Jan 12

 Yesterday I didn't sleep or rest well. Came up "online" somewhere in the afternoon with for me an under subscription of sleep.

Fragile. Emotional thresholds pushed very low. Ah ha. This old chestnut. I always explain it as thresholds lower as you become more anxious, stressed, crackers. My shrink tends to frame it the opposite way, too much, overwhelm, but the same principle, things rising above your thresholds. We both kind of agree that it works in both directions. The bar comes down. The Stuff goes up. We're very clear about how it manifests.

Played some games with a friend. Ended up talking long about me and dealing with CFS. I apologised to him. Profusely. It wasn't him. It was me. But I explained to him how what he said knocked me down a lot. He apologised. Said he should have been more careful. And that I was smart enough to know he didn't mean it in that way. I know. It's not him. It's me. It's a symptom of high fragility. It is a consequence of having to deal with what I do, day to day, it leaves me no margin of error. No spare space to draw on. I live on that line because I have no choice. I have fought a defensive retreat as hard as I can and I have nowhere left to retreat to. But also. Really. It was the anxiety about the house. I need to sort out the house. I do not have the capacity to sort out the house. I am going to be crushed in the inbetween. Panic.

I get. That from a certain calm even minded frame. It makes no sense. But. For me. I am all too aware this is how it works. Not just in me. But in a lot of people. I have seen it and empathised with many people that go through the same things. You can see it. How peoples lives spiral out of their grasp. If you're in the cohort that never experience any kind of mental fuckery, or struggle to understand, in all sincerity count yourself lucky.

For me. My rough rule of thumb seems to be. The more you hurt me. The more suffering I endure. The more empathetic I become. It makes me understand shades of all kinds of suffering and how horrible it is to an ever finer degree. And I react with sympathy to others. I can see how that works.

My friend was very good about it. I apologised a lot. For being me. For being a prick. For being sensitive. But we talked about it a lot. He is used to dealing with people with different levels of coping - although in his case its always kids. But as he said. Dealing with me and CFS was new territory for him. He was learning through me. And he thought he had made the mistake of casting it into his own perspective. That classic example of the mentally healthy doing the equivalent of telling someone suicidal, have you just tried cheering up.

We know that is one of the worst things you can do. He knows it. I know it. You don't do that.

He said he would be more careful in future. I said he shouldn't need to be. It is my fault, not his. There should be an expectation for someone to be more robust.

He said did that feel like someone was telling you that what you were going through didn't matter. Wasn't real.

Yes. It was I said. The feeling of the opposite of what therapy does. I laughed amongst the turmoil. I said it was the opposite of being seen and acknowledged. It was being dismissed and belittled. Even though. I absolutely knew he didn't mean it like that. But. It wasn't a rational response. It was an emotional one. The animal squealed and ran.

He said he could understand that would knock me hard.

He asked about my history with mental fuckery. About this and that. I spent a long time just talking. Selfishly. Just talking about my experiences. Properly framing how hard each day was. That nine times out of ten I pulled myself together to hit a high of playing a game. Slumping either side of that. And that also. Brutally. It wasn't worth it. None of it was worth it. The line of it being worth it had been crossed a long time ago. If I was a horse we would be at the point of taking me behind the chemical plant and shooting me in the back of the head. That I am still here is... I don't know. I don't know why I am still here. Probably. Because I am a coward more than anything else. But. That only goes so far. Eventually. That doesn't stop you either.

It was. A heavy conversation. I apologised for that too. It isn't fun. It isn't happy to lay that kind of shit on people. I am sorry for that.

Always backwards. Always apologising. Always minimising my space. I don't count. Don't take any burden on my behalf. That absolutely murderously fucky dysfunction carving lumps out of me.

We talked about the overlap between mental health and physical health. Absolutely. They dance together. One upsets the other and round and round they can go. They can feed off each other. Splitting them out explicitly becomes tricky. There are seperate concerns there. But they do intertwine with each other. It is just. A function of the beast. IF you receive a physical kicking all the time, then over time, you pick up mental scars. The flinch. The reaction before the kick. Trauma. This is trauma. The physical health burden traumatises you.

Even if you were better tomorrow he said. There would still be issues.

Absolutely. I said it was apparent that there were now deep ugly scars in my psyche. Even if you removed all the physical health pressure. That shit had left scars. Again. This is trauma. You don't just instantly heal from that. Sometimes you don't heal at all.

I said I had been aware for sometime how trauma shaped people. You could see that their problems they suffered for eventually warped their shape. They became the shape of their trauma. A cookie cutter, warped, hunched, to fit that cut out. I had seen it time and time again. This to me is part of the understanding of those things. This shows you why people can act erratically. Like assholes. Or panic. Or whatever it is. And even in non dysfunctional people. That shaping occurs. The things they learn from their parents. Their quirks. Their copeable things. The things they can't cope with.

