Day 13.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. “New year, new you!” *snort* As if. I don’t suffer that delusion, I’m not buying a gym membership or quitting smoking or taking up a new hobby for half of January.

Instead, I try to always be looking for things that I can do to grow or improve myself. Does it work? Sometimes. Life is a journey, after all.

Life has been difficult for me. I mean, in general, and in perpetuity for as long as I can recall, just difficult. One thing after another, except for when I’m just minding my own business and a whole bunch of things jump me all at once. I’m 40 now, I’m tired, and I’m starting to feel this is just my lot in life, to struggle. Some days I really rail against that idea, some days I wallow in depression over it, some days I feel positive that I can still turn this all around, somehow.

I’ve been doing DBT, dialectical behaviour therapy, specifically a course called Distress Tolerance. I mean, I’ve been attempting. I have the book, and I can go through it any time, but the group therapy is online, video chatting. I hate video chatting to begin with, and I find the material just mentally taxing. So I’ve attended maybe half of the sessions, because I’m forgetful – but also because my stick-to-it-iveness is lacking if I’m being honest. It’s absolutely helpful material, really, I’ve just felt so out of it that it’s hard for me to focus a lot of the time.

So, I’m currently disabled. To explain why is a long story and a laundry list of issues, which I’m trying to tackle in a multitude of ways. I worked in administration, admin assisting, project assisting, coordinating. It worked for me for a long time, because even with physical ailments I had, I could still think. I could still organize, multitask, and remember.

Then I was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia, after years upon years of being dismissed and told that there was nothing wrong with me or being treated as an anxious hypochondriac. A short few months after that diagnosis, I was in a double impact car accident. And even though I’d had plenty of periods of cognitive difficulty, the moment my car was hit, my brain went full fog. I remember sitting in my seat, just staring straight ahead, not knowing what to do.

I was stuck in that fog for a year.

Everything after the accident was bungled, I know now. At the time, I had no idea what to expect, what to ask for, how to seek the best treatment. I went to the ER and the doctor who saw me poked around at my neck briefly, wrote me a prescription for T3s, told me to follow up with my own doctor and sent me home. I saw my doctor the next day, who repeated what the ER doc had done (minus codeine), and handed me off to physio. Off I went to physio, and nothing more was done. When I complained to my physiotherapist of all my cognitive issues, months later, he told me that I likely had a small fracture in my neck, likely had a concussion, asked if I’d had an x-ray. Nope, I sure hadn’t. I asked if it would be beneficial to request an x-ray at that point, he said it would likely not be visible on a scan as it would have healed by then.

The accident happened in July of 2014. The neck pain I had hadn’t gone away, in fact it got worse. The following January I began noticing weakness in my left arm and hand. Eventually it came to a point where I was dropping things. My pain level was excruciating. I finally went to the ER, and as a friend had suggested, asked for an MRI. And the MRI showed herniated discs in my cervical spine.

As of 2015, I had formal diagnoses of bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety, PTSD, fibromyalgia, and degenerative disc disease. What more could I ask for, right? It’s a fan-fucking-tastic combo.

Eventually my cognitive issues faded. They didn’t go away, I never knew whether a day would be good or bad, but they came in waves. I used my good days to catch up on the things at work that I was unable to do on my bad days, and I stayed afloat that way.

Then I couldn’t balance work and home. I could work, or I could handle things at home, but never both. One or the other always suffered, usually home. I hated it but I needed to work, so I did my best to keep going. Pretty much a shambling and decrepit thing, by then.

Finally, toward the end of 2019, my good days became fewer and fewer. I wasn’t staying afloat anymore, I was drowning. I couldn’t catch up on work because I rarely had good days. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t multitask, couldn’t remember. Often I went to work and just held a chair down, and for 8 hours did nothing more than act as a switchboard. I wanted so badly to do better but I couldn’t. I had 11 days off for Christmas, and I had typically used that time to recover and go back to work fresh. This time, I struggled to do housework, to shop for groceries, to cook – to do anything but lie down.

I went back to work feeling as bad as I had when I’d left.

So I began to consider asking for a short term disability. But remember, I had no cognition. I would think about taking time off, and then consider that maybe I wouldn’t have a job to go back to, maybe I’d be replaced, maybe I’d put undue stress on the company. And my mind would spin out of control. I would panic, and then shut down, and shove it way back to the back of my mind until next time. I basically just existed, day in, day out, on autopilot as much as possible.

