Also, might need surgery or other scary procedure on my wisdom tooth. It’s horribly broken, not quite pushed up, laying on its SIDE and the roots are all fucked up. Fun times! Waiting for the referral while ouching about another wisdom tooth I pulled yesterday. Only one left after I get this one out. Maybe done with scary after that.

Not feeling too well this week, teeth aside. I’ve been working on various project, done some sewing and tomorrow Mum and I are going to the museum! But right now I just want to sleep and meh and read a book. Oh and eat something. But not in that order.

I think I’m going to eat strawberries for dinner. With icecream.

It’s Midsummer, one of our biggest holidays of the year. It’s always the Friday following summer solstice, and it’s delightfully void of any religious connotations. Some say the shape of the thingy you raise and dance around (see pic) is obviously phallic and has to do with pagan fertility rites, but according to Wikipedia (which obviously knows EVERYTHING) it hasn’t been proved.

Mostly it’s an excuse to do shots (many, many shots), fall over drunk in a heap and do things you regret the following day. I’m going to a party tonight, but I’m not going to drink much. I’m instead armed with my camera that my sister claims has a “Russia a la 1987″-filter, that makes everyone look dreary and grey and ugly, but that’s a story for another day…

In all, the last few weeks have been a bit insane. I finally started what I call “pretendy work”, which is basically a project where people who have been on sick leave for a long time go to hang out and take walks and do crafty things, as a way of getting back into routines and seeing other people. It hasn’t gone so well, because I don’t function very well in the mornings, but next week I’m going to try afternoons instead, and see if that works better.

I say afternoonsssss as if I go there every single day. It’s a once a week occasion, for the time being. But yes, I’ve been doing that, and I’ve gotten a therapist (finally!) and he’s asking some really difficult questions, but in the end… I think he’s helping. One thing that he’s doing is giving me sheets of paper where I’m supposed to record the things I do during my days, what level of anxiety they cause and how it makes me feel. I was very surprised to see that I’d actually managed to do things that would cause me to curl into a ball only a few months ago. Nothing big, really, mostly things like phone calls and voice mail, something I had a very hard time with for a long time. Maybe some time I will actually be able to make phone calls as well!

I also saw a physical therapist for my knees, which helped a lot, although the daily stretches are a bit of a pain. They do help, though, together with the little knee braces he told me to go buy.

Currently I’m writing a story about my home town, just to see if I could. It’s kind of fun and has involved research about how it used to look a few hundred years ago. I think I might have to visit the museum too. It’s tiny, but I still remember this model of this town in medieval times, from when I was about ten. I don’t think I’ve been there since.

I’ve been doing a lot of short stories as of late, because I’m in a period where I’m kind of doubting my ability to pull together a novel length plot. It’s just kind of daunting, so doing bite size writing instead has been a nice break. Except, of course, that the last “short story” I wrote morphed into a novella instead…

Ah, yes. Being succinct has never been my thing.

I’m reading a very interesting essay in four parts about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I don’t have it, but the way it’s described is spot on for how my social anxiety is working. Long quote, but bear with me:

Hyper-arousal is more or less the physical equivalent of hyper-vigilance. In my experience, it’s the single most common PTSD symptom, at least in people whose trauma involved violence.

Imagine you’re watching a horror movie, and the music builds and builds, and oh no! She’s going to the basement! She’s walking down the stairs… feeling for the light switch… The moment of your highest tension, right before the jump-cut to the monster that makes you scream, is what hyper-arousal feels like. Only more intense, and all the time. Usually including in your sleep. If you can get to sleep.

Sudden noises make you jump. Sudden motion makes you jump. Touch makes you jump. You’re taut as a guitar string. Walking down a busy street, with all those cars moving fast and making noise, is like running a gauntlet. You sweat. Your heart pounds. You breathe fast. You always want to look over your shoulder.

Once when I was in a really bad state, someone admired the necklace I was wearing, then reached out to touch it. Normally that would have been fine, since I had warning, but I was so edgy that I jumped back, without meaning to.

