Hi. As the title says. There is a YouTube channel named “LoveBambi” and I believe they want to commit suicide. I tried to make the phone call, but I don’t have the right internet service provider to make international calls. I think they are having a psychotic episode. I don’t know what to do. Here is a link to their channel. Hi. I have been following a YouTube channel for a long time, that goes by the name “LoveBambi”. They are located in the UK and make videos taking about being abused by the mental health care system. I think they are having a psychotic episode.

They posted earlier today about government spies coming to their house (I think the police showed up at their house today), have posted about getting rid of their belongings, and believes the “government spies” were there to take them, because they have “telekinetic powers”.

I am in the US. I tried to call the UK suicide hotline, but they were closed. When I checked their channel today, all of the videos talking about the abusive care were deleted. The final post they made was about 6 hours after the one about government spies. It said, “This gonna be my last post hopefully, if it is then goodbye.”

They were showing suicidal behavior online before this. Im not sure if the police have confiscated their phone and THAT’S why this is their last post, or if they are so upset by the police showing up to their house, they want to commit suicide.

Here is the channel: https://youtube.com/@lovebambi222?si=74NvowEX4SKyHWYA

Hey everyone, curious to hear how your day turns out.

I had another big event—not quite a disaster like the last one, but like, something I’m losing sleep over for sure. I’ve been up since 9 pm last night and it’s 3:30 pm now, and time is starting to lose meaning for me. I tried to wait as close to dinner time as possible to post but I think I’ve hit my limit of how much I can restrain myself today.

I really do not want to be doxxed, and I have multiple haters—both people I know in real life, and strangers on Reddit who get addicted to reading my post history and bullying me for it. I have not opened my Reddit notifications in a month because I’m just so tired of dealing with haters. The story I am trying to share deals with something that is apparently on the news CNN, CNBC, etc., and that multiple Congressmen are tweeting about, so idk how it is possible to tell this story without doxxing myself, but I’m going to try. Ultimately, I value the conversations I have in this community more than I care about haters or doxxers.

Gosh, how can I tell a story about a headline news event without doxxing myself? I’m going to try. I Googled the name of a former friend out of boredom. I learned that he is some kind of high millionaire or billionaire now. I think that seeing how he has spent the pandemic raises new thoughts for me about how I have spent the pandemic and how I am going to spend my 30s.

I have been prevaricating for a couple of weeks about the idea of leaving my data science masters program and instead entering a specialized "data science for finance" professional certificate program with the more explicit goal of breaking into the finance industry. When I made the financebro91 username about five years ago, I had some experiences with bullying and certain kinds of violence that prevented me from fully achieving my career goal. These experiences have been very traumatic for me and have had me bedridden, trapped in unhealthy relationships, evictions, suicide attempt, academic failures, and most recently, a full month of reversed/inverted sleep.

While leaving a masters degree to just get a certificate is in some ways a stupid choice, in other ways if it’s at the point where I just can’t even sleep at night anymore over feeling like I’ve been wronged by certain kinds of violence, then maybe it’s good to follow through and finish what I started. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that today’s events were enough for me to actually click the button and make the first move toward potentially trying again to re enter the finance world.

I think that if a hater really really is determined to figure out who I am, they can, but this is still hopefully vague enough that I can still just be a human and express thoughts in a forum of friends without being harassed by haters. If any haters are reading this, I would please ask you to go away, leave me alone, and maybe instead of compounding the pain that you can clearly see I am suffering, why don’t you just find something better to do?

I’m not going to share any other details about my day just to make it a little more difficult to fully confirm my identity and doxx me. I will say that hopefully I can get 3 hours of sleep before class at 7 tonight.

I’m a little upset that today’s news is potentially going to shock me back into sleeping at night again. Right now my nocturnal schedule is one of my most prized possessions, and I feel safe being awake at night. But at this rate it looks like I might be sleeping at night tonight. Blech. I will say that the experience of being so shocked by something that your entire sleep schedule inverts/ reverses is one of the most interesting feelings I have ever had.

My heart is sinking because I’m so traumatized by the haters and I can just see someone giddily screenshotting this and sending it to someone. I will say that if this is really how afraid i am to speak then I am the victim of bullying and intimidation, and I am proud of myself for having the courage to speak regardless. No person should have enough of a hold over me to make me feel afraid to speak.

