It is 6 in the goddamned morning, and I have not slept a wink. It’s my own fucking fault: I drank coffee after 6pm and then a giant Coke around 11pm when I asked my husband to get me a cheeseburger. He’s going to be all worried when he gets up now because of what can happen if I don’t sleep for too many days in a row. It’s just one night so I’m sure it’ll be fine.

I need to do what a friend is doing and follow some sleep hygiene practices. Number one is no caffeine after 6pm. I think number two should be no stimulating activities after 8pm: that includes writing and doing art. Watching a show or a movie is fine, though: reading is better. Number three should probably be no screens after 11pm or midnight. Aromatherapy would help a lot: I was very into slathering myself in the summer, particularly during “episodes”, but now that I’m medicated, it’s not something I think about.

I am trying so hard not to be constantly angry about having to take dangerous medication and having to deal with idiot psychiatrists who really don’t care about my well-being: they just want to maintain society’s status quo, and that means keeping the insane people quiet at all costs, even their own happiness, livelihood, and sometimes their very lives. The severely mentally ill are nothing more than dust bunnies to be swept under the rug of Western civilization. I can’t stop having my next appointment in my head because those people make me so anxious, and that’s how I deal with anxiety: by pre-rehearsing the anxiety-producing event to the best of my ability so that I can anticipate and be ready for anything. It’s like doing battle, and I shouldn’t have to have that mindset when I’m dealing with someone who is supposed to be taking care of a major aspect of my health. I can’t say any of those things to a shrink, though, because they’ll just take it as further evidence of my supposed “illness”. My therapist was right 7 years ago: there’s no such thing as mental illness, just maladaptations to a really fucked up world. Doctors really are fucking with shit they don’t understand. I wonder how much more progress the world could have made since Freud if we’d followed Jung instead.

I’m also angry about the lack of support for sufferers of complex PTSD, and also a lack of awareness. I know it’s a new thing, but I tried to find support groups in town last night, and there weren’t many. I get most of my support from the internet by participating in forums on Reddit, Facebook, and MeWe. Social media is a really powerful tool, and I love engaging with people, so I’m going to make cleaning up and actually using my various accounts part of my recovery and healing process. My husband and therapist can’t be my only supports, as much as wish they could be: the burden of my baggage is just too great, I have to spread it out. I have two Twitter accounts and wonder if I don’t just need one: I also have two Tumblrs, and should probably get rid of one. There are a lot of mental health reform advocates on both platforms, and I should really try to connect with them, and keep up with them. When I stay isolated and feel too alone, I get in a bad headspace. It’s already bad enough that I feel like no one really believes some of the things I’ve experienced. They’re all nice and say “well if it was real to you, that’s all that matters”, but it’s not all that matters, and I despair at the notion of spending the rest of my life with people being my friend to my face, and then quietly murmuring amongst themselves when my back is turned about my mental health. I don’t have a psychological problem as much as I have a spiritual problem, I feel, or perhaps they carry equal weight. Western civilization’s attempt to peel the spiritual away from the scientific, or even the philosophical, has not resulted in beneficial things.

I’m slowly waking my brain up.  Again.  It’s not nearly as bad as it was after I got off the haloperidol, lamotrigine, and Ambien, but I’m still annoyed I have to go through this process.  In a way, part of me is still waking up from taking my last psychiatrist’s meds for so long: I’m only just now getting back into reading, despite being off those meds for two years.  It’s taken that long for me to slow down internally that I can handle sitting in one place to read the words and actually engage with them, or rather, allow them to engage me.  Right now I’ve got an awesome stack of books I can switch between if I get bored with one, and I’m going to get a library card, perhaps today.

Other things on my mind today include how people treat me now after the last couple of years of my mental health issues being so severe, which I now know are due to my childhood trauma, not just an imbalance in my brain chemistry.  I feel like that doesn’t matter to other people: all they care about is making sure I don’t lose it again, at any cost, including my own happiness.  I keep thinking about the Nine Inch Nails song “Every Day Is Exactly the Same” where he talks about not wanting “them” to come around and he “can feel their eyes are watching in case I lose myself again”.  I know I’m not always aware of my mood shifts and other things, but people around me are so sensitive about it that they make a big deal out of what used to be normal behavior for me, but it’s been so long since I’ve really been myself that they see my normality as a sickness, when it’s not.  I’m just becoming the person I’m supposed to be, and I’m tired of that freaking out the people around me.  I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life and free to be myself than live like that, and the more people treat me differently, the more I fear that’s going to be my fate.