joreth | Entries tagged with depression

www.helpguide.org/articles/suicide-prevention/suicide-prevention.htm

I decided to start being open with my depression and my occasional bouts with suicidal thoughts. I decided to do this when I acknowledged that it is possible to continue to *live* while still being suicidally depressed. I acknowledge and accept that these thoughts are part of my condition and that I don't have to act on them. That makes it easier for me to talk about it publicly.

But because so many suicidal people do not talk about their depression or their thoughts, a lot of people are under the impression that, because I might mention something about death or hopelessness, I must therefore be in danger. Really, it's when I don't talk about it that I'm probably in the most danger.

And then I get all the usual reactions to people who have no idea how to handle other people having complex emotions, which is bad enough, but it's compounded by the fact that I'm not actually in any immediate danger so I don't *need* that assistance even if it was helpful, which it isn't.

A lot of the things on this list don't apply to me because of my decision to talk publicly about choosing to live while having suicidal thoughts. My talking about death isn't a "warning signal", but it might be for someone else. I'm talking about death because I can't handle needing to comfort other people with their own fears and concerned feelings about me while I'm also going through my own struggles with my own feelings. I can't do the emotional labor for the both of us anymore.

So I'm talking about it to normalize talking about difficult subjects so that the rest of y'all can learn how to do your own emotional labor so that you can better support those people you're feeling all those concerned feelings about instead of making us try to make you feel better when we feel like shit first.

So, even though a lot of this article doesn't apply to me, personally, I'm sure they apply to other people, and this list of Don'ts is particularly applicable to me.

"But don’t:

Argue with the suicidal person. Avoid saying things like: "You have so much to live for," "Your suicide will hurt your family," or "Look on the bright side."

Act shocked, lecture on the value of life, or say that suicide is wrong.

Promise confidentiality. Refuse to be sworn to secrecy. A life is at stake and you may need to speak to a mental health professional in order to keep the suicidal person safe. If you promise to keep your discussions secret, you may have to break your word.

Offer ways to fix their problems, or give advice, or make them feel like they have to justify their suicidal feelings. It is not about how bad the problem is, but how badly it’s hurting your friend or loved one.

Blame yourself. You can’t “fix” someone’s depression. Your loved one’s happiness, or lack thereof, is not your responsibility."

I especially love this line here: "It is not about how bad the problem is, but how badly it’s hurting your friend or loved one."

One further note on the warning of antidepressants. When I went through my therapy the last time, the doctor began to prescribe something for me that would increase my "motivation", but literally in the middle of writing the prescription, I said something or other that made her change her mind and she prescribed something to lift my mood first but that wouldn't necessarily give me more motivation.

(No, I have no memory of what either drug was or what the mechanism was to isolate those two specific emotions. I did some research later and it lined up with what she said, but now I'm left only with the memory of the *effect* of this conversation, not the details. So accept it on face value).

The thing is, that I had at that point reached a place where I was a high risk. I was willing to die. But I couldn't get up the motivation to actually get up off the floor of my storage unit, where I had fallen to sob hysterically, to reach for my gun on the upper shelf. That lack of motivation was, literally, the only reason I didn't die that night. It was just too much effort to go through with it.

So, later, I went to the therapist and we discussed options and she changed her mind on what drug to give me in the middle of the session. Now see, my depression is situational, not necessarily my brain chemistry. And my situation changed shortly thereafter. So we don't really know if the drug worked or I just got out of that depression on my own.

But what I do know is that my *mood* lifted before I gained back my motivation to do stuff. It was still some time later before I could feel motivated about things, I just didn't feel so *hopeless* anymore. And that's when I did some research about the drugs we talked about and the incidents of people who accomplish their suicides after they begin taking antidepressants.

So I now believe that there are 2 parts to suicidal depression: a lack of hope, and a lack of motivation. And I believe that if a person who is suicidal ever gets their motivation to do stuff back before they lose their sense of despair and hopelessness, that's what causes them to take their own lives.

And if we're prescribing them shit that makes them feel motivated to do stuff but they haven't gotten over whatever makes them feel hopeless as fast as they gain their motivation, that may contribute to why people suicide after taking antidepressants.

So if you know someone who is suicidal and who is finally convinced to start taking medication, be aware of this motivation / mood split.

As I sit squarely in the middle of the season that triggered my last bout with depression, I came across this Facebook post I wrote towards a lull in the depression. It's interesting reading it again almost 2 years later. Although I think I have pulled out of the depression itself, I have not, in fact, gotten past my self-doubt of my character judgement, and I wonder how much of my inability to trust my own judgement has interfered with my ability to date and meet people in the past couple of years (really, this year shouldn't count, since I'm also not meeting people because I refuse to date in person, which, on top of my prickly online personality, means guys don't generally stick around long enough for me to consider them worth dating):

REALLY long rambling. Basically, I'm just doing some introspection out loud.

My last several breakups have severely undermined my confidence in my ability to judge character and make good partner choices. First was the guy who managed to date 2 feminists and then go full on misogynist "but misandry!" after we all broke up (his choice to breakup, btw, he's not doing some incel "the feminists dumped me, therefore women suck!" thing).

Next was the guy who abused all his other partners and I didn't see it. Then was the guy who ghosted me and I gave him another chance, only to have him ghost me a second time. Before that second ghosting was a casual partner who ghosted me once, I gave him a second chance, and he also ghosted me again.

Then came the dude who was so terrified that I would find someone to replace him that he dumped me for his ex-gf, because that makes sense. #HeLiftedMeUpAndThrewMeDownCryingPleaseDontHurtMeMama

So in the middle of my depression, I'm having a serious self-esteem issue over my ability to make good choices for myself. Which leads me to questioning and probing at some of my patterns, trying to identify and recognize them.  I noticed one pattern several years ago, but couldn't really identify it. I could tell *something* was a common thread, but not quite sure what. I think I may be zeroing in on it.

I have different kinds of attractions to people. I'm sure others do too, but I'm interested in mine right now, to troubleshoot, not trying to identify some Grand Unifying Theory Of Attraction that other people might also feel.  The most obvious is sexual attraction - we have a chemistry where we feel drawn to each other, aroused, can't keep our hands off each other, etc.

And I have an aesthetic attraction to someone where I just find them so pretty that I have to keep looking at them. For most of my life, I mistook this as sexual attraction. This partly contributed to my early confusion about my orientation. I thought I was bi because I found some women so aesthetically attractive that I felt I had to keep looking at them. But, it turns out, at least in me, the aesthetic attraction and the sexual attraction are two separate axis that may or may not cross and when it comes to women and femmes, they do not cross.

I can have an intellectual attraction to someone where we click really well on intellectual interests and pursuits. I get excited just thinking of the conversations we could have together.  I also discovered something that I'm starting to call my Fascination Attraction. I have noticed that there are a few people in my past who I felt drawn to in a unique way. I felt a kind of fascination with them that wasn't really any of the above attractions.

It's kind of similar to the fascination that some people might feel when looking at a particularly interesting insect. Some people find insects gross or creepy or weird or scary or whatever. Some people find insects beautiful. But some people don't find them to be either, they just find them *fascinating*.

And, of course, it's not purely aesthetic for me, but chances are that the person I feel this attraction to isn't necessarily *conventionally* attractive. Not that they're *unattractive* - I mean, they often are considered attractive - just that, well ...

Let's say that the Avengers is a lineup of what counts for "conventionally attractive". If you look at the whole cast, there's actually a pretty decently diverse range of appearances, given that it's still Hollywood. I've seen a handful of different Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic/Good/Evil charts using Avengers characters. There are quite a few archetypes in that cast. But, because it's Hollywood, for all their diversity, they're still *conventionally attractive* within their archetypes.

So, let's say that the people I feel this Fascination Attraction to fit a description more like "interesting". Even given the range of Avengers-attractive, they might be more aptly described as "interesting" *even if people also happen to find them aesthetically attractive*, if that makes sense?

That's really my type, if I could say that I had a "type" at all - interesting. I like people with interesting faces. Sometimes that falls under the category of "conventionally attractive", sometimes it doesn't.

So, I have this Fascination Attraction. I'm not entirely sure what is drawing me to this person, because it's not aesthetics *even if they happen to be conventionally attractive* and it's not intellectual attraction *even if they happen to be intellectually stimulating* and it's not even sexual attraction *even if we happen to have sexual chemistry*.

I don't really know how to describe it, except that it's recognizable to me as this kind of attraction. I can go through my romantic and sexual history and pick out which of my previous partners I felt which of these attractions for that drew me to them initially (over time, as I get to know someone, my attraction tends to be more nuanced and pull from several different directions).

But the point of identifying all these different types of attractions is to recognize patterns associated when I act on the different types of attractions.

For instance, when I act purely on sexual attraction, I tend to find out after the fact that we have radically different political views and I might regret either getting to know them better or having started a sexual relationship. Like my mechanic, for instance - the homeopath conspiracist who thinks cigarettes won't kill him but chemotherapy will and that David Hoagg is part of a troupe of "crisis actors" who fake mass shootings.
Like, sure, he was a good fuck back in the day when we were sleeping together but holy shit! I still haven't decided which is worse - finding out just how much of a barking moonbat he is or knowing that I used to get naked with him now that I know his bizarre ideas.

So, when I feel an instant sexual attraction to someone, I probably ought to rein in the hormones a bit and ask myself, do I really want to fuck someone who will very likely turn out to be my opposite, politically speaking? Or am I willing to have the sexual experience and just go out of my way not to get to know him, so that I don't have to deal with that knowledge if he turns out to fit squarely in my Sexual Attraction : Wild Beliefs bell curve.

This Fascination Attraction, now ... that's an interesting one. See, when I have casual sex with someone with wildly divergent sociopolitical views, I don't feel anything particularly strongly, except perhaps some embarrassment in some of the more extreme cases. But with the Fascinators, that's where the roller coaster rides seem to happen. Extreme highs and lows. More regrets. More "I wish I had known that up front" thoughts. More "maybe I shouldn't have" or "maybe I should have gone more slowly" or "maybe I should have taken the other option".

I'm not yet sure if this is consistent across the board. I have to do more plotting of my history chart to see if the correlation is steady or if there are any exceptions. But with my recent self-doubt, it makes me very nervous when I find my interest in someone hitting that Fascination Attraction button. I feel drawn like a moth who knows exactly what will happen when I touch that flame but I go anyway.

So I hit the brakes and pull back, and then I second-guess my second-guessing, and down goes the spiral. With my depression and my recent painful dual breakups, I find myself less inclined for emotional attachments and more interested in casual relationships or hookups, but that leaves me open to the Fascination Attraction, which I am now second guessing because of the depression making me doubt my ability to judge people well or make good choices.

And 'round it goes.

I'm really kinda anxious for this whole depression thing to fuck off for a while. It's making me lonely and driven to pursue finding partners but also to back away from potential partners because I assume I'm going to fuck it up by choosing poorly. Catch-22.

This is a post I made on Facebook on January 28, 2019, and it was commentary on a link of some sort that is now deleted so I have no idea what the original content was that prompted me to write this post.

But it's about my experience with suicidal depression, so I'm archiving it here:

I spiraled into a suicidal depression about 4 or 5 years ago and managed to claw my way out, but only barely. The depression was right there behind the wall, waiting for an opportunity to come back. It sometimes sent raiding parties over that I would have to battle for a day or two, and scouts in the form of random anxiety attacks, so although I felt that I was out of the depression, I wasn't quite out of the woods (to mix all my metaphors).

I was suicidal as a bullied child, but I pulled myself out of that one so far that I didn't even recognize that time in my life as "me". I knew that it had happened, but it felt disassociated, like a movie I had seen. I couldn't remember what depression felt like. Until I hit it again a few years ago.

Now, I got kicked back into it thanks to a major breakup, a minor "breakup" that was still intense for all its shortness, and a forced move. That's what my depression is related to these days - loss and instability. I'm not naturally prone to depression, it's situational. I've just had some really shitty situations for a really long time now.

So, because of the depression a few years ago not completely going away, and then getting pushed into another one a few months ago, I'm starting to forget who that non-depressed Joreth was, like *that* was the "situational" version of me, the movie version, and I don't really remember what it feels like anymore to not be depressed.

I'm now remembering times in my life where things kinda sucked as extensions of my depression (because memories are malleable). I'm starting to identify as a person with depression, rather than a person who happens to be going through a depressive episode right now or who happened to have gone through depression before.

This is becoming my new normal. And I have to be careful because that nihilism was one of the stages prior to the suicidal ideation starting to slide towards action. The only reason why I didn't actually attempt suicide the last time was literally because my apathy was too strong to motivate me. But I had started preparing by putting my affairs in order. That "this is just my life now" was the first step off that ledge.