“Er… may I touch your necklace?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, figuring that it would be fine since I knew it was coming and vowing to stay still, like a normal person. She reached out her hand toward me. Just like it had the first time, it felt as if someone had suddenly and without warning lunged toward me in a threatening manner. Entirely without volition, I jumped backward.

That is what I meant earlier about some PTSD symptoms making you feel and act as if you are losing your mind.

I call it sensory overload. I’ve no idea if that’s a proper term, but there you go.

About six months ago I wrote a post on Glee and disability and said some things, mostly defending the show. It didn’t go over so well, probably because it wasn’t very well thought through, and I have since deleted and regretted and blah blah blah. Of course, none of the people who thought I was being wrong on the internet (which, maybe I was, or maybe I just didn’t articulate it right, or…) then didn’t see me admit that I actually was…

And this is why I’m kind of hesitant to write this. Because I don’t want to put my foot in AGAIN.

But guys, Glee is getting worse. I know that they try to be all inclusive and talking about important stuff, but it’s not going so well. I feel like since I defended it, it’s gotten continously worse, and it makes me sad.

Don’t get me wrong, it still has its moments, the songs are (usually) amazing, but the storylines… Meh.

(SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS behind the cut)

Read the rest of this entry »

About two seconds after I published that last post I spectacularly ran out of spoons and wanted to die. So now I’m in bed with FatCast (awesome podcast with two of my favourite bloggers!), and they do a special blog just for updates of the podcasts themselves, show notes, etc, which makes scattered-brained people like me extra happy) and my knitting.

And this will be boring but I just wanted to remind myself what I’ve done today, as to not beat myself up for being “unproductive”. Some of these are not big things… for most of us. But they are for me, so, you know, here we go.

- Written 500 words (today, 8,000 total in the last four days, which is actually the crazy part),
- Blogged here,
- Drafted forever long post at my HAES-blog, still not done, but took lots of spoons to write,
- Cooked,
- Baked bread,
- Went to the grocery store/post office,
- Took the rubbish out,
- Booked laundry time,
- Read some book and some blogs,
- Napped and played with kitten.

Okay, the last two aren’t that impressive, but yes. Lots and lots of stuff. Six months ago this would’ve been like a week’s worth of activities.

So, yes. Not podcasts and knitting. If kitten lets me.

Always after I spend some time out in the real world I get sad. I see all these people, and get snippets of their lives. They talk about work and family and friends and all this… stuff. Their world is so inherently different from mine, and most of the time I pretend that I just returned from abroad, that I’m still finding my way back home, because I don’t want to let on that I’m sick. That I spent like a year and a half barely leaving my flat, that I just now have started going outside again, and even then it’s only for hours at a time. I don’t want them to know that I can’t work, or live the way they do.

I’ve been home for three years. I pretends it a few months, and I hate that I do that.

And as we talk and they ask where I live and I admit to it being a small town and they ask if I’ve never wanted to live somewhere like here (here being the city) and what I work with and I say that I am looking for work because the truth is just too embarrassing… They talk about their life, their work, like you do, and I think “I could have this, I could do this”. I think that maybe it’s not such a crazy idea. I’ve done it before. I could do it again.

A few hours pass. I get tired. I want to pull away. I want to go home and curl into a ball and wait for my strength to return. I realise that no, I can’t have this. I can’t. And it makes me so sad.

It’s not like I don’t want to have friends over for drinks. It’s not like I don’t want to have fun. It’s not like I don’t want to work and go to school and live an actual life. It’s just that my brain, my body and my mind doesn’t work like that.

It takes me a day or a week or a month to recover from those hours of talking and laughing and drinking. I lay in bed, staring at the mess of my apartment. I stare at the dishes that needs to be done, the empty fridge and the clothes that need to be washed.

I do that for days.

I sleep, most of the time. I watch TV. I browse through blogs that I can’t find the energy to actually read. I talk to my online people. I look at my writing project.

I sigh and go back to bed.

And I’m sad. I’m really fucking sad that I have to do this, and I’m really fucking angry that my psychiatrist thinks I’m ready to go back to work, and I really fucking disappointed. In myself. Mostly myself.

