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Big, big changes.

There have been big
changes. Truly, a great many of them.

I’m actually so exhausted that I’m having a hard time
doing this.

I didn’t sleep properly for several days because of
anxiety taking over my life, but it took over in the background, meaning that I
didn’t know a damn thing about why I was stuck awake, trying to sleep but not
being able to and instead spending an…if I’m being honest, kind of an inordately
long stretch of time playing Minecraft.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t mind that I was doing
it.

It’s not that I welcome the super late nights—I mean I
didnt plan any of this—but the fact is, I was able to sit down and focus
on quite a bit of gaming. I dug a giant mineshaft, and actually did a bunch of
infrastructure work on it—actual stairs, fences to act as guardrails along fall
zones on side mines…I mean I got lost at some point and I have had to build a
backup base because I surfaced somewhere that wasn’t my home island, but holy
crap did I get of work done on that game.

I even picked up FF14 again. I’m moving the main story.
I discovered a new class that I’m good at.

These are things that I have done recently, when I
officially became the only (alleged) human living in this apartment.

It’s just me, Tweedledee (Nanna) and Tweedledum
(Mowgli, but answers to Momo too) in this place. Well, and the spirits. Some of
them are ghosts. Some of them are other kinds of spirits. There’s borrower
activity that we keep an eye on at all times because stuff will go missing for
no damn reason other than to make sure that you’re paying attention to your
surroundings.

It is a weird feeling, being officially just me here,
being officially (technically) divorced. I spent a surprising amount of time as
a devoted huswife, and I don’t regret any of it. What I do regret is not
standing up for my mental care sooner than I did. I spent so much time on a
medication regimen that made me worse by the day. It made me more hopeless, and
it filled me with a rage that was disproportionate to anything going on. Add
this to the fact that I didn’t feel like anyone was listening to me, and I was
definitely not great to be around.

Okay, so I regret a couple things.

Anyway, that ended with me having a severe allergic
reaction to Depakote, and I just sort of…quit my brain meds, on the supervision
of my therapist.

I won’t lie: when the therapist asked me the last time
I felt completley hopeless, wanted to die, etc? I couldn’t answer the question.
I couldn’t remember the last time.

I know this is a weird time to say this, being on my
own like this now after being someone’s person, after living with the gremlin
who is still one of my very best friends to this day, after finding out that I’m
going to have to start the disability process over again because that First
Denial(tm) finally came in:

I think that things might be looking up at
last.

Gods, now that I’ve started to open up like this, I
want to go on and on and on…but I’m actually so exhausted that I
want to sleep so badly that the (extra) Vistaril and (standard number
single) Ativan that I took out to help slow my brain down enough to sleep look
welcoming, so welcoming.

The problem is, with the Prazosin dose I’m on, things
have one disadvantage. I had to get that dose increased, because I wasn’t
getting relief from the night terrors. This dose helped me sleep again (I mean,
at least until very recently); it kicked the night terrors and nightmares into
the middle distance. But…now I barely dream.

There aren’t words for what that realization did to
me.

And yet, I still must sleep.

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Exhaustion.

I’m a week off my most recent nde and frankly, I’m fucking exhausted.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’m afraid of consuming anything.

Between the incense trigger, the soap trigger, and finding out that I am probably allergic to Depakote, I’m scared of everything now. I’m even scared of my cannabis.

Isn’t that fucked? The very thing that I used to manage my anxiety, my sweet herb, the kind bud—because I was vaping at the altar when the last reaction happened, my brain has decided that it’s time to be afraid of cannabis.

I haven’t had a vape (beyond a test hit supervised by my roommate (long story I don’t feel like explaining right now if you haven’t heard already)) since the last event and even then I thought I was going to drop dead from it, because the last time I hit it, I was at the altar, communing.

Imagine being me, realizing that I may have been spending the last couple weeks microdosing death.

As I write this, the memory returning to me again, Mowgli Beelzebub Momo Moogle Hawkins, Esq, sits next to me, helping to bring my running nerves to a halt. He’s the sweetest cat I’ve met since losing Darling Prince. In fact I think he and Shelly are teaching Momo and Nanna how to ESA from the other side of the veil. The vaporizer sits next to my computer, running cleaning cycles as I try to make sure that there is no remaining resin from my last session inside of it. Since the last time I hit it for real was at my altar, the brain isn’t exactly primed to see this thing as a saviour rather than a threat right now.

The q-tips covered in black, fragrant resin are slowly accumulating next to the other side of the computer. The device itself, after its first run with Palmolive and boiling water, is running another cleaning cycle after having six or seven q-tips come back covered and one come back just fine. I don’t trust it.

I don’t know what I trust right now.

All that I know right now is that I fought the gods to come back, after having taken days and days on holiday in Suicide Ideation Island (and a week in the looney bin, which is where my relationship fell apart and turned back into platonic). I didn’t want to go the first day I went out again, and the cops had to epi-pen me back into life again. I didn’t want to go when the Depakote sent my body into lethal shock state not once, but twice, in a single day.

