Nh

I find every moment with you intoxicating,
Every moment apart a turbulent current of insecurity.
I wonder, do I trust my intuition,
Or descend to the candlestick’s pyre?
Discordant, trending toward order;
I pursue the immortal truth in solitude,
Versus the transient solace in lies of omission.

I see trauma

I see trauma like the kid in The Sixth Sense sees dead people. All the time.

Today, against better judgment, I fulfilled a promise that I needed to keep to a friend in a bad place. I bumped into someone I’d known from my teens while there. An inadvertent misunderstanding could have made a homicidal sociopath with anger issues potentially hostile.

My friend ended up getting screwed over for trying to be helpful. The homicidal one ended up being the victim of theft by the person I’d known from my teens. I tried to help that person re-acquaint with mutual friends we’d had back in the day and to find a good treatment counselor.

I see the origins as I see the danger. The psycho was raised ruthlessly by a father who knew no other way to survive; trauma is the gift that keeps on giving down the generations. He was broken by him as he was taught to break those whose respect he thought he required. Wherein, of course, respect = fear.

My friend whom I had to fulfill the promise to has a golden soul, but it is wrapped in dangerous electrified razorwire from what he has gone through.

My other friend, from the past, I barely remember, but she’ll steal from the men she devotes herself to in order to get more opiate to numb the void where pieces of her were removed. The ever expanding trauma ripples shredded her, as well.

This guy was the last one. I won’t return there. I’ve known it was coming; I fulfilled my promise, and now I’m done. I cannot help but try to help those who have gone through anything that I relate to on these levels, but when my mission means I may risk helping my own flesh and blood through a dangerously insane present & future, I’m afraid I am officially the fuck out on this one.

Psycho once said I deal with things like ‘a girl’ for healing, instead of killing innocent animals and randomly beating people. I can carry that cross. Have you learned no new insults since the ’80s? I’ll help build a better future via detour from that house.

I’m going to help as many people as I can with my time here; with training they’ll come to me, and those ones will be ready.

I hate leaving anyone behind, but I’m done with those settings for the rest of my life.

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The last few months have been absolutely pivotal. My wavering and inability to pick the route that may be best to carry out what I want to accomplish on this Earth is gone. It won’t be easy, and there will be detours along the way, no doubt, but I know exactly which direction I am going. I’ve been in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for my entire life. I can help people avoid the dead end that I thought I’d been handed along with them. People don’t need to just survive. That’s how we fucking got into this mess. People need to thrive.

The Delay

I have tried to write an account of everything that’s happened, or even just some of the more major things that’ve happened, since I last wrote here, and I can’t do it yet. I can’t maintain the cohesion that it takes to form it into a narrative. This is going to take some time. I’m trying to bring good from everything that has happened, but right now I’m really still working on surviving again, let alone getting back to thriving.

What’s happened since 6 May ’21:

