In Memoriam
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Daily Archives: December 7, 2012
Real Girl, Real World
I live in my head. It;s true. In the last year I have taken up residence on the top floor and for the most part I have a very busy adventurous life wandering the corners of my mind, sometimes to the point of forgetting that I reside in a body, that is a physical manifestation … Continue reading
Abraham-Hicks Emotional Guidance Scale
Abraham-Hicks Emotional Guidance ScaleUpward Scale: joy, knowledge, empowerment, freedom love; passion; enthusiasm; positive expectation/belief; optimism; hopefulness; contentment.Downward Scale: boredom, pessimism, frustration, irritation, impatience; “overwhelmed”; disappointment; doubt; worry; blame; discouragement; anger; revenge; hatred, /rage; jealousy; insecurity/guilt/unworthiness; fear, grief, depression, powerlessness, victim.
I just discovered this scale while browsing around the web. This sort of thing is fairly interesting to me so I figured I’d talk about it.
I love this! Ilenva, who writes Silence of Silence, hips us to the Abraham-Hicks Emotional Guidance scale. This is an allegedly divinely inspired (and you know what, I'm on the side of divinely-inspired. This is too big for a mere human to dream up without Help.) It gives us an easily grokked graphical diagram of how our emotional states work. We are either on an upward spiral or a downward spiral at any moment in time. The Emotional Guidance Scale provides us with a great toolbox for locating where we are at any given moment, and either encouraging us to keep going up until we achieve what I would call unity with the Universal Overarching Creative Presence (my term), or giving us an opportunity to catch ourselves in a downward slide and (hopefully) use our own toolbox to make a leap over to the positive spiral and get on up and out of there. I might have to make a laminated card out of this to carry on my person and check in with when I'm feeling slide-y in the wrong direction. I hope y'all enjoy this, and do hop on over to Ilenva's blog and see what she's up to.
Awards and Stuff
It’s hard to accept blog awards when you don’t really feel like you deserve them. However, these were the last …
Anxiety attack from hell
For the last year, I have been through stressful periods, and sometimes, I fell apart and emotional shrapnel went flying.
Other times, it was just “take it a day at a time” and while I worried, I did not obsess or come apart at the seams.
I was pondering this the other day, how with all that has gone wrong in the last year, am I not spazzing out?
Well, it hit last night, in the form of an anxiety attack that lead to a heart attack-like panic episode.
It was 11:30 pm, I was finally going to bed…and WHAM! My mind just began to overflow, a total traffic jam of financial stressors and what ifs and holiday stress. It boiled over, and my heart rate accelerated, my thoughts became fearful and paranoid, my mood went from semi stable and upbeat to OHMYGODWHATTHEFUCKAMIGONNADO??????
It was all encompassing. Gripping.
I had to take an extra xanax.
I eventually fell asleep.
And woke up at 3:52 am and have been up since.
My stomach is burning, which is the typical physical reaction when my stress level boils over.
I do not want to see my job lady today. Not after being rejected for that position I wanted so desperately. It was doubly insulting that I was disqualified from the running the very day after the interview. I guess a history of instability and a panic attack induced babbling during the interview are not what employers are looking for.
That just kicked me down into the gutter.
I had had hope. I am fully qualified. But I will never live down my past. And I can’t even deny my present struggle.
Major bucket of suckage.
I don’t want to go to the shop.
I don’t want to think about Christmas.
I want to curl up under a warm blanket in a nice dark safe closet and lick my wounds and try to remember how to breathe.
But I will wind myself up and do what has to be done and pray the physical symptoms die down soon. It is so hard to function when not just your mind is off kilter, but when your body has followed as well.
People think mental problems are not a big deal provided you are not dancing in the street naked while wearing a tinfoil hat.
They are very very very wrong.
Mental illness impacts everything in your life, not just things that are stressful.
Would be one thing if my “symptoms” were limited to holding a job.
But this shit follows me everywhere, jobs, relationship, hobbies, socializing, even my ability to relate to my kid.
And those morons who think it’s some character flaw or a weakness…I would like to shoot them. Not nice, but sorry, I would. Or whack them with the metaphoric shovel.
