Wednesday August 12th - An Unexpectedly Disappointing Start

If you're here it's most likely that you came from my Bluesky account where I recently shared a thread opening up about my struggles with some significant mental health issues. What was all that about, then? In that thread, I said I would be admitting myself to an inpatient program at a mental health hospital. Funny story about that... When I went to my intake they did not admit me for inpatient hospitalization like I was hoping they would. Instead they referred me across the street to a different program in a different building. Apparently the facility I went to is primarily intended for crisis intervention care and, according to the people I spoke with, the partial hospitalization program offered across the street would better suit my needs. But it would take another day or two to get started in something like that.

I don't know what I was expecting when I first arrived, but it certainly wasn't this. I've been pushing back against multiple people in my life telling me to admit myself to a program like this for so long now. I had finally got to the point where I had accepted the fact that I need help. I actually took myself to the hospital and did the hard thing of asking for help... and they said I didn't need it?

Now, I know that's not actually what they said. The program they referred me to is probably much closer to what I actually need. The inpatient hospital is more for individuals experiencing crisis, and I'm not. My struggles are very real and significant, but they're more of a slow burn than an active blaze. The honest truth is that I'm not in the form of crisis that this facility is intended for. But after everything in my journey that brought me there in that moment that was not what I wanted to hear.

Unfortunately (or maybe it was actually extremely fortunate, who knows) I was too tired and apathetic to respond to this in the moment so I just kind of let it wash over me. They directed me over to the other building and said that they'd talk to me about treatment there; so that's what I did. They explained how the partial hospitalization program allows participants to return home each night and maintain a significant level of autonomy (especially in comparison to inpatient hospitalization). The program runs 9am-1pm from Monday through Friday, usually for about 3 weeks. The space was about as welcoming as a corporate healthcare facility can be. I immediately noticed lots of queer friendly decor very quickly which is always a good sign in a place like this. There were a few rooms for group therapy, some individual meeting rooms, and a lunch room that featured an office-style kitchenette and some fridges. The space actually reminded me of the PRIDE center at the college I attended (May she rest in peace. Curse the Ohio legislature and their crusade against queer existence!) at least on an aesthetic level. The very kind woman behind the front desk brought me back to the front desk and told me I could start on Thursday, which was another 2 days out from that moment. I knew it wouldn't be very successful to push for anything sooner, and I didn't exactly want to try anyway. So I just said, "Okay, thans" and left. I walked across the parking lot, unlocked my car, and sat back down in the driver's seat, heavy with the crushing weight of yet another defeat.

And then I had to drive myself home. I had left not anticipating to return for at least a week. It had only been about 6 hours. It felt like I had already built this whole situation up into such a significant endeavor and immediately fell flat on my face before it even began. I had never felt like such a complete failure. That drive home was really challenging. I had to fight off so many of the self-defeating emotions which were the driving force behind me even doing any of this in the first place. It felt like all my demons were throwing a party to celebrate their absolute victory over me and rubbing it in with as much salt in the wound as they could muster. I'm not gonna lie: It wasn't fun; It was probably one of the most difficult drives I've ever made. I wasn't crying or panicking or anything like that; the driving itself was actually fairly easy (I think I somehow avoided the mid-day traffic because the roads were actually really empty). But I just sat there in the deafening silence of road noise through a busted door seal and let every single horrible thing my brain could come up with reverberate inside my head and throughout my very being. I don't want to share the specifics of what those thoughts were; honestly it's a slippery slope that I can't venture too far down without falling back down to the bottom. So I will just say that it was one of the most intense spirals I have experienced that I can remember and it lasted from the moment I turned on my navigation to the moment I pulled back into my apartment complex's parking lot. When I got inside the only thing I was able to bring myself to do was lay down on the couch. It was about 6pm when I laid down and I didn't get up until noon the following day. My hips and shoulders ached as I sat myself up. I could smell my breath. I don't know how long its been since I was this deep in the pit... but, here we go again.