• I recentered my life around the priorities that I hold dear, and began really learning to hold compassion for myself as I do for others
• many, many more difficulties than were necessary surrounding pursuit of my bachelor’s at Dickinson State University – the hard stress period started ramping up immediately as I was trying to enroll in school there – you could not trust anyone to do their job properly
• I ran my first half-marathon
• I swam across a small natural body of water while learning to face my phobias
• fall semester started
• evidence of my a-mother’s ‘rent-a-friend’ taking financial advantage of her mounted; my aunt and I both reported her, found out later we were only a couple from many
• my a-mother was admitted to the hospital after the last of a series of falls, often involving broken bones due to osteoporosis
• they were not going to release her without 24/7 medical care, they couldn’t even test her balance because it was so bad they knew that she would topple even with 3 nurses and orderlies there to help as the test was administered
• her ‘rent-a-friend’ would not return the vehicle that my a-mother owned when it was demanded; more evidence of bad things
• she was discharged from the hospital, my son and I had no clue until we arrived to visit and she was gone
• rent-a-friend had convinced her that the thought of her needing medical care was ridiculous, just like when she helped by convincing her that the two dementia diagnoses had both been incorrect, as well
• rent-a-friend went to the west coast to visit her daughter
• the night my aunt arrived to talk with her about the fact that her rent-a-friend had swindled her house out from under her, my son and I found her, on our way to the airport, collapsed in her doorway
• the following morning I had to take her off of life support; it was a fatal aneurysm, no chance of recovery
• search warrants were executed at her house on all financial records, rent-a-friend was under investigation
• her body was taken custody of by the state for a full autopsy
• my aunt began to fight for executor status in my mother’s will, as the rent-a-friend had been granted it before
• stress, like you’ve never experienced, with every phone call and every miscommunication where I was not allowed to discuss things with my aunt’s attorney and nobody else would give me the time of day. my aunt would make demands and degrade my character scathingly after demanding tasks be carried out that could not legally be done because she was not yet appointed as executor nor had probate begun. seems the family still needed to leave a mark before this was done
• my grades declined; I realized that my ability to focus on the course work was not coming back easily, even after half a month had passed
• went to Crazy Horse with my running group and had a great time; ran the half marathon relay with them, and our team won the masters’ division
• half a dozen deer jumped in front of us on the way back; the emotional recharge I’d gotten with that great chance to relax trickled away, as the one that we couldn’t avoid passed due to respiratory failure in a horrible roadside reenactment of my a-mother’s Chenye-Stokes breathing and respiratory failure
• had to drop out of school eventually, despite a lot of professors giving me a lot of chances to try to catch up
• got bronchitis 6 times in 3 months; my weak spot has always been my lungs, and with that amount of stress I was on my back barely able to breathe more than I was up and about during that time
• had a breakthrough with EMDR therapy; finally realized that I can actually see a path out of this c-PTSD paralyzed life now
• got afraid of the Covid, with my asthma and respiratory weakness. Didn’t want my son to end up in abusive hands that might frivolously deplete his monetary chances for a good future, that would go to him in case of my perishing… My first vax was J&J, I didn’t trust the mRNA shot. No worries with that one. My booster was Moderna, because the pharmacy tech argued with me about it and how the J&J shot had been causing clots and wasn’t as effective. I folded; I hadn’t been ready to defend my viewpoint. I thought I was golden for the J&J shot because I was taking the damn vax in one form, at least, and that’s what they wanted, right? Besides she’d been to school for it.
• in the ER less than 18 hours later for EKG due to chest pains, arrhythmia, and a whole lot of really bogus other reactions to the vaccine; getting shot up with 12 vaccines at once in the army was never anywhere nearly as bad as that was
• back to the walk-in clinic a few weeks later as my runs are getting weird and my heart isn’t staying at the rates it should for my level of exertion, not to mention more arrhythmia and chest pains
• neighbors slash tires on my Jeep the day after I have the new winter set put on for less risk of an accident over the winter months
• Holter monitor for 48 hours shows nothing new
• back for more, can’t run at all any more now, heart rate always spikes dangerously
• two week Holter monitor shows four electrical signaling blockages over the course of over 55+ events recorded during that period; triple beats, delays between the upper & lower chambers, all kinds of horrifying things that I stopped researching because stress tends to trigger more of this crap
• put out the fire in the downstairs neighbor’s appartment that had filled the building with smoke
• VA fails to properly schedule an echocardiogram or a stress test, finally gets me in to see a cardiologist after a month and a half waiting to even talk to scheduling about it – appointment is Wednesday next week – hopefully he can still help even without the echo & stress test data

I can’t work right now, I can’t go to school, I’ve got a little money to survive off of from taxes, but it’s limited, to say the least. Nobody has a clue when anything with the estate will ever be transferred. The attorney just had to file a civil suit against the rent-a-friend because the PD still hasn’t brought charges against her. They’re afraid that if the house is sold and the loan that she swindled from my mom is paid off that she might not have to pay that back, if no criminal charges stick with that amount tagged on as restitution. The case has obviously been deprioritized, it’s been over 7 months. Last I heard they were still waiting on results from the state medical examiner’s office.

These are only the biggest examples. Each one of these major events spreads out like a horrifying fractal, reproducing smaller and smaller copies of the same horrifying and putrid stressors into the days and weeks surrounding each peak. I need a break. I’m really feeling how much my eggs were in one basket with where I was at for coping mechanisms. Since losing my ability to run or really even lift weights or go for a significant walk, I’ve been repulsed sometimes to notice my thinking regressing to earlier methods of coping. Cardiology on the 30th will hopefully at least let me know what I’m dealing with; I pray there is a way to recover what I have lost. I’d just started feeling possibility and the self-reinforcing rewards of self-care and boundary setting. I’d like to walk a little farther down that path; running down that path would be even better.