This is not a good quality of life.
having to wind yourself up on a daily basis wears you down physically and mentally.
I am at the point now where I have to force myself into the shower with self bullying techniques. It just seems like too much trouble. No one cares how I look. No one wants to get close enough to me to tell if I smell bad. They might catch my mental cooties.
What does it fucking matter?
But I will fling myself into the shower, and I will feel better afterwards.
Then will come time to shower again and the battle with myself will begin again.
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
Suckage.
Posted in Read Along
Do you think they will ever find out the how and why of mental illness?
I do so looove reading the literature when I get a new med, or visiting the website.
They all have that cutesy little thing going. “It is not known exactly how (insert med name here) works, but it is “thought” to…”
Yet, desperate little creatures we are, we go ahead and agree to take the meds, in hopes of feeling better.
They don’t know how the meds work.
They can’t really explain why some people’s brains have these alleged “chemical imbalances.”
Some “professionals” surmise that it is all behavioral and depression is simply a choice and mood swings are a learned behavior. (Borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder have many characteristics in common which makes one wonder how many people are bipolar and not being treated properly because some genius professional has declared it nothing more than a personality quirk.)
No one can just grow a pair and admit: WE HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA. NONE. ZILCH. WE ARE IGNORANT. CLUELESS.
Furthermore, the professionals can’t agree on much of anything. Psychologists tend to be against meds and want to talk you into being cured.
Shrinks don’t want to talk to you, they just want to shovel pills your way.
Seek counsel with a religious leader and they’re likely to suggest an exorcism.
No one knows shit. No one agrees on anything.
And here we are, grappling with an illness that can’t be explained and is thought fictional by the masses, taking medications that often have horrid side effects and no one knows exactly how they work or what ten or so years of taking them might do…
And the masses think we do this for fun, like side effects and constant misery somehow benefit us and add to the quality of our lives.
To these ignorant professionals and mindless masses I want to say something:
WE ARE WILLING TO GO TO ALL THE DOCTORS AND COUNSELORS AND TAKE ALL THESE MEDICATIONS BECAUSE WE ARE DESPERATE BECAUSE OUR BRAINS ARE SENDING US THE WRONG MESSAGES AND ALL WE WANT IS TO FEEL STABLE!!!!!!!!
If you are wondering what sparked this particular rant…
Well, today around 3 pm, my mood just suddenly, abruptly went south. I don’t mean shifted. I mean, bottomed out, like falling down an elevator shaft. There was no trigger. There was no missed med dosage. Just from out of nowhere I became extremely down and sad. R even noticed and asked what was going on.
And I had nothing beyond, “I don’t know, I just feel very down.”
Another curveball hit around 4pm when random anxiety attacks swooped down on me, causing the whole racing heart, sweating, shaking, paranoia, fear, rolling stomach…Again, no trigger, no missed meds. Just random.
It got me to thinking…
Why, with all of the medications and progress in the psych field, why do we still not have explanations? Why is it all still “this is thought to be caused by” or “it is not known how this works, but is thought to …”
It’s like suffering from The Unknown Illness. We don’t know what it is, but we’ll cook up this book called the diagnostic manual, and we’ll give everything a syndrome or disorder name, and we’ll ply them with meds and they will thank us for the glimmer of hope of feeling better even if we can’t explain why they feel shitty in the first place or why the pills we give them makes them feel better/worse.
And ya know, we’ll make a gazillion dollars charging an arm, leg, and their firstborn up til the patent runs out and people start having organ failure or dropping dead from our drug and we can shove some cash their way…and make up a new drug and rinse, lather, repeat.
Sound jaded? Maybe even paranoid? Irrational?
Hardly.
I don’t discount a lot of pharma companies aim to do good deeds and help.
I also don’t discount that a lot are money grubbing soul less assholes who’d feed their own mother a cyanide/arsenic combo to make a buck.
(My Cymbalta, what the insurance paid, for one month, was almost $400. You do the math.)
Yet they can’t even definitely tell me how this shit works.
And no one can tell me why I feel the way I do, other than “it could be genetic/familial.”
Very comforting.
NOT.
I want to know why. Why does my brain send the wrong messages?
I know I will likely never exactly know why.
But I wonder. Constantly.
