Oh hi!

It’s the start of a new year so you know what time it is! it’s time for me to come crawling out of the darkness to explain where the hell I’ve been! It has almost been a year this time!

The biggest thing that has happened recently has actually been a change of my diagnosis. I had been living with bipolar for many years now but the biggest problem my psychiatrist had was that my paranoid delusions and hallucinations didn’t fit in with the rest of my symptoms. So, I now officially have been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

I’m still learning about it all to be honest but what it means is that I have symptoms of Schizophrenia and also symptoms of bipolar disorder, so if anything I just moved to an area that is just a little bit more complicated than before. This has meant that I’ve had to go harder on the anti-psychotics which I’m not really enjoying but I’m just glad to not think there are people living in my roof anymore, although I will always have a soft spot for Chad.

I’m hoping now that I have something that fits me a bit better that I’ll be able to find some normalcy and consistency in my life, I go to therapy every second week and I’d say it’s pretty helpful except for the random anxiety I get at night time. I can’t seem to work out where it’s coming from or what I can do to avoid it because it’s so all over the place. It seems to happen when I don’t have anything planned for the evening, it will start with this intense heaviness settling in my chest and I just don’t know what to do. I’ve tried ice, distraction, breathing techniques, ASMR and even just leaning into and trying to see what happens but it just hangs over me. If anyone has any tips feel free to let me know.

In other news The Gremlin is turning 8 this year, he is the funniest dude you will ever meet. For Christmas we got him a boxing bag which has only helped in weaponizing him. He has officially been diagnosed with ADHD which along with the autism is a wild ride but we have all come such a long way and The husband and I are much better parents than we use to be. We aren’t perfect of course but bluey sure has taught us alot! I’m not even kidding, that show is amazing!

This month will mark a year since I started attending a book club my friends and I set up, it has been really great. I’m going to start rocking up to this blog more often, so I’ll chuck up what we are reading each month in case anyone needs any inspiration. Just be warned that some months might be rather heavy in smut but hey if you’re into that your welcome!

I have also been doing a yoga challenge this month, well the 5 days of it we have had so far, it’s basically 10 minutes of yoga a day which has been really easy to get into. It’s mainly to help get a routine set so I do it every morning, but so far it’s only showing me that I’m like a humpty dumpty person and that I will never be flexible enough to become a pretzel.

I swear I’ll try to be better with blogging this year, even though I’m not even sure how many people read here. I enjoy writing and I would love to get a community going as I search for some Schizoaffective friends! (Or any friends at all, honestly I need more friends)

A letter to myself.

Dear Kass,

I know you are on a journey of self discovery but I have recently learnt some things that I think would be very beneficial for you to remember.

You are living too much in the past, the what ifs are getting so big they are about to swallow you whole! It’s sometimes fun to look back on fond memories but the thing is, you don’t have a time machine so you can’t redo anything. The choices whether wrong or right have led you here and my god your life is so nice!

Of course I know that past trauma still has you in it’s clutches but a thing you haven’t realised is that you are holding on to the trauma as well!!! I think it’s easy to get stuck mourning the person you might have been without it or the happiness you lost because of it but think of the happiness you are losing by not moving forward. You can’t change anything that has happened but just look at how much you have survived! Sure you don’t need ALL of those fight or flight responses you have but maybe letting go will help with those too. Regrets are too heavy to carry forever.

Now onto the elusive idea of happiness. You are constantly searching for it and haven’t even noticed that you had it all along. You aren’t going to be happy all of the time because nobody is! Also you are mentally ill so sometimes you are going to fall into dark pits of despair but that is never permanent. Remember that although there are times when you feel hopeless and heavy there are also times when you feel light and free.

Another thing we need to talk about if your body image problems, yup you are a chunky lady but that does not make you worthless! You do not need to shrink yourself!! You do however need to start loving yourself, I don’t mean to the point where you can’t stop staring at your reflection like Narcissus or anything but you do need to see your worth.