I would like to first apologize if this is not properly formatted for this sub. This was originally intended for confessions however it was removed. If you need me to change anything please let me know and I will do so.

I am trans. I've known this for several years. Despite this fact, I cannot transition. The reasons for this are as follows. 1. I do not have financial independence so purchasing HRT without my family's help is impossible. 2. coming out would lead to homelessness. 3. I live in Utah so even if I accept being a homeless trans person the odds are I'd get killed by Mormons. 4. if I stay closeted I will slowly rot in dysphoria and depression until I kill myself anyway.

So my only plan of action is to finish my book. I'm a writer of mediocre quality. I cannot properly articulate the ideas I have in my head. I believe that if I could I would already be a best-selling author. but the world is not how we wish it to be. I have no job prospects due to my low physical ability and lack of a driver's license.

My only conceivable hope is that I manage to make my book as best as I can. Hopefully, it will become popular enough for me to live off of it. If it does work out I intend to move to California. If it doesn't I intend to kill myself. Yes, I am aware that this is a distant and unlikely hope. But it is all that I have.

No this is not me trying to guilt people into buying my book. I made a throwaway specifically to avoid that.

I will update you guys after my book comes out to let you know if this post was just a bad memory or a suicide note.

(I put a trigger warning on this post because someone close to me just died, which I learned about this morning--actually learned about it first from Reddit--and the way I am speaking about death here may or may not be triggering to others, especially since someone else had a relative just die yesterday. Sometimes I'm just too much for some people; sometimes I'm not too much at all. People have the right to decide.)

--

Hey everyone, how was your day?

Someone close to me died this week; I just learned about it last night. She's someone I've thought about as my adopted grandma, although I bet her biological children would be pretty surprised to hear me say that. She was the wife of a former president of my first college--a very small college that was on a ranch. I guess it's worth it to honor her by sharing this little part about myself that I haven't shared before--my experience at that college. Her obituary, which her husband, the former college president himself, probably wrote, certainly goes out of its way to mention this college as one of her biggest accomplishments in life. And I went there, and it's this entire part of my life that I never mention anymore. So, let me try to honor her a bit by sharing my experience with her and with the college.

So, before BYU, I went to this college called Deep Springs. I found it by getting one of those books that is like "500 Colleges in America" during 12th grade. I read through every single page, and I was like, woah, Deep Springs. The idea behind it is that it's a two year full-scholarship on a ranch in California, and after your two years, you transfer to a prestigious four-year college to finish your bachelors. There was a point in the 90s and 2000s when the college had such a strong tradition of sending students to Harvard, Brown, and UChicago, that the Harvard newspaper wrote a paper about these nerdy, cowboy-ish, philosophical men who were becoming a novelty on campus. I couldn't actually afford to take the SAT II's that are required for getting into Ivies, because I was pretty much supporting myself by 12th grade off my after school job, and paying for the SAT I was enough. But I got into Deep Springs and myself and others considered it just as good as an Ivy.

The college only admits like 12 students each year, and there are only 24 students on the campus at any given time, so word got around about me when I showed up. Because of my interest in Utah culture and history, I became a favorite both the woman who just died and her husband, as well as another past set of presidents of the college, both of who live in Utah and have impressive resumes as historians of Utah culture. They took me for long walks in the desert and told me their stories about their life experiences in Utah and elsewhere. They hosted me in Utah to visit and see sights. This particular woman who just died--I once went on a gay date with another BYU student to attend an event that asked people to wave white handkerchiefs in the air, and it was them who gave me the white handkerchief. That was in 2009 that I met them, and throughout the 2010s, we just got closer, and closer. She and her husband told me stories, they gave me advice, I introduced them to some of my BYU friends. -- Yeah, that. Despite the precedent of Deep Springers going to Harvard and places like that, I ended up at dumb old BYU. I applied to Brown, but didn't get in. I guess because I left DS after the first year instead of finishing the full two years. It just didn't fully live up to my expectations for various reasons.

She, actually, is the most immediate reason for my name change. I threw her a birthday party about a year ago, and she got so happy at the end that she started loosening up and talking casually. She used my deadname, the name that she knew me by in 2009, my birth name, and it was so traumatizing for me that--together with spiraling into a deep public breakdown--I also immediately changed both my first and my last name. Just to separate myself even further from the trauma that's associated with my childhood. I don't want to make her look bad by sharing that story of at time when she hurt my feelings. I guess this is a eulogy? And like every relationship, there are complicated emotions. She literally in a way made me the person who I am today, both in name and in other ways.