#GetMeOutOfHere

My recent dating debacles have led me here.

I'm tired of relationships starting out because we had 500 long conversations calmly laying out what we each want and don't want and since things lined up, we made a rational decision to start dating.

I'm tired of the easy, sit on the couch and watch movies, be in the same room on our different devices, comfortable relationships.

Don't get me wrong, I like those things, and they're still actually mandatory qualities for me to be happy and fulfilled in a long-term relationship.

But I'm tired of that being the ONLY thing in my relationships.

I'm tired feeling like I'm chasing my partners. I'm tired of feeling like sex has to be scheduled or it won't ever happen. I'm tired of feeling like it's an effort to have fun, do something exciting, leave the house, have an adventure, get drunk on each other, and feel alive.

I miss passion.

The problem I'm finding is that other people who know how to do passion can't do any of the other things. So it's an either/or situation. If they know how to passion, and can't have the long, calm talks, or the hang out on the couch in comfy clothes, or making time for sex when life gets in the way, then the passion is nothing but a roller coaster with a giant, free-falling drop at the end.

Which fucking hurts.

I want a partner who is so into me that he feels like he can't help himself but to touch me whenever he gets within range. I want someone who is so turned on by me that he feels like he might lose control. I want someone who is drawn to me like a moth to a flame, who can stoke that flame in me with a look, a touch, a growl in my ear.

And that passion is carried into the rest of our relationship, where we are both excited to go out to discover our city, or to adventure together somewhere new, or to share in a cinematic experience on the couch with hot chocolate, or to talk about our wants and dreams and desires and boundaries. Where those mundane activities are also passionate, and also merely window dressing for more settings in which to feel the passion for each other. I want the heat of passion, tempered with reason and comfort, in a way that the reason and comfort don't dilute the passion, but the passion colors up the reason and comfort.

I want passion without the instability that usually comes with passion when it's not tempered with reason and comfort.

I've spent the last 4 years feeling like I have to sit patiently by waiting for someone to finally decide he might want to be with me, and when I got tired of waiting, I felt like I was chasing after someone, and if I have to chase, then that means he's running away.

So I turned to someone who inspired passion, and it took me to soaring heights and a steep, sharp, drop before I even knew what was happening. For a brief moment, life was bright and saturated again, and then it went to harsh black and white, much more stark than the lukewarm pastels and watercolors of the previous relationship.

I want that passion, I miss that passion. That's what was missing before. But that fucking drop at the end is wicked. I could do without that part.

Originally written January 10, 2019. Archiving here for a record of my depression.

Dancing produces endorphins that, if they don't make the depression go away, at least keep it in a stalemate.

Dancing is also a social activity where I could possibly meet more people, since part of my depression is not having any connections to other people in real life.

But I can't go dancing because I am way past my time for moving out, so I can't justify leaving the house for social events until I move out.

But I can't finish packing because my depression is giving me executive dysfunction.

Not being moved out yet is contributing to my anxiety, which is what made my depression close enough to trigger.

Going dancing and not making those connections because connections take time and I've forgotten how to relate to "regular people" so suddenly I'm socially awkward again like middle school, which is, probably not coincidentally, another time I had major depression, so going dancing and not making the connections I'm looking for make me feel worse when I come home, alone.

Making connections only reminds me that I'm trying to leave the state and I'll have to leave these connections someday soon, which makes me resist making new connections.

Thinking of leaving the state and how my ability to do so is pretty much out of my control, so I might be stuck here for a long time, and that's a long time to not have any real connections so I'm just alone for a long time, which makes the depression worse.

So I should go dancing to try and make some connections.

But I can't go dancing because I have to pack.

OTG I have to pack, there's so much to do, I just can't get started.

But I'm losing my place to live and things are only going to get worse if I don't get out ahead of this problem.

I wish I had someone to go through this with me.

Maybe if I go out dancing, I'll meet some people.

But I'm not good at making connections, as evidenced by the last several social settings where I actively tried.

So I'm just doomed to be alone.

And besides, if I *do* make some connections, I'll just have to leave them behind.

Fuck I'm fucking stuck here and I can't get out.

I should go out and meet people to make it more bearable.

But I can't take the time because I have to pack...

#depression

Tips from a life-long introvert & adult sufferer of periodic suicidal depression for those of you new to being stuck inside for long periods of time:

You may be washing your hands more often, but don't forget to shower too! Lots of people might think this is gross, but when you add the anxiety and the isolation on top of the novelty of not being required to dress up or interact with other humans, actually showering can start to slip down on the priority list.

This is a big problem for people suffering from depression, and you might be new to the experience of depression. But being a shut-in might give you some new feelings, like lack of motivation and apathy. So make sure to shower.

Groom yourselves. Don't just shower and comb your hair, but actually TAKE CARE of your appearance. Every few days, get dolled up as if you had a date or a very important business function. I don't mean to get *dressed* up, although you could if you want to. I mean to be deliberate and conscious about your appearance and take extra steps.

If you're a full-out kinda person, then break out the makeup kit and hair products. If you're a little lower maintenance, then moisturize your face, buff your nails, comb your hair with a mirror, etc.

Shave or trim. I realize that not everyone shaves face or body hair, and some people don't even trim, but if this is something that you do when you're putting in extra care for a fancy or important event, then do it every couple of days now too.

Pick out an outfit. It doesn't have to be fancy, it should just be something that you thought about and *picked out*, not just grabbed whatever was on top in your drawer.

These kinds of deliberate choices are super important during a depression. They help combat feelings of apathy and helplessness and they help bolster your sense of identity. *What* you do isn't as important as the fact that you are making conscious and deliberate choices *to do it*.

If you are normally a "fuck you, I don't care what I look like" / "fuck the patriarchy, I won't buy into all the bullshit rules for my appearance" / "down with consumerism and capitalism, I refuse to get sucked into appearances-matter-to-line-your-pockets!" sort of person, this is still important to do.

It's not about meeting some arbitrary standard. It's about practicing making choices in who you are and expressing it through your appearance and in grooming and hygiene.

So pick whatever standard you want, as long as it takes some effort on your part. Pick the highest standard among your various standards for various circumstances, or pick some standard that is totally not you at all just to see what it's like to get up that way for fun. The point is - break your daily routine and put some effort into yourself.

Time to get over your fears of the phone! Traditional phone calls or video conferencing or whatever allows you to interact with another person in real time without coming in contact with them. Y'all already know about text-based mediums, but now we are losing our in-person socialization so we need a temporary substitute for this. Start calling your loved ones when you would otherwise have spent time with them in person.

Cook a meal and then Facetime with them while you both eat something. Make a cup of tea and Skype with someone. Put your bluetooth earbuds in while you work out in your living room and your workout buddy works out in theirs. Leave a video chat running on your computer while you clean the house. Run a Google Hangout with video for half a dozen of your friends on one device while running a Netflix Party with those same friends on your laptop.

Leave the house. For most of us, we are not under a strict quarantine, we are under self-isolation recommendations. That means don't congregate. You can still go for a solo bike ride. Take a walk around the block and combine it with a phone call to a loved one. You don't need to come in contact with people every time you leave the house, so leave the house for a little bit every day. Even if that means just going into your yard.

Start a new hobby or pick up an old hobby. Gardening right now is probably an excellent new hobby, as it can be done solo, it gets you outdoors, and you can do it while talking on the phone to people. Then, you'll need to shower and clean up afterwards. 2 for 1! Working out - same thing.

Teach yourself how to knit from YouTube videos. Try your hand at jewelry-making. Start painting your spare room like you've been talking about for years. If you ever wanted to start writing your first novel or memoirs, now may be the perfect time to get started.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to self-isolate with a loved one and neither of you are sick, you can pick up some hobbies that work best with other people, like dancing (even solo dancing can be easier to learn with someone else learning alongside of you). Again, YouTube can help, even though I usually recommend in-person lessons as superior to watching a video. But you can start taking those lessons in a few months when all this blows over. You can get a head start with YouTube.

Sign up for The Great Courses. This is an online program that gives you access to all kinds of learning opportunities, including actual accredited classes. Learn something new!

Structure your day. Look, I get it. I sleep in late, I take about an hour to actually get out of bed once I'm awake, and I get sucked into the internet. This may seem like a luxurious benefit to the new self-isolation restrictions. But not having some kind of structure can lead to aimlessness, which leads to apathy. You don't need militaristic precision in your schedule, just pick some kind of structure.

Set timers and only faff about online until the timer goes off and then start your hobby. Set a timer for meals so that you don't forget them and start eating at random times. Do your new workout routine first thing in the morning to get your day started. Cozy up with a cup of tea and your onsie and Facetime for a goodnight chat with a loved one separated by the travel bans, and set a timer so that you don't end up staying up all night and messing up your schedule the next day.

Set aside time for goofing off or being impulsive or not having a plan. You don't need to do this, but a lot of my "spontaneous" friends chafe at the mere thought of having a schedule. But humans really do function better (both emotionally and as part of a cooperative society) when they have some kind of structure in their lives. So leave yourself some time for your spontaneous impulsivity while adhering to *some kind* of structure that still allows you to be productive and stave off depression and apathy. And those of you who have trouble with spontaneity could take this opportunity to learn more about it and stretch your creativity muscles.

Elsewhere, I suggested Netflix Party. I've been using this for years, and nobody seems to have ever heard of it, and then all of a sudden, major internet outlets are recommending it. This is a Chrome plugin that allows several people to watch the same Netflix video at the same time. Everyone needs to install the NP plugin and everyone needs to be able to login to Netflix wherever they are. And then everyone needs to have access to the same movie (this is relevant if you want to have a NP with people in other countries - not all videos are available streaming in all countries).

Then one person starts the Party, selects whether they want solo control of the video or to share control with the other viewers, and invites people to the party by sharing the link that NP provides. Everyone else clicks on the link and you're all now watching the same video that's synced up to everyone else's screen. There is a chat sidebar if you want to chat, but I like to have a second device sitting next to my laptop running a video chat app so that I can see and hear the people I'm in the Party with. I wear earbuds with a microphone for the video chat device, and then headphones on top of them that are connected to the laptop. This gives me good sound quality on both devices and prevents audio feedback.

I'm still trying out other programs to watch synchronized video through platforms other than Netflix.

I can't stress enough how important it is to stay physical - and I don't mean just moving around. I mean to care for this bag of meat that we live in. Exercise and grooming to the best of your ability is still important even though we're (hopefully) not going out and partying right now. It's good for your physical health as well as your mental and emotional health.

So enjoy being able to work from home and cuddle with your furbabies and see your kids all day and wear comfortable clothing and not care about impossible cultural standards if this is a benefit to the current crisis for you. Absolutely take advantage of it while you can. Just be aware that these are the same things that contribute to other sorts of challenges like depression and chronic illness. So while they're fun when they're novel, we still need to be doing the other things too.

Keep moving, feeding, and cleaning your body, and keep (or start) caring about your appearance - again, not to meet externally imposed standards, but to keep in touch with the vessel that we are housed in and to keep the connection between the state of this vessel and the state of our mind strong and healthy. It's like maintaining your car - you might not care if your car looks like shit because appearances don't matter to you, but peeling paint and exposed metal and dents in the frame impact the functioning of your vehicle and, if not maintained, will increase the speed of deterioration.

It's not about appearances, it's about *functioning*. Appearances are also functional. Grooming is important. Being physically active (to the best of your ability) is important. Keeping busy is important. Socializing is important. Learning is important. You can get through this self-isolation period. If my entire generation (GenX) could survive as latchkey kids, y'all can make it through the next few months.

I wish this was taught alongside the messages not to allow someone to hit you.

When I was a kid, I was bullied. I had no lessons in how to deal with strong emotions. So my emotions exploded outwards in fits of physical rage. I broke a lot of shit. My parents would get mad at me for being so destructive, of course, but there were no resources for telling me how *not* to be destructive when my feelings were just too big for my body.

I learned to swallow my rage at being bullied and it turned inward instead, towards self-harm, depression, anorexia, and suicidal thoughts. As an adult, I continue to battle explosive rage and depression. The physical violence, however, seems to have been pretty well taken care of with the suicidal depression and the apathy that it manifests as, which I haven't been able to shake in the last 5 years.

I'm basically now that lab rat who is so used to a horrible existence that I have no motivation to change it even when given opportunity, because I don't believe it will really change.

When I was a teen, I was engaged to someone who damaged property every time he got jealous. I was absolutely confident he would never hit *me*, and, to be fair, I still am. But this was not a healthy dynamic whether he ever hit me or not.