I don't want to do this. Not again. I don't want to have to do this again. I don't want to have to pick myself up and climb out of this Pit like I have had to do so many times before. My arms are sore, and I just want to sit here at the bottom. I wish I could lay here and watch my flesh rot away and my bones weather into dust. Maybe beautiful mushrooms would blossom from the nutrients my body could provide. it feels like that's all I have left to give this world.

If only I could just do that.

How cruel is it that our instinct is to survive? When all I want, more than anything I've wanted before, is to lay down on the floor and curl up so tight that I pop out of existence, something keeps me from crossing that line. It's happened every single time I've found myself this deep in the Pit. Whenever I just want to let go, something snaps inside of me and holds on with inhuman force.

This human world has failed me. The world we have constructed is not built compatible with brains like mine. It has pushed me away and told me I have no value to it, that if I cannot meet its cruel and inhumane expectations then I should just go away and die. But instead of giving up, something inside me just keeps going, completely unaware that there's even any other option. It's like how a cat doesn't really recognize the reflection in a mirror as their own face. This part of me is unable to recognize that my brain, the shape in which my consciousness exists, just doesn't fit into the cookie-cutter shapes that our constructed world demands we squeeze ourselves into. It feels animalistic how this instinct suddenly washes over me. But every time I find myself here, back in the deepest depths of the Pit, that instinct finds me through the darkness once again and won't let me let go. So eventually I sit back up.

I sat up around 12:45 today. By then I had been on the couch for over 18 hours. My husband helped me get a drink of water and we walked to a nearby Sonic to get some food. I hadn't eaten for over a day, so I needed to eat something. It was nice to feel the sun on my skin.

Thursday August 13th - Casting Off (For Real this Time)

Okay. Well, I have officially made it to the partial hospitalization program I was referred to when I first went in seeking inpatient care. I did it! That's a victory worth celebrating, even if I don't want to. This was my first day. It was largely intake related stuff. I spoke with a doctor about physical symptoms, discussed medications with a psychiatrist, and spoke with one of the providers about the struggles that brought me there. I did also have the unfortunately necessary conversation with the business manager. You know the one... where you get to see the bill. Those one on one conversations were sprinkled throughout a longer day consisting almost entirely of group therapy. I was gently pulled out of the group setting whenever someone needed to discuss anything directly with me.

Group therapy is entirely new to me. I've been in the mental healthcare system for over a decade now I've managed to only ever do individual treatments. Being in this kind of group environment is somehow still a first, and I definitely felt it. I was honestly terrified the entire time. It took me quite a while to speak up for the first time, and after the fact I was shaking. My chest felt caved in and trembled like I had just downed 2 glasses of ice water and felt frozen from the inside out. But I was able to get myself to contribute something to the conversation, and I even got some really nice positive feedback from a few of the other participants.

What were we actually talking about, then? The discussion was surprisingly structured. All of the participants (I never counted but I want to say there's about 12 of us in the room) start by filling what can only be described as a worksheet. Actually, on that note... A tangent: A lot of my experience so far has felt unexpectedly like school. Specifically it gives community college vibes with a touch of corporate healthcare mixed in. The discussions are lead by one of the providers who, and I say this lovingly, feels like a teacher in this setting. It all just feels so much like school and I wasn't expecting that at all. Ok, tangent over.

The worksheet is fairly straightforward. You start by identifying from a list any emotions you've felt in the past 24 hours; things like sad, frustrated, hopeful, scared, etc. I find it very helpful to have a list to choose from, because I struggle to identify my emotions in a vacuum without any prompting.

A Sidenote on a Recent Understanding

I experience something which I only recently found a word to describe. It's called alexithymia, or emotional blindness. It's more of a symptom than it's own distinct disorder or condition. Now, take this all with a heavy grain of salt: I've learned about this on my own and not from a medical professional so my understanding is likely not 100% accurate. But how I've come to understand this phenomenon in my own experiences is as lack of an inherent sense of my current emotional state. Don't get me wrong, I can understand the emotions I'm feeling in a given moment, but the process is more manual than automatic.