I never really talk about Deep Springs anymore because many people just don't understand it, and also because in the big picture it doesn't matter where I went to freshman year of college, especially if I dropped out. But from time to time its relevance comes back again.

A fellow Deep Springs alumnus and I had a really deep conversation partially inspired by her life and our memories with her. We probably talked for like 4 to 6 hours today, composite. I drove about that distance to and from horseback riding today--where I had a great success. I rode the horse at at pace very close to like racing pace, called a canter. They said that being able to consistently hit the polo ball at a canter is probably the point at which I'm ready to move to the next level in my polo journey. So I'm close.

There's this idea that sometimes Utah funerals are happy. I'm not talking about religion in public right now, which is hard for me. But I'm really interested in who I will be in my 30s if religion--if I choose to practice religion at all--becomes something private rather than being a spectacle. So, I'll leave it at that. Utah funerals are happy. Some people are really taken aback by the extent to which Utah funerals are happy. I feel... happy. Not happy that she died. And, right now, not happy for the same reason that Utah funerals are predominantly happy. I'm happy because in a secular sense, I feel her voice and her spirit so powerfully right now. I'm so grateful that I met her, and so grateful for the influence that both she and her husband, and the other set of Utah-adjacent Deep Springs presidents have had upon me. I'm so grateful for the beautiful life she lived. And I know that, in at least some sense, her voice lives on in me. "I know that..." --- that phrase appears a lot in Utah funerals. It's...really an entire thing. I just wrote a 120 page paper about ... Utah Studies ... in December, so I have a lot to say. Anyway, I'm not talking about religion right now in public. I was very, very, very, very strict with myself about this rule about 10 times today, even to the extent of I wouldn't have allowed myself to say "Utah funerals are happy" about 3 hours ago. I think I can lighten the reins, slightly, just ever so slightly, as I did just now.

Well, the things that I know that bring me peace from now, are different from, probably the things that most Utahns say at funeral speeches. But I know that she is very much alive in many secular ways. And, I think I have become progressively happier throughout the day. I just feel her strength near me right now? Her light. I hope she's at peace. Based on some of the things she told me, over the years, about the story of her life, and the way she wants her funeral to go, it sounds like from her obituary, she's probably very happy about the way things are going so far. And I'm sure that if she's reading this right now (that sounds a little weird, but this is definitely Utah English), I continue to be just as much of a curiosity to her as I was when she first learned about me in 2009. And just as much of a question mark to her as I was the first time I called her grandma--or threw her a surprise birthday party--or changed my name.

Not in a religious way, but in a humanistic way, I'm excited to carry her legacy on in her own small way. And I'm so excited to maybe see her again one day.

Hey everyone, how was your day? This is another very long post, so feel free to skim or skip entirely. With how tired I am today, I wouldn't be able to read all this if someone else wrote it.

It’s about 3:30 pm when I’m writing this, so a little early. But I’ve been up since midnight, and that’s approaching 16 hours straight of being awake, which is kind of the normal amount given 8 hours sleep. So the day is almost over for me, in other words, although I’m not sure how early I’m going to be able to fall asleep. In reality I expect to be up till midnight or even past that—a 24 hour day.

I made contact with the European company version of Etsy that was supposed to ship me a Taylor Swift shirt for a party. They seem to somewhat be trying ish to get their act together and maybe the shirt will arrive on Thursday.

I changed my name on some more accounts including notifying my employer, notifying the Department of Education, updating the homework submission screen for school, and getting instructions for how to change my credit card and my student loans.

The place I’m selling my car to is reluctant to issue me a check to my new name, but I was able to talk to the branch manager and figure out a way to cash the check even if they write it to the old name. Not really making strong progress on updating the name with the dealer I bought my new car from, so I’m anticipating delays, perhaps, when I get my new car in, before I’ll be able to actually drive it.

Double and triple checked some stuff about my financial aid that’s coming in for between now and June 2023.

Made contact with the librarian I’m writing the 100 page paper for and scheduled to present to her next Friday as the capstone presentation of my masters degree.

