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I just realized that it's been a couple of months since I wrote anything here. I'm trying to be more consistent than that.
Mostly what's been happening in the intervening time is that depression has been kicking my ass. I got a little bit of relief while on vacation in Seattle, but that was also only a little bit of time, and now it's back in full force. Most (75%? More?) of the intrinsic reward that I depend on for motivation to do much of anything has simply evaporated into the ether, so far as I can tell. If nothing else, the habit I've needed to cultivate these past several years of 'eat every 4h like clockwork' is standing up well under stress testing, even if what gets eaten is banana-and-yogurt rather than a proper meal. Cooked food was an early casualty to the acute shortage of fucks to give, but regularly putting something in my stomach has not been.
I'm finding this difficult from another, unexpected direction. Some 2/3 of my life was lived in an environment where the family-unit (whatever its variable composition) had no resources to deal with awareness of my problems, let alone the problems themselves. And so I learned to wear the mask of okayness everywhere, to reinforce it at home, and to withdraw from people so that they wouldn't be burdened by my needs*. But right now, living with Z, there is no place to withdraw to. And I'm malfunctioning too badly to keep up a socially acceptable veneer, no matter how my conditioned reflexes scream that Bad Things Will Happen.
The fact is that my problems right now are a weight on Z, when he's already operating near the limit of what he can handle. I can see that my inability to get traction on dealing with the current MDE is deeply frustrating to him. (It frustrates me as well, of course, when I can feel anything besides the undifferentiated greyness.) And yet, he's still here. He has not rejected me for this un-chosen thing that my brain does, or backed away from my suffering out of self-preservation. I am inexpressibly grateful to him.
Now if only I could find where my unwanted programming lives and shove his counterexample down its throat.
* This meshes interestingly with having also picked up such a degree of hypervigilance in any social situation that it doesn't leave enough attention for being aware of what I need, much less what I feel. At any given time, which failtastic bit of programming predominates?
Mostly what's been happening in the intervening time is that depression has been kicking my ass. I got a little bit of relief while on vacation in Seattle, but that was also only a little bit of time, and now it's back in full force. Most (75%? More?) of the intrinsic reward that I depend on for motivation to do much of anything has simply evaporated into the ether, so far as I can tell. If nothing else, the habit I've needed to cultivate these past several years of 'eat every 4h like clockwork' is standing up well under stress testing, even if what gets eaten is banana-and-yogurt rather than a proper meal. Cooked food was an early casualty to the acute shortage of fucks to give, but regularly putting something in my stomach has not been.
I'm finding this difficult from another, unexpected direction. Some 2/3 of my life was lived in an environment where the family-unit (whatever its variable composition) had no resources to deal with awareness of my problems, let alone the problems themselves. And so I learned to wear the mask of okayness everywhere, to reinforce it at home, and to withdraw from people so that they wouldn't be burdened by my needs*. But right now, living with Z, there is no place to withdraw to. And I'm malfunctioning too badly to keep up a socially acceptable veneer, no matter how my conditioned reflexes scream that Bad Things Will Happen.
The fact is that my problems right now are a weight on Z, when he's already operating near the limit of what he can handle. I can see that my inability to get traction on dealing with the current MDE is deeply frustrating to him. (It frustrates me as well, of course, when I can feel anything besides the undifferentiated greyness.) And yet, he's still here. He has not rejected me for this un-chosen thing that my brain does, or backed away from my suffering out of self-preservation. I am inexpressibly grateful to him.
Now if only I could find where my unwanted programming lives and shove his counterexample down its throat.
* This meshes interestingly with having also picked up such a degree of hypervigilance in any social situation that it doesn't leave enough attention for being aware of what I need, much less what I feel. At any given time, which failtastic bit of programming predominates?
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