I spent way too much time learning about things that I wanted to live for to go out now because of a fucking pharmaceutical or a damn incense cone.

As I’ve said before, once you’ve been brought back a couple times, it gets harder and harder to drag back, especially if they’ve happened on top of each other like mine have been.

You ever heard your spirit guide shouting “GO BACK” at you while your body tries to prevent that? It’s terrifying.

I’ve been sleeping on the couch lately. I’m not in the doghouse, I have my own room and shit, but I’ve been staying out here because I want to tell my brain that this room is not a giant flashing neon hazard zone, that the room is safe, that I won’t die if I look at my altar, that I won’t die if I hit my herb, that if I don’t die if I hit my meal, that I won’t die if I drink a bottle of kombucha, that I won’t die if I have a glass of pineapple juice….

I know that sounds like a whole lot of paranoia, but—I’ve died twice now, man. They epi’d me back—and at this point I’m not sure if it was the incense or the depakote that fucked me over the biggest. This is why I’m going to go see an allergist in January.

I…I’m so tired of being afraid of everything.

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Grand Rising except to chronic illness

hokay, so

here’s the earth no let me get serious.

I’ve been having a hard time the last couple of weeks. Mentally, and physically. It’d been a while since I last spoke to my therapist when I had my latest breakdown/through, and honestly I’m not entirely sure I’m completely OK right now. There is just….a fucking lot going on right now, you know?

I’m having to retrain my body into doing things I took for granted for years…like sitting up at a desk or in a desk-like sort of situation like I got going on right now (I’m on the couch, there’s a lap desk keeping my legs from boiling because Sheba heats up like she thinks I need help keeping my tea warm, and there are like a thousand pillows). It’s only in the last couple weeks that I’ve been able to stay sitting up for extended periods of time! Basically, if I have been doing anything, it’s been laying down on a mobile device, and only like that, for a long time.

I play like I’m used to this, like it’s something I’ve made total peace with, but it still fucking bugs me. I had to TRAIN in order to sit up and play a game at my computer again. I used to be the kid dragging an entire assembly around for a LAN party. Now? I’m lucky I can handle the weight of my laptop in my backpack on a day to day basis.

Basically, last few weeks got real rough. I have never smoked so much in my LIFE, and with the exception of Thursday, basically none of it was for the fun of it. My pain management situation has gotten beyond insane, and I’m lucky it’s managed as well as it is right now. Fact is, it wouldn’t be if I didn’t toke up regularly. Now, I’ve never been the kind for weed evangelism, but…if you’ve tried everything else out there, give it a shot. I know it doesn’t work for everybody, and a lot of us still have to see ‘a guy who knows a guy’ when we want to get some, but if, like me, you went through everything from regular NSAIDS to opiates to more-frequent-than-I-wanna-admit trips to the ER where all they could do was run tests and then knock me out with morpine (no seriously), it’s worth a shot.

Now, I’ve spent the week doing housework. I’m actually going to use this Sunday to actually do nothing for once. I’ve earned it.

(btw, if you happen to need me to tag the cannabis-mentioning posts specifically for you to be able to blacklist them or something, tell me how you need me to do it! I am a huge-ass stonerd and I’m tired of hiding it—so it’s gonna show up time to time. Fair warning.)

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Good Night, sweet Darling Prince.

(TL;DR for those who want just the meat and none of the heart-vomit: Beloved kitty gone from cancer and I’m not ok.)

___
We put my dear beloved kitty DP down today. He was 16.

We realized he was in trouble when he abruptly stopped eating and started being cuddly with the entire house.

After panicked searching, my partner found a vet that would do the job.

He declined fast. The tumor they found was like a stone. There was no chance. Stomach cancer in a senior age cat is a death sentence. They can’t recover.

It’s far kinder to let him go than to take extraordinary measures. …we couldn’t have done that either way, because we’re literally poor.

We gave him one last night of cuddles before we sent him across the bridge to wait for me.

We tried to find a ride for two hours.

I actually dehydrated myself crying and the only reason I’m not right now is because I literally can’t right now. At 8:45, at my altar because I have a broken ankle and could not make the heroic trek on foot to the vet’s office, but with a paw on my fiance’s hand and my voice as one last message from me (via Telegram), he finally stopped trying to fight the drugs, dozed off…and slipped off to wait for me in the After.

…I hope I didn’t frighten the neighbors with the primal scream that I only barely managed to bite back. Though the Anguished Grief-Striken Negro Wailing™️ may have caused some concern.

I have a hard enough time if the dead body was empty when I got there. I freak out. I get sick. I—Well, I’d call it spiraling into apocalyptic despair, but “spiraling” implies at least a little mercy, a little reprieve before I hit the bottom. No, it’s more like the ground teleports to meet me. Pretty much everyone who knows me and cares half a whit about me knows about this form of thanatophobia of mine ([i]thanatophobia[/i] is the fear of death). But I so wanted to be there for my darling boy as he crossed over.

My fiance literally took five minutes expressing his absolute prayers-answered gratitude that I couldn’t be there.