Sorry to end on a negative note. This is a work in progress…

The Big Unexpected Delay & Where I Find Myself Now

So it’s been around 5-6 weeks since I wrote the post Undulled, talking about how hard some of these medication changes were hitting me. Since then, not a frigging peep. So much for my fight to keep a post coming out on a daily basis, or at least 3-4 times a week. In my defense, I have to say that I had absolutely no idea how difficult this medication change was going to be. Even after stabilizing at my new level, I’ve been completely off-balance by it. Settling down with my original/old conscious patterns and capabilities has not just been something I can sink into.

I struggled when writing that last sentence, at first writing ‘original emotional makeup’, and then trying to add other little bits to describe it better… I still don’t even know how to describe it, you see. It’s so much more than that. It’s like being a whole new person, in a way, or maybe an old person, transferred into a whole new brain, with new capabilities. Like an operating system, and its myriad of programs, being transferred to new computer hardware, with different amounts of memory, a different processor, etc… All of the original thoughts are still there, but they’re still pretty fresh, even alien, in the way that they express and come across.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to properly express it to the people that I talk to, though my group of ‘friends’ has now gone through serious pruning, thanks to my ability to discern things about the people around me that I’d been unable to make out for around a decade now. Here are some of the changes that I’ve been able to consciously take note of:

• Having a conversation is completely different. I don’t have any idea how it is even possible that such a massively influential change could sneak up on a person so gradually that they wouldn’t see it coming, or know that it’d happened, but it did. For the last 10 years, I’ve been unable to have anything like the animated, spontaneous exchanges that I used to have before. In that interim, I’ve had to spend my time, while the other person or people were talking, always frantically trying to come up with what I was going to say next, unable to devote my concentration in full to what they were saying. That’d left my ability to fully engage with other people severely limited. I simply had to do it this way, or else I’d be stuck in a conversation bound to have uncomfortable empty silences, while I let what they were saying sink in, and process, and finally came up with something to say that sounded like a decent response. Before, I’d very rarely ever had to deal with a conversation like this, only in the most intimidated or pressured situations did I ever need to expend serious, noticeably disabling, effort to comprehend and process what the other person was saying. As a result, my responses in just about any conversation had been limited, dull, unoriginal, and sometimes downright cliche. Just over the past few weeks have I come to remember that I used to be able to effortlessly engage in dialog with people; much more meaningful responses just come to me, as what they’re saying flows across my mind. I even remember now that I used to have a pretty decent ability to make people laugh without even trying. I have wit, whereas before, I was just a sounding board. Finally, my descriptive abilities are much less stunted than they have been during this medicated period; it doesn’t take me any effort at all to create vivid and colorful descriptions of whatever I’m trying to get across.
• I have confidence, maybe even a bit of charisma. I have seriously not had the slightest iota of it since not too long after my medication began. Maybe I was able to hold onto it through my first stretch through college, but that was only due to the accomplishments I was able to make, solely in academics, certainly not based on anything interpersonal. And why would that be a big surprise? I’ve always been a person that craved and needed, more than anything, a social network to be able to feel any sense of support, and dare I say, self worth. When my ability to have a decent conversation waned, I found myself unable to meet new people. My old friends from back in the day were rapidly becoming harder to find, as they became involved with friends, family, and careers, leaving their old circles behind. That left me high and dry. I found myself in a situation where I’d previously been able to find and meet some of the more non-conforming individuals; now, these people seemed to not have any interest in me. I guess I chalked it up to age, when in all reality, I’d simply become a person with less interesting qualities to offer. I was downright boring. Isolation began to eat at me, and my confidence dwindled even more, as the months and years progressed. Any attractive qualities that I had for any serious relationships were pretty much gone, too. I was just a lone wolf, wondering what had happened to me; I’d been a beacon, before, in situations where I was alone in a crowd. I forgot how I had ever been that person in my past that’d walked into a club and been able to talk to whoever I wanted, let alone end up getting a way to contact that person again.
• I feel actual joy, elation, and happiness again. Before, I think about the best I could hope for was contentment. As my confidence dwindled, and the isolation grew, I became Eeore, being melancholy again all of the time. Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely balanced by an ability to feel depression and heartache much more deeply, as well. It’s truly a double-edged sword deal; the magnitude of the highs are balanced by the lows. I can feel a bad day’s anxiety, loneliness, and depression like a hatchet wound to the chest. Yet after a day like yesterday, when I’ve reconnected with former old friends and even some family, I find that there may yet be something in this world to live for.

