Stick to the Script

I’m starting an SSRI today ¹Escitalopram, if anyone is interested. I’m am not very hopeful that it will do anything I like, even beyond the scope of my usual distaste for human medical care. I don’t have generalized anxiety disorder and have atypical symptoms with respect to anxiety of any sort, which has and continues to be a problem with all treatments I have tried – they just don’t apply to me ²My body is not tense. I am breathing normally. I am sufficiently grounded. I learned to be physically calm despite being in serious distress when I was still a toddler (or maybe even an infant) because it helped me survive. That is not a path to relief for me; I am already there and it is not the piece I am missing.. I don’t have diagnosable depression ³But at the same time I have to be careful to describe my relationship with death, to avoid scaring people, because they might imagine my daily life as suicidal and they aren’t comfortable with that. As some of you know the wrong person thinking you’re suicidal can put you at serious risk of imprisonment and/or death, particularly if you … Continue reading because most of the criteria are a comparison to a non-depressive state I don’t think I’ve ever experienced (or at least can’t recall or imagine in any useful way). And I’m worried that I’ll talk myself into “liking” any change that I do notice, even if it’s bad for me, because that’s a thing I often did to survive ⁴When you cannot make changes in your life, and in particular when you cannot predict what you will get, the options are to learn to like what is offered or to be upset. If you are going to eat worms it’s much better to learn to like it than to be upset about it, even if it makes you sick to do. I have hurt myself in this way frequently in the … Continue reading in the past.

I was also unconvinced that my physician had any better plan than just guessing at things that are generally well-tolerated and asking me if I liked it. But they agreed to basically let me try whatever I asked for so I’m gonna give it a shot and try to do some science to see what impacts it has. I should try to believe it’s useful though, at least while I’m testing, because it almost certainly won’t work if I don’t believe in it. Even Advil works better when you clap your hands and believe, so I’m going to try that too, when I can manage it.

I got a voicemail from Pete today (it is not possible for them to make my phone ring directly, only to leave messages), which I didn’t listen to but Shanda said contained nothing I needed. This system of her interfacing for me is better than when I have to listen to messages myself but I should maybe just let them evaporate without anyone checking at all. I’ll do a review with Shanda but I suspect I haven’t had any communication I’d miss in years, other than when I got them to send me a few grand when I moved to Cleveland, and even that was sort of break-even after considering the harms.

Finished this season of Better Call Saul. I’m so excited by the parallel storytelling, and by the handling of narcs. KWex decides she’s in it with Jimmy, but he’s afraid she’ll bail when things get tough. He’s afraid he’ll ruin her if she doesn’t. Jimmy is up for staying alive in dangerous situations. He’s not call about it, he doesn’t like it, but he makes it happen. And he can see the play, to stay in the game, most of the time. She doesn’t think she can handle any of it but is actually better at handling powerful narcs than he is. It’s her day job – she works for a criminal who happens to own a bank, instead of one who only deals in cash, and literally the same technique works on both of them.

Jimmy and KWex are cooking up a big scam for the final season and they’re excited – I’m excited – but the show is about pain (and we know that they break up again before Breaking Bad) so I’m sure it will gut punch us again at the end. She has always loved his scams but is also afriad of them and rarely resolves those too feelings. He sees her excitement and wants to scam with her, but also sees her fear, and it pushes against all the times his FoO and the world told him he wasn’t a real human. I’ll have to wait a year or so to see though.

Quarantine theater is finally coming along. We’ve got a solid screen mount and a prototype for the projector that I’ll finalize tomorrow. With a little luck Friday might bring a full stack trial and pictures for marketing and art purposes. Before that though I’m going to undertake mowing, which I haven’t done in years. Mowing smells like colonialist bullshit to me (and it is, FYI, so you should consider doing less/none of it too) even if it wasn’t part of my trauma ⁵Pete was such a dick about this for no reason. He lives on the middle of no where and doesn’t need to mow at all, but from the time I was 7 I was responsible for about an acre of steep mowing, and by the time I was 12 it was a couple acres and all the trimming as well as all the mowing I was expected to do for other people. For a minute when I … Continue reading. I’ve lived here for almost a decade, don’t own a mower, and have only used my trimmer maybe 6 times. But the projector is going to be only a few inches off the ground, and the grass is more than a foot tall, so something had to change. At least for a 0.5 square meter patch of my back yard.