Lose weight or don’t lose weight, it doesn’t really matter. Nobody gives a shit what you look like anyway! But you should try walking and I don’t mean power walking through the hilliest neighbourhood you can find. I mean just a casual stroll in the sunlight because let’s face it, you really need some sunlight.

You are 33 years old! You still have so many possibilities for yourself but you are always giving up, thinking that death is an easier option. For so long you have been searching for something that would tether you to this life, something that would make you want to try living for a change, but there are plenty of reasons to try and if you can’t think of one then I’ll help you out.

You are loved and there are people that would suffer if you just left. You keep assuming that you are a burden on everyone but the ones you lean on also look to you for support! Leaning on each other only makes us all stronger.

The biggest thing I want to leave you with is this, none of these changes are easy they will take work and you will need to scramble up some of those shittier thought processes but please try. Contentment is so close I can almost touch it with my fingertips, you just need to push forward.

You got this, #2022kass.

The return of the king.

Well here I am again, I didn’t forget you completely.

I left you all on a bit of a depressing note so you might be asking, hey you feeling better about life my guy? and the answer to that would be a huge resounding NO my friend, but thanks for asking!

While I was away I had a brief meltdown, my beloved fur baby Midnight became ill and sadly did not make it, The husband took off on deployment, The gremlin was diagnosed with autism and now we are currently in another lockdown so it’s looking like my kid won’t be going back to school properly until October sometime.

I have also discovered that I am DEFINITELY not built to be a teacher, I have the patience of a drunken man and the temperament of a scorpion and unfortunately my kid is exactly the same. So there are a lot of weird rambling arguments with neither of us actually getting anywhere. While I’m desperately trying to teach The gremlin not to write all of his letters backwards, he is desperately trying to get me to explain to him (for the millionth time) why it is that he suddenly has so much paperwork!!

Where is The husband you may ask? well I don’t actually know to be honest, all I know it that he is out sailing the high seas with his sea bros and just doing whatever sea bros do. I do know that he will be back some time in December and until then The gremlin and I will struggle along and try not to break too much of the house while he is away.

Onto my beloved fur child. Midnight died in May and it was the worst. It was so bizarre, one minute he is sick and the next I’m having to put him down. I held him as he went and it was terrible, to be fair since he had some kind of brain complication he was just a bit of an empty vessel as it was, I couldn’t really feel him there anymore.

He was cremated because I couldn’t stand the thought of burying him or scattering his ashes somewhere, Midnight was dumped when he was a kitten and then rescued so to me it felt like it would be abandoning him all over again to do so. So he lives beside my bed and sure I might be too weirdly attached to an urn but I’ll never be ready to let that guy go, he was my emotional support animal and I was his. Sure not in a legal way, like I couldn’t take him into a shop with me or anything because we both wouldn’t have known how to cope with that so we would have ended up hyperventilating on the floor somewhere, PLUS he was a runner and would have straight up abandoned me in my hour of need so maybe he wasn’t the best support animal for outings but whenever I would have a meltdown at home or if I went into a depressive episode he would stay by me and he would either lay curled up by my stomach or he would sleep on my pillow right beside my head. I’ll never be able to have that again and for that my heart aches.

Midnights brother Iggy changed pretty quickly after his death, he suddenly became clingy and needy which was a nice change since before he was a bit of an asshole. I guess even he noticed Midnights absence even though he seemed to kind of hate the guy. I am slowly adapting to living with just one cat, I still buy too much food and too much kitty litter but after nine years of living with two cats I guess it will be a hard habit to break.

Onto the young Gremlin. So after three years of doctors appointments and assessments it turns out the little dude has autism, so now we are moving into a new stage of doctors and therapists and all that kind of stuff. He is pretty calm about it all mainly because he has no idea what is going on, not because of the autism, just because I’m too boring to listen to. He just thinks that he has a bunch of new people to hang out with now, and that’s cool with me because it turns out those new people are amazing and so helpful. I feel bad for them that they have to deal with me though with my bag of crazy, a few of them are trying to help me sort myself out since I can emotionally regulate about as well as my kid. Ah we have fun.

