Jan 31

 Yesterday. Was edge of crisis day. If not wandering across the edge at times.

Hard to describe. Short version. Dangerous. Losing the plot point.

Very no bueno.

A friend fished me out and talked to me online. Concern. Suggested I ask Hazel to stay a few days.

I have done so. Hazel is staying for a few days.

I warned her I might have a meltdown. That's ok she said. I had some minor meltdowns instead with her present. Just. How hard it was. How hard stupid fucking bullshit fuckface being ill all the time was. And on. And other stuff. And fuck my life. And so sad. So very very sad. And lost. And anxious.

Too much. Is the short version.

So. The issues here are. Chronic illness giving me fuck all wiggle room. Nausea. Nausea is, apparently, one of the strongest ticklers of anxiety. The body doesn't like nausea. And turns up the anxiety dial because "hey, shit's wrong, lets be worried and watchful, we're under attack". Ok. This isn't a psychological thing. This is a physiological thing. Whether you like it or not. Agree with it or not. Your body pushes the "release stress chemicals" button. This. I have been dealing with long term. This is why I get anxiety spikes out of nowhere when I feel nauseous.

Then.

Auditory fuckery. And vestibular fuckery. Is another high anxiety antagonist. Again. The body says. Hey. This isn't working. We're under attack. Pushes the "release stress chemicals"  button.

Again.

This doesn't make for happy calm states. Double fucked. Maximum carnage.

Then we have. Just inability to do shit because of the usual long term chronic illness bullshit. Crashing out if you try to do something. Want to check the heating ? How about no. How about instant crash out and nausea instead. How about. Don't move from your bed and be helpless. Hows that ? Nausea beyond its shitty fucking destabilising effects - the psychological ones. And. Add in a, there is an urgent problem to deal with at the house. Whilst you're long term ill. And short term ill on top of that.

Eh.

You can see. Just from a mathematical stand point. This is Not Good.

And lets make no mistake. I am not saying I'm not crackers. I am crackers. Crackers doesn't help. Being a high fucking order systems dipshit that seeks answers from everything. Being a neurodivergent fuckface. Doesn't help. Not good. The other patterns. Stupid high intelligence ending up seeing many things, a childhood geared towards spotting negativity fast, accurately, reading people, reading lies, reading all of the shit. Giving you a very gloomy high definition world view. Not wrong. Just horribly insightful. In all the worst kind of ways. Too much. In and of itself. 

But the rest of it. Isn't good either. All the other patterns that make up me.

Anyway.

Too much.

And when I say too much. I don't mean. Oh. The shopping bag is too heavy. I mean rather more psychologically damning too much. Too much to keep on living too much. Existential too much. Suicide is easier too much.

Critical fucking meltdown too much.

Eh. Meh.

It is not the first time I've been here.

I have stayed, for the most part, on the right side of the line this time. In almost certainly a saving grace being calling for help - very hard - before I go fully nuts, and Hazel being able to offer some time just to keep my company here and there. And nudge me into some less anxious, more stable kind of thought patterns. If nothing else. Just her presence. Another human. Another set of hands.

And it helps. Quite a bit.

I hate that it does. But it does. I hate how human that makes me. When my childhood is all about being inhuman. About being strong. Doing the impossible thing. Not needing care. Or kindness. Or consideration. Just. Do it. The adult I trained into. The saviour. The fixer of all things. The doer of the impossible. Useful from orbit - so useful in a workplace. Dysfunctional up close. This isn't a skillset. This is a fucking pathology. This is trauma on the move.

I hate I need help. 

I feel terrible about it. Awful. Worthless. Helpless. Just. Let me fucking die instead. None of those feelings are minor. They rage. And I have to reach through that storm. And somehow, impossibly, ask for help. And accept it. And sit with it. Because this isn't me. This isn't the child I was taught to be. It is not the adult I was further conditioned to be.

It is. Very hard. Oil and water. Fire and ice. Not me.

And yes. I fully understand, like I fully fucking understand everything. That that is fucky. I also understand there is nothing actually wrong with that. A normal fucking human. Is absolutely fine. But that is not the world I live in. That is not me.

Oh. That's not normal my dude. Yes. I know. Put it on the list of Reasons Why I Should Not Fucking Be Here And Why I Am Worthless. 

Bit of a vicious circle that one.

Today. My anxiety is under control. Today everything is under control. Just about. Barely. Like these things do. It is the wind, that blows soft and then hard. Minute to minute. Hour to hour. At times the breeze drops to a trickle. Breathe. It's ok. And then picks up and eddies around. And you endure. Up and down. Sometimes with no visible external sign. But inside. You wander. From meadow. To hellscape. Jumping around.

Another test. Another form of suffering. Another endurance. Another set of battles that many people will not understand, not perceive and at best be confused about if not just outright dismissive or hostile.

This is the landscape of anxiety. And mental fuckery.

Congratulations if you've never been to those lands. If you have. I am very sorry. Truly.

Sigh.

Anger. Denial. Depression. Bargaining. Acceptance. Round and round the fucking grief wheel we go again. Faster and faster. Unresolved.

Anyway.

Perhaps the next few days I can make some space to breathe.

The problem I am fully aware of, is at that crisis edge point, where, eh, all the wheels come off. Every minute you stay in that landscape. Has days of fucking comedown. If you're in that state for 2 weeks. Expect months of recovery time. I know how that shit works. I know how horribly sticky and corrosive that shit is. Losing your marbles is not a 1:1 ratio with recovery from it. IF. You recover. It is the final state of metal grinding against metal. Where not only are you doing that and causing structural damage. It's also to the point where bits of machinery are coming off wholesale, and smashing on the ground behind you. The vehicle literally shaking itself to pieces.