It will get better. It always does. But I hate that it takes me so long.

I’m home again! Stockholm was exhausting, but so worth it. I’ll probably be stuck inside for a week or a month or God knows how long, but it was nice. Exhausting, but nice.

It’s so hard to describe to people how much energy it takes to act “normal”. Not flinch when people come too close or – even worse – touch me. Not back myself up against a wall to have at least SOME sense of stability. Smile. Chat. Be at least somewhat interesting, which, I’m telling you, isn’t easy when you get out as little as I do. Not stare at people who manage all of the above without any effort whatsoever.

It takes so much energy, and after three days around other people non-stop – even if one of those days basically was laying in a heap with my siblings, hung over and eating junk food – I was just about to break down. This happened on the train back home. There were too many people, on all sides of me. Behind me, to my right and to my left, and when the person in the chair in front of me leaned his back rest down towards me about two inches I flew out of my chair and found myself another seat. This of course meant that I could get kicked out of it at any time, seeing as it might’ve belonged to somebody else, but I’m glad to report that they did not.

It wasn’t a fun ride home, but after a couple of hours the crowd eased up and I could pull out my computer and get some editing done.

I suppose I should talk about the trip for a bit, because it was pretty awesome. I’ll start with saying that all pics in this post save the last one is from the inside of my sister’s new shiny apartment. It has an awesome vintage theme to it. So sad I’m too lazy for that sort of thing.

Anyway, on Friday she and her roommate had a party to celebrate their new flat, which is ALLTHEIRS. It’s a rental, but their names are on the lease, which is not anything to take for granted in Stockholm. Most apartments there are to-buy, and when they’re not you have to save up queue time for decades to get a decent one, so of course people hold on to them forever, subletting them and a lot of the time you have to move several times a year because of this AWESOME situation. So they’re excited about this place, and it’s very cute, although out in the suburbs. Then again, suburbs are seriously underrated.

I was nervous that it would be a big party, but it wasn’t huge or anything. Twenty or so people, most boys, for some reason, and all very nice. I talked about knitting with this gay boy for some time, and I can say that it was when he started talking about what shades of pink that was acceptable on a bloke that I decided that he was in fact not straight. Stereotypical, yes, but I was totally right.

This was, I think, the first party since I was 19 that I wasn’t tempted to bum a smoke from someone, which is all kinds of awesome, actually.

The two youngest attendants, my brother and the brother of A’s roommate, babies at the young age of 23 and 24, passed out in a corner, and I kept having to go poke one of them to see that he was still alive. Because, yes, my dear brother didn’t move or make a noise for like four hours, and I got all mum-like worried about him. The other one was snoring, so I didn’t worry so much about him.

The night ended at about 4 am, when A. and I fell into her bed and promptly fell asleep, but not until she, who has extreme phobia of vomit bent over the edge of the bed and threw up. She wasn’t even upset about it, which I guess proves just how drunk she was.

I’m so too old for this stuff.

Saturday we went and bought chips, crisps, bacon, hot dogs, chocolate and litre upon litre of Pepsi and consumed it all laying down. I was the least hung over, I believe, and actually got some writing done while the rest of them moaned and complained and watched bad movies.

There’s an awesome film clip from the party, which starts with one of the guys talking into the camera, all serious, before skipping off to the next room over, the camera pans out and shows the whole party dancing madly. It looks like it’s arranged and from a music video or something, but it so wasn’t. Am sad that the guy refused to let us upload it, after having watched it the next day.

On Sunday we had lunch with A. at a small thai place. The staff looked kind of panicked when I asked for something with “no flour, no soy sauce, no coconut milk”, because they didn’t even know what gluten WAS despite their advertising saying that they had gluten free options, but actually scrounged something up. It was glass noodles with vegetables and chicken (because glass noodles with just vegetables and salt sounded too damn depressing), and I put some sweet chili sauce on it and it was delicious, despite sounding boring as hell.

I was worried about cross contamination, but I didn’t get sick, so I think they managed it, which made me very, very happy. I didn’t have such luck on Friday, when I ate all of three chips that had been fried in oil that “may or may not” have been used to fry chicken nuggets in as well. THREE.

