THE COUP: ILLEGAL SEIZURE OF POWER

Maybelline sound asleep.  She loves her crate.  Makes her feel safe and secure.

I don’t know if I can write this post.  I feel extremely dissociative at this very moment despite taking my medication.

I don’t know why it’s important to write this, but last night’s experience was so bizarre, disruptive, and disturbing that I need to make sense of it.  

Last night wreaked havoc on me, and I’m not sure I can adequately give voice to it.  

I think something was triggered in our session with Therapist yesterday.  We came home, journaled, and then went to our place of worship.  I was so emotional through the services that I sat in my seat and cried.  When time was up, we had a congregation prayer, and it dawned on me my eyes were open during it.  Then I had a flashback to a time when I might have been eight years old, and I refused to close my eyes during prayer and hadn't been for a long while.  Closed eyes do not equal safety.  You must always keep your eyes open to remain vigilant and safe from people hurting you.  

When I remembered this, I began to dissociate and switch.  It was like the light switch was being turned off and on, off and on, over and over.  The switching was constant, and I had to leave quickly.  

Meanwhile, I came home around 9:30 pm and my lower extremities were in such pain, but I had no clue why.  I hadn't done anything differently to cause such pain. It baffled me, but I took pain medication that never worked.  I doubled the dosage and nothing even came close to alleviating the pain.  

Meantime, Husband left to go to bed around this time of 10:00, but I wasn’t sleepy so I stayed in the living room to catch up on social media, pay bills, etc.  But I kept noticing I couldn’t remembering what I was supposed to be doing.  I would start a task and then forget what I was supposed to do.  It felt like I was flitting from one thing to another, but I couldn’t make sense out of anything I was trying to accomplish.  

I can not overstate it when I say I couldn’t remember from one moment to the next.  It was like being in a dense, thick fog, and I couldn’t process anything.  I was confounded, but couldn’t untangle the mental mess.

I decided to take my night meds and go to bed, but the dissociation had other plans for me.  I wasn’t tired or sleepy despite taking sleeping pills.  

It honestly felt like someone was overriding my medication or it just didn’t affect them.  It never felt like true insomnia.  This felt totally different, like my members were just wide awake.  Almost manic but without the hyperactivity.  I was simply awake and not able to think clearly.

Hours later, I took a muscle relaxer and laid in bed feeling very strange and out of sorts

Sleep finally found me but in bits and pieces, tossing and turning.  

I’ve had insomnia frequently in life but never before did it feel like the hostile takeover of last night.

Today has been similiar.  I’ve been spacey, dissociative, and I have an unrelenting migraine.  

I write this experience because I’m trying to make sense of it, and I’m wondering if anyone reading this might have had a similiar experience because this was way out of the spectrum of normal for me.

Anxiety's Amusement

Once upon a time there was a paradox called Missing in Sight whose anxiety was so rampant and uncontrolled that ten minutes after waking on Saturday morning,  she took her usual cocktail of a Clonazepam and a muscle relaxer to chase the anxiety away.  Meanwhile, she felt she was going insane.  She would hit her head with her hand repeatedly to chase away the crazies.  When that didn't work, the wall took the brunt of her head.

Soon her medicine assumed her, and she went to sleep for about an hour.  When she woke, the same anxiety was expectantly waiting for her, licking its lips, eager to pounce on her.  She tried to think of other ways to deal with the misery, but to no avail.  She couldn't concentrate, so she wasn't able to read or color.  She had taken medications that left her tired and drained, so she couldn't take her dog for a walk.  She couldn't be still, so watching t.v. or a movie wasn't an option.  

She felt if she could just cry then she might be able to calm down, but a tear could not be found.

Once again, she took more medication to put her to sleep so she would not have to deal with the anxiety.  This time she slept a little longer, but when the meds wore off and she woke to reality, the monster of anxiety woke with her, and she could not escape the roar of its meanness.

She tried to last it out.  She thought maybe if she put on her favorite movie then she could endure the panic; however, the movie turned rancid to her eyes.  She did not know why, but she could not tolerate her best movie.

All this while, Husband was home, but he was asleep off and on.  He didn't know what to do for Missing in Sight.  She suggested to him that he go to the store and buy beer because she knew it would take the edge off.  So off he went.

