Triggered And In So Much Pain

[Ava Jarvis]

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of pain.

And like. This is only Mother's Day. The holidays just provoke worse reactions from here on out.

Gods I don't know how I'm going to ever cope with anything ever again. I don't know how I'm going to work again.

But yeah, plans for trying to create a new tradition have failed miserably which is like insult on top of injury.

I feel so horrible. I've been with my trauma for more than 20 years. And it still hurts and I still can't cope. If anything it's gotten so much worse.

I have to operate tomorrow enough to call paratransit ride at 7am and try to get them to correct the wrong pick-up time they assigned to me so that I actually get my therapist's appointment.

I alternate between dead inside and unfortunately not dead inside.

It's pretty bad that I feel terrible for putting pressure on my friend (who is also chronically ill). But they don't tell me to stop and they don't pressure me to stop and they don't passive-aggressively push back at me, even though they are flaring up themselves. That welcoming of my honesty is one of the few things that gets me to try harder to be ok.

But it's ok to not be ok. I don't owe being ok to anyone. That's what my friend says, and it's true.

I spent much of this morning on the phone with one of my other friends trying not to scream and failing. Lost myself to time and the past even though I tried so hard not to lose it.

Tomorrow is gonna be full of screaming. If the pattern holds out as it has over the past, the worst days are yet to come as the delayed reaction to the holiday winds up and then explodes.

I hate seeing that all coming. I get so complacent during spring.

And it will only get worse. Until early fall, roughly speaking, and then everything goes downhill but MUCH worse.

Oh well. It's just straight-up suffering and nothing ever stops it and I'm going to just fall apart no matter how hard I try tomorrow.

I say this on any other forum, I get some asshole telling me to "man up" and "grit through the pain" and "be strong" and "I'm just giving you tough love."

It's going to get so bad.

 

[Ava Jarvis]

Ohh yeh. I'd take some Xanax, except I decided never to do that again, because I just end up taking the whole bottle, not cause I'm trying to kill myself, but because the Xanax does almost nothing at normal doses.

 

[sun seeker]

I'm sorry.

Unfortunately, I can relate to a lot of what you are saying. I wish I knew what to say to make it better, but I don't... except that I don't think anyone here is going to tell you to be strong. (What do they think we're doing, anyway??)

I really hope the therapist turns out to be awesome. That would be the silver lining in what looks like an otherwise very dark cloud.

 

[Ava Jarvis]

Ok. I am going to apply my Amazon Training to this.

I am going to instrument the SHIT out of what is happening to me. ("Instrument" in programming parlance is basically to put in code that takes measurement of the live performance of the code in various ways—speed, memory usage, etc.)

I am going to get data. I know from the past that roughly a Mother's Day is the baseline for the rest of the holiday. The scale goes like this and is fairly predictable:

Mother's Day < Father's Day < Birthday < New Year's <<< Thanksgiving << Christmas

Valentine's Day is an outlier. I don't feel much on it some years, other years it hits as hard as Mother's Day.

There is not a strict linear progression of constant coefficients going on here in terms of stuff like Despair Power, Flashback Probabilities, Average Severity of Flashbacks, and the Length of Affected Days and the wave function that approximates my emotions during those days. I'd say the progression is more of an exponential curve of some sort.

Everything is pretty rough and it'll be hard to come up with units of some sort, I guess. Might be a good idea to take a base of five relative units for each measurement. Then I can scale up for successive holidays up the chain. I imagine there is some kind of plateau too—units probably don't always go up, they could level out at some upper limit.

Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

Gonna science the SHIT out of this if nothing else.

I mean, I'm already tracking my moods on this mood tracker thing that allows me to track mood to any scale of time I want: not just daily, not even just hourly. Thing has second-level granularity, but mostly that just means I can track any flips or dips at any time I want.

Science the SHIT out of this.

 

[Ava Jarvis]

Thanks @sun seeker. Yeah.

But science. Gotta do something. It might not be worth much.

Just not sure ... Not sure how any of this is gonna work in the future. The current money won't hold out forever but it will last into next year if I'm careful and nothing terrible happens financially.

 

[Ava Jarvis]

My friends remember previous years. Sadly I don't, because the PTSD also manages to do something to whatever tries to store some of my memories into longer-term storage. The mood tracker will record some data for me at least in something that can't (as easily) lose it.

My friends and I will compare notes as well when I am better.

 

[Ava Jarvis]

Did I ever say that me and my closest buds are nearly all nerds to a T?

Cognitive science and all that, some of them, programming also.

We can do this. Like in The Martian.