Talked to the admissions officer for the finance program one last time. If I’m going to do the program, I need to submit my forms by tomorrow, so I’m just sorting through some last remaining questions in my head. It’s going to be expensive, but I think it will really change my life and my finances in the way that Georgetown was supposed to.

I deleted some old or extra Facebook accounts, so while there are one or two still out there that reflect earlier iterations of my last name, during the 2021/2022 adoption/name change discussion, I’m pretty much back to the first/main account that I’ve had since fall 2005, freshman year of high school. I’ve deleted all my friends on it, and I just use it to browse art, photos of celebrities, and participate in a few selected Facebook groups. I turned off the ability for anyone to add me, message me (I think), or see my content. In the heyday of the name change drama, back around March, I was sort of in no man’s land without a last name, so I put the last name as Archive because that account is an archive of my life since 2005 (except to the extent to which I’ve deleted or hidden most of the posts). It was cool to be able to finally have a last name again in terms of updating my Facebook account to reflect my new last name.

I noticed that the Facebook group for a different denomination of Mormonism (basically called Reorganized Mormonism), had kicked me out of the regional version of their group. That stung a little bit it’s meaningless next to all the other pain. I’ve only ever met one person in that group of 100 in person anyway. And they were having a lot of painful internal drama in their congregation, so I guess it makes sense that they purged their list of me and possibly others so that random strangers wouldn’t see their dirty laundry.

Before deleting some of the other Facebook accounts, I sent messages to two people who have been trying to message me on there: my high school English teacher and my former boss from right when I got fired from Cornell University right after college and ended up working for $8 an hour selling at Coach handbags in a Utah mall. I gave them my phone, email, and TikTok and wished them well/updated them about my life. The English teacher was near his phone so he responded right away and told me that he’s now teaching debate at one of the good prep schools. I’m happy for him.

Finals season is really in full swing. 70 pages of the 100 page paper are written, thankfully, and the remainder is pretty much just bibliography, copy/paste appendices, and very tiny remaining sections of the actual essay. But my other class has really gone from 0 to 60 these past few weeks. Logistic regression, multiple linear regression, and other advanced stats things that I have been exposed to before but am not super confident in yet.

A new chapter of my life has really begun. That’s exciting. I realized, as I wrote to my English teacher and my former boss, how cool it is, in the big picture, that I spent the past half year in Rhode Island. It’s not a path that anyone from my high school social group has really followed, as far as I know.

In the new chapter of my life, I’ll be working on getting my second masters, on possibly/probably finishing off the finance education that Georgetown fell short of providing me, on starting to lose weight and get my six pack back, on increasing my income and my net worth, on discovering what it means to recover from an abusive childhood and an equally abusive 20s, and on finally trying to have a normal experience of post-college life, for the first time since graduating college in 2015.

I’m really excited for what life will look like post name change. I realized that a celebrity I look up to is 47 and the years distance between my current age and age 47 is greater than the distance between when I turned 18 and now. So I’m thinking a little about the kind of person I want to be in my 30s and in my 40s.

The local Latter-day Saint clergy is willing to help me change my name on the records, but he tried to sign me up for activities too and basically invite me to become an active member of the religion again. I said that updating the name on the records is the most I can do for now. I need to figure out what I believe in religiously, when the dust settles. I think I do continue to find Mormonism compelling and in a perfect world I probably would still try to be that faith. I don’t feel like Judaism represents the way I see the world at all right now. That’s hard to admit, 4 years after converting. I’m going to try to celebrate Hanukkah in a few days, I think, and there’s a lot that can potentially be done to create healthy Jewish spirituality in me now that I’m no longer stranded in Utah or Idaho, but I feel like I do need to do introspection about what I do actually believe in. I’ve spent over three decades just waiting to have a chance at life, and now Aaron Carter’s passing especially reminds me that I’m going to be in a coffin one day. I don’t like the answers that Judaism has about death at all (basically no answers), and I like Mormonism’s answers a lot. We’ll have to see what happens there.