I had qualities that I took pride in before. I had confidence before. I had a personality that was strikingly individual before. I guess I was somewhat edgy, had a sarcastic and cutting wit, and even drew people to me at times. I’ve had people tell me that I could light up a room, on occasion. I didn’t even know this any more. My memories were like looking back on a movie reel, with my character played by somebody I couldn’t comprehend, let alone identify with. All of the interesting and unique facets of my personality, which I’d always relied on to help me find my social support, were filed off, leaving a dull automaton in the wake.

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So, for quite awhile, I found myself incapable of dealing with just about anything, as I reacquainted myself with my capabilities, and how to ride the emotional tides that I’d forgotten. I guess I just needed some time to get my sea legs back, in that sense. I’m sorry that I was incapable of keeping up with the schedule that I’d set, as far as updating this blog, and the others that have barely even been started. For a long time I was so horrified that I had started this journey in the public eye that I didn’t know if I could even continue. I mean I was so close to suicidal, when the emotional instability was peaking, after the Abilify was out of my system, that I started fearing that I might get a friendly official visit, due to having my son, while I was going through this. Anybody that knows me understands that no matter how bad things are, I would never resort to such an alternative, with my sole charge being to bring this man into the world in the best way that I can, and to ensure his capability to lead a fulfilling life on his own when it is time. While there may be friends or family reading this, it is a public blog, and the amount of strangers who’ve never met me, and don’t yet have a clue who I am, are likely to overrun those who know me personally.

I now find myself starting to make concrete steps towards the goal that I’ve set for reshaping myself in the form that I am pushing for in this blog. I’ve been running consistently now for over a week, which is usually enough to cement me into the habit. I’ve been lifting, as well, which is always a harder habit to maintain for me. My son has been coming with on these ventures, and I believe that he is as committed as I to making sure that these new patterns hold.

I’ll be straight: the state in which I now find myself, physically, horrifies me. Age is becoming a noticeable factor. I do not bounce back to my previous level of fitness as quickly, or as easily, as I have before. My son was tugging at what used to be my triceps about a week ago here, and I felt him pinch at the ‘bulk’ (if you could call it such) that was there, and his fingers met with a nauseating lack of resistance. I mentioned to him that I thought I’d lost more muscle tone than I ever had in the past, and that there was nothing there any more, and he simply said ‘yeah, you’re right’. Ah, the honesty and openness of a child. I’ve never felt my meat simply hanging from my bones like wet crepe paper before, there’s always been more consistency to it. I’ve had habits for the last 6-9 months that’ve eaten it away, as well as simple atrophy, as well. I’m noticing improvements in my run, though, so there’s some proof that I’m at least on the right track. If my heart and legs can still improve, so can the rest of me. I’ve successfully been staying away from the destructive habits that were so able to synthetically calm and soothe me, when I had nothing else to distract from the omnipresent failure, and I’m going to meetings to make sure that that continues.

I am optimistic for the future. I felt that way for a bit, when I first came off of the Abilify, then it disappeared into a tumultuous sea of chaos for awhile, but I’ve been able to pull myself back up on shore, and have a much tighter hold on it now. I’ve not been recording my workout stats for the blog here just yet, but that’s going to start posthaste. I don’t doubt that there will be dark days in the future, especially during the weekdays, when there is nobody for me to share with from my slowly rekindling relationships of old. Yet I have confidence that I will continue on this path. I have meetings where I can share what I need to during the week, even if my small group of IRL friends is unavailable. This area seriously lacks venues to meet people (apart from standard watering holes everywhere), and distractions from the everyday grind, but I can handle it. It also lacks people that I connect with easily; I have strikingly different values and ideals from the average Joe around here. Yet I’ve always been able to find the outliers in this area, it just takes a little time and digging. I’ll do it again. This is not the best area for me to be me in, it never has been; the coasts have always been far easier places for me to find people that I identify with. I’m not stuck here forever, though, and I will survive– maybe even thrive.