He said that seeing this would have broken me beyond repair. The harsh lights, the antiseptic air…the quiet room that made it clear that this was a huge moment…the second life left his frail, still-plushie-soft body—

I can feel the scream rising again in my chest, like mercury in an old thermometer that’s so old its glass has begun to craze and frost over, as I try to explain the absolute hollow-point bullet I dodged to you.

He said that between everything involved, and knowing what he has learned about me, he already knew that this was a mercy that he had to grant. He’d been cagey about getting me out there, and knew what had to be done.

Our ride text-attempts didn’t get responses until 9:30 AM.

According to the vet, it was a good thing we got there when we did…because he wouldn’t have made it that long.

My dear darling boy would have died in my arms, wrapped in the hot-pink fleece blanket I’d been laying on the past few weeks.

…I know for an absolute fact that my fiance was right.

I have suffered many, many things in my life. I was shot in the knee with my cousin’s bb gun at 5 and whipped with a switch (flexy bendy stick) for “lying.” My mother’s death at 9, from breast cancer, during BCA month—so abbreviated because my keyboard insists on planting a godsdamned pink ribbon emoji after that demon disease’s name. My grandfather’s death, where I held it together just long enough to break down HARD in the limo…where my dumbass cousins cracked up laughing at my grief, mocking the sound that had ripped its way out of me after five days of zero tears and probably starting my path to a flattened affect. 9/11. Rape and PTSD. Illegal eviction. Bipolar crashes so hard that I actively wanted to die immediately.

None of them,
not a one,
hurt like this.

I wouldn’t have cracked.

I would have simply disintegrated. I know there wouldn’t have been any coming back from losing my friend and familiar if I’d had to actually watch the spark leave his beautiful but cataractian eyes.

(Well fuck there go the tears. Guess I’m hydrated again.)

The poor dear was only home from his boarder’s for 13 hours.

He spent his last 13 hours with me. With us.

He was only here 13 hours but it felt like we experienced 13 years of love from him.

He was only here 13 hours, but the place feels so damned empty without his old-man meow.

… as weird as it is to say, I’m not sure I would trade those 13 hours for another day with him. I know he was hurting. He was weak, tired, physically unable to process input anymore. When we nabbed him, while he was in the crate, he frantically tried to reach me, even going as far as getting up on his wobbly spindly legs and charging the carrier door. But he melted into my body when I swaddled and carried him later, snuggling into my chest and neck like old times, and I could feel him: he seemed to be saying, “I’ve gotten everything I needed. Now I can rest.” And when I realized that, I broke. But…

…in that short time, I felt so much love. From my fiance, who immediately fell in love with the boy; and from the boy himself, just happy to feel, smell, and hear me for just a little longer.

In that short time, love came home.

Now, I’m in the dark. I’ve lost the moon.

And my grief is the night sky, heavy with rain clouds.

And tomorrow I am home alone.

I’d be lying if I said I was positive I’ll be OK when I wake up. But anything is better than what bearing witness would have done to me. I know the only reason I might have survived that would have been my brain calling an emergency shutdown and rendering me catatonic.

…please. if you can…candles, prayers, affirmations. Anything.

I want to get through this. I’m just not sure I can.

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May I present:

Real talk on being real: nonbinary edition

I noticed something a while back: a lot of people got real fucken weird when I came out as nonbinary.

I mean yeah, there was a lot of the shit that you would expect from this sort of thing: the casual transphobia started real quick, both from people that I don’t know in person and from people who I would have thought would do better about this kind of thing. Family members got weird initially; some friends were confused; people from the job where I was working were…to put it frankly, they were terrible. That was an experience that I hope to never go through again, that’s for sure.

But the worst, I have to say, came from people that I thought would have been better about it.

I remember an old friend who thought that I’d ‘changed’ since starting to navigate the space between racce and gender. He got weirdly aggressive about both–but the thing that stood out the most was when he told me that I’d ‘changed’ somehow since I’d ‘become’ nonbinary, and implied that it was a decision that I’d made, as if being the way that I am is some kind of frivolous choice that I’d made. He did a lot of running around in circles before I finally got ticked at him for that nonsense–after which he flounced out and blocked me on Facebook. And yes, he was in fact a cis whyte gay man–that most visible member of the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

It was a preview of what I was going to be dealing with going forward.

I did not and do not want to even try to fit into that little binary box. I’ve been crammed in it long enough thank you very much–I didn’t fight my way out of it just to step back into it for cis people’s comfort.

If you’re uncomfortble with the idea of nonbinary people:

  • that’s a YOU problem;
  • you need to work on that
  • we’re not in charge of your comfort level;
  • we’ve been around as long as civilization, just like you;
  • and you definitely need to do some research and get comfortable with the idea that we’re around, and have been around for a long

It’s not our job to make you feel good, cis people. Please educate yourselves about nonbinary people, stop trying to be edgy and funny (you’re neither), and for the love of fuck, decolonize your thinking. A lot of this rage and intolerance is because of deeply whitewashed, colonized thinking–and by this point, we should be over that shit.