And I had always resisted it as best I could. Or thought I did. I tried not to let encountered traumas shape me. But. One. It turns out my childhood traumas had shaped me in a way I couldn't see for quite some time. And Two. I was now so banged up, that I was very much becoming the shape of my trauma and experiences. Warped. Dysfunctional. Fucked up. I am human. And the outcomes are very human. Regardless of whether I understand it all or not.

Today.

I have woken up at 3am. Anxiety riding high.

Hmm. Ok. A bit of realisation. This isn't just anxiety, anxiety. This is physiology. I am getting cortisol anxiety spikes here. I have been here before too. I understand this.

What happens is at some points in your autonomic cycle, your body preps you to wake up, or start things up, or respond to something. And hormones shift up and down. One of them is cortisol. It gets used as a Go Spike. It's also used for stress response. Anxiety. Fear.

What happens then, is if your baseline is anxious. Stressed. But dealing with it. When you layer a wakeup cycle on that with a boost in stress chemicals you get a very high anxiety spike. Panic blips.

Too much. Too much chemical.

And so.

You get a very "unpleasant" period. Of swivel eyed anxiety and fear.

Knowing it a little that this is a hormone high does help. A little. Calm. This is your stupid fucking body not going you many favours right now. It lasts for anything up to two hours in me. And typically. As time goes on. It comes down. It comes back down into bearably copeable stress. Rather than out of control panic.

I think my worst case of this was a couple of years ago. When they were monitoring my heart. I didn't super understand the mechanics of it at that point. But I experienced the worst anxiety I had ever had on waking up. Getting prepped to go the hospital. What the FUCK is going on. This isn't a bad hospital appointment. It's not cool. But it's ok. Just go in. Talk to someone. And yet. The anxiety had me so fucking high wired. It was terrible. Rapid breathing. Shaky. Absolute fear.

At that point Hazel was staying with me during one of her stay over periods. I can remember talking to her as she was half awake in the guest bedroom. My anxiety is super bad today. Super. Bad. As if sharing it could somehow make it go away.

Anyway.

It's 6.30am. My mental state has come back down into copeable levels of stress. It's not pretty. It's not cool. I am an absolute fucking shitshow of coping. I hate that my stupid fucking asshole CFS et al has reduced me to this. This. Is rage. Rage about my fate. Rage about not being capable. Rage about being made vulnerable, helpless. It provokes a different existential end point. Suicide out of pure screaming sulking rage. This. Is my dads way.

For the millionth time.

Reset. Breathe. Zen. Calm.

I have to employ nuclear strength calm bullshit. And fail continually. It is a horribly hard war. That no one sees. 

Calm.

Calm.

Come up with a plan. Easy. Slow. Plan. Just. Pick something up every day. Try to concentrate and come up with a plan. This is pathetic. I have run all sorts of projects in my time. Spun multiple plates. Adulted - against my will. Yes. But. You're not that person anymore. Your legs have been cut off. And now you get electrocuted for doing "wrong things". You are traumatised by warfare. A war that people can't see. You are only human. 

Anyway.

Sure.

Whatever.

Fuck off. 

Let me check my wheel of stages of grief again.

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Hmm. Uh huh.

One of the things my friend said was that at some point his context for what I was going through ran out. He couldn't understand it. He had nothing to compare it to. Just guess.

Of course this makes sense. Particularly where 90% of what I go through, on my own, half of it purely internal, is just not visible to anyone. Sometimes. People will get glimpses. Where I don't have enough energy to maintain a mask. And it slides. Or. Even more rarely. You see the bare metal. You watch me slide into a state of awfulness. But the people that have seen that are next to none. I will typically, like a dog, go find somewhere to curl up out of sight, out of mind, to quietly go die. The one person that has spent a significant chunk of time with me at all levels is Hazel. Ask her. She has seen me at my worst. Curled into a ball and crying because it's so bad.  She has seen me bounced in and out of A & E. She has seen me slumped in a GP office and ranting at the GP on my behalf - look at him, LOOK AT HIM, does he LOOK alright to you shouting in the middle of the surgery at another round of ineffective GPing. This is the bit that people don't see. The worst bits. Or the bit of me that is so wiped out I don't move for a day. Dead.

But I am aware. There are some poor fuckers out there. That can't even get out of bed. Constrained to life completely chained to a bed. Bed pans. Dark rooms. Bed sores. People that don't want to live like that. No one makes a fucking choice to shit in a bed pan. No one.

So at least I can get up. And use the bathroom. And get a water. And sometimes do the washing up. Or play a game. I have a leg up on those people. Not that comparison is any kind of fucking wisdom. It is stupid. Never compare miseries. It's the most pointless fucking thing ever, and at worst it's toxic bullshit of emotional invalidation.

Anger today.

It seems.

Rage.

Sigh.