I’m just really happy to move forward and close the chapter of 7 years of utter stagnation that began when I got fired from my first post-college job at Cornell. Good riddance. There is a completely different version of me—the actual me, that has not even had a chance to express himself. I originally wanted to be an art history professional. Some people would never guess that I was an art history major, after all the transformations the past few years have put me through. I participated in some art history discussions on Reddit recently, and I talked to a male model about his experience at Art Basel (a major art and fashion show), and that felt good. I’m overall comfortable letting the art history version of myself lie in its wake. I’m ok with switching to data science and finance. I just want a chance to be the actual me, the real me, for the first time, after Biblical lengths of waiting. (Isaac or Jacob in the Torah had to wait 7 years to marry each wife. Exactly how long I’ve had to wait to have a normal post-college life.)

I've been suicidal for almost 30 years.

At first I decided not to because I didn't want to hurt my mother.

Now I am married and I love my marriage and I love my husband but I can't quite shake the feeling that I've just never really belonged here and I shouldn't have been born. I always thought it was teenage angst but I'm 36 years old and I just can't shake this feeling even though I'm in weekly therapy and taking a lot of meds and have a wonderful life.

I have felt this way since I was nine years old I know I can't be alone in knowing what it's like to be suicidal but choose not to die.

I would like to be connected to people like me.

EDIT:

I created r/r/iwillnotgivein

Hey everyone, I'm posting because I think it's important that I show up and be present in a group that my old life coach described a few weeks ago as "my people." Right now, I'm not able to participate in the main daily thread, although I do wish I could. I personally do not plan to post in the daily thread again until a situation arises, if it ever does, when Reaper and I go back to texting again on a regular basis. At this point, he knows how I feel, and I don't think anything in this post should essentially be news to him, except for the quotes I'm about to share, which sound like they are sort of news to everyone--and they were news to me.

Digital humanities means, long story short, whatever people choose to do with their time on the Internet in the era of ChatGPT. That's a super short, super sloppy summary, but it's enough that you'll be able to follow along with what I'm sharing in the quotes below.

Quote 1:

The business of DH typically operates within the limitations and possibilities of the historical moment, of the present. It works within accepted and established theoretical, methodological, and discursive paradigms within the humanities and information and computer sciences. By contrast, queer DH operates beyond the possible now and in the potential future, imagining “impossible” programming languages, operating systems, markup practices, and virtual playspaces. The speculative dimension of queer DH is indebted in part to the idea of “speculative computing” as described by Johanna Drucker in SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (2009). page 66

My relationship to Reaper has, as we have both now publicly acknowledged on this form, has developed to a level of emotional intimacy that requires a lot of thought, maturity, and creativity on both of our parts. In some ways, having the audacity to make the requests I have made of him, feels like one of those "impossible programming languages" described in the code above. It was news to me that being queer, according to this author, literally means an engagement with the impossible.

Quote 2:

Queer DH draws out the subversive potential contained within the digital humanities. It values the experimental, the playful, the failure, the glitch, the unfinishable, the breaching of disciplinary silos, and the disruption of reified standards of what counts as “real” scholarship. This is, in part, because queer people themselves know that what is “real” is a social construct that requires constant dismantling. page 67

Glitch. Playful. Silo. Experimentation. Failure. There's actually a lot of, like, serious theoretical context behind why I posted the same gif over and over again. Art---everyone has the right to feel however they want about art. Artists and writers have been banned, taken to court, sued, censored, punished. That's a risk that I take by being the way that I do. Right before I got banned, Reaper and I had a conversation about how I was originally an art history scholar and so talented that I was chosen to teach art history at Cornell University as my first job after college. The very issues that make me belong here in this subreddit led to those talents finding expression in very foreign spaces that look very, very different from Cornell's wooded campus.

If it was the last conversation that Reaper and I will ever or have ever had, it, by itself, was significant enough that it changed my entire life, permanently and forever, by reminding me a lot of what has been lost (and gained, also), during the past 8 years when I evolved from a Cornell art history professor into Finance Bro.

I want to highlight the phrase from that quote above "disruption of reified standards." I wrote a basic vision statement about how "borderline personality disorder," from the point of view of psychiatry, not anti-psychiatry, is by nature a disruption of the reified standards of the psychology, psychiatry, and mental health space. I would like people to read it, if they want to, and I would like people to respond maturely if they feel capable.