So when I got engaged a second time a few years later to someone who threatened to break my collectible figurines if I dared to sleep on the couch after arguing all night about him sexually assaulting me while I was trying to sleep, it took longer than it should have for me to figure out this was abusive.

As in, I eventually managed to leave him (with most of my possessions intact), leave the state, and grow into middle age before I learned that this also counted as "abuse". I left him because I thought he was a jerk, not because I recognized what he was doing as abuse.

Abuse, according to all the after-school specials, was someone hitting me. I have never been hit by anyone other than my parents, and even then it was rarely and always followed by extreme remorse. Breaking objects was just what people did when they got mad. We even have pop songs about it. Some people enshrine it in their ethnicity's culture. It's normalized.

My rage as a kid was the result of long-term abuse from my peers. I had no other way to process it because I was not given the tools necessary to either empower myself to escape the bullying nor to manage my emotions. It was never about showing my power over someone else, it was about being *powerless*. I expressed my property destruction in private, usually on my own things. My rage was not intimidating, it was impotent.

And when I realized it was hurting my family to see me be so destructive (even if it was my own possessions I was breaking) as well as hurting me because it was my own stuff I was destroying, I turned that rage inward so that my family would suffer even fewer effects of my rage and I'd stop losing possessions.  As an adult, I express my rage with hurtful words on the internet. But the closer a person is to me, emotionally, the less hurtful my methods of dealing with them are. I save my rage for the relative safety of the internet.

But an abuser saves his rage for only those *closest* to them. While most people abuse because they feel fear and insecurity, their abuse is intended to *take back* the control that they feel they are owed. It is not an expression, a venting, of an already-lost control, the way my rage is. Their rage is *the tool* they use to gain control back.

They might genuinely be hurting, as I was, but their hurt comes from the loss (or fear of the loss) of control over you, whereas mine comes from the loss of control over myself to someone else.

I rage because I keep having my autonomy taken from me. Abusers rage because they keep having their toys taken away from them. Neither are healthy, but only one is abuse.

When people rage, they want you to see how much they are feeling. When someone's rage is to show you that they have the potential and the desire to hurt you because you are not allowing them to control you, that's abuse. That's violence.

I wish I had known the different kinds of rage, the different expressions of fear and pain, and the different ways that control is exerted when I was younger. I would have made different choices.  I also wish there had been resources for managing emotions. It would have helped both with the crushing pain of being bullied AND with the crushing anger that leads to bullying, which later leads to misogyny and racism and acts of terror and abuse.

Everyone wants to feel sympathetic towards the stories of mass shooters who were supposedly bullied as kids, as if being bullied turns us into sociopathic killers. It doesn't. But emotions that are too big to handle on our own does turn us into a wide variety of monsters, depending on what those emotions are and where they come from.

Since we don't have those resources, the best we can do is recognize that these emotions (and their expressions) in particular are violent, abusive, toxic, and learn how to avoid and escape from them.  When someone breaks your stuff and slams doors and furniture, it's a message to you of their anger and of how much they want to hurt you. It's meant to show you how bad things *could be* if you don't manage their emotions for them right now.

I scream at people to leave me alone. Abusers intimidate people into staying put. It's not enough to just not allow someone to hit you. They have to not intimidate you by violence *near* you too. Because violence *near* you, in your direction, is still violence *at* you.

https://theautisticalien.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/autistic-life-hacks/

I am not autistic, but I do have OCD as a side effect? of my anorexia, and I also never defeated my depression from my last depressive episode (like my first one that went totally away for decades until my life fell apart a few years ago and I had another episode that I combatted and am mostly OK from but still actively battling and sometimes lose ground with).

So I have a lot of executive dysfunction these days. I do most of the things in here. Switching to all disposable utensils has made such a huge benefit in my life. So has the dry shampoo and the tooth pick thingies instead of floss. Backup keys everywhere. Obsessive about places for things. 2 laundry baskets OTG when I started that! Giving in to pre-packaged food (sometimes the only time I'll get any veggies at all). Music and ear buds. Notes on my hands. To-do lists to prioritize. PACKING LISTS! ...

People often talk about "last thoughts" - the people they think about right before someone dies (or thinks they're going to die). I hear this most often in movies, not so much in real conversations.

But it seems to be a big deal - some character is about to die, and they think of someone special and realize that they wasted their life and they never told that person that they loved them, or something. This is supposed to be a big revelation - something you won't discover until it's too late, so you better live your life now in such a way that you won't have this regret on your deathbed.

It recently occurred to me that I have had enough near-death experiences to be able to answer this question. Between multiple car accidents (including the one where I rolled my car down a hill when I was 17), being chased by bears and mountain lions, and nearly falling a few times, I actually know what my "final" thoughts are.

Every time I think I'm going to die, I think of my parents, and how much my death would hurt them. And my biggest regret is that I very likely won't be able to either tell them at the moment so that they can prepare, or that I would have to go before them at all.

I've been thinking about this for some time now, and I really want to share with them that I *always* think of them when I fear for my life, but I haven't figured out a way to say it without causing them the pain that would come from having to even consider their oldest child dying before they do.

So I'm saying it here. Whatever it means to be someone's "final thoughts", I know what mine are because I've had several ... opportunities ... to have what I thought would be "final thoughts", and each time my thoughts were of the same people - my parents and the pain that my death would cause them.

I hope they know how much I love them, and that everyone I love knows how much I love them. And one of these days, I'll figure out how to tell them this.

#DoNotNeedAdviceForThisConversation #MorbidThoughts #ButWeNeedToFaceTheDarkSideOfLifeSoWeCanPrepareForIt #IHaveStaredIntoTheVoid

The thing about new partners, is that I end up revisiting a lot of memories of old partners. When I'm in a new relationship, we talk about ourselves, and part of ourselves is our past that made us who we are today. So I end up going over a lot of old stories, partly as illustrations for how I want to be treated or want not to be treated, and partly because I'm just sharing stories of my experiences and who I am.

I don't know if "ironic" is the right word, but what got me on this tangent tonight is not a "new" partner, exactly, but talking with my most recent ex-FWB during our breakup, rather than as part of the "get to know each other" stage in the beginning. Perhaps because our relationship was less than a month, and the breakup came suddenly, and he's actually doing his part of the breakup well, some things that I associate with a "beginning" didn't happen until the end. This isn't really relevant, I'm musing tonight.

Anyway, during one of our breakup talks (because a good, compassionate breakup where both people are being kind and considerate of each other often takes several discussions and check-ins to make sure everyone is OK), I got to talking about some of my abusive exes.

Here's the thing... when I was growing up, all of our "afternoon specials" about abusive relationships were about domestic physical violence. I knew all the warning signs for a physically *violent* partner, but I knew absolutely nothing about an emotionally abusive or psychologically controlling partner.

Over the years, I've told a lot of stories about a lot of exes. In the last decade or so, as I've had the opportunity to meet and know some truly amazing people, when I've told these stories, I've been met with horrified reactions. I was not prepared for the strength of the horror in these reactions. To me, these stories were about jerks, sure, but "horror"? I mean, they weren't great stories, but I also thought they were run-of-the-mill "bad", not "abusive-bad".

Now, with a lot more education on what abuse is, I can look back over my relationship history and see that I've actually been involved with a whole bunch of abusive men. Remember, when I started telling these stories, I was not aware that they were tales of abuse. So I'm not retconning my memories, which can happen pretty easily. I can look back over the time I told one particular story, and at the time I thought it was normal-bad, but now I can see that *the story I told at that time* was actually abusive-bad.

So I've been in a lot of abusive relationships. But what I always had going for me is a strong sense of self. You can ask my mother about this. She and I have been locked in conflict over my agency for literally my entire life. She describes me as "headstrong" and "independent". From day 1. What would happen is that I would get into a relationship with someone who I saw as confident and "strong", and because I was excited to be in that relationship, he would treat me well.

But eventually NRE would wear off, and I would start showing more enthusiasm for my own life than for his. And, being an abuser (which means he believed he was justified in controlling his partners behaviour to match what *he* thought they ought to do), he would employ various psychological tactics to bring me back in line and to behave more like I did in the beginning of the relationship when I was drugged out on NRE.

But my strong sense of self would kick in and I would always resist. And he would escalate, and I would resist harder. In a very short span of time, one of us would get pissed off enough at the other to break up. So I didn't recognize these relationships as abusive because the conflict would be relatively short-lived and always resulted in a breakup, usually with me angry rather than sad over it.

Over the years, I have been faced with some form of the question "how would your exes describe you?" from a variety of sources - Cosmo quizzes, new partners, friends, etc. One of the things I pride myself is on being honest about my "flaws". So I would usually answer these questions with something along the lines of "cold-hearted bitch". That was, I believe, the most common parting shot I would get from exes.

I have always been described as "cold", as "unfeeling", even been accused of sociopathy on more than one occasion. Some days I would agree with those descriptions. Other days I'm baffled how anyone could think that of me. You see, one of the reasons why I'm polyamorous is because I feel. so. much. I have so many feelings that I'm often overwhelmed by them. I sometimes feel like River Tam from Firefly, when her brother finally starts to make progress in diagnosing what her captors did to her when they experimented on her brain - "She feels everything; she can't not."

I went out with a guy not too long ago who is way into the woo. I find his beliefs to be completely absurd, but I do find some of the language he used to be useful as metaphor. When we first started talking, he described me as "empty". He said that he "looked into me" and found just this empty space where he expected to find ... I dunno, "me", I guess. Later, as I began to trust him and to develop feelings for him, I let my guard down and he noticed. He discovered what all that "empty space" was for. Whatever emotion I was feeling at the moment floods into all that space. He said he had never met anyone who felt so much at one time. He said he couldn't even see how he once thought I was "empty" before. I said that I was never "empty", I just had walls up and was only letting him see me controlled.

I feel a lot. I feel so much that it's just too much to keep up continuously. I have to shut down every so often, just to stay sane. In fact, one of the primary symptoms of my depression is apathy. When all the bad shit gets too overwhelming and sends me into suicidal ideation, I just stop feeling anything. I think this is the main reason why I haven't managed to kill myself yet - I want to be dead but I don't feel strongly enough about anything to go through with it.

Back to my long history with abusive men. Gendered abuse has some particular traits. Women are socialized to be nurturers, caregivers, to be polite, to consider other people, to do emotional labor. Men who want to control women can use this as a form of control.

"Why would you hurt me like that? You don't want to hurt me, do you? You should stop what you're doing so that I don't feel hurt by it."

"Now, now, be a good girl..."

"Stop being so hysterical..."

"Pull yourself together, you don't want to make other people uncomfortable, do you?"

When my former metamour was being abused by our mutual partner, he accused her of hurting him for wanting to be with her other partner. She wanted to do a thing, he would get upset by it, she would try to understand why he was upset, he would accuse her of hurting him. This would immediately stop her in her tracks, as she spent the next several days wracking her brain to understand *why she was hurting him* so that she could stop.

Not me.

I moved in with my abusive fiance, against everyone's advice. Almost immediately after moving in together, he began trying to control me. He wanted to change my clothing, change my career, force me into a homemaker role. I even asked him several times why he said he loved me, since he didn't seem to like me very much.

One of the many things that he would do was coerce me into sex. He would try to initiate sex very late at night when I had to wake up early the next morning. I would reject him, so he would wait until he thought I was asleep, and put his hands between my legs and try to take my underwear off without waking me. Most of the time I had not fallen asleep yet, but I would pretend to stay asleep, hoping to discourage him but it never did. Every single night I would "wake up" to him molesting me and I would yell at him to leave me alone, and he would start an argument that would keep me awake for *hours*, trying to talk me into having sex.

After a few weeks of this nightly molestation and some chronic sleep deprivation, I started trying to leave the argument. I would get up to go sleep on the couch. As I reached the door, he would threaten to break my prized figurine collection unless I remained in the room. So I would grab my pillow and sleep on the bathroom floor, which was *technically* still in the room.

When you're in a relationship with someone, you typically work under the assumption that both of you are operating in good faith. At least, people with reasonably healthy views on relationships do. Sure, there may be conflict, but we assume that we are both on the same team and that we both want to resolve the conflict, and that we both care about each other so nobody would want a resolution that actually compromised the other person's integrity or sense of self or value system. We might be *angry*, but we don't feel that our partners are out to get us deliberately.

This is how abusers get their foot in the door. They are not operating in good faith. So I spent those weeks arguing with him because I earnestly believed I just had to make him see why this was hurting me and he would stop because he didn't *really* want to hurt me.

But by the time I was willing to sleep on the tile floor with my head next to a toilet? I no longer believed he was operating in good faith. I was not able to leave right away, but with all my big emotions and the constant attempt to wear me down, I had to find some way to live there until I could leave.