Positive note for the day: I asked my son the other day if he noticed any difference, now that I was off of the meds and stable. He remarked that I seemed more ‘vibrant’. Totally bonus! A few minutes after that, he spontaneously offered that I reminded him of Keanu Reeves, because of how calm & cool I always was. I can handle that. 🙂

More coming soon…

Undulled

I didn’t think that things would hit as hard as they did, when they did. I didn’t want to write anything about this shit in this ‘reboot’ of my blog, at least not right away, but I guess I might as well. I’m going to lose who I’m going to lose anyway. Judge as you will.

The Lexapro/escitalopram, Lamictal/lamotrigine, and Abilify/aripiprazole are medications used to help me find a little more inner peace (at the expense of some self-respect, it appears), considering that I am diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder (though that is currently under re-evaluation as a potential misdiagnosis), and anxiety disorder. The trifecta was helping things, but not enough to do the one thing that really matters in this world; you can’t matter to anyone in this world, or be worth shit, if you can’t hold a job. Well, guess what I’ve never been able to do, barring once, at 43 years old? Something dealing with the cPTSD that I experienced as a child sets me up for failure, every time, when I’m in a job setting, unless I’m completely occupied using my left brain the entire time. Or maybe it was the fact that the one time I’d landed a software developer job I was working remote, and not having to worry about the traditional job setting. I don’t know. Nobody does, and that’s half of the problem. All I know is that anywhere from hours to a few months down the line from starting, depending on the type of work and the amount of work that I put in, a panic attack starts that doesn’t stop. At all. Not for anything; it’s paralyzing. The only things I have the choice to do are sob, scream, rage, or leave the setting. So I choose to leave the setting when that happens. I’ve tried pushing through and tried different coping techniques. Nothing helps. Nothing has alleviated this.

I didn’t really notice much of a difference when I went off of the escitalopram or lamotrigine. Lamotrigine, I suspect, was completely unnecessary as the bipolar disorder was a misdiagnosis caused by my mood changes when I was using on a regular basis. The escitalopram? Who knows. I guess my depression isn’t related to the neurotransmitter that that one regulates (serotonin), or else the depression itself is a byproduct of some other underlying/root issue. I just hope it’s not the one that so many writers have written about, where the ability to see more, and clearly, reveals nothing but more reason for sorrow.

The aripiprazole, being a higher caliber of psych med, obviously was doing something. Because as soon as it was out of my system, and I had a little bit of time, I couldn’t help but think back over the last few years that I’ve spent in this apartment. Specifically, the friends that I’ve made, the ones that I’m able to see on a regular basis. They’ve all been using me, and I’ve been more than happy to deal with it, in exchange for the comfort of having another human being around that is even (quite obviously) just acting like they care. This has wrecked me. Of course it had to come at the same time as I was starting to rekindle a relationship with someone… I realized that even though she had 4 years clean and seemed like she’d taken time to work on herself, I could never explain to my son the things that she had done in front of him without losing respect in his eyes. So I cut her off, the only person that I’d been around for some time who was there to listen and to give a shit, and to even come and spend time with me when she could, that wasn’t out to get anything from me. The loneliness is, again, no stranger, as Bukowski would say.

All of this shit piled in on the day that I was to bootstrap this program, but I could barely get out of bed, or stop leaking at the eyes. So it had to be delayed a few days. I had to find the will to keep breathing before I moved on to anything that made it even harder to breathe. I wish I could describe the better to people who haven’t experienced it. It’s like every injustice in the world; be it in the past, present, or future, cuts deeply and never heals. It doesn’t take long before every little thought of a baby bird blown out of its nest a little bit too early, starving, or at the mercy of predators, parents witnessing helplessly from above, suffering the world’s justice, covers you in cuts to the bone.

It’s impossible to move or take action, when your tendons are severed, and your skin has become a roadmap of unflexing scabs and scar tissue, only breaking open when they are pressed or stretched too far. Yesterday was bad.

Update Postponed

As if you hadn’t already noticed…

Tomorrow, I think maybe detailing some of the other struggles, which came into play hard over the last 48 hours, will be due.

I really didn’t expect all of this to derail me so unexpectedly, but the unexpected happens for all of us. So, I guess I might detail overcoming these setbacks, as well.

Medication Changes

The medication change that I alluded to in the previous entry was not the only one that I’ve recently gone through. Over the past month, I’ve discontinued the cocktail of three psychiatric meds that I was on, due to their ineffectiveness in the areas where I am struggling. With the nearly 0 score on the benefit scale, I was simply no longer willing to put this crap in my body, especially when you start thinking about the cumulative effects of having these in your body as the years roll by. And hell, the strongest medication I was on made me so oblivious to some people treating me poorly that it was diminishing my quality of life.