The dick bag who has collected a quarter million in rent from me is getting antsy to sell this house now that the actual owner is dead. He isn’t prepared to do anything about it until global death ramps down, but he wasn’t me to share his anxiety about finally selling a thing he has hoarded for decades. He imagines he’s going to have it appraised and then sell it to me for that number. I imagine a counter that is the value of the housing in 2011 minus the quarter million I already paid. But hey, good luck to him selling speculative, old single-family stock when people can’t pay rent. I’m sure all that time hoarding will really pay off.

Dog is on ‘roids and it’s a bit much. I’m glad he’s active again but he’s at twitch level 14, can focus even on things he likes, and won’t sleep, even well after midnight. He’s also somehow more interested in food, despite a baseline already at dog levels of eating anything he can get into his mouth, and literally can’t sit still while Shanda and I have food out. We’ll have to get him titrated to balance out the uppers and the downers. Either that or open a dog gym and let him take out his energy lifting and barking all day with other ‘roid dogs.

I talked to @BPS in what became real-time comms late last night. They’ve been having a rough time the past few weeks. I wish they could find a way to have a minute of rest, from their day job and whatever else is consuming all their energy, because it looks a lot like they’re just pushing through and hoping they can hold their breath until it’s done. Or more realistically, until they burn out and rest is forced upon them, because the world never lets us be “done” in the way that anxious brains wish for. Still, I was excited to talk with them – to be worthy of their interaction – and I think I might have helped a little. It at least helped me.

It’s my name day tomorrow ⁶For a second I was excited to get a mail order cookie from my sales drone interface to capitalism, since they send cookies for birthdays. Not great cookies, but good enough and free and delivered to my house without being ordered. But the patriarchy says he is going to use my deadname day, so I won’t get that cookie for another 8 months (or I … Continue reading. Shanda, and every union shop I’ve worked in (while being excluded from the union for age or other hierarchy reasons) have a birthday holiday as extra time off. I’m on the queue this week (in addition to my regular week, to cover for someone else) so it’s not easy for me to step out, but I think it will try that next year. I’d definitely do a drug day ⁷I’m out of most of the good drugs anyway. Black market sales are so tedious and slow. Why can’t I Subscribe & Save some MDMA? I guess maybe I could – Amazon does run Pillpack – if I took the white approach and got a physician to write me a note about it., given the time, but I’m feeling pretty lazy about it right now. Last year Shanda invited people and took me out for things, which was tolerable but not great. I’d do better with a nice dinner in a setting where you can pay attention to me without panicking. The world has conspired to make no people an easy choice this year. Maybe we could practice some of the parts I never learned as a toddler before I’m asked to perform them in public again.

I still need a therapy topic. Probably not a big one though, since my therapist is likely to spend a while not really listening to me about a feeling they shouted 2 sessions ago. I know therpaists like to imagine they stay detached, and that they are trained to feel bad when they don’t do it perfectly. But I’m not worried about that, and their anxiety on the topic makes it difficult for them to hear me on things that are important to me. It might go better but I think it’s more likely that I just settle for being done with it. In any case, maybe we can poke at… the way I can’t get started on a GoFundMe despite having done them successfully before? Or maybe I double down talk about how there has been no progress on a topic (several, in fact) that I was promised research about and assistance with. Or maybe we just try to warm up into an LI topic about some aspect of food for next week. We’ll see how it goes.

I see in that I am working myself back up to angry. There hasn’t been a lot of space in the household for my angry recently. We were full up. But I think that’s getting better. It might be time for a part 2 of the CASA story, if I am still up for angry next time I write.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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