Enter the coldness.

Once I started to believe that he really did not have my best interests at heart, I went cold. I shut down. We weren't simply not seeing eye-to-eye, he fundamentally did not see me as a whole person. He saw me only in terms of how I could support his story arc. So I stopped caring about him in return.

One of the things I had suspected him of, was being a pathological liar. At first, his lies were ridiculous but, again with the good faith thing, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Looking back on them now, I can't understand how I ever thought they could even possibly be true. But I was young and naive and in love. He made up all kinds of outrageous stories, which I will save for another time because this is already very long. Now that I had lost the rose colored glasses and I could finally see the flags were red, I decided not to believe anything he said and to start calling him on his shit.

One day, we were driving home from my parents house (where I did my laundry) and we got into one of our repetitive arguments in the car. We lived in an apartment complex with a carport underneath the apartment units. I pulled into our slot, got out of the car, got my laundry basket from the back, and started walking across the low-ceilinged carport towards the stairs to our unit, all with him still arguing about whatever.

I had gone cold. I was simply refusing to argue any further. I just couldn't expend any more energy or emotion on this same fucking argument one more time. I said what I had to say and that was the end of it, as far as I was concerned. He did not like that, and kept arguing at my retreating back. He hated it when I went cold.

Suddenly, he stopped talking, mid-sentence. I heard a rustling, and when I looked back, he was lying on the ground, seemingly unconscious. I assumed he was faking. I stood there for a moment, watching him to see if he would get up. Then I adjusted my grip on the laundry basket, turned on my heel, and walked up to our apartment, leaving him lying on the oil-soaked concrete.

I went upstairs and started putting the clothes away. Eventually he came into our bedroom, holding his hand to his head and walking unsteadily. Slurring his words, he said that while we were arguing, he somehow managed to walk into one of the low pipes in the carport and knock himself unconscious (he was 6'4" and the carport ceiling was about 6'6" high so he had to duck under the plumbing pipes).

And THEN, while he was unconscious, a mugger came and stole his wallet. He woke up just as the mugger grabbed it and ran away. Most of his fabrications were stories intended to illicit sympathy from me, so that I would stop being mad at him and start feeling worry and concern instead. This was the most transparent lie he had ever told (and he had told some whoppers!).

So I said "oh my god! A mugger! We better call the police right away!" He immediately tried to talk me out of it, while I "argued" how important it was that we file a police report. I mean, what if the mugger came back? What if he tried to rob *me* while I'm down there alone, at night? He doesn't want anything bad to happen to me, did he? I picked up the phone and actually hit 9-1 before he finally came clean.

He made the whole thing up because I was so mad at him and he just wanted me to stop being mad at him. So I dropped the act and the phone, said "no shit", and gave him the silent treatment for the rest of the night.

This story, and several others, have been running around my mind for the last week or so. Particularly the part about being "cold". It used to bother me. At least, when I wasn't actively in one of my defensive modes where all my emotions shut down, it did. But this week I realized something. I frequently go "cold" at the end of a relationship, but talking with my ex-FWB about some of my experiences with abuse, I noticed the pattern. I go "cold" as a response to abuse.

This abusive fiance was deliberately trying to manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour. In this particular story, I finally got him to admit it. He didn't want me mad at him, so rather than address the thing I was mad about, he tried to make me feel sorry for him and to feel concern for him. Because he was trying to manipulate me into *feeling* what he wanted me to feel, my response was to stop feeling entirely.

Well, not "entirely". Like Hulk in one of the Avengers movies, I still always feel rage. That's always bubbling beneath the surface, all the time. But it gets compartmentalized, and in these situations, I just stop feeling.

Abusers are not evil super-villains twirling their mustachios and consciously plotting the manipulation of their partners. They are quite often people in pain. They are people who feel fear, as we all do. It's just that their reaction to fear is to hold a metaphorical gun to someone else's head and make them do things to prevent themselves from feeling fear. They are calculating to a certain extent, but mostly they just feel fear and they feel *justified* in reaching for tools of control to address their fears.

My abusive fiance abused me because he was afraid. He was afraid to lose me. So he tried to direct my feelings towards those that would tie me to him. So when I stopped having feelings, he was terrified. Apparently it's very scary to have someone you love go cold on you. I wouldn't know. If any of my exes ever went cold on me, it was towards the end of a relationship where I was probably sliding into apathy myself.

But as I looked back over my history, at all the people who accused me of being "cold", these were also all the same people who, when I tell stories about them to relatively healthy, non-manipulative people, are the ones that my friends recoil in horror about and tell me that they were abusive. Apparently this is my last defense mechanism for abuse. You can't manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour if I don't feel any emotions.

I'm kind of surprised at the realization that all those accusations of being "cold" were A) probably all true, but because B) were in response to abuse. When I think of abuse victims, I see mostly afternoon special TV characters and my former metamour who was an emotional wreck at the end of her last abusive relationship. I see people who are beaten down, dejected, shells of their former selves, but most of all, *emotional*.

But when *I* face abuse, I get hard. I get cold. I get sharp. There may be a reason why I like knives so much.

I'm not saying that being in abusive relationships doesn't leave long-term damage on me. It usually takes me a while to trust people again. And I'm very cynical. I don't like to open up to people. It seems like I'm very open because I talk about so many personal things in very public spaces. But I can talk about things while being guarded. I'm not really sharing any intimacy, even though I'm sharing a lot of details.

Apathy and coldness and hardness are my defense mechanisms. It's when you know I've reached the end. These are what come out in response to abuse, control, manipulation. I can only extend my compassion so far. When I feel like the other person is not meeting me in the middle, when they're not operating in good faith, when they're trying to control me, I take away those parts of me that make me vulnerable to harm and control - my emotions.

Becoming a knife edge is my response to abuse.

https://onbeing.org/blog/the-gift-of-presence-the-perils-of-advice/

Just a bit of perspective - but when people are complaining about "technology", particularly mobile phone usage, this is actually what they're asking. They're longing for more present-ness from people. They're asking you to witness them.

So while I am firmly on the side of "technology is good, the internet has saved lives by bringing connection to those who have little or none, and nobody owes you their attention", when a partner or friend spends a lot of their time on their device while physically spending time with me, it can feel hurtful because it feels like they're not really present and not witnessing either me or our rare and limited time together.

Sometimes I wish various partners I've had wouldn't be so prepared with their charging cables and their phones would just die so they have no choice but to be more *here* with me, because phones are so rarely their "in case of emergency" device there days; they're usually their "get instant answers and check in on people who are not present while the present ones wait for attention" devices.

So maybe "completely unplugging" is an unrealistic or selfish request, but if someone you value is complaining about your devices, perhaps putting it down a little more often and just being in the moment with them is an act of kindness, a response to a bid, that you can afford to pay a little more.

Also, stop with the fucking unsolicited advice. Seriously, if you feel this compulsion, there are tons of FB groups with people asking advice and Quora is a place specifically designed for advice giving.

"Advice-giving comes naturally to our species, and is mostly done with good intent. But in my experience, the driver behind a lot of advice has as much to do with self-interest as interest in the other’s needs — and some advice can end up doing more harm than good."

"He talked while I listened and asked a few more questions. When we were done, he told me that some measure of peace had returned. It was a peace that had come from within him, not from anything I’d said. I’d simply helped clear some rubble that blocked his access to his own soul."

"Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through."

"And yet, we have something better: our gift of self in the form of personal presence and attention, the kind that invites the other’s soul to show up. As Mary Oliver has written:

“This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”"

I'm going through my blog, looking for a particular entry, so I'm coming across some old writings and I found this paragraph:

"I went after something that, at the time, I felt I needed to help cope with all my chaos and loss and pain. And it did help. It was honestly the right thing for me at the time and I don't regret it at all. It directly led to another series of events that eventually contributed to my healing, and to pulling myself out of the bleakness that was consuming me. It turned out to be absolutely necessary for me, although I couldn't have known that at the time - I thought it was something I should do, but I didn't realize how it would start a snowball effect that would ultimately lead to saving my life. The details are not mine alone to share, even anonymously, but I will also say that the thing I "went after" is not actually the thing that I was accused of doing that lead to my partner "Flipp[ing] the Fuck Out". But I did pursue another relationship, and its progress frightened my abusive ex."

It got me to thinking.

I see a lot of "my partner is doing / wants to do this new, scary thing and I don't want them to!" posts in the forums. Sometimes they're asking how to make their partner stop, and sometimes they're asking how to learn to be OK with the thing. I don't want to focus on what they "should" do, because, honestly, it depends on the context.

But I want to address their fear from the perspective of the partner who wants to do / is doing something "scary".

As I mention in this post, and in a lot of other posts that I make on the subject, I went through a turbulent period. I lost everything important in my life at the same time - I lost my place to live and then had to escape from a "friend" who offered to "rescue" me but turned out to be a monster who tortured my cats, and from there I moved 7 times in 2 years because I *kept losing my place to live* through circumstances beyond my control.

If you've never lived in the kind of poverty where the very basics of life such as "shelter" are uncertain, you can't know what this kind of uncertainty does to one's psyche. I've now been in my current apartment for 4 years and I *still* keep all of my things in file boxes on the shelves because I'm afraid I'm going to have to bug out again with no notice.

But, more than that, I have this sort of apathetic distrust of the world. I now expect that people will fail me and abandon me and that life as I know it will get turned upside down, and that this is just how life is and there is nothing I can do about it.

When I was a kid, my parents were lower-middle class. We lived in the suburbs, I went to a private school, didn't have to buy my first car, but my parents were just barely making an income to support their lifestyle. They didn't live above their means, they lived just barely at it. They never got into trouble, they never had their home foreclosed on, they always kept their head just above water. But there were some months that were tense.

My situation now is nothing like that. To live with that level of uncertainty seems to me like a fantasy, like real people don't actually live like that. I aspire to be so wealthy that I can sit up late at night in my spacious kitchen, balancing a checkbook and finding corners to cut so that the kids don't notice how tight the belt is. To me now, that's a level of wealth that's as unattainable as gold-plated toilet seats. And yet, that's my entire childhood experience.

Back to the point - I was experiencing a devastating series of losses. In addition to my unstable living situation, I also lost both of my cats, who had been with me since I first moved out of my parents' home. They were more than just pets. They were part of my transition to adulthood. They were my source of comfort and companionship. I can't overstate my bond with my cats, it was so strong. And I lost them both almost exactly within a month of each other, thanks to that White Knight who decided that he didn't want me there after all and took it out on my cats instead of just telling me to get lost.

On top of that, someone who I had very strong feelings for years and years ago but who had hurt me very deeply, had come back into my life and seemed to be hinting that he could make up for the hurt and offer me some solace and comfort and love that I felt I was missing. And then that person almost immediately took that offer away just when I was starting to trust that the offer was real, by announcing that he was moving to another state.

Plus, the nation was in an economic "recession" and I was not working as much as I needed to pay the bills, let alone put down deposits on all these apartments I had to keep moving into (and out of).

I was living in a quicksand bog with giant attack rats hiding behind every tree and random geysers that shot fire whenever I stepped near them.

At this time, my then-partner was going through his own shit. As I predicted, he had taken on too many partners and they were consuming his time and attention. What I *didn't* predict was that the reason they were consuming his time and attention is because it takes a lot of extra effort to manipulate and control multiple partners, particularly when one of them is resistant to that control.

So he was abusing one of his partners, and she went "crazy". His life was filled with arguments that he thought they had resolved, only to have her bring them up again and again. So all his spare time was taken up by her and her "erratic" behaviour, and all his other partners started to get pissed off that he wasn't available to them. I was allotted 10-minute increments of his time in phone calls 3 times a week. That was the extent of our relationship.

I detail all of this to explain how utterly chaotic my life was and just how dark things got. I spiraled into a suicidal depression. I actually got to the planning stage, where I started trying to tie up loose ends, get my various passwords to people so they could access my social media accounts to make announcements, my bank account to handle my post-mortem financial obligations, my list of Important People so that family and friends would get notified, etc.

Before it got quite this bad, though, when I was still on this path but not at the destination, I felt a pull to do some things. I didn't yet recognize that I was slipping into a depression. I didn't yet recognize what was so valuable about these things that I wanted to do. All I knew is that I wanted to do them, and I wanted to do them very strongly.

These things were very scary to my then-bf who, unbeknownst to me, believed he was right to control his partners when they did scary things. Well, not *totally* unbeknownst ... there were red flags, I just had on rose colored glasses that render the bright red grey.

When I first started dating him 3 years prior, I had 2 other partners - 1 who he had known for over a decade and was friends with him, and another who he didn't know very well but had a decent reputation in the poly community and was *extremely* conservative in his dating practices.