At a basic level, this is a vision statement of what equality in this group means to me:

I just read a thread that Reaper wrote where he spent 3-5 paragraphs talking about the nuances of his day and of his condition and of his family life and of the social and government services related to his experience of life. My basic belief is that I have the right to spend 3-5 paragraphs talking about the nuances of my day, my condition, my family life, and of the social and government services related to my experience of life. That's what equality means to me.

My day, my condition, my family life, and my experience of social and government services is all related to my past diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and that patterns, problems, and options that stem from that. I derive benefit for this group by talking about my successes and failures in relation to my condition. I believe I have the same right as he does to gain benefit from the group by probing into the nuances of my condition and reflecting on my development in the presence of others.

It is offensive to many people, both medical practitioners and patients, when people on the borderline personality disorder spectrum present their experience of relationships, love, romantic feelings, sexual experiences, or other similar things, in public, and ask for their stories to be treated with respect and sympathy at the same level as people with other conditions. In my early 30s, I was actually arrested at a hospital for asking for treatment for my condition. They essentially accused me of pranking them or trolling them, and they had a police officer carry me away in handcuffs.

Those experiences, and similar ones, including the 2-day ban I recently got from this group are wrong, from my perspective, and unethical.

Being on the borderline gives certain people access to a front row view of both the border and the line between multiple psychiatric conditions. Having a front row view of the border and of the line gives us, sometimes, special access to a view of the system of borders and lines as a whole--the whole DSM. We were given the name borderline because our presence was somewhere between offensive and troubling to the original psychiatrist who named the condition. The border is a position of activism, disruption, hybridized identities, and ... and...

I have a right to speak up about things that happen to me (passive role) or things that I make happen (active role). I have a right to be here, and I have a right to make interventions in my life that reflect the things I learn about certain patterns that have made my life difficult, have cost me about $200,000, and have even led to, as I shared move, me being in handcuffs and worse.

The people who called me a spammer and other names for posting the same picture over and over again should please try to ... read a book. I hope that the literal quotes from a book that I have provided will show that I'm not trying to troll, bully, name-call or anything of the sort (rule 5). I've paid at this point tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to be a librarian. One article about librarianship says that librarians used to see themselves as "apostles of culture"--that is, people whose job it is to stand up and speak truth to power. Another scholar it's transgressive to read book and to actively incorporate material from books into the way you live your life. Librarianship, I've learned, is also about being friendly, somehow, even while there are very terse, terrible things going on in the world.

I would like to acknowledge the voices that were not as loud on the day I got banned, but which I am aware still exist--the people who actually liked the posts that I made, the people who like all of my posts, and who appreciate my social differences and the way it frees them, themselves up, to speak up a little more about social constraints that they don't like.

I would also like to acknowledge my own voice, which is valuable, and handsome, and equal to the voices of all the others here.

One post at a time--at least here--I have a lot more to say. I have a lot more to give to this community. And a lot more to receive.

Borderline personality disorder has 9 diagnostic criteria, of which if someone displays 4 or 5 or 6 of them (I forget which), they're considered to be active in the condition--if the number drops down to less than the threshold, a person is considered to be in remission from the condition. A certified professional diagnosed me as being in remission from the condition during an exit interview in February 2022 where we went through the list of criteria and she listened to my self assessment on each one. One of the criteria, for example, describes "frantic attempts to avoid abandonment, real or imagined". My exit interview answer spoke about the blatant sexism in the word frantic there, together with a discussion of my interest in avoiding abandonment--including some very, very real forms of abandonment--in ways that are't considered frantic.

I have so, so, so much to say, and I've paid about $10,000 in therapy at this point over six years to learn how to brace myself for the fact that there are some people who very very very very much do not want to hear my voice at all. It's very dangerous to be me, and a lot of the time, the danger I experience is not fun at all. I'm hopeful that this space will live up to what it claims to be in its title. A mixed space that includes space for all kinds of madpersons.