While he was gone, she took round three of meds, but this time she tripled the dosage.  The possibility of accidentally overdosing broached her mind, but she could not comprehend what this actually meant.  Childlike, she only wanted the anxiety to go away, away, away.  So she swallowed the pills and fell asleep.

Husband eventually came home with the beer and later woke her to tell her goodbye.  It was mid-afternoon, and he had to leave for work.

She fell back asleep for another hour, and when she woke she was all alone in the early evening hours.   Stunningly, it seemed her anxiety had lessened.  Her breath found its way back to her chest, the butterflies in her stomach shushed, and her heart quit slamming between her thoracic walls.  The hurricane of anxiety had weakened to a small thunderstorm.  The beer did not seemed to be needed now.

She tried to do relaxing tricks that she could not do earlier in order to keep the angst away: color; music; movies; dog.  However, she could not get rid of the residual anxiety.

She decided to drink a beer.  Then another.  And another.  She thought all the meds she had taken over the course of the day would have left her system by that time, and nothing bad, whatever that might be, would happen.

She fell asleep again.  Or more accurately, passed out.  One knows not how long she would have slept if not for the hallucinations of voices and noises that kept waking her from what felt like vivid but aggravating dreams.  

So, half awake but completely drunk, over-medicated, and anxiety's amusement, she stumbled off to bed, and fell face first into the blackness of the night, anticipating in her dreams of the anxiety that would startle her awake the very next morning.

Off my meds = on to a psych ward

So, since I have no psycho-iatrist, I have no meds. Since I have no meds, I am one heartbeat away from being committed to the psycho ward/looney bin/crazy tank. My emotions are all over the range. Sad, content, committed, depressed, excited, hopeless, frantic, ect... I am fighting with D. day and night. Not just verbal fighting but throwing things, explosive outbursts, and an apt to curse him out. Parts of me just can't control it. It builds and builds and builds. Tonight, I took my laptop to the living room to do my computer crap, blog, e-mails, etc... and I'm surprised I didn't hurl my laptop at him.

Instead, I gathered sweet foods in the house, took the carton of ice cream in the bathroom, sat on the floor, ate, and then gave the food to the toilet bowl so it wouldn't be hungry.

It's getting too hard to handle. I don't, don't, don't know if I can make it. Make it to anything or anywhere. My weight continues to slowly decrease. Painfully slow. I wish it would go faster. But never mind that. I had chest pains today. Scared me for the first time because I wasn't working out when they occurred; I was just watching a movie. I find it ironic though that as intense as this relapse is appearing I actually applied for a summer job and have been called in for a mass interview next month. It's at a water park and I would love the job. I spent one summer as a guest at this water park and it was better than going away on vacation. So how cool will it be to work at the water park! I don't know if I'll be in treatment or not, but I'm going to proceed as if I'm not.

I reapplied to my university. I had to withdraw this same time last year because of the eating disorder and I am determined to go back this August. I miss the university setting and I love to learn and read and really want to be a teacher. We have so much to offer our future students, it would be criminal not to finish school and at least try and be a teacher. If it's too stressful, there are other jobs in the school system that would probably suit us just fine.


I came across this quote and found it thought provoking:

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. ~ Tom Stoppard

I don't know what to think of it, but I wanted to include it in my meaningless post. I guess what strikes me is about how we burn our bridges and have nothing to show for our progress but waste and want. It's a rather cynical take on the human condition and trying to get better. Does recovery mean all or nothing? Maybe it should. Anorexia has to be all or nothing. You can't have a little bit of an eating disorder and relinquish some of it, too.

I love quotes and songs and writings. One of my alters stores our words for us and for the past decade has kidnapped all the words that could adequately convey how we feel inside. Sure, we can say we're sad, but the woman with the words could say it in a way that would take your breath away and MAKE you feel through her use of words exactly how we feel and what we are going through. I know she's still around; what I can't figure out is why she isn't as vocal as she has been in times past.

Words from this alter would be just as helpful as meds would be. Words, whether in books or music, are very therapuetic and can save a soul. But I'm usually too zoned out to focus on the book, which is a fear I have of these postings: that they are random and unfocused and hard to follow.

No matter. Don't sweat the small stuff. I can only hope and pray that we'll gain better ground and be focused soon. We have to by August for school. It feels like this time it's all or nothing.

That's alot of pressure to put on ourselves. Gulp.