Sometimes you don't come out the other side of that. Obviously. Sometimes you do. But with one wheel permanently missing. And forever more when you go round a left hand bend at a certain angle and certain speed. The vehicle dips and scrapes, and sparks fly. A forever wound from a vulnerability.

And if you're lucky. You recover. Back, mostly, in one piece. Except. The vehicle never forgets. Never quite the same again.

Because.

Once you've knocked on the door of hell, and had a walk around the torture rooms. Even if you walk back out the door. You don't forget. You don't forget what happened. You understand what's possible. What the future might be. You intimately understand that there are monsters out there in the dark. And they will eat you. A very different mentality from someone that has never had to wander out there. And walked through that door. To them. The world seems safer. And more understandable. Predictable. Complacently so.

It is the difference between someone that has been to war, stood in shitty foxhole, seen people around them wiped out. And someone who only heard about wars vaguely in passing and believes that war couldn't ever really happen.

It is a brutal existential revelation. One of those ones that rips off the easy pretty facade. And exposes the ugly, mortal, fragile, nihilistic - you don't fucking matter - area beneath. It is one place of pure suffering.

There is in that. As ever with any existential revelation. The cost. And the benefit. The cost as above. You will always be haunted by the knowledge. At the very least. If not scarred. Brutalised. Fucked. Even destroyed. The benefit. Is that you know one of the edges. One of the edges of the human condition. The thin line between life and death. Sanity and insanity. You know where it is. How far it can be pushed. What happens on either side. It gives you an accurate measure. An understanding. Not only for yourself. But in everyone else around you. It gives you some capability, an increasing capability, to stare into the eyes of pain and know where someone else is. It gives you insight, that someone who has never visited those places does not have. Can never have. You can only get that wisdom from paying the cost.

Only the burned, truly know what it is to feel the burn.

I was thinking about this a little today as I waited in the car - we had a short venture out to pick up a parcel for Hazel.

Thinking about the strengths of Hazel. She has a very high understanding of a group of associated mentalry. Adept at understanding anxiety, depression, mood switches, general "craziness", suicidal ideation, and most of the attendant real world wisdom associated with it. Not perfect by any means but who is.

The short version of this is, and I've said this before, is that it makes her "friction free" when you talk about anxiety. There is no need to educate. Explain. Argue. Because you're talking to someone already fluent.

It made me consider the common scenario for such things.

If we have two people, one suffering from something. Lets say. Depression. To pick one example. And the other person has no context for it. No training. Nothing. They are just coming at it from a concerned person - we're going to completely ignore the antagonistic bystander who just rails on such people.

Such people typically in a bid to be "helpful" use their own context for solutions. Have you just tried cheering up. Have you just tried having a cup of tea. Watching <some comedy> always cheers me up.

Almost none of these are helpful. Some are actively unhelpful.

What this is actually doing is communicating a need for education. I am going to launch with a series of wildly uninformed bits of information, which actually just say, help, I need education and understanding on this matter, and, I'm asking you.

To put it another simpler way.

This is like a master carpenter working away in a woodshop confronted by someone with zero woodworking skills coming into the shop and saying things like. Have you tried X glue. I really like it. It fixed my tea cup great. Or. I think you should use this screw driver. Or. Have you see this stain ? I saw it on the TV. It looks amazing.

Education is a task. Not an insignificant one. In fact its such a thing that people can be employed, full time, dedicate their entire lives to just teaching. And. Conversely. Some people will pay high sums of money. For the opportunity to learn something. And frequently. The whole thing. Takes time. And effort. And is not trivial.

So. In this frame. You end up with. Helpful bystander trying to help. Whilst not explicitly saying teach me. They are implicitly saying, my knowledge is so poor, and I am making mistakes and things worse, that I demand education in order to stop offence, or harm, or just additional load.

And the person they are implicitly asking for education from. Is the person who probably has the least energy, the least resources - someone at the bottom of some mental health hole.

Ironically then.

Good intentions.

You end up with the people seeking to help, actually demanding help, from someone who is least capable of giving it. IE. Please educate me as to why what I just said was wrong.

You get bonus points for surly negative acceptance of education in the huge assumption that is provided. If ignorance is confronted, pointed out its wrong, in this case you might get a sulk. Well. You're just not being helpful. Or trying. If you just tried my ignorant method. You'd see. Which is tantamount, again, to not only education, but a demand to be walked through it practically before the error is understood. At a stupidly high cost to the person who actually needed the help in the first place.

It's just one of those very awkward negative "local minimums" in a datascience respect.

None of this is to say however, that other people can't have important input. For anyone with knowledge, or skill in the area. Someone who is fluent. Outside input can be more use than internal input. Because the external input is not caught up in the same eye of the storm.

Outside context in say, depression, is often hugely more valuable than inside context. Because the inside context is poisoned by negative narratives, spirals, catastrophisation etc.

But only. When the outside context is fluent.

The mistake. Is in most people thinking they are fluent. When they are the opposite.

Back to Hazel.

Hazel is fluent. In a bunch of tricky mental things. More from a lived first hand perspective than anything else. But also backed up with theory.

So very few people have this. It is unfair to expect people to have it. It's why people are generally utterly shit at dealing with struggling people. I guess. If this wasn't true. There wouldn't be a huge need for therapists.

Also. It's not universally true that just because you have walked through those fires. Whatever they maybe. That you are capable of pulling meaning, learning, and correct application of it to others. That's. Another ask. Not all burned people become adept at learning to deal with burn victims. Sometimes. They never escape the pull of their own fires. And everything is cast in the light of their own, personal bonfire.

Tricky.

I am thankful for people who understand the landscape of such things. It is. One burden less. And I try to endure with good grace. Those that try to give you their ignorance as a form of help.