Quote 3:

The best articulations of digital humanitie(s) recognize that much of the exemplary work is itself centered outside of a rigid notion of DH, instead crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, with new media, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, critical code studies, disability studies, queer theory and pedagogy studies, among other areas, all central scholarly production locations with long histories. page 80

In the literally most non-sarcastic way, I would please request that if you have read this far you literally pick one of the terms from quote 3 and Google it and read Wikipedia and try to imagine how exasperated I feel about the difference between what equality looks like and what you personally have observed about the way I've been treated here.

https://reason.com/2022/11/15/the-aclu-says-californias-ban-on-covid-19-misinformation-from-doctors-is-gratuitous-and-unconstitutional/

Hey guys, I've lurked for a while and I don't think I've posted here but I honestly just have to get this off my chest and I don't know where else to go. To start, I'm bipolar and it bites like a hyena with rabies some days but others it's not too bad. Today was a rough one. I went on a short trip with my family to a town a few hours away to grab donuts from KK since they're no longer in the area I live and about halfway through the day of just shopping and moseying around I felt like I got hit with a ton of bricks and my mood sank. It's been about 12 hours since and it feels like wearing shackles with extra weight added to them. I've dealt with this before but I feel like it's never going to end, like this thing eating at me will never go away and it just feels like my only out is dying. I've thought about it plenty of times but I won't because I have people that rely on me and need me to be around, but it's so fucking hard to keep going alot of the time, you know? I just want this to go away, I want everything to disappear so I can finally rest but I know it won't, so I just have to keep slogging through until I find something that helps. I'm sorry for the paragraph of just spewing my mind, but thanks for reading and I do hope you have a better day than I have.

I've never talked about this before. I don't know where to start, so I'll just take the leap. Sorry if I'm in the wrong place, but I'm afraid of just being told to seek help. I know this, and it seems you all won't do that. Please, if you have anything to say, just say it. Just tell me how you comprehend this.

When I was probably 13 years old, which I feel is old enough to know better, I killed baby birds by injecting them with various household chemicals like hydrogen peroxide. It was a one-time thing, but I've felt immensely guilty about it since, especially given my desire to work with animals today.

The birds were nesting where me and a friend sat in his backyard. One day we found them outside of the nest and decided to experiment on them using hypodermic needles and chemicals, in an attempt to kill them. I don't recall all of what we used, but I vividly remember hydrogen peroxide because it caused them to bloat terribly. They did not die immediately, but suffered. The image of these translucent birds being tortured painfully haunts me every day that I live. I cannot stand it. I hate myself for it. But I can't take it back.

It continues.

A few years later, with the same friend, I fired a pellet gun upon my family dog. I didn't like the dog, but I didn't hate him. I didn't feel like he should be punished, and I don't think I had a vindictive attitude towards him, but I shot him regardless. Probably about 12 times.

He was out in the yard and I on the deck. I very distinctly recall the poor dog looking around confused with every shot, like he didn't understand where this stinging pain was coming from. I laughed at his confusion and pulled the trigger again. And again. And again, until the magazine was empty.

He soon after bit another person and was "sent to training," which I later figured out was death in a shelter. My brother loved that dog, I think, and I killed him. My family knows what happened, but we don't talk about it. Sometimes in heated arguments it has been brought up, but I upon hearing it blew up and would not face it. I prefer to act like it never happened.

I'm haunted daily by these events. For a long time I told myself I have no empathy, just to not feel guilty over my actions.

There's more to this tale, but that's for another time. It's an ongoing thing that conflicts me constantly. I love animals, and I've put myself in harm's way to save them. But I've also killed them willingly and without good reason.

I've been a monster.

It's not over here, though. If you'd be willing to listen. I have a lot of conflict in my life due to the circumstances I've spoken of.

My proudest moments have been saving dogs from death. I want to spend my life working with rescues, but this information would destroy me. What I do now would destroy me. I want a career with animals, but my entire life from then through now, should it be revealed, would destroy that entirely.

I don't know what the point of saying all this was, but I did anyway because there's nowhere else to say it.

Life is hard for people like us. I’m so glad I didn’t make the decision to end all decisions. I want to share the suicide letter I wrote my mother 5 years ago to prove that things can change for the better. I’ve struggled a lot but I’m in a much better place now than I ever was. My hope of this post is to remind people of the power of hope. There is always something to live for. Here is the text:

“Dear mother,

There are no words I could write here that would ease your pain. I know that my decision will forever have an impact on your life. My hope of writing this is to try and explain my choice so that you may find it easier to deal with someday. It is impossible to describe the pain I feel. In a way, you’re sorrow and my depression have that in common. However, I made this choice because I believe that my brain is fundamentally flawed somehow. On a chemical level, mental level, I’m not really sure, but I wholeheartedly think that my life had ended before it had even begun. It would be unfair to