What does that mean in more tangible terms? Consider proprioception, which is one of those secret extra senses we have but don't teach to children alongside the main 5: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. If you're unfamiliar, proprioception is the sense of where our bodies are in space around us. Hold your hand behind your head and you just inherently know where it is even though you can't see it: that's proprioception. If I didn't experience alexithymia I imagine understanding my emotional state would be more like knowing where my hand is behind my head. But with alexithymia, I have to go through a much more manual process to determine and understand my emotions.

I have to have a moment of recognition, consciously assess myself, my feelings, and my behavior, and come to a conclusion on what emotions I'm feeling. Some are easier to identify than others while many I'm just not good at recognizing. Anger is one example that I struggle with. I don't get angry nearly as much as I used to. But when I am angry I often find myself so caught up in being angry that I'm not aware that I'm getting angry at all. In these moments my emotions are directly controlling my actions and behavior with no cognitive step where I let my rational brain assess the situation and respond in a way that is appropriate. I often fail to trigger the first step: having a moment of recognition, which means that process never triggers. That's just, one of the emotional weaknesses that I have recognized in myself.

Before I move on with the rest of the worksheet, I want to share how I still, even after the self-awareness of this emotional blindness, get caught off guard by it in unexpected ways. Earlier I described how my chest was trembling after sharing in the group setting for the first time. In full honesty, it was a very physically intense feeling, but I wasn't panicking about it. I didn't think I was having a heart attack or anything, because I'd actually felt that exact feeling plenty of times before. But somehow it wasn't until that instance that I connected the dots in my head between that feeling and the anxiety that caused it. It feels silly in retrospect that it took that long to associate the feeling directly with the anxiety and use it as a stepping stone to work backwards from "what am I physically feeling?" to "how am I emotionally feeling?" I may have spent 12 years in therapy working on myself, but I still have plenty of blind spots. I'm still learning, I will be forever, and moments like these are what that process can look like.

Ok so back to the worksheet. The rest consists of similar "in the last 24 hours" style questions. I rated my depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation out of 10, identified any major stressors I've experienced, that kind of stuff. There's also a question asking what I'd like to talk about with the group today; I want to put a pin in that and return to it later.

Once everyone's filled out their worksheet, we all take turns sharing our responses with the group. The provider leading the conversation responds first, offers their thoughts and asks further questions, and then opens it up for the rest of the group to converse. And to my surprise, that is the majority of the group therapy discussion. There are additional conversations lead by the provider (which I missed out on that day because I was pulled out to discuss medications) but the main chunk of time is spent giving everyone time to share their responses and discuss what they want to discuss.

And as far as my first day goes, that was about it. Group sessions go from 9am-1pm. I'm driving up to Columbus each day so I had about 2 hours on the road to get home, so that makes it more like 7am-3pm. By the time I made it back home I was so exhausted. I laid down on the couch and fell asleep before I could realize that's what I was doing. I woke up in time to leave for Friday's session.

Saturday August 15th - So What Now?

It's Saturday now. I was too tired to write about Friday. I also could've gone to a voluntary Saturday session today, but I slept in and woke up feeling stable enough to take the day for myself.

I told myself I was going to take this moment seriously. I said that after all the time I'd spent apathetically wallowing in the Pit, the time had finally come to do what I have had to do so many times before and climb my way back to the surface.

I don't want a lot from this world. I'm not asking for much here. I just want enough stability in my life that I can feel confident about navigating the future. But time and time again I find myself where I am now: at the bottom of the Pit. I've never been able to find the stability I want. It's hard not to get hopeless and resign myself to the belief that it's just not possible for me. How will I ever be able to build a life I want if I constantly have to crawl out from underneath crisis after crashout after episode after burnout? I'm 26 years old and I still struggle to brush my teeth and shower on a regular basis. It's embarrassing.

Is this how Sisyphus felt?

Once again I am forced to confront reality. The world is going to keep on spinning, with or without me. The universal law of entropy has yet to be dethroned. For now, and forever, I will have to continue to work towards what I want. Even if I somehow one day find that I have achieved exactly what I have been desperately longing for, tomorrow looms ahead. Even the strongest foundations weather to time. The world is not a stagnant phenomenon. Everything exists in constant motion. That can be the most beautiful and freeing thing. But it also means that staying often feels like moving backwards. Everything is always changing forever, and that is a very sharp double-edged sword. There are always new opportunities and new beginnings, but we must stay moving to find them.