It is a relief to have a diagnosis but it is full on to be doing it alone, and The gremlin is not loving life without his dad which has been an uphill battle getting him to understand. He reminds me every few days that I am not the preferred parent and even when I do something he is pumped about he likes to make sure I don’t get my hopes up about him liking me which is super nice. #mumlife.

Anyway, I won’t promise I’ll be back regularly but I hope I will be. I do like writing here even though I actually have no idea if anyone is even reading what garbage I spew out.

R.I.P my prom night dumpster baby, you are sorely missed.

Can we get an F in the chat (or whatever it is that the kids are saying) for this little beauty.

The pile of anxiety.

I’m a pretty worthless person and I hate myself almost all the time. I don’t really know when it started but I do know that I felt this way for many years. I wish my brain wasn’t so fucked up, I wish I wasn’t so mentally wired to believe that everyone hates me.

I mean, everyone has their own stuff plus most people that have dealt with me before tend to disappear because I’m too intense or I have burnt them out. But when these things happen it just proves me right which is worse. I am fortunate to not have entirely alienated myself so I have a few people who keep me around, but I always feel like the clock is ticking.

The issue is I don’t actually trust anyone that much because I assume everyone wants to escape me but I so badly want people to want me around and to love me that it makes me an entirely inconsistent person.

I’m going back on meds now, mood stabilisers and since I can barely leave my house due to my anxiety so they have upped my fibro meds because they are also used for anxiety.

This post has no point and since no one really reads it I’m basically talking to myself. I guess I’ll take my worthless body back to bed so I can try to build up some energy to parent my kid.

Well then….squirrel!

So funny story….

Ever since I went into hospital and came off the meds I have been working with my psychiatrist to figure out what is happening in my head, but the problem (aside from my complete lack of ability to regulate) is that my bipolar had gone totally quiet.

So I began to question whether or not I had ever had bipolar at all, I mean borderline personality disorder and bipolar are often medically confused for one another and borderline does describe alot of my symptoms.

I started to get stressed out about it all and life happened to notice it and decided that I could probably do with a bit more chaos.

Last week I had to go under sedation to get my wisdom teeth taken out and as it was the first time I was getting knocked out I was understandably scared shitless then the Husband went back to work and had to start getting ready to go away which has been very unpredictable and to top it all off the Gremlin starts school in a few days and I don’t think he will transition into it easily due to his regulating and processing issues.

Anyway all of these things started consuming me and I started losing more and more sleep, and then suddenly I felt this need to change up my wardrobe so I spent over $300 on new clothes (including a pastel pink cropped tank top that says “needy” on it, which totally goes with my introverted personality…) and then I needed to change up the bedroom to make it more of a zen space so I spent $130 on a bright pink and purple doona cover that has magic mushrooms on it and then I wanted new bedroom furniture so I started thinking that I could probably just take ours out back and repaint it all (which is something I have never done in my fucking life but I was and continue to be completely convinced that I could ace it) and then I had a surge on energy so I started working out and my self confidence spiked way up which has caused me to start strutting around my house like I’m some kind of sex symbol.

Anyway I was on the phone to my best friend last night talking about all the things I have been doing when it suddenly clicked and I said “Oh shit, I do have bipolar” and she just replies with “Yeah I know” and we just burst out laughing because it was the most ridiculous thing in the world!

The most important thing I had forgotten about my bipolar is that it is almost always triggered off by things like stress and a lack of sleep, so of course I wouldn’t have been having issues with it because after I left the psych ward everything had calmed down and I started a better routine with my doctor and psychologist.

So that is the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t have bipolar and then proceeded to fall face first into a manic episode.

Well I have prattled on long enough, I feel like I have five different songs playing at the same time in my head and I also have another six tabs open on my computer that are screaming at me to buy all the things, so I’ll be on my way, on my way, make that six songs playing in my head.

Thanks for listening to my Ted talk.

*please note: I apologise in advance if this post has errors or is difficult to read, I went over it a bunch of times but I kept losing focus so this is as good as it is going to get baby!

Hello darkness my old friend.