The partner that my abusive ex had known before me was a long-distance partner who I saw only once or twice a year, at best. The other partner only had 2 girlfriends (me and another), had been with us both for a long time, and his other gf had her own conservative sexual history.

There's this phenomenon in the poly community, where people with insecurities seem to have no problem "sharing" their partner with people who came before them, but who then freak out whenever someone new comes along. It's because the preexisting partners are part of the initial calculus when deciding on beginning a relationship, but new partners are a *change*.

People, as a general rule, are frightened by change. We are more comfortable with known variables. Coming to us with existing partners is a known variable. We set up our expectations based on what *is*, right now, so when a new partner comes along, that upsets the status quo and changes the expectations. We don't usually like that.

In the 3 years that I was with that abusive ex, I lost the local partner almost immediately (because he also couldn't deal with the change of me dating the abusive ex - not that either of us knew he was abusive at the time), so I was only dating my long-distance partner and nobody else.

So even though I'm solo poly with a HUGE rap sheet of dating partners, I was, in effect, basically monogamous with this abusive ex. I had an LD partner who I never saw, so the abusive ex could almost forget that he existed, except to capitalize on the fame-by-association he got for being metamours with him, and I had the abusive ex, and that was it, except for group sex that included the abusive ex's own branch of the network. I could focus all my relationship energy on the abusive ex because I wasn't *dating* anyone else, even though I was technically connected to a couple of others.

He got used to that. For 3 years, that's how it was. I don't actually need a whole lot of partners in my life. I don't really have the time or attention for that. I need the *freedom* for multiple partners, but one or two healthy relationships and *maybe* a couple of casual hookups every year or so is pretty good for me. I can get by on just one, long-term, satisfying relationship for years, especially when my sex drive tanks for months at a time.

So then the abusive ex became unavailable, and then all that chaos happened. And I needed ... something. I found myself drawn to a couple of experiences that frightened my abusive ex. In our entire relationship of several years, this was the first time I had ever taken on a new partner, or wanted to. This was the first time he had ever had to deal with how, when, and why I take on new partners.

And he really didn't like it.

So he sought to prevent me by pulling out all the usual SJW, "enlightened" poly language - I was hurting him, I was disrespecting his "boundaries", I didn't care about his feelings, you're supposed to move only as fast as the slowest person in the group, I need to consider the safety of everyone else in the group, I need to consider group cohesion and how these new experiences fit (or didn't) into the style of the group, everyone else in the group needs to have a vote on what I do because it affects them, etc.

I needed to have these experiences for me, but he turned them entirely from things that happened to me into things that I DID TO him.

What I was unable to articulate at the time, because none of this stuff ever becomes clear until after the fact, was that these experiences literally saved my life and I *needed* to experience them. We throw around the word "need" a lot in poly relationships. "Different people meet different needs". "I need for all my women to be with no other men." We all "need" a lot. But most of the time, this word is not used correctly.

As it turned out, I *needed* these experiences. And I needed them in ways that I couldn't predict. There is no way that I could have known that, in just a few months, I would find myself sitting on the floor of my storage unit, sobbing hysterically, and gazing longingly at the gun that was just out of my reach but having literally not enough motivation to get up off the floor to either grab the gun or dust myself off and leave; and no way to predict that these experiences that I had would lead to relationships that gave me the sort of comfort and stable base that I needed to eventually leave that storage unit and not reach for the gun that night, or on future nights.

These specific experiences that I wanted that my abusive ex yelled at me about one night, keeping me up several hours past my bedtime the night before a performance when I really needed my sleep (and told him that I could not have that discussion that night for that reason) - these specific experiences were not some magical sex dates that brought life back into my suicidal brain. It wasn't that simple.

These experiences led to things that led to things that brought about a relationship and a renewed attachment and affirmation of my other relationship and a deep bond in solidarity with a metamour, that all became my rock and my salvation after that night on the floor of the storage unit.

Those experiences that drove a wedge between me and my insecure, abusive ex were not directly responsible for saving me from suicide, but I can draw *direct* lines from those experiences to the broader circumstances that provided me with the safety net that I needed to pull back from the edge.

If you think of a safety net, with its webbing of rope connecting from multiple points to multiple points, and all those strands and connections are what make it safe to catch you, my couple of experiences that so freaked out my ex even before I had them and they were just possibilities, those experiences are the spools from which all that safety rope came.

So, when you're thinking about your partner who wants to do a thing that frightens you, remember this story. Your partner is probably not on the brink of suicide at this very moment, and likely won't ever be. Your partner's experiences probably won't be literally life-saving to them.

But the things that your partner wants to experience will be the foundation of who they will become in the future. There's no way to predict who they will become or how their experiences will affect that. But those experiences are things that their future selves need to become their future selves.

Sometimes that's not a good thing. Sometimes we have experiences that we do not benefit from. But, again, we can't predict that.

So, you can be like my abusive ex, who was so frightened of me having experiences that I *needed* to have even though I didn't know yet that I needed them or I didn't know how to articulate how important they were that I have them, he was so frightened that he tried to manipulate and control his partners in order to avoid feeling that fear, and when that didn't work, he ended up losing the very relationships that those experiences made him afraid of losing in the first place. You can be that person.

Or you can recognize that your partner is not your possession, and is a fully formed human being, who needs to have experiences in order to become who they will become. And sometimes those experiences are life-saving. You can ride the curl, or you can try to push back the ocean with a broom. Either you will fail and the tide will wash over you anyway, or you will succeed in containing and hampering all the wild glory that is an unfettered wave.

I know it's scary to face the unknown. But this isn't about you. This is about your partner and who they are and who they will be. Are you the kind of partner who stands before your mate and blocks their path?

Or are you the kind of partner who feels fear, takes a deep breath, tells that fear that it will not control you or make you control your partner, and musters up every ounce of courage you have to trust in your partner and let them be who they will be?

This isn't about you, this is about them. What kind of partner will you be to them?

Life rewards those who take the Path of Greatest Courage. I took mine. I risked losing a relationship that I valued, and I did lose it, but in exchange I also lost an abusive partner, the scales from my eyes hiding his abuse of his other partners, and I gained a measure of control over my circumstances, and my life as well as some deep connections and a better understanding of myself. I think it was a fair exchange.

So when you and your partner make it through all of this to the other side, how do you want them to look back on their relationship with you over this? Do you want them to see you as I see my ex? Someone who was holding me back and causing harm, who I am better off now for having traded him in for those experiences he was so afraid of?

Or as someone with courage who faced your fears, trusted in their love, and embraced your partner for all they are and all they will become?

https://themighty.com/2016/03/when-you-feel-suicidal-but-dont-want-to-die/

When I was about 13, I was so severely bullied that I became suicidal. I gradually lifted myself out of that state without ever once actually attempting to take my own life.

Then, many years passed. So many years, in fact, that I forgot what being suicidal felt like. I'm not naturally depressive. I don't really have the brain chemistry for it on my own. My depression is entirely situational. When the situation is resolved, I go back to being "me".

So I spent the vast majority of my life not being depressed. In fact, I was so in love with life that I was absolutely terrified of death. It was unthinkable. It was unmentionable. It was the thing that could never happen. I was (and am, in my "natural" state) so opposed to death that I would be an Alcor member if I had the money for it. That's one of those cryonics groups that freezes you at the point of death in hopes that they'll cure whatever you died of sometime in the future and bring you back to life. Any hope, even far-fetched hope, that death won't claim me was worth having that hope.

A metamour of mine calls death The Void, and she is so opposed to it that she is dedicating her life to defeating death through science. She is a dragonslayer. I remember being that afraid, and that affronted by death. Or, I should say, I know that I used to be that person, but I don't remember how it feels to be that person these days.

2 years ago, I slipped into a suicidal depression again for the first time since junior high school. I didn't even recognize it at first, because I wasn't me. I kept losing things and I didn't see an end to the loss in my future, so I started longing for death. But I didn't self-harm. I sought help and I worked on my situation and I eventually pulled out of it again.

But unlike my childhood depression, I did not swing so far to the other side that I forgot what suicidal depression felt like. I changed my circumstances but only marginally. The fear of slipping back into those circumstances remained constant, so the suicidal thoughts remained nearby - gone but not forgotten.

With the new Trump presidency, I lost my battle again. I've been in a suicidal depression since the election and it's not letting up because it's not a situation that I can change. But I'm also not in any immediate danger. As this article tries to explain, suicide is not black and white, it's not an on/off switch. I know these thoughts aren't mine, I know what's causing them, and I know how to seek help if the thoughts get louder than my voice.

But this is what it's like inside my head these days. I'm in the grey area. I can laugh, I can have fun, I can orgasm, I can smile, and all of those things are genuine. But there is a layer underneath that doesn't go away. It's like trying to grow a garden on top of permafrost, or like trying to grow anything in this fucking sandbar of a state - It can be done, but the roots don't go very deep and the sand can take over.

The hardest part about living with suicidal depression is the inability to talk about it. I have made a conscious choice to talk about it online, but I know that it makes other people feel bad. That's really what's so hard about having a mental illness. On top of the symptoms of my illness, I also have to manage other people's emotions about my illness. I can't talk about the thoughts in my head because they will hurt the people who care about me. I can't share the emptiness with others because they feel sad for me or frustrated and helpless because they can't fix it.

I have to feel these feelings and also feel the disappointment and responsibility because my inner feelings made someone else feel hurt. So I keep my thoughts to myself except when they start to bubble over and I write a post about it because I just can't contain them anymore.

I don't want pity or to make others feel sad for me. I'm not complaining or seeking sympathy or hugs or anything. I just want to be able to have my feelings, to be understood, and to be accepted that I have depression without taking on additional responsibility of making other people uncomfortable about my feelings. I want for people to, when they hear or read my words of depression, to just go "oh, that's Joreth and her depression," not "OMG it's so sad! I feel so bad that I can't help! Now I have bad feels because you have bad feels!"

So I share these things hoping to make other people understand what it's like, so that maybe they can learn to just hear and acknowledge their loved ones suffering from mental illness without also feeling guilty or pity or sad or frustrated or hurt just because *we* aren't having the positive emotion that *they* wish we would have in this moment.

Depression, even suicidal depression, is a livable state. It's not a comfortable state, but a livable one. We need more nuance in how we approach and interact with people who have mental illness. Many of us don't need hospitalization or extreme care. Many of us just live in the grey area.

http://tacit.livejournal.com/627806.html

This is fascinating! I also had no idea that other people don't feel cold as pain. I mean, I knew other people had higher thresholds for cold than I do, but I still assumed that their experience of cold was similar to mine, just at higher doses, if you will. For me, cold is *pain*, like stubbing your toe pain, as well. I absolutely can't do ice treatments for injuries because the ice causes a deep ache that I interpret as being "in my bones" and in my joints and aggravates the pain from the injury.

I do sometimes use ice to numb the area around insect bites because I'm allergic and numbing the entire area is the only coping mechanism that works even a little bit. But the ache from the cold hurts so much that I don't know which is worse, the body-aching cold or the mind-maddening itch. Both sensations are so unpleasant that I often wonder if this time will be so bad that I will literally lose my mind in order to escape the sensation.

I also find being wet very uncomfortable. Especially the *transition* from dry to wet. It's one of the things that I associate with my OCD that prevents me from doing the dishes as often as I should. If I get hot and sweaty *enough*, I will start to find the thought of being wet less unpleasant, and once I'm in the water, I'm mostly OK about it. But I'd rather not get wet. I was just talking with Ben the other day about how grateful I am that we all come with electronics on our bodies nowadays because I have a built in excuse that everyone respects for not being thrown in pools (since, y'know, my consent isn't a good enough reason on its own).

Oh, and I don't do caffeine. Like, at all. I went off caffeine some 21 or more years ago as part of the process to diagnose a sleep disorder and by the time we ruled out caffeine as a causal factor, introducing it back into my system started giving me migraines. So I just don't take caffeine. Chocolate, as having something very similar but not exactly the same as caffeine, doesn't trigger the migraines, and also doesn't cause any other similar symptoms such as more "energy" or the ability to fight off exhaustion or sleep deprivation better. It does, however, help keep my mood more even and less volatile, so I eat chocolate fairly often.

But I otherwise *do* inhabit my body. I *feel* myself in my space, almost all the time. I'm acutely aware of where I exist and I believe that's related to being in chronic pain as well as having to compensate for other people (mostly men) being largely unaware of the space that they occupy, with a little bit of "oh no, am I going to sit on my cat?" pet-owner-concerns thrown in. The chronic pain and being acutely aware of my body is why, I believe, I developed the reaction to pain of feeling sleepy. It's the only time I can disassociate from my body so when I hurt, I sleep. This has the drawback, however, of being able to sleep through some discomforts that ought to wake me, like needing to pee or my arm being asleep or whatever. Because, otherwise, I'm very much "living in my body".