Thats the curse of all of this. We have to do this for ourselves. Nobody else is going to take care of ourselves but us. I went to my intake for inpatient care on Tuesday having given up, and hoping once again that someone else would solve it for me. Even though I was actively embracing the fact that I was going to have to do lots of specific work by myself, for myself, for the rest of my life, I still fell victim to the universal desire to want someone else to just fix it.

Nobody else is going to just fix this.

If it has to be me, I might as well just start. There's no value in wasting time and wallowing in it any longer. Besides... I've been doing exactly that for long enough now. So how am I going to do that, then?

It feels like almost everything in my life has come to a stop. I'm off my habits and routines almost entirely. I'm not taking my meds. I spend much of my down time dissociating on the couch. There are very few things going on for me currently that won't need some sort of restart at this point. This is, honestly, not new. And that is, honestly, so deeply discouraging. But I have to continue moving forward, and so I just won't be discouraged by it.

That everything has come to a stop is also, in a way, very freeing. The canvas is blank, and very little is in my way that I would have to remove. It's an incredible privilege to be able to fall into moments like this and not have it be life ruinously devastating. I have somewhere to live and sleep at night, after all. There is so much I have to be grateful for in this moment, and I try very hard to maintain my awareness of those things. But awareness isn't enough. I need to do them justice. I need to take every effort I can to make the best of this moment. If not for myself, then for every single person who has sacrificed something big or small to help me get by until now.

What's the Plan?

Let's do that then; Let's take this seriously. I thought that admitting myself to the hospital would automatically be a reset and a restart in many ways. That didn't happen, so now I have to do it myself. My gut instinct is to approach this process with three high level steps:

1. Honestly and accurately assess where I'm at right now. What does my life look like? How do I spend my time? What do my surroundings look like?

2. Decide long term goals. Where do I want to be? Where don't I want to be? What do I want my life to look like and how do I wish I spent my time?

3. Chart our path forward. What does the path from today to tomorrow look like? What could different routes look like? What are some immediate next steps that could help build early momentum?

Reading this back, it's kind of a parallel to the process for navigating with a map. Modern navigation tools make this very convenient, and they've boiled it down into three very similar steps:

1. Where are you? Usually these apps can detect your location and pinpoint you on the map.

2. Where are you going? Put in the address you're trying to navigate to.

3. How do you want to get there? Sometimes, more often with longer routes, you'll be given a few route options. You can choose which way you want to get to your destination, before the active navigating process begins.

Somehow, noticing that similarity makes the Sisyphean dread I was describing earlier feel less dreadful. Maybe I'm not constantly pulling myself out of the same Pit over and over. Sure, maybe I keep falling into a pit, but it's not the same Pit each time. When I'm at the surface I'm not just hanging around in the same place. I'm moving forward on my journey.

Okay, maybe the Pit is becoming a less accurate metaphor... Maybe instead I can try to view it through a different lens: as if drifting off course on an ocean voyage. My life is mine to lead and so I have charted a path forward that I wish to follow. But life is, of course, unpredictable, and so things keep throwing me off course. Where as seeing it as "in the Pit" feels like I'm back in the same place as before, seeing it as being off course doesn't. It's an easier metaphor to use and still recognize all the progress I've made in my life. Sure, maybe I keep finding myself off course, that may be true. but in my defense: we're sailing in some pretty stormy waters right now. It's hard to stay perfectly on track in the first place, but at least we're still above water, right? Besides, does it really matter if we drift a little off course here and there along the way as long as we make it to where we're going in the end? I like this linguistic change. It makes these moments feel less like a setback and makes it easier to accept that as long as we stay forward, it's just part of the journey.