Greetings hidden lurkers, I have returned from the dark abyss to vent about how much of a hot mess I am these days. So strap in because this post is going to be all over the place, much like my mental state.

Long story short I started having what I thought were mixed episodes and I started hearing things so my psychiatrist started tweaking my meds which ended up in a week long stay in the psych ward. During my stay the ward doctors came up with the idea that I may also have borderline personality disorder which could be interfering with the bipolar. So in an attempt to see what my base line mental state is I am slowly coming off of all my medications.

This process is long and tedious and if I’m honest, I’m completely terrified. Changing medications is one thing but not taking anything is like walking a tight rope without a safety net. For years I complained about having to take medication and I always wanted to be free of it all but now that my dream is coming into formation I’m not as happy about it as I thought I would be.

The adding on an extra diagnosis isn’t my favourite thing either, the bipolar was already enough of a handful and it definitely did not need a sibling. I mean, I’m so unstable right now the slightest inconvenience will tip me into raging emotions town. Parenting is probably the hardest thing currently because I was never very good at it to begin with but now I’m entirely useless, the more I pull back from the gremlin the tighter he clutches to me and it honestly makes my skin crawl right now, I know it sounds like a horrible thing to say about your child but I’m just so irritable. I want to be left alone, I want to run away from it all.

As for borderline personality, I read up about it and it definitely makes sense for me. I’ve always been emotionally unstable, insecure, self destructive and I’ve always fucked up my friendships and relationships. I fit into a bunch more of the traits as well (although a lot of people I know do).

I don’t know how it’s possible to feel so empty yet so full of pent up emotions but that’s how I feel. I have tried really hard with all of this brain stuff but I keep getting smacked down, things will get better but as soon as I get complacent they get ten times worse. At some point I’m supposed to catch a break right?

To make matters more stressful we are currently in the middle of getting the gremlin tested for autism, because life wanted to make things more interesting for us I guess. The gremlin is terrible at regulating himself which apparently I am also terrible at according to the psych ward doctors. So he and I clash something chronic and our household is very tense. The stress has led to a constant twitch in my left eye and my poor husband left trying to mediate the fighting that occurs between me and the kid.

So for now I guess I will play the waiting game medication wise and then outside of that I’ll do all the therapies that I have to do in order to make sure that I don’t run off into the woods never to be seen again.

I started the year out thinking that I would make 2020 my bitch, but then 2020 turned around and made us all it’s bitch so I don’t think I’m alone when I say that this year can go and fuck itself.

A rogue post.

I had an idea of what I was going to write on here but as is the way of my brain these days all of my ideas are completely gone and I’m left with an emptiness is always filled in by anxiety.

So I’m going rogue, I’m going to tell you how I’m feeling right now because I’m afraid that I will explode if some kind of emotion isn’t released. I think that’s my problem, while I will talk about what is going on inside of me I rarely take the time to actually feel it. I try to swallow the emotions just as I swallow the pills that numb me to them.

I’m very disconnected from myself, I think I have been for a lot of my life, partially out of necessity but mostly out of fear. But cracks are slowly starting to develop and I honestly don’t know how to navigate it all because what the hell do you do when you go from feeling nothing to feeling every bloody thing.

I lifestyle changes I need to make in order to actually live my life, because the way I am right now isn’t working out for me and this isn’t living! I can’t concentrate, my emotions are all over the place, my skin is just crawling all of the time and I just need things to stop for me so I can get my balance back.

Useless. That’s how I feel about the situation and myself, I turn 30 next year and all I’ve done is have a kid and as much as I love the Gremlin I don’t want to just be a mother. If I had to choose a profession it would be writing but I don’t even know if I have a talent for it. I lack confidence which makes me second guess myself and not even both with trying.

This post got away from me but there you go. I’m not going edit this because I’m already going crazy from forcing myself to concentrate on one thing for longer than a minute.

Yup.

 

Mental breakdowns and therapy cats.

Wow, it has been ages since I have logged on here. So hi I guess!