I had already asked my doctor in the fall of 2019 to refer me to a psychiatrist, thinking that perhaps my medication needed adjustment. I was on a wait list for a consultation with a neurosurgeon. I had found a therapist who specializes in trauma, and that was helpful and yet, not. Nothing was getting me back to functional.

Eventually, unable to come to a decision on whether to take time off work, I was unceremoniously fired. It came out of left field for me. I had good relationships with my boss and coworkers, so I thought, I considered them friends. My boss had always told me that if he were to fire me, he would have given me warning beforehand. There was no conversation, no warning, no asking why I wasn’t working well.

In the end he made my difficult decision for me, and I’m not upset about that. I am upset about how it was handled, and how after nearly 4 years with the company, there was no warning, no conversation, I was blindsided. My replacement had already been hired. Everything went on behind my back. If I’m honest, I’ve got to admit that it still stings, nearly 2 years later.

I always tended to keep my personal life separate from work. I didn’t lie, when anyone asked how I was I would tell them, but saying “I’m tired and in a lot of pain” means something different to people who are generally well. It’s difficult to convey the gravity of the situation, how it means that I have a fatigue that no amount of sleep will fix, how I have pain that will never go away, how I exist in a haze and can’t always think clearly, how it often feels like I’m recovering from the flu or a night of horrible binge drinking. I don’t go into how many painkillers I take in a day just to function, how I take medication for nerve pain, how often I wake up in the night from nightmares or pain.

In time I got more diagnoses. A hiatal hernia that had caused me to aspirate stomach acid – something that happened in my sleep and I woke up unable to breathe, feeling like my lungs were on fire. Bursitis in one shoulder. This year, I got the same kind of pain in my elbow, and inflammation in my spine between my shoulder blades that feels very much how my neck does. I’m still awaiting my doctors appointment to try to figure these things out.

Everyone has been suffering these past two years with our “new normal.” Covid-19 cases, lost income, lost social lives… it’s a shit show. I lost my job no more than 3 weeks before Covid restrictions hit. I know that it’s been hard on everyone. But it’s been hard on me in some of the same ways, in addition to the issues I already had. And trust me, I really hate to do the “woe is me” routine, I often don’t. But this is my space, and I’m only being honest, and I’ve left out a lot in hopes of some kind of brevity. I’m not here for pity, yo.

Who knows what 2022 has in store. Let’s hope that it’s not actually 2020 v.2.0, that we don’t get mutant giant murder hornets or a variant of Covid that causes our brains to leak out of our eye sockets or that the 2020 upgrade doesn’t include a literal apocalypse or Trump finds a way to become God-king of the United States.

I hope we find a way back to “old normal,” but with improvements because Covid has absolutely shone a fucking giant LED headlight on the flaws in our society and government, medical systems, and the way we work.

I also hope that I can find a way back to “normal.” By which I mean, functional.

This year I am seeing a psychiatrist, my therapist, I’ve done group therapy, I’ve gone to the Brain Injured Group because I believe that I do have a brain injury at this point. The car accident would’ve been concussion number 3 for me, and I feel like that’s probably 3 too many. I’ve been referred back to the specialist who diagnosed me with fibro, who I hope can help me with some of my physical pain because, well, fuck this shit and I’m over it. I’m slow, my brain works like a 12 year old obsoleted computer, and so I’m wading through it all as best I can in the interest of self improvement and quality of life.

In DBT we have been going over radical acceptance. The concept that we cannot mentally fight against what is without causing ourselves pain. Being able to make peace with our situations, while still actively looking for ways to improve them. Because you can’t just kick and scream that it’s not fair, it changes nothing. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Not for the new year, just for myself, just because of where I’m at in life.

For a long, long time now I’ve had issues with fatigue and concentration, and I haven’t felt up to blogging. But this is something that I typically enjoy doing and I would like to do it more often – that’s a goal.

There’s plenty to talk about in the world, some serious, some hilarious.

If I can keep at this, I’ll see measurable improvement and I hope that will keep me working on getting better. Seeing results is always empowering, yes?

Yes. Of course.

PS – I’ve added a feedback button below, and would welcome any likes, hates, advice, requests, etcetera – from readers out there!