What's more, I can also start to "feel" my partners as extensions of myself when I am in close proximity for extended time periods or when I am granted extreme amounts of physical intimacy. They did a study on dancers a while back (I don't have the citation on hand) that showed that partner dancing develops this particular encapsulation of other selves over time, so I suppose it's not surprising that I do it too. Knowing that it's a dancer thing, I now use this to teach people how to deliberately foster this sense of partner-as-extension in relationships through my and Sterling's Simple Steps workshop where we use dance techniques (with no actual dancing required) to improve relationship communication.

I am one of those people who "feels" music the way

tacit describes never having understood before. I knew that others didn't have that same sensation because I've tried to teach people how to dance and I've seen the lack of recognition when I try to describe this feeling. Knowing that he has synesthesia, I didn't realize that he also doesn't "feel" music. I sort of imagined the act of "seeing" music as being like "feeling" music only with extra visual stuff. Because of my connection with music, I'm particularly fascinated with how he experiences it and how his experience can be consensually manipulated to better communicate with him through music.

One thing I noticed, though, is that I do have periods where I don't feel like I'm living in my body and I feel like I'm this ball sitting at the top of a meat vehicle. Those periods are my depressions. That description of being a ball sitting on top of a biological vehicle isn't metaphor, it's literal - that's what my awareness of my self actually is in those periods. If you've never been aware of your body yet separate from it, I think it's very hard to understand from the descriptions. If you've *only* been aware of your body yet separate from it, I think the feeling of being connected to your body, of *living within* the body is very hard to understand. In both cases, the descriptions all seem metaphorical to the person who doesn't know those feelings themselves. I know because I am both of those people. When I am feeling connected to my body, the description of a ball atop a meat vehicle sounds metaphorical and I can't quite wrap my head around it empathically even if I grasp it intellectually. But when I'm in a depression, I can't remember what it feels like to be connected and I doubt that I ever really did, and my brain insists that my memories of once *believing* I was "living in my body" are lying to me and that I never *really* felt that way at all, therefore I likely never will again, or if I ever do, it'll just be a return to a delusion. Depression sucks.

I find this particularly noteworthy because Franklin isn't prone to depression that I know of so this sensation is either different from his or isn't dependent upon depression to exist. I don't know if the sensation of not living in my body has a causal relationship with my depression or just a correlated relationship, but they always go together. In fact, that's one of the red flags I use to determine if I'm in a depression. When the depression turns suicidal (thankfully rarely), I don't just feel like a ball sitting inside a meat vehicle, I feel like a ball being *constrained* by the vehicle, limited, like the vehicle is filtering out all the color and warmth in the world and if I could just break free of the body, I would no longer feel the pain of being colorless, of being cold, in a sense, of an absence of life and warmth and color and joy.

Because to me, cold is pain.

Current Mood: contemplative

One of my pet peeves is when people straighten something and then laugh and say "OMG I'm so OCD!" No, you're not. OCD is not about liking things tidy. Yes, some people with OCD do express it in ways that include straightening things like crooked pictures or their table settings, but that's not what OCD is. Look at the letters - OCD is about having intrusive thoughts that you obsess over, and then having compulsive behaviour that you literally cannot stop yourself from doing no matter what. What makes it OCD is that last letter - D for Disorder.

A psychological disorder is a deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional pattern of thoughts, feelings, or behaviours that interferes with the ability to function in a healthy way.

Let me repeat that: distressful; dysfunctional; interferes with.

When I was a child, we used to laugh at and tease my dad because he couldn't leave the house without checking that the stove was off and then asking all of us if we checked to make sure the stove was off. Then, as he drove away from the house, he had to have everyone verify for him that the garage door was closed. If he couldn't get verification of these things, he would sometimes even drive all the way back to make sure.

We all treated it like some kind of quirk, something worth making fun of. Dad seemed to take our teasing in good humor, but that may be a survival trait he picked up from his own family growing up. His family is ruthless about teasing each other. As much as I loved hanging out with my fun-loving uncles, growing up for me was also torturous because I couldn't escape the harsh insults and criticisms from people who seemed to have a magical laser-like ability to find exactly those insults that would hurt me the most. So when my sister and mother and I would roll our eyes and say "geez, Dad!" or "there he goes again!", it was probably pretty mild by comparison and something he was able to laugh about himself.

In college, I took my first broadcast class with a teacher who had OCD bad enough that he was, at one time, institutionalized for it. On the first day of class, he showed us a video he had made called The Touching Tree. He showed us this video for 2 reasons: 1) it was an example of the kinds of things he would be teaching in his course - composition, lighting, camera movements, editing, etc. and 2) it explained what having him for a teacher all semester would be like.

Watching this video I finally put a label to my father - OCD. I had no idea that his silly quirk about the stove or the garage door or needing to check all the windows at night or not being able to sleep without a fan running or needing to have a bowl of ice cream before he could sleep or of microwaving his food even if it came right off the stove were all symptoms of a mild form of OCD. I also had no idea that some of the intrusive thoughts and odd behaviours that I had were also OCD.

Many years after identifying that I probably had some form of OCD, I discovered another thing that explained why my OCD isn't quite the same as either my dad's or my former teacher's versions and not in ways that were accommodated for in the natural variance of expression of the disorder - I discovered that anorexia actually could *cause* OCD. My own condition wasn't isolated as an anxiety disorder on its own, but a *symptom* of some other disorder! So there are some specific things about me that don't *quite* line up with classic OCD. But there are lots of things that do.

For instance, one of the expressions of OCD is getting stuck in a counting loop. Right now, go ahead and count to yourself from 1 to 10. If you don't have OCD, you probably just counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you do have OCD, there's a good chance that your counting sounded more like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...

Imagine if you had a simple task like counting inventory. Now imagine reaching a particular number, and then thinking to yourself "wait a minute, did I skip a number? I might have skipped one. I did skip a number. I better start over to make sure I didn't skip a number," and having that thought intrude repeatedly while you are trying to count so that you never finish counting. Imagine not being able to silence that voice and not being able to stop yourself from starting over, even though you KNOW that you didn't skip a number and that this is holding you up from your job.

My version of that is songs. In fact, while writing that paragraph about counting, in my head I now have the counting song from Sesame Street stuck in my head, but only the chorus. I constantly have a song playing in my head. Most people are familiar with earworms. But what if you have never in your entire life NOT had a song stuck in your head? And what if it's not the whole song, but one verse stuck on repeat, like a scratched record, and it's playing for hours, sometimes days?

As the song lyric is playing in my head, I'm having parallel thoughts that go like this: "did I sing that too fast? Thoughts travel faster than verbal sounds, I might have played that part too fast. Yep, the tempo is too fast, if I try to sing it out loud, I'm singing faster than the song in my head. I need to start over. Did I faithfully recreate the entire song with all the instruments and harmonies or did I just play the lead vocals? I'm sure I forgot the guitar in there. I better start over. Oops, I'm going too fast again, I better start over..." This is why I'm always wearing headphones, or at least why I try to always have them with me. I can drown out this broken record player with other music (and it has to be some other song, not the same song).

Sometimes, it's not a song lyric, but a spoken sentence. If you ever watch a movie with me or listen to a podcast with me, watch my hands. I will often tap out the rhythm of the last sentence I just heard and I'll tap it out over and over again until some other sentence or phrase catches my attention. Sometimes I'll mouth the sentence myself just after they did, and I might silently whisper it several times. This is an outward expression of the same loop in my head and that sentence or phrase will be repeating long after I've managed to still the tapping or whispering.

OCD is expressed in a lot of different ways, so even though it's popular to think of it as neatening up things or washing hands, that's only scratching the surface of ways that someone can have disruptive, intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviours. Something that I didn't know until I talked with my teacher that first night of class is that people think that germaphobes are neat freaks but sometimes they are incredibly dirty. It sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it - if you are *afraid* of germs, you might be too afraid to actually clean a surface where you think the germs are living. That might get you too close to the germs. So someone with the germaphobic expression of OCD might actually live in filth and squalor because they are too afraid of germs to clean their house.

So, you see, OCD doesn't mean simply that you like things in order. It doesn't just mean that you like even numbers. It doesn't only mean that you straighten crooked picture frames or place your books and DVDs all in order. Does the thought of those things being out of order intrude on your ability to do anything else? Are you helpless to move onto the next task until the straightening is done? Do you repeatedly go back and check to make sure you really did straighten it correctly? Do you know that you're acting irrationally and do you feel a sense of self-loathing that you can't control this straightening behaviour? Then you might actually have OCD. But just liking things straight and orderly, even if it will "bug you until you fix it" is not OCD.

My OCD is very light because my anorexia is very light. I've only had it get out of control twice in my life and both were under extreme duress (which is actually kinda the definition of anorexia - when I feel that my life is out of my control, I seize control over the one thing I know I can control, my diet). Most of the time, my OCD interferes with my life but in a manageable sort of way. I'm fortunate, I have found some tricks that work just well enough that people think I'm merely quirky, like my dad, instead of actually making it hard to hold down a job or maintain social ties.

But those intrusive thoughts are still there, always running in the background. It's a constant struggle to drown them out or channel them into helpful ways. The compulsive behaviour is always there, interfering with my daily life. It's a constant struggle to contain them to unnoticeable blocks of time or movements too small to notice. If your interest in straight lines isn't something you fight with in order to be productive and prevent people from thinking you're weird, then it's probably not OCD, you just like things straight, which a lot of people do.

If you take away only one thing from this, take this: OCD and other anxiety disorders are not about willpower or preferences. This is not something that you can just stop if you try hard enough.

By definition, a compulsion is something that you cannot stop, at least not without help. I didn't eat for a year and I used to do 500 crunches every night before bed, so trust me when I say that I have plenty of willpower. And yet, I can't stop doing certain other things. That's because these things don't fall under the category of "willpower". Willpower doesn't touch these things.

And logicking or rationalizing them doesn't make them go away either. Most people with OCD are very well aware that they are doing fucked up shit. We are aware that it's not rational, that our brains are lying to us, and that other people don't do these things. That's part of the problem - we know the truth but we can't stop anyway.

IT HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH WILLPOWER. I can't stress that enough.

This is not something that a person can just change if you explain how ridiculous they're being. This is not a character flaw. This is not a sign of weakness or laziness or lack of trying. This is a mis-wiring of the brain that mere "willpower" or "strong character" can even touch let alone fix, anymore than having trouble walking on a broken ankle is about "willpower" or having a "strong character". It's fucking broken, we know it's broken, and it will take outside intervention to correct it and even then it may never be as good as an ankle that was never broken.

Here are some videos that explain OCD. If you have ever straightened something up and then said to the person next to you "oh, it's just my OCD", then you need to watch these, at least the shorter ones. And if you only watch one, watch the first one called OCD & Anxiety Disorders: Crash Course Psychology #29. I'll include near the end the trailer for the video that my old broadcast teacher made, because the whole video is about 40 minutes long but if you have the time to watch the whole thing, I recommend it. I'll post the whole video just after the trailer.
OCD & Anxiety Disorders: Crash Course Phsychology #29:

Watch on YouTube

This Is What It's Like To Be In My Head For 3 Minutes:

Watch on YouTube

A video about OCD:

Watch on YouTube

Preview Of The Touching Tree by James Callner:

Watch on YouTube

The Touching Tree (the full movie) by James Callner:

Watch on YouTube

This movie was my introduction to OCD and it's how I learned that my dad likely has it because I recognized him in the main character. The teacher in this film is actually *my* first film teacher. And I don't mean that my teacher was like the film teacher, I mean that the actor who played the teacher was my professor in college. He showed us this film both as an illustration for the sorts of things we would be learning in class and also to introduce us to his condition so that we would understand what it meant to interact with him.

Just because you like things neat and tidy, it doesn't mean you have OCD, but there is a slight possibility (2%-8% of the population) that you have something called OCPD - Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. Now, this is really confusing because the names are so similar and even the symptoms seem similar.

But OCPD is characterized by a general pattern of concern with orderliness, perfectionism, excessive attention to details, mental and interpersonal control, and a need for control over one's environment, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. People with OCPD do not generally feel the need to repeatedly perform ritualistic actions - a common symptom of OCD - and usually find pleasure in perfecting a task, whereas people with OCD are often more distressed after their actions.