Which I guess goes to show that I am really sensitive, and maybe that will shut my Mum up when she thinks I’m overreacting…

After A. went to work I dragged E. with me to various yarn and book shops. The haul was this. I have no idea what the blue yarn is, but it feels exclusive and was kind of expensive. Kind of in the same vein as Manos or Malabrigo. It was in a bargain bin without tags and I forgot to ask, because I was a little stressed out.

Then we went to the sci-fi-book shop in Gamla Stan, which is very cute and old, all cobble stone streets and old houses, some dating back to the 14th century. It’s a massive tourist attraction, but fortunately it’s not summer yet, so it wasn’t too bad. The bookshop was really big and awesome. It had huge amounts of books in English, so many that I didn’t even bother going to The English Bookshop, as I had planned. I wandered back and forth for probably an hour, looking for names I recognised. I ended up buying the Modern Faerie Tale books by Holly Black, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (because people won’t shut up about it) and on a whim, an anthology called Love Is Hell, which sounds cheesy but is actually pretty awesome. So far I’ve only read two of the stories, but I really love the one by Scott Westerfeld. He builds up this whole world where humans have done away with all inconvenient things, like sleep, illnesses, hormones, and so on, and then, the kids in it get as a school project to try to live with these things again, and find that it is pretty awesome.

The best part about this was probably that I asked this girl who worked there (who by the way was awesome, chatting to me about how great it is with anthologies and finding new authors that way, and understanding the importance of matching sets of books) if they’d gotten in White Cat by Holly Black yet. I knew it was a recent release, but not exactly how recent. As in, the release date is May 4th and I was asking for it on May 3rd.

The awesome part, however, was that they’d gotten a few copies in, and already sold it out. The day before it was supposed to his the stores! And when I tweeted this Holly Black replied to it, which made me squee because I’m such a fan girl for YA authors.

PS. Tansy, if you look really close you can see Siren Beat in A’s bookcase! I let her borrow it, convinced that it will be the perfect introduction to urban fantasy. She hasn’t read it yet, though, the wench.

My psychiatrist thinks I don’t suffer from any kind of anxiety, that I’ve adjusted well to my medication against a different mental illness altogether (the one he believes I really suffer from, because apparently one person can’t have more than one of these) and that I am fit to work 100%. I can’t even begin to describe the – wait for it – ANXIETY that causes. Just hearing those words.

And no, I haven’t been given a call by a therapist, like he promised.

Days like these the best thing to do is going to bed and hope that tomorrow will be better. Because what else is there to do?

On the upside – bought ticket to go to Stockholm for three days. This coming Saturday to Monday. It will be immensely difficult because of above mentioned ANXIETY, but I so want to. I will likely be decked on the couch for a solid fortnight afterwards, but I haven’t been out of town since August and I really need to give myself small challenges every now and then to try and on my own learn to handle my ANXIETY.

So, Saturday my sister and her roommate is having a party, Sunday I’m hoping for coffee with this blogger who writes awesomely about fat acceptance among other things, and Monday there’s shopping. I want to go to The English Bookshop, ScienceFictionbokhandeln (click links to see their awesome signs, I love them both) and possibly a clothing shop or two. And a few yarn shops. Of course.

And there you go. Something good to go with the bad, although I am very nervous that I’m going to fuck up my diet and somehow end up glutened and sick half the time. I suppose I’ll pack lots of gluten free cereal and ricecakes. Just in case.

Tomorrow (ANXIETY permitting) I’m going to the gym and writing up a storm. I hope. Because, yes, I am still arranging my life to not let the illness I apparently don’t suffer from affect me more than it possibly can. So, no bus at rush hour. No lengthy adventures. And lots of sleep to catch up from the ones I’ve already embarked on. Which means many, many hours of sleep and daytime napping and barely cooking when I come back next week. Still, I have to do it. If only to prove to myself that I can.

Also, Friday is Valborgsmässoafton. It’s another holiday of ours. I’ll blog it when I have pictures from the bonfires.