Oh, please note that at the left side of the graph, it appears that these medications are just being started, as the plasma concentration registers at 0. Such is not the case. I’ve been on these meds steadily for years and had quite a stable plasma concentration as the require for proper functioning. The app that I wrote has a bug where it starts the plasma concentration level at 0 at the beginning of each graph, so that’s just something I need to fix in the application itself.

Lamictal

Lamictal is the first of the meds that was thrown at me, when I finally began seeking comprehensive treatment for everything that I could. It’s used to treat bipolar disorder, which I’ve been diagnosed with for many years now. Interestingly enough, as the time has gone by, both my doctors and myself have started to doubt this diagnosis more and more, as it only seems to be external chemical factors that cause my bipolar symptoms. Since I’ve started taking care of myself and living healthy, I’ve had no symptoms that resemble bipolar disorder for a very long time.

As I came off of the lamictal with the taper, I noticed absolutely no change in my mental state, or ability to handle things, other than being able to feel a wider range of emotion, and being able to think & calculate more rapidly.

Lexapro

Just like every other antidepressant that I’ve been on (barring Wellbutrin, and its stimulant effects, which makes sense as it works on different neurotransmitters), I didn’t feel a damn thing from Lexapro except for discomfort going onto it and coming off of it.

Other than that bit of withdrawal, nothing seemed to change at all after I was off of this. Antidepressants don’t seem to change much for me.

Abilify

Now this one is a little different. After going on this med somewhere between 2010 & 2011, I was, for the first time in a very long stretch of years, able to commit to a daily routine without emotional upsets totally derailing me. I credit this med with being able to get me through college for first time, though it did slow my thinking, and dull my ability to visualize datasets, like when I was working on calculus and the like.

I thought this drug was integral to my stability for a long time. It definitely led me to a point where things did not bother me as deeply. I decided to go off of it, though, because it still wasn’t good enough to help me keep stable, gainful employment, and the antipsych medication group interacts poorly with a newer type of therapy that I’ve been wanting to try with much better results often reported. Not to mention the longer term consequences of being on this for awhile.

When I was coming off of it for the first time in years, I had a very disturbing realization, though. A huge portion of the reason my stability had gone up was because I had stopped reacting badly to people taking advantage of me. I’m a pretty laid-back and trusting guy, and if I’m not on guard, people take advantage of that a lot. It’s one of the things that used to seriously disrupt me, when I’d find out that someone I thought was loyal was just using me. Well I’ve gotten to the point now where I think I can effectively establish proper boundaries with people, but only if I’m able to notice this in the first place. Plus the long-term bad health effects of this drug and the cognitive diminution/slowing… Ugh. I’m never going back on this one unless there is absolutely no other alternative for me than starving to death on the street. Too many people walked all over me on this shit and I should have been pissed about it.

So I’m starting with a clean slate, at this point. Even the abilify, with the magnitudes longer half-life than the other two psych meds, has cleared my blood plasma completely at this point. This leaves me ready to try the therapy that I have had such high hopes for for years, now. I’m afraid this is another classified subject, up until I’m ready to start spilling more details, but I should be able to begin the new therapy in somewhere under two weeks here. By then you’ll know, and be able to see the notes and results on the kind of therapy that I’m trying out.

Another Short Holdup

Yes, I had planned to have my first video out by now. I may still be able to get one out today, but that has yet to be determined.

I don’t think that I’ve mentioned it much publicly yet, but I’ve been in the middle of a major medication change for a couple of months now. Communication with some medical professionals was not evidently concise enough, however, and as a result one of these medications that needs to be replaced with another is still much more concentrated in my blood plasma than is healthy for someone planning on doing heavy cardio & resistance training. Thank god I wrote an app to track those kinds of stats, along with their half-life drop-off times. I’ll have to explain more how that’s helped me later on, as I open up a bit more to some of the particular challenges I’m having to fight as I strive to re-implement these positive habits.

This is my current plasma concentration of the medication blocking some activities.

bad the people don’t own the means of production,To make a long story short, I’ve not been able to get my hands on the replacement medication as soon as I’d thought due to insurance issues. Any time the plasma concentration of this medication is higher than ‘2’ on this graph, I can’t do my physical routines in the morning to start out my day, and I really want to start that way and build from there.