According to Wikipedia:

"Unlike OCPD, OCD is described as invasive, stressful, time-consuming obsessions and habits aimed at reducing the obsession related stress. OCD symptoms are at times regarded as ego-dystonic because they are experienced as alien and repulsive to the person. Therefore, there is a greater mental anxiety associated with OCD. In contrast, the symptoms seen in OCPD, though they are repetitive, are not linked with repulsive thoughts, images, or urges. OCPD characteristics and behaviors are known as ego-syntonic, as persons with the disorder view them as suitable and correct. On the other hand, the main features of perfectionism and inflexibility can result in considerable suffering in an individual with OCPD as a result of the associated need for control."

Anorexics are extremely likely to have either OCD or OCPD - or both! I likely am one of those anorexics that has both, as I have the distressful intrusive obsessive thoughts like patterns and loops of OCD as well as the satisfying feeling of lists and organization and the rigidity and inflexibility (my mother would say "stubbornness") associated with OCPD.

More about OCPD at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_personality_disorder and more about OCD at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_disorder

I have a question and I need for everyone interested in answering it to assume that I am asking in good faith, not trolling.

Are there any articles that directly compare and contrast the difference between being gaslighted and someone who is *actually* the horrible things that a gaslighter accuses the victim to be?

Let me expand a bit. OK, a lot.

I've had the misfortune to see a gaslighter work his black magic now in person, right in front of my eyes but on someone other than me, and I've seen the devastation it caused. I've seen it in a poly context, which, for some reason, actually made it harder for me to see at first - easier for the gaslighter to hide. I've been an outspoken critic of what I have eventually come to see as real abuse in the poly community and how our own community standards protect and privilege abusive relationship structures and behaviours. So, in no way do I want to counteract any of the work done to bring awareness and solutions to gaslighting.

But I'm reading a lot of articles on gaslighting lately, and it struck me that, if I switched perspectives in my head and read the article *as if I were* the gaslighter himself (choosing a gendered pronoun because I am most familiar with male abusers and female victims, and I feel the need to use different pronouns to help keep the illustrations understandable), using the excuses and justifications he gave to make it look like he was the victim, if I took on that mindset for a moment, I couldn't tell from many of these articles who was whom. And a gaslighter or narcissist can find ammunition in these articles to continue their subjugation, and validation in these words.

So, for example, this one article lists several "tell-tale signs":

1. Something is “off” about your friend, partner, … but you can’t quite explain or pinpoint what.

So, this gaslighting observation that I mentioned above, in the beginning, he had me (a close but outside observer) convinced at first that he was the real victim. He confided in me his perspective. I do believe that he really did believe the stories he was spinning to me. It wasn't until I talked to the victim alone and then confronted him about the victim's side, and then HEARD him say "no, they don't feel that way, here [victim], tell Joreth that you don't feel that way" and then the victim proceeded to confirm the gaslighter *even though* I had just had an hour long conversation with them in tears about exactly how they felt. The victim told me that *I* must have misunderstood or misheard their anguished cries, that it wasn't a big deal, that everything was worked out.

I KNOW WHAT I HEARD. The victim felt a particular way, the gaslighter insisted that they didn't, and then the victim's story changed to match the gaslighter's version.

My point is that I believe the gaslighter is that fucked in the head that he (and most of them) really does believe his (their) version of events. I don't believe that most gaslighters are deliberately plotting to undermine people like in the movie, but I know for a fact that undermining people is the effect that's happening. I was one of his confidants, so I heard what I really believe to be his honest and true view of himself and his motivations. I believe that I understand the view of himself that he holds, at least well enough to read an article from a gaslighter's perspective who doesn't think he is doing anything wrong.

So, when I read articles like this and I put myself in the mindset of that confidante for whom I was on his side before I knew better, I have a hard time telling from these articles that *he* was the one who was doing the gaslighting. That's how he had me fooled for as long as I was.

He believed that something was "off" about his victim. They kept "changing their story". They weren't consistent. They saw things in strange, corner-turning ways that he didn't understand. I was constantly playing "interpreter" for them because he just didn't understand the victim.

4. You feel threatened and on-edge, but you don’t know why.

As the blogger Shea Emma Fett alluded to, abusers really do feel victimized, but they feel victimized by their victims' resistance to the abuser's control. When this gaslighter attempted to control his victim, and they resisted, the abuser felt personally threatened. I went out on a date once with a guy who I had a history with and I was interested in a future with, and my then-bf, when I told him all about it, accused me "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!" Listen here, asshole, I did *nothing* "to" you. This thing *happened* to me. It may have affected you, but it wasn't done *to* you and certainly not with malice. Nevertheless, he, and the abuser I'm talking about, felt threatened. This abuser was *constantly* fighting with his victim, to the point that he started working as late as possible to avoid being at home where another fight might break out. He was on edge all the time. He didn't understand why this was happening or how to avoid it (because he didn't understand that it was his own doing and he didn't understand the victim's wants - namely the desire to not be abused). He would check off "yes" to this one too.

6. You never quite feel “good enough” and try to live up to the expectations and demands of others, even if they are unreasonable or harm you in some way.

The motivation for this gaslighter's behaviour was a massive amount of fear and insecurity. Every time he felt his insecurity crop up and it prompted him to try to control other people to manage his fear, I stuck my nose in to tell him that he should do better. His victim also ineffectually tried to tell him that his attempts to control them was hurting them and he needed to do better. In my own arguments with him, he accused me of being unreasonable for insisting that his attempts to control his partners were harmful. He insisted that *my* suggestions for not controlling people were actually harmful *to him* somehow. We argued in circles and I never got a clear explanation for how other men (even men that he didn't like) seeing naked pictures of his wife harmed *him* (for example), but he clearly believed that it did.

Remember that ex above? He honestly believed that my date, and what we did on our date, with my new prospective partner was something done *to* him, and that it harmed him in some way, even though he wasn't on that date and he was told about the date both before and afterwards, prior to my seeing that ex in person again so that he could make informed decisions about how to relate to me in the future (and no, I didn't have wild, unprotected, fluid-exchanged sex with some random stranger and come home with an STD or something, which is usually what people point to when they want to defend the position that it's reasonable to be upset about what one partner does outside of a given relationship or to control, or even request, a specific set of behaviour for outside a given relationship).

I insist that a no-rules, boundaries-based relationship is the better relationship standard, and the gaslighter believed that my standards are too high, are unreasonable, and harm him in some way. He's not the only one who thinks that either. I have been told, verbatim, that not everyone is as "evolved" as I am when it comes to relationship and emotional maturity. I call bullshit on the "evolved" part. As far as I'm concerned, respect for agency is the bare minimum. I get that it's not always *easy*, but it's also not some advanced, high level concept set aside for, I dunno, monks who have reached enlightenment or Clears who have spent millions of dollars to the Church or whatever. Learning to respect other people's agency is something that children are capable of learning, and it's a lifetime of societal reinforcement that causes us to unlearn it (if we learned it in the first place) by instilling a sense of entitlement to other people's bodies, emotions, and minds. When fear has a hold of you, respecting other people's agency may be challenging, but challenging is not the same as "harmful". But because it can be challenging, someone who is an abuser or who is gaslighting someone can indeed believe that the standards their victim might suggest are "too high" and are "harming him". Personal growth is uncomfortable, especially when you resist it. That doesn't make it, necessarily, "harmful", but it can feel that way, so a gaslighter could see this "tell-tale sign" as evidence for his narrative too.

7. You feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong with you, e.g. you’re neurotic or are “losing it.”

The gaslighter excused his efforts to control people away by claiming he had PTSD. I do not believe that self-diagnosis, I believe another one made by an actual diagnostician but that's not actually relevant right now. What is relevant is that the gaslighter *does* believe that he suffers from PTSD and he does, indeed, exhibit several symptoms, including "checking out" (which, I'm told by reliable clinicians, are also symptoms of a handful of other mental illnesses including the diagnosis I believe is more likely to be the correct one). Every time he tried to control his victim and they pushed back, here's what would happen. The victim would insist on their reality, and the gaslighter would go glassy-eyed and catatonic, unable to interact with the world around him. *Until*, that is, the victim recanted and accepted the gaslighter's reality. Then, suddenly, he would "wake up" and start interacting again. Later, though, he would use that as "evidence" that the victim was "inconsistent" and kept "changing their story" and therefore shouldn't be trusted to know what reality was.

But because he would get "triggered" by his victim's resistance, he would often come to me in distress over how he was "losing it" or that there was something wrong with him. PTSD and other mental illnesses are viewed as "something fundamentally wrong with you" or "neurotic" by society in general, so regardless of which mental illness he might have, he could legitimately think that "something is fundamentally wrong" and he would be "correct" about that. He felt that he was being hollowed out, that he couldn't function in daily life anymore as their arguments increased in frequency. He had trouble concentrating at work because he was always upset about their latest argument. He was stressed and frightened by obsessive thoughts of losing his victim. When I saw only his catatonia and the aftermath of their arguments, it was completely believable that he was the "victim". But that required keeping the victim feeling isolated in an "us against them" tribalism within the group, because as soon as I started talking to the victim themself, and seeing the arguments from the beginning, not just the effect of the argument on him, things looked very different.

My second fiance was a gaslighter. He was very young, though, and clumsy about it, and I'm way too self-confident for those kinds of tactics to work for very long on me. He did things like this too, only he wasn't nearly as believable about it. Whenever we got into an argument, if it looked like I was going to win (or that he was going to lose, since the argument was usually about whether or not he could have sex with me or I could go out in public without him), he would get "sick" somehow. He got "the flu" twice a week on the nights of my ballroom dance class. He got an upset stomach on laundry night if I wanted to do it at my parents' house instead of his parents' house. He got another one of his upset stomachs on the night of a friend's bachelorette party when I told him it was "no guys allowed".

One time, he even "knocked himself unconscious" on a low-hanging pipe in the carport when we walked from the car to the house during an argument. He managed to somehow hit himself in the head hard enough to lose consciousness completely without actually making any sound of impact and while moving at the rate of a slow lumber. I've had someone swing a metal pipe at me with the intention of hurting me and hit me on the head and I didn't go fully passed out. Head injuries don't work like they do in the movies. And when I left his ass lying on the concrete, he also somehow managed to get "robbed" in broad daylight while lying unconscious (that one was the last straw and I called his bluff hard enough that he admitted his lie). His various maladies and misfortunes were intended to distract me from the argument and trigger my compassion so that I would forget why I was mad at him and run to him to take care of him. Fortunately for me, I'm not the "maternal" type and my reaction was to give the benefit of the doubt the first time or two, but then to become contemptuous of an adult who couldn't care for himself. Contempt is the number one relationship killer, and unconsciously developing that emotion as a response to abusive tactics has probably saved my life on multiple occasions.

So, once I saw this gaslighter's tactic from the other side, I recognized it from my own abusive ex-fiance. He would get "sick" and I would have to stop arguing to care for him, because if I kept being mad at him while he was sick, then *I* was the monster with no compassion. Fortunately for me, I'm not terribly bothered by people I'm mad at thinking that I'm not compassionate because *I* know better, and that's what matters to me. But this gaslighter was taking legitimate mental health issues and preying on his victim's concern over harming others and their fear of being seen as not compassionate. Again, I believe that he really believes his side of things. I don't think he actually deliberately calculated how to fake PTSD in order to win an argument (whereas I do believe my ex-fiance faked his unconsciousness - which happened more than once - although his upset stomachs were probably a real reaction to anxiety). I believe that he really was "checking out" because I believe there is really something very wrong with him. But it was always just so *convenient* that it ended as soon as the victim recanted, and then that recanting was used later to further undermine the victim's position and even their standing in the community. If the victim stood their ground, they were "driving" the gaslighter to a mental breakdown, but if the victim backed down, they were unreliable and couldn't be trusted. Either way, the victim was the "monster" who kept "harming" their abuser.

But from the gaslighter's perspective, since these episodes came more and more frequently as the relationship spiraled faster and faster towards its demise, he felt that he was "losing it" and becoming more and more unhinged. And he was becoming unhinged. He was a total wreck of a person by the end. But he was still a gaslighter, and I do not believe the victim was doing it *to* the gaslighter. I believe it is a consequence of the sort of person the gaslighter is who had to face the sort of person that the victim was.

8. You feel like you’re constantly overreacting or are too sensitive.
9. You feel isolated, hopeless, misunderstood and depressed.

