Sad

I am so sad today.  I have no clue why.  It's been a harder week so maybe that's part of it.  Maybe it is the snow and freezing wind (which feels as bad as the coldest I've ever experienced, which was -20 and locked myself out of my house with wet, shoulder length thick hair back in grad school.  Did I mention that when I did this my car was running and I was locked out of it too?  I went out to let the car run while I dried my hair and brushed my teeth every day.  Since I lived in a city I always left one set of keys in the car while it ran and then when I was ready to go I brought out another set of keys.  That day when I went out I automatically locked the house door and didn't realize it until I'd already locked the keys in the car. It was so cold that day that I started it a little early so I wouldn't be late for clinicals, then while I was finding an awake neighbor to ask for help at 6:30 AM (I had to call AAA to unlock the car; there were housekeys on the same ring) and then since I was clearly going to be late I called in, only to discover the message I had missed while outside that the school was closed due to the dangerous temperatures.

I did go up to the post office.  No package.  Hopefully I'll make it in tomorrow.

I think that my mood is affected by anxiety.  However I only am allowed one anxiety pill per day and I keep putting off taking it until night because that's when the worst panic attacks are. I'm not even taking them nightly which I probably should when one is still available.  It's hard because the hospital pulled me off anxiety meds totally (first they tried changing klonopin to ativan which didn't work so they took them away).  While I understand why, that until I'm further out from my suicidal days having much of the medication I was most focused on and which is the only dangerous med that could be taken from me (conveniently the other truly dangerous one is lithium which I'm not about to overdose on--Dr. Mind is able to keep me from having these anyway.  He doesn't actually count what I'm doing or even really watch me anymore but it's pretty clear that I am to behave responsibly with meds in his office; I think not doing so would be an even greater violation of trust than anything else I've done lately.

Sometimes I think I'm sad on these days just because I know that I was incredibly stupid and broke so many promises that I've made many times over the years.  Yet the people who I promised are being kind to me instead of yelling at me and I think it would be easier if they were mad.  I can't believe the series of decisions I made that were dumb and everything I've been taught not to do without seeking help.  I feel so frustrated with how many backward steps I've taken even after I corrected the first mistake.  This whole last 5 days has been rough.  I did go to the post office and had a brief conversation there so I met the requirement of doing that today, yesterday, and Monday.  Tomorrow or Sunday I'll be going out with my mom for a while to celebrate my birthday so I'll hit 4 times which is the goal.  But I do not feel happy.  I guess nobody said I had to, but I'm just frustrated with myself.

Partly that is for the dumbest reason ever--I'm really disturbed by the inability to maintain eye contact.  Like disturbed enough that I need to talk to Dr. Mind about it and hopefully he'll tell me I've done this every time I've been really sick and I don't remember it.

It was a very, very hard won achievement for me to do that.  Hard enough that during therapy school we'd have personal goals with these mini-projects we did and that worked so well that they carried it over to most of our other classes.  A classmate suggested I work on that and it was really an achievement of my entire grad school class because everyone helped me with it.  We had one class that we would be given one of 2 theories of OT to learn every week.  In that week we were responsible for learning everything possible about it and then in the seminar we divided into 2 teams to debate and discuss the 2 theories paired for that week.  I absolutely loved the class.  It was the best of most academic talents that I had and because I used to have until I got sick a pretty much photographic memory it was a chance for me to excel because I would read the theory and every research article I could find and memorize all this so everyone would have these huge stacks of articles and I had a few note cards.  It was fun for that talent to actually have a purpose, and I really liked turning the information around in my head and finding good and bad things.  I remember the day that this girl who aggressively tried to be the highest score in every class, even one like this that was basically pass/fail up until one paper at the end that was pretty hard to fail since it was called "My theory of OT", but anyway, I remember one debate getting intense and everyone made a big deal because while we were debating back and forth I maintained eye contact the whole time.

 In 2007 vocational rehabilitation did an OT evaluation of me.  The end result of that was that I learned that my eye contact lessons had paid off as I made better eye contact than anyone else with severe bipolar the evaluator had ever seen.  With Dr. Mind it is also something that was hard won; I remember about 6 months into seeing him he stopped a conversation mid-sentence to ask if I knew I'd been looking him in the face for 10 minutes and what had changed?  I was so proud of that.  And while I've often not looked at him much when dealing with something hard it's been 6 years since I couldn't maintain eye contact at least some.

I am just not comfortable with who I am right now.  Which really isn't necessarily bad since getting comfortable with a very symptomatic me would not be helpful.  But it  is somehow symbolic of how wrong things are just now and I really hate it.  I also hate the reminder that I'm probably not doing this because I'm embarrassed.  And because of what it was it's not like we can just agree to move on and forget what happened.

Anyway, this is a weird post and I don't really have a good reason for feeling sad, I just do.