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Jun. 16th, 2020 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeI don't even remember when I last updated, although it's probably been less time than I remember. Long story short, someone brought something up in discussion yesterday that turned out to be a major trigger of mine? Somehow? I think it was a perfect storm of it being a sensitive (racism-category) topic, and it was duly labeled as such! And then on top of it being that and me having already had a hard past 12 hours emotionally, it managed to mash one of my trigger buttons really hard, such that I spent a good 3-4 hours in what I can as a Farscape nerd only describe as barely controlled Luxan hyperrage. I was really mad, okay. (Not at the friend, btw. Not the friend's fault. But the person who said the things, ooooh grrr.)
So after a while, and by after a while I mean as I was drugging myself to sleep with ZzzQuil that night, it occurred to me that maybe I had been under a lot of stress lately, and to list the stressors. And I started listing them out, starting from March 26 to almost three months:
Going into quarantine, thus isolating myself so I see only the boy every day and some store employees about once a week if I can. A couple weeks after that, going into in-house quarantine because of the boy being on the covid ward with actual patients there, therefore inducing in myself touch starvation for... I don't know how many weeks it was but we'll guess 8? It was after local lockdown. Windstorm of doom, tree falls, thereby bringing half of an actual nightmare I've had repeatedly come true. (In the nightmare the tree destroyed the house. This did not, thankfully, happen.) Got into a giant money and logistics fight with my Aunt, who believed she could just tell me things and I would magically be reassured and convinced everything would be taken care of. No. Second windstorm comes up, thereby confirming that the first windstorm has now given me a panic trigger. The windstorms continue, about three or four of them before the windy season dies down. I'm still in quarantine. Around the end of April, I think? No, beginning of April, Murdock gets sick, losing weight, badly limping, vet can't figure out what's wrong at first, so that's about a week of stress before we take him back for a proper blood test, vet confirms diabetes. Keeping in mind this is added stress because six months before our other cat had started abruptly losing weight and it turned out to be an extremely fast moving fatal cancer. So. Thankfully that stress has since resolved. He still walks funny, but that's because of muscle loss and we're working on building it back up. He's taking his medications well.
So we're into... May? Ish? My birthday happened. That turned out to be much less awful than I'd expected given we were able to do none of the things we'd planned, and we'd planned some extra special fun. Then George Floyd was murdered and the entire United States overturned in protest. (Several other countries have had protests too, but the US seems to be overturning more than most due to various.) About that point I got off Twitter because having an endless parade of 'and this city's police department did this heinous thing' 'and these people were ignored by medical departments' 'don't forget the concentration camps are now gas camps' was... not good. So that took away both one stressor but also one source of relief because I wasn't talking to my glam squad anymore, or sharing things with my writer friends. I'd started making new friends in a more smaller, contained, with a designated "awful stuff goes here" area type of place, but making new friends and feeling connections takes time! So that's a work in progress, albeit a positive one. People in my neighborhood started shooting off intermittent fireworks even up to midnight and 1 in the morning, which is a sign of overall positive morale but still a stressor. And then also our downtown area, where the store is and where some of my relatives live, was subject to three or so nights of tear gas, vandalism, fireworks, and cops being awful.
And I think even at that I'm missing stressors, I haven't been reporting on here as much and... ugh, I don't know. It all came to sort of a head yesterday afternoon? Ish. I think yesterday afternoon, and time is doing that crash into itself thing again. So, trying to get back into the habit of daily blither on here so I can keep track of what's going on. Also tagging. Tagging should be a thing. If for no other reason than then I can look for the tag to find out how much stress I've been under. Even apart from the individual things there's been the ongoing isolation stress, the boy-is-working-on-a-plague-floor stress, the financial stress of not having a job and unemployment only stretches so far (there's a thing there but until the thing happened that was a stressor) and the when will this end what happens after stress. I'm under way more pressure than I allow myself, is what I'm saying. Not that I can allow myself to be stressed or not stressed, but I haven't been accounting for it, and I probably should.
... this has gotten long enough that I think this is going to be a two post day. Post about what I've been up to incoming.
So after a while, and by after a while I mean as I was drugging myself to sleep with ZzzQuil that night, it occurred to me that maybe I had been under a lot of stress lately, and to list the stressors. And I started listing them out, starting from March 26 to almost three months:
Going into quarantine, thus isolating myself so I see only the boy every day and some store employees about once a week if I can. A couple weeks after that, going into in-house quarantine because of the boy being on the covid ward with actual patients there, therefore inducing in myself touch starvation for... I don't know how many weeks it was but we'll guess 8? It was after local lockdown. Windstorm of doom, tree falls, thereby bringing half of an actual nightmare I've had repeatedly come true. (In the nightmare the tree destroyed the house. This did not, thankfully, happen.) Got into a giant money and logistics fight with my Aunt, who believed she could just tell me things and I would magically be reassured and convinced everything would be taken care of. No. Second windstorm comes up, thereby confirming that the first windstorm has now given me a panic trigger. The windstorms continue, about three or four of them before the windy season dies down. I'm still in quarantine. Around the end of April, I think? No, beginning of April, Murdock gets sick, losing weight, badly limping, vet can't figure out what's wrong at first, so that's about a week of stress before we take him back for a proper blood test, vet confirms diabetes. Keeping in mind this is added stress because six months before our other cat had started abruptly losing weight and it turned out to be an extremely fast moving fatal cancer. So. Thankfully that stress has since resolved. He still walks funny, but that's because of muscle loss and we're working on building it back up. He's taking his medications well.
So we're into... May? Ish? My birthday happened. That turned out to be much less awful than I'd expected given we were able to do none of the things we'd planned, and we'd planned some extra special fun. Then George Floyd was murdered and the entire United States overturned in protest. (Several other countries have had protests too, but the US seems to be overturning more than most due to various.) About that point I got off Twitter because having an endless parade of 'and this city's police department did this heinous thing' 'and these people were ignored by medical departments' 'don't forget the concentration camps are now gas camps' was... not good. So that took away both one stressor but also one source of relief because I wasn't talking to my glam squad anymore, or sharing things with my writer friends. I'd started making new friends in a more smaller, contained, with a designated "awful stuff goes here" area type of place, but making new friends and feeling connections takes time! So that's a work in progress, albeit a positive one. People in my neighborhood started shooting off intermittent fireworks even up to midnight and 1 in the morning, which is a sign of overall positive morale but still a stressor. And then also our downtown area, where the store is and where some of my relatives live, was subject to three or so nights of tear gas, vandalism, fireworks, and cops being awful.
And I think even at that I'm missing stressors, I haven't been reporting on here as much and... ugh, I don't know. It all came to sort of a head yesterday afternoon? Ish. I think yesterday afternoon, and time is doing that crash into itself thing again. So, trying to get back into the habit of daily blither on here so I can keep track of what's going on. Also tagging. Tagging should be a thing. If for no other reason than then I can look for the tag to find out how much stress I've been under. Even apart from the individual things there's been the ongoing isolation stress, the boy-is-working-on-a-plague-floor stress, the financial stress of not having a job and unemployment only stretches so far (there's a thing there but until the thing happened that was a stressor) and the when will this end what happens after stress. I'm under way more pressure than I allow myself, is what I'm saying. Not that I can allow myself to be stressed or not stressed, but I haven't been accounting for it, and I probably should.
... this has gotten long enough that I think this is going to be a two post day. Post about what I've been up to incoming.