This is really just more of an extension of the last one. The relationship was spiraling out of control because the victim was doing more and more resisting of the gaslighter's attempts to control them and their own breakdown as a result of the gaslighting working, and that led to daily fights that consumed their every waking moment and also took over the atmosphere of the rest of the immediate community whenever either of them was present. When you feel like your life is going out of control, regardless of why or how, it's not unexpected to feel isolated, hopeless, misunderstood, or depressed, especially if someone is trying to tell you that your behaviour is out of line. When he wanted to control his victim, I told him that he was essentially overreacting. I told him that he needed to dial it back and let his victim (who I had not yet begun to think of as "the victim") have their agency and do their thing. I told him, more or less, that his feelings of fear and the need to control them were too much, out of sync with the reality of the situation, and that the solution was for him to get over his issues, not control the victim's behaviour. In essence, it could be argued that he saw my words as telling him that he was "overreacting or are too sensitive". So, from his perspective, these are a big "yes" also.

11. You feel scared and as though “something is terribly wrong,” but you don’t know what or why.

Again, I believe that he believes his own narrative. This gaslighter felt that his life was spinning out of control and he didn't know how to wrestle control back. Every day was fraught with arguments and intense fear. More and more people were becoming unhappy by the splash zone of this one relationship. Life began to look chaotic and turbulent. Not only was this relationship a source of pain and fear, but because the two of them were constantly fighting, all his other relationships started to suffer and he started to fear that he was about to lose his other relationships as well. Then, not a month after he told me that I was the one stable thing in his life, we had our own blow-out that he apparently couldn't anticipate. Everything was "terribly wrong", but because the truth was his gaslighting and he didn't recognize it, he didn't know why everything was "terribly wrong" or how to fix it.

12. You find it hard to make decisions.

With his catatonic episodes happening more and more frequently, and the arguments happening constantly, he started to revert to a more child-like mental state. He had trouble making decisions because his brain was just freezing up from all the chaos. He was never good at making decisions anyway, preferring others to take the lead on things, which is actually one of the reasons why it took me so long to figure out that he was controlling the people around him to manage his insecurities. It's hard to believe someone is a manipulator when they appear to be such a follower. But because he felt that his life was out of control and that he was losing his own grip on reality, making decisions became more difficult than usual.

13. You feel as though you’re a much weaker version of yourself, and you were much more strong and confident in the past.

This was something he actually told me, more or less. He was so distraught by everything that was happening, that he felt like he was becoming "hollow", which is sort of like saying he is a "weaker version of [himself]". I have absolutely no doubt that he felt like he was losing his mind. His life wasn't looking the way he wanted it to look and the way he had always controlled his life in the past wasn't working with this partner. This partner was resisting his control, and he felt so entitled to controlling them to keep his own mental issues manageable that their resistance to his control was threatening and made him feel harmed. Having those feelings, and the extent to which this whole relationship was disrupting everyone's life, it doesn't matter that he was the one abusing the victim, those feelings still feel real and still affect how one sees oneself and their place in the world.

14. You feel guilty for not feeling happy like you used to.

This gaslighter was *known* for his exuberance for life. In the dictionary, next to the word "happy", you'd see his picture. I've known a bunch of people like that - in fact, it seems to be one of the elements of "my type".

tacit is one of those people for whom "happy" is an integral characteristic too. But, obviously, this gaslighter was not happy all the time during this period. He was stressed and anxious and depressed and angry and sad all the time. For someone whose very *identity* includes "happy", not being happy can make one feel like one is not oneself anymore. And for some of those people, if part of their identity rests on their ability to be happy and for others to see them as happy, particularly if their happiness makes other people happy and their sadness makes other people sad for them, no longer feeling happy can feel like a personal failure.

So, this gaslighter failing to control his victim, causing them to be miserable, which causes them to challenge the relationship and the attempts to control, which makes the *gaslighter* unhappy, this can lead to a sense of guilt for not maintaining this happiness in the face of all this loss and misery even though the gaslighter is the one causing the chain reaction in the first place. Since this sort of gaslighter doesn't realize that he's the one setting the spark, he has a difficult time recognizing that his unhappiness is something he can fix because it's something he caused. Or, he might suspect or know (possibly subconsciously) that it's something he caused (even if he believes he caused it but have the wrong ideas on *how* he caused it), and so feel guilt for knowing that he did it all to himself.

So, this whole long exposition is to explain that I am looking for sources to help explain why, when a gaslighter feels these things, it's *not* a sign that they are a victim or being gaslighted by their actual victims. When a person is gaslighted, they start to believe that they are an abusive monster who is doing terrible things to their abuser, but an abuser actually *is* doing all those things. I could write a similar checklist of "how to know you're being abusive" and read it through the perspective of a gaslight victim and that victim could conceivably reach the conclusion that they are, indeed, an abusive monster because of the lens that each is viewing the world through. I know there's a difference, I just don't know how to explain or illustrate that and I'm looking for sources to cite and other people's words to use as analogy or illustration or explanation.

www.theage.com.au/interactive/2016/the-big-sleep/

I'm seeing this article making the rounds on FB. It's a story about a married couple at the end of their years choosing how to finish their life. Consider this your content warning both for the article and the rest of my comments.

For most of my life, I have never understood the desire for suicide. Death, or as tacit and my metamour call it, The Void, has always terrified me. I want any and all methods possible to prolong my life. I suppose I could be called a transhumanist, because I'm in favor of radical life extension. I want to live for hundreds, thousands of years. I want death to be *optional*.

And that's what makes me support this couple. I couldn't understand this decision until recently, but I also have always known that it was not my place to decide what was right for other people. Just because I couldn't imagine the sort of circumstances that would make someone embrace death doesn't mean that I would *never* understand that decision, and the thought of longing for death but being denied it was just as terrifying to me as the thought of dying itself.

I have been suicidal twice in my life. The first time, I was a very young teen. That teenager doesn't seem like me. I see her from the outside now. So I was unable to empathize with people who wanted to die, although I supported their right to choose on principle. The second time was much, much more recently, and it was after I discovered words like "transhumanism" and "radical life extension". This time, I was able to experience being in the mind of someone who longed for death and who wasn't able to understand people who wanted to go on living. Now I live with the memories of being both people in my head.

You might think that, having come (mostly) out of a suicidal depression, I would feel grateful that I stuck it out long enough to no longer wish for death, and to find life even more precious for those (and other) close brushes with death. But this makes me even more strongly in favor of the rights of assisted suicide. It's true, I'm glad that I did not have the opportunity to go through with it. Now. But I am even more convinced now that our approach to suicide is wrong. There are far too few resources to help people like me who are having an emotional imbalance, for whatever reason, get past it and learn how to embrace life, and there are far too many laws that are unable to distinguish between people like me and people like those in this article. These are not the same kinds of suicidal tendencies, but in both circumstances, the tendencies are treated the same - as a problem we have to legislate against. Instead of placing benches in the courtyard, we put up signs telling people not to sit on the planter.

These people made a rational decision that they considered from all angles for many, many years. They do not believe in an afterlife, which could (and often does) influence someone's desire to die by convincing them that there's something better waiting for them "on the other side". They had nothing to gain from their suicide, and plenty to lose - including their daughters, their freedom if it failed, their daughters' freedom if they were found guilty of assisting the suicides, but most importantly, they stood to lose that which frightened them more than death - a slow decline into pain and confusion.

I am no longer certain that I can face that kind of future with a stalwart, steadfast commitment to life borne of fear of The Void. I'd like to think that I still love life as ardently as before. But I can't fault them for their choice, and I can understand their fear better than I ever have before. I have always stood for making death optional because my goal is to live forever. But in making life optional, that requires making death itself a valid choice. As the unrelated saying goes, consent is meaningless if you can't say no. Making death optional doesn't mean very much if you can't choose that option when you want it.

Surprisingly, this article actually made me feel hopeful and optimistic. Yes, they died. But they died on their own terms, just as they lived on their own terms. We should all be so lucky.

Even though I ballroom dance, I'm not a Dancer and I don't have what is typically thought of as a dancer's body. I'm relatively thin and small, but I have just enough of my Latina heritage to give me hips and an ass, while just enough of my Northern European heritage to make it not obvious and to make people who don't know that I'm Latina say stupid things like "oh, but you're so skinny!" whenever I complain about weight.

When I buy dance tights, I have to buy the larger sizes because of the stereotypes of what a dancer's body is supposed to look like, so I already feel annoyed buying tights right out of the gate. About a year ago, I bought my usual size, only to find that I couldn't pull the waistband up over my hips. I bought another pair, one size up (which, of course, was too big everywhere else, but I dealt with it), and felt bad about my weight gain ever since. So I've been trying to dance regularly and to control my portion sizes, and y'all know about my recent 2nd attempt at a 30 Day Challenge regimen.

Well, my larger size tights got ruined the last time I wore them thanks to a rough edge on my fingernail, so I only have the too-small pair left. I tried them on today, just to see, and I was able (just barely) to pull them all the way on! They fit everywhere except getting the waistband over the hips (as they probably did when I couldn't pull them all the way up at all last summer), so even though they're still uncomfortable to get past that point, it means that I've lost enough weight to wear them again.

This is in addition to having to add another hole to my belt and now being unable to wear my jeans (that I bought specifically because my old pair didn't fit anymore, so I think of them as my "fat jeans") without a belt. I'm feeling so much better about my shape and my progress lately. I know that I'm still thin and that I don't have the social stigma that others do, but it's still problematic for me.

The biggest concern I have is that I'm too poor to replace my wardrobe, so I need to maintain my weight just so that I don't have to buy any new clothes. I'm not quite down to my target weight yet, but it does mean that I'm starting to fit into some of my smaller clothes again, which really relieves a lot of my anxiety about spending money. I was pretty OK with how I looked with the extra weight, but every time I got dressed and something was tight, I fretted about needing to spend money on clothes.

This anxiety triggered my old anorexia that I thought I had gotten over decades ago, and I've been working to keep the anorexia in check by channeling the obsessive thoughts into a more healthy version, such as portion control as opposed to starvation, and the 30 Day Challenges as opposed to binge-exercising. The weight loss has been gradual with no adverse health effects, so I'm doing much better this time around.

I'm feeling encouraged by the tights, but I'm going to work on not letting it fuel a frantic workout routine and to remind myself to eat regularly.

Please don't comment with "but you're so thin / pretty / don't need to worry about weight" or offer compliments or tips. I know I'm thin, I know some people think I'm fine just the way I am, and I'm already doing what I feel is healthy and necessary for my body, given my peculiar dietary and psychological issues. This is way more complicated, involving psychology & social class issues, than anyone can help with in the comments section. If you're not my therapist, nutritionist, or medical doctor, I don't need advice and I'm not fishing for compliments. I don't care what other people think of me so validation that someone else finds me attractive doesn't help, and, in fact, will probably trigger one of my other issues about objectification.

I, and other people, need space to discuss our body issues without that space turning into someone else's expectations or desires for our bodies. It's not about how you see me, it's about how I see me and how I feel about me and how I can deal with all the sociopolitical-economic issues around being me.

Profile

Joreth

The Inn Between

Page Summary

How To Help Someone Who Is Suicidal
Depression & Self-Doubt
When Suicidal Depression Becomes The New Normal
I Want No Ordinary Lover. I Want A Fucking Storm.
Depressive Cycle
Self-Isolation Tips For n00bs To Avoid Getting Cabin Fever
You Do Not Have To Be Hit To Experience Domestic Violence
Life Hacks For Any Version Of Executive Dysfunction
Thinking About "Final Thoughts"
Abuse And The Cold, Hard Edge - Some Musings
The Gift Of Presence & The Perils Of Advice
What Kind Of Partner Will You Be When Your Partner Wants To Do Something Scary?
When You're In The Gray Area Of Being Suicidal
On Learning To Be A Human
No, You Don't Have OCD Just Because You Like Things Neat & Tidy
What's The Difference Between A Gaslight Victim And A Gaslighter?
The Big Sleep
Weight Progress & Thin Person's Body Issues

August 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

The Journal Of The InnKeeper

Ranty Lessons by Joreth

Entries tagged with depression

How To Help Someone Who Is Suicidal

Depression & Self-Doubt

When Suicidal Depression Becomes The New Normal

I Want No Ordinary Lover. I Want A Fucking Storm.

Depressive Cycle

Self-Isolation Tips For n00bs To Avoid Getting Cabin Fever

You Do Not Have To Be Hit To Experience Domestic Violence

Life Hacks For Any Version Of Executive Dysfunction

Thinking About "Final Thoughts"

Abuse And The Cold, Hard Edge - Some Musings

The Gift Of Presence & The Perils Of Advice

What Kind Of Partner Will You Be When Your Partner Wants To Do Something Scary?

When You're In The Gray Area Of Being Suicidal

On Learning To Be A Human

No, You Don't Have OCD Just Because You Like Things Neat & Tidy

What's The Difference Between A Gaslight Victim And A Gaslighter?

The Big Sleep

Weight Progress & Thin Person's Body Issues

Profile

Links

Page Summary

Tags

August 2024

Syndicate

Banners