Well everyone, I am posting this post on my mental health blog, because I think the thing I want to talk about has to do with a mental illness symptom that I have decided to give in to on purpose. It is kind of an OCD symptom, and the resulting effect puts me in a certain category that I usually try to avoid, which is “eccentricity.” Basically, as I feel sad to take down my awesome Christmas tree and another smaller Christmas tree, I have decided to replace those decorations with three fake Christmas trees from K-mart. One of them is already up and decorated, and tomorrow I am hoping to pick up another one that I ordered a few days ago. I will just move all the lights and ornaments from my other tree, and it will be in my room year round. I love my apartment, but it is kind of small, and I do think that having three Christmas trees as the main light sources is something unusual in the way that would cause many normal people to have their sanity questioned. Well my mental illness is usually very much over all the lines into mental hospital territory, and I personally try not to be in a zone that seems more like a “just a plain old weirdo” category. I’ve just never wanted to be a “crazy cat lady,” or one of those people who might be kind of gifted, or might just put too much stock in New Age crystals and the occult. Well of course a few Christmas trees here and there is not the same as that, but I have to say that to me, this allowance for OCD to have its way does in fact knock me either down a few notches or up a few notches to be a classic, undeniable oddball, much like certain Christmas ornaments that can be purchased at the 99 cent store in my neighborhood if anyone else wants to celebrate Christmas in a possibly excessive way.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Monday, December 16, 2019
A Chocolate Fix
Hi everyone, I thought I would share something interesting and kind of funny about something good that happened because of some chocolate desserts. Dessert is already pretty good as it is, and chocolate actually does help with depression. But yesterday, I was looking at just a picture of chocolate desserts, and my whole outlook changed in a way that I think could be very lasting. I have had religion problems for a long time, and felt an excessive sense of responsibility for people’s spiritual wellbeing and safety, and several years ago became more fretful about other problems in the world and poverty and suffering in our country. I have felt a sense of hopelessness sometimes, thinking that there are too many people who do not have a clue about how to help everyone out there who needs help.
But yesterday on facebook, I found a New York Times page featuring their best chocolate desserts, and something about it made me realize and actually believe that there are millions of great people out there who are making the world a better place. That seems kind of stupid, but that is the reason I am writing about it. It is just kind of comical. With all the heroism and miracle medical care interventions I know about, something about the chocolate desserts actually convinced me that there are enough good people to overcome all the world’s evil and problems after all. I just imagined the kind of people who would make those perfect chocolate puddings and cakes and pies, and I thought they must be awesome people, and it made me have a sense that maybe we do have enough good people out there.
I am writing about it on this mental health blog instead of my regular blog because I think there might be some mental health principles mixed in with why that worked on me like that. My despair has reached delusional proportions at times, but the sight of chocolate pie somehow reached me, and I am now thinking about all the nice school teachers and all the good kids who don’t pick on other kids, and all the medical places and emergency rooms and people in other countries, too, and feeling more hopeful.
Something about the common-ness of chocolate desserts, and the fact that the people making desserts that good aren’t usually seen as heroes, necessarily, and yet are providing one of the best things you can think of for people, made me feel like the scale must literally be tipped towards happiness. It is so funny, because I really did look at all the pies and puddings and thought, everyone is going to be okay.
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Retail Store PTSD
I have recently been remembering sad times from my early years of mental illness. I did great when I first became mentally ill, and was able to finish college. But then, when I got home, I had to go work in a bookstore and was on the wrong psychiatric medicine. It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I stayed at the bookstore for twelve years, and during the last two years, for some reason, people started being mean to me and humiliating me with all the embarrassing material that I already had been abused by for years. I think about it all the time and people are probably tired of me always trying to think and talk about it and try to find some kind of mastery over the experience.
I actually did achieve some happiness after all by writing poetry, being blessed with awesome friends, and doing things like making cookies and volunteering. So I am okay, but I think that looking back, it is kind of interesting to see the bookends of torture that were part of my bookstore life. It was about two years on either side, and my experience during the first part was essentially a condition of something like a captivity PTSD, and the condition from my last years is more like a combat PTSD. I of course don’t mean to compare the experience itself with what people go through as crime victims and soldiers, but I think that it is very interesting to see the nature of the conditions. For the first problems, I was essentially trapped and drugged. There is no way to describe how bad the medicine hurt me and how much people were okay with that for various reasons. And what is left to do but try to escape in some way. That is the correct goal during captivity. And then, with the last part, when people start tearing me to shreds and threatening a life and literary contribution that I worked on for years after losing everything, the nature of the destruction is kind of a shredding and tearing of my life and self. The symptoms are very different and aren’t as much about escape, but the results from facing everything and managing emotions and mental life that were torn up on purpose.
I don’t really need to try to label it necessarily, but I do like labels and naming things, and have always appreciated my mental health diagnosis as an explanation for a whole life that doesn’t match a lot of the world. I think to look back now with some sense of recovery but also a sense of loss, it is kind of interesting to interpret the extra disorders that got added to my illness, and see a very clear pattern that can’t be denied. In some ways, for a while, it did seem deniable and even absurd. I still can see it as being comical to end up with trauma like that from working in a bookstore. But obviously there was more to it than that. There was bad medicine, depression itself, the threat of mania and psychosis, family problems, four hundred thousand customers who I had no control over, a concentration of the most destructive media problems in history, and then the oddest component of all, which is bad people deliberately making it worse for some reason. Soon I will try to move on from these recent blog topics, but it has been on my mind a lot lately, partially because of legal intimidation and health problems. In the end, I have to note the interesting absurdity and find some happiness because of what a never-ending comedy resource it is likely to be for several thousand or million years.
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