Not much has changed in my absence, The Gremlin is over three years old now and while he is very cute he is still a pain in the ass. Mentally I’m still a fucking mess, probably more so now.

I started having “mixed episodes” which are god awful and I ten out of ten do not recommend. So the doctoring lords changed my meds and fucked things up more because it caused my anxiety to spike to stupid levels which led to another med change (and a brief stint in the psych ward AGAIN) which caused insane restlessness and agitation and that’s where we are now, restless, annoyed and really wondering when things will improve for me. Basically I’m feeling sorry for myself.

Many people (Like maybe four or five) want to know what my plans are and since it’s fucking overwhelming to try and figure it out I’m going to write ten ideas right here…….

1. Fix my meds
2. Get a psychologist and stick with it, DO THE HOMEWORK IDIOT!
3. Start meal prepping in order to develop a routine
4. Exercise!! Most likely swimming……uuuuuggghhhhhh
5. No more drinking……most likely….maybe
6. No more caffeine for anxiety reasons
7. Start going out more for play dates or whatever (Kill me)
8. KEEP TO A ROUTINE
9. Eat less take out
10. Do things that make me happy.

There you have it, read it and weep my dears.

In other news, Midnight has taken it upon himself to become my personal therapy animal. He follows me everywhere and last night while I was anxiously trying to sleep he forced himself onto my pillow in hopes of easing my pain. The trouble is Midnight is like me in cat form so he is jumpy and anxious and startles super easy which means he really only makes things worse for me.

Me: Ok let’s try deep breathing

Midnight: You anxious friend? Here, pat my fur and feel your nerves float away….wait, what was that noise??!?!?

Me: It’s nothing

Midnight: That’s the sound of a fucking murderer coming for us *jumps up* we gotta get out of here

Me: You’re so silly *nervous laughter*

Midnight: Shit it’s getting louder, SAVE YOURSELVES!! *Runs away*

Me: HUSBAND!!!!!

The sentiment is lovely though.

Drugs….

I hate taking my meds, I really fucking hate it. Everyday I have to force myself to take them because my brain tries to convince me that I don’t need them, and sometimes I’ll go rogue and not take them but I generally get caught out by my family or friends and then I’m forced to take them again.

The shit thing about Bipolar is that, while 90% of it sucks, the manic periods can be awesome. I can get so much done! Maybe I’m just miss having energy, my body is so shit right now.

I just have no creativity and I keep gaining weight and it all sucks, and what makes it worse is that the doctors are still playing with my meds…..uuuuuggghhh

I do get curious as to what I would be like if I wasn’t on anything, when I say this to the people in my life they remind me that the last time I decided to go rogue with my meds I ended up in a psych ward……might be nice to have another vacation….Kidding mum!!

The Gremlin

The Gremlin is now two and his interests include eating, throwing tantrums and wrestling with unsuspecting children that get too close.

I don’t know what personality I expected him to have but I definitely didn’t expect him to be so boisterous and crazy, especially since he is an only child. His current obsession is jumping off things, the higher the better, the amount of times I’ve had to catch him mid fall from the couch is ridiculous. Many of you might be thinking “Well why not just let him fall and then he might stop once he realises that it hurts” yuuuup tried that and it does not faze him, today at playgroup he got pushed off a big mat and landed on his face and he pretty much just got up and continued on with his day, meanwhile I was recovering from the small heart attack I had from seeing the fall.

The Gremlin also enjoys all things hot, especially fire, fire is his favourite. I don’t know what he is going to be once he grows up but I assume it will include eating, fire and wrestling. A fire eating wrestler maybe? Well whatever it is I hope it’s lucrative, I’d like to be put in a fancy nursing home.

Speech wise he can say a few things but the most prominent saying is “Oh shit” which is so great, especially when he is screaming it out at playgroup so all the other judgy mothers can look on in shock. His other favourite words are no, mumma, nanny and MORE lol.

Aside from that there isn’t much to report, he is growing up so fast…..but not fast enough! Come on school days!!!

Anyway, here is a picture of my kid.

 

Isn’t he beautiful.