The good news is that I have the misinformation fixed with the insurance, I believe, so I should be getting my hands on the replacement med today. That means I will immediately be able to stop the one graphed above. It has a fairly short metabolic half-life, so while an all out run may not be the best idea tomorrow, I should certainly be able to at least get some resistance training in. By the next day I’ll be fine for cardio.

NOTE: As of just after 5pm here, I have taken the last dosage of that med, and have now switched to the med that will not be holding me back. As soon as the graph drops below 2, it’s on. So we’ll be going with less cardio-intensive resistance training tomorrow (just getting the muscles back used to it), and then there will be cardio the next day.

An Admission

I know that I’m not going to be able to dance around a few subjects forever here. My situation, between the psychological areas of focus, my situational handicaps, and my physical issues, is a bit more complex than I’ve made it out to be yet. I don’t want you to be under the misunderstanding that I’m expecting a bit of meditation, exercise, and a goal-driven day to miraculously cure all of the ills in my life.

I actually have, in the (personal) notes about the goals that I am going to be working towards, written some pretty comprehensive plans and methods for taking on issues that a lot of people never get past. I’m just not willing to let the personal issues that they indicate the existence of be public right now. After I’ve proven to myself that I’m able to stick to this project on a daily basis, then the details from the notes on some of the other, underlying factors will come to light. This vlog/blog is not just to be about improving one aspect of a person’s existence; it’s really a constantly evolving set of steps to enable a person to evaluate their own character/person, identify areas where growth or change is desired or necessary, and to implement plans to handle this. The plans of action will be documented, in order to show what measurable changes they have caused after implementation. Plans that don’t seem to be working well enough will be modified.

I’m excited to be on this project, and I really hope that it pans out for the long term. I hope you’ll be patient with me as the more sensitive details of my situation gradually emerge.

An early exercise in keeping healthy boundaries

I haven’t even gotten the first video made in this self-improvement program yet, and already I’ve had to take a step that fits firmly into the category of self-improvement. That is, by establishing healthy boundaries and not accepting treatment that is less than what one deserves. I’d almost forgotten to write this category down when I was making the list of different key areas that this program is to work with in a person’s life. I’m glad I remembered it. It should be, perhaps, a bit more major of a focus for me than I’d originally given it credit for. I’m getting better with identifying people out to use me for emotional, monetary, or whatever other reasons, but it still takes me a bit longer than it should. Anyway, without further ado, here are the facts (with identifying details removed) behind my exercise in standing up for proper treatment by others today:

I cannot help but think how appropriate it is that I stumble across this meme right now. I just finished off severing ties with the person that I’d spent the most time hanging out with, since the end of that disastrous relationship prior. My best friend, I thought, for the interim here, when I’d expected only the shock of getting used to cold isolation again.

It became evident, quite awhile ago, that this person was taking out a lot more from the friendship than they were putting into it. Honestly, I didn’t mind too terribly much; I thought that this person was struggling with some things that caused an incredibly tight situation for cash, so I just kept doing what I could, knowing that efforts were being made to pay me back.

Well, I did get a payback here and there, but other things started happening in the meantime that I had to take note of, as well. Despite plans being made with me on a day, for instance, this person would ditch me for shitty, inconsiderate, seedy individuals that only took what they wanted… It happened on a few occasions. Started pulling back a little bit with that, when I realized that all the abusive, manipulative, and violent pieces of shit were people that were higher on the friends list than I was.

This person’s friends had ditched due to the personal problems being endured for a long time. During that time I was the best friend, confidant, and invited over all the time. Soon as they came back into the picture, I didn’t hear anything for sometimes over a week. Unless a favor was needed.

So I was getting ready to sever the connection, just as soon as I got paid back a portion of the money that I’d loaned. Figured I might as well mitigate the financial losses of trying to help so much by whatever small amount I could. Even as I was getting ready to do that, though, a good & loyal friend of mine that I’ve known since childhood divulged that this person had been talking smack about me behind my back. Even after everything that I did, and even after doing everything to keep me around as much as possible when nobody else was there.

