it, the core of so much suffering, aggravation, anxiety, and despair, is the inner critic – that voice inside that tells you how stupid and ugly and unlikable you are, how you never get anything right, how you’ll always be a failure. It’s a shadow that follows you around, no one can…
-
Everyone knows of it – the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Everyone grieves something – lost family/friends, a lost job, lost opportunities, lost hope. No one goes through the five stages in a linear fashion and in fact, we as humans are all over the place. I realized as we talked…
Documenting my journey through the mental health system 