THIRTY. I’m thirty years old. Big day, people! I spent it doing big things too, let me tell you. I went to the psychiatrist, ran errands, became irritated-by-way-of-anxiety, had coffee with my grandparents and… drumroll please… took a nap.

Ah, good times.

I have however gotten about twenty birthday messages on Facebook, because it tells people when your birthday is. I love living in the future, and I’ll never take seeing my family for my birthday for granted after so many years abroad, and it was in all a lovely day.

This weekend my sister comes home and we’re going to bake up a storm. Sadly (or maybe awesomely) my plans of British high tea was kind of set aside because of plans of utter and ridiculously yummy chocolate party idea!

We shall have chocolate cupcakes, chocolate mousse and chocolate chip cookies. Possibly two kinds, if I can be bothered. Possibly some fruit to for the crazy people in my family that is doing the low-carb thing. I so don’t understand that, but to each their own.

(Carbs is yummy. Carbs is amazing. Carbscarbscarbscarbs.)

It will be grand. And with that said, and done, I have to share with you a new bunch of health care related WTFs. I’m sure you’ve missed them.

Here we go:

1) My doctor is about to go off to other adventures. He’s apparently what we referred to as a “relay race doctor”. That is, the mental health care is so shitty that no doctors want to work there for more than a couple of months, so they kind of come in, do what they can for three or six months and then duck out as somebody else picks up that stick the relay runners use in the Olympics… and keep on running. So, he’ll call me in four weeks, check up on my meds, and that’s it.

2) Summer holidays is upcoming. That means that after he calls me in late May I won’t be able to get an appointment until SEPTEMBER. And then, of course, it will be a different doctor, but I have no idea who or when. Just… autumn-ish.

3) I was supposed to be called to an appointment with a therapist in January. I, um, wasn’t. Why? Because apparently two therapists were retired, one went on maternity leave and nobody thought it would be a good idea to hire a couple of new people. And the kicker is probably that the doctor I mentioned above made this my fault, for not calling and bugging them until they realised that none of the remaining therapists had actually contacted me… Which, let me tell you, I would’ve done, albeit grudgingly, if I had KNOWN that I was supposed to get a call in January. Which I didn’t. Because when I asked (in March) how long it would take, I was given the helpful answer of “oh, a couple of more months, probably”.

Sigh. Swedish health care at its best. I’ll take some Glee on that, I think.

Yesterday I went with half my family (mum, grandmother, aunt) to an antique shop in the small town of Hjo, which is pronounced kind of like “yoo”, with a long o-sound. Yes, the Swedish language is a very strange one.

Anyway. Hidden away on a shelf I found this typewriter. Well, this model. The one I found have about 100% more dirt and rust, even after a thorough cleaning, but it’s so very pretty. It was, apparently, made in 1922, once belonged to the bishop of a parish nearby (allegedly) and is mostly functional. I don’t plan on actually using it, but it’s pretty and only cost me 100 SEK.

That’s just an aside, though. About six months ago I blogged about The Spoon Theory and how many spoons various things cost me, and I thought I should amend that, to show some progress…

SIX MONTHS AGO vs NOW:
Daily chores (wash-up, tidying, etc): two spoons half a spoon, two-ish if it involves cooking.
Taking out the trash: one spoon none.
Showering, dressing, etc.: one spoon per task for all of them put together.
Going to the grocery store: seven spoons two spoons if quick, four if it takes all night.
Hearing the phone ring: two spoons none.
Picking up the phone: four spoons three spoons.
Having a visitor: seventeen spoons two spoons, double if it includes cleaning beforehand.

Certain things are still hard for me, such as making phone calls, being social several days in a row, being around people for more than a few hours at a time, and so on, but it’s still much better than it was six months ago. Also, most of the work to actually manage this I’ve done on my own, since I’m still on a waiting list for a therapist.

I cook more than twice a week. I keep my house mostly clean. I pick up the phone when people call me. I read books. I don’t nap all day and stay awake all night. I spend time with my family. I go to the gym.

All things I had to struggle endlessly with only six months ago. So, yes. There is progress, even if it’s not nearly as quick as I’d like to.