So today, once again, another lesson in letting people go their own way. It’s not necessary to come to a mutual understanding or agreement about fault, what happened, or anything like that. Some people just don’t live up to the standard of human decency with which I expect to be treated. Thus I’m practicing something that’s always been a little tough for me, with my twisted childhood; a little bit of self-love, standing up for being treated as I should, and maintaining my healthy boundaries. It’s getting a little quicker that I catch on every time, but there’s still room for more improvement.

The self-improvement vlog

Even before my last relationship went south, I started losing momentum on a lot of the beneficial and cornerstone habits that I rely upon to keep me centered and focused on responsibilities and priorities. I know that she demanded an unhealthy amount of attention from me, but the truth is that I have a tendency to lose track of my own positive routines, due to focusing too much on my partner, in just about every relationship. I’m pretty glad to be aware of that now; at least I’ve been able to spend some time focusing on stressing how vital dealing with this is for my success.

By the end of the relationship, when she got really vicious and hurtful, I’d lost track of every single positive habit that I normally do to make certain that I’m ready for whatever comes my way. Meditation and running were the two fundamental cornerstones that I used to start my day; between the two of them, they keep me in a positive mindset regardless of what life throws at me, usually. I’ve also picked up plenty of bad habits that are actively destructive to several aspects of my life that I hold as very important to me. I’m not going to go into detail on what those are precisely just yet, but the details will come as the road unfolds here.

So now I find myself in a situation where I have ongoing destructive habits that are actively at odds with my ability to re-establish focus on the positive cornerstones to my life. I’ve made it out of a rut this deep before, but I had the benefit of relative isolation at the time, leaving me nothing but time to focus on myself. Plus the destructive habits weren’t quite as prominent on that occasion. I know that it was still really hard, because I’ve got hundreds of journal pages about getting out of that rut, but I think this particular rut might be a little bit tougher to successfully pull out of. I’ve started to break out about five, maybe a half a dozen times, since setting my mind to this goal, but things keep setting me back, and then I fall into the old familiar destructive habits when I am prevented from making forward motion. Much like how I caught either severe pneumonia or covid about 5 weeks ago, which is still making it very difficult for me to breathe without coughing uncontrollably.

Given all of these things, I started thinking of what other kinds of implemented structure might assist me in sticking to my regimen better, at least for those first couple of weeks, while the patterns are becoming regular habit again. All of a sudden I thought about some of the fitness Instagram blogs that I follow for inspiration… I’ve always thought of doing one of those, but have always been afraid of petering out and failing in the public eye. Well upon second thought, I think that maybe the public eye part of things could be a serious asset for me; an additional motivator, helping me hold myself accountable to my goals set in the public eye, with daily practice and periodic progress documentation being recorded. Not only could it be something to help me maintain focus on my goals throughout the day, but if other people ever get interested in it, maybe it could be a positive influence for others, as well. Honestly, though, that factor is pretty irrelevant. I think that the program structure that I’m thinking of will help me maintain a fixed focus on my program, and that could be just the bit of extra boost that I need to push into the zone where the positive habits and structure become self-reinforcing.

It’s important that I get these things established soon, because I have college coming up again this summer semester, if all goes according to plans. So there’s really no time to lose. So let me get down to some of the details of my program here…

I’m starting this program with the goals of first, getting back into excellent physical shape; I may not be able to run long distances right away, but I can do some, and walk the rest. I should be talking to a physician about that soon. This will be alternating on days with weight lifting. I intend to complete these activities with my son, because he has the same goals, but has problems putting in the effort to get where he wants to be. So this part will be a joint venture.

Second, meditation has proven to be a cornerstone keeping peace, even in stressful situations that used to really trigger me. Since I have practiced mindfulness meditation for several years fairly regularly, I have become utterly convinced that it is absolutely vital for me, in order to be able to handle the stresses of many facets of life. It is, perhaps, barring exercise, the most effective tool I’ve found against my constant anxiety, self-doubt, and depression, which was all instilled by the c-PTSD throughout my childhood. Every morning will start with this. I might as well throw in here that a 3rd focus of this program will be to obtain regular therapy for my issues of this sort, and to stick with it no matter what may arise while I’m going to school.

There are going to be several other areas that this program will branch into, in an effort to bootstrap better habits and time management into my life, but I’m going to draw this entry to a close for now. It doesn’t have to be conclusive, it just has to be posted, so that I’ve got something to hold myself to, now. I will detail things more and be adding an information page soon. Stay tuned!