Earlier, I expressed how at 26 I still struggle with basic habits and routines like brushing my teeth or showering consistently. I called it embarrassing, because it feels like I'm struggling with the same stuff I struggled with as a child. I remember how, when I was young and questioning authority as all children do, I would go to the bathroom when my mom told me to brush my teeth and just pretend. She learned that she had to smell my breath to make sure I actually brushed my teeth like she told me to. It feels so juvenile. Why go through all that effort to avoid brushing when it would be just as much effort to just do it? Well, in my defense I was a juvenile, so maybe that's ok. But the truth is I'm not a child anymore. I don't need my mom to check my breath to make sure I've brushed my teeth anymore. It's up to me now, and I have been successful at living up to those expectations on my own. But at the same time, sometimes I still fall off track, and thats ok. Like I described earlier when I finally sat up on the couch after rotting there for 18 hours: sometimes I can smell my own breath. I have myself to lean on where I didn't before. I have so many more experiences to draw from, tools to use, and a much stronger support network behind me as I continue to move forward in my life. Yeah, sometimes I fall into moments of my life where habits like consistent hygiene and self care fall to the wayside. But there are also times in which I am much better at maintaining consistency in those habits. And even if I find myself in another moment where those habits are weaker, I know that I have been closer to where I want to be in the past and I will be able to find my way back there again. Maybe this time I get even closer than I ever have before.

So... What About this Website?

I will confess, this is not how I initially planned on launching this website. I've been cooking on the idea of starting a blog for some time now. Professionally, I'm a graphic and web designer, and I've always desired to have my own personal website to do fun things with. I've been watching from a distance a growing resurgence of personal websites and forms of online presences which are re-embracing independence and invoking the energy of a bye-gone early-internet era. I want to be a part of that in my own way, and exist online outside of major platforms and social media feeds. This feels like a good first step towards that; it's simple and achievable. And it gives me a place and a reason to start practicing my writing again. It's been a long time since I've had that.

I have actually been building the structure of a basic website for a while now; it's close to finished enough that I think I can get it into a polished state fairly quickly. I may have let myself ruminate too long on how I want to kick this off. Do I make some sort of introduction post? Do I just start with blog posts about things I'm interested in? How do I want to approach this? I think that question has started to get in the way. So let's try to side-step it entirely. This doesn't have to be perfectly well put together right from the very start. Why not just start by sharing some public journal entries? Just start doing it and worry about how to do it better once you've gotten started.

I've been journaling for a significant part of my life, but it's primarily focused more on task and event planning than it is on writing about my experiences more narratively. My journal entries are lists, not a paragraphs. I'm sure I'll be sharing more about those journals here soon enough, but suffice it to say, I've actually avoided for surprisingly long the more traditional style of long-form reflective journaling. Until now! I'm in this moment in my life where I've given myself a significant chunk of time to look inward and focus on myself and my emotional needs. If there's any time to try that more traditional journaling style, it's now. And I think that embracing radical transparency could help me here. Honestly, I don't know if trying to do this just for myself and the value it brings for my current treatment is enough to get myself to consistently follow through. But if I set the expectation that I want to share these thoughts and reflections publicly, even if nobody is interested I think that might be more motivating. The mere act of committing to do this reflecting in a public forum itself becomes an accountability buddy, even if nobody is reading.

So I'm just doing it. I'm launching my blog. Yay! Yippee! This is the launch post, I guess. Instead of coming up with some over planned out launch strategy I'm just going to start by posting some public journal entries, like this one. I'll keep doing that as long as I find it valuable, and as I have more to share, I'm sure you'll see that too. In a short time here I think I might get around to some sort of self-introduction post, but for now I'm still getting to know whoever it is that I want to present here. In many ways, whoever finds themselves at home in my head is still a stranger to me. But we're meeting up for coffee every now and then so I'm sure I'll know them well enough to introduce you all here soon. I hope these public journal entries may bring value to even one person who stumbles across this website, but if not I know they will bring value to myself. If you've made it this far, thanks for your time. I'm not sure I knew where I was going with any of this when I started, but I think I like where I ended up. Somehow I got nearly 5000 words out since I started writing this. Yeah, maybe I could learn to be more concise, but for now I'm just happy to get this out. Maybe in the future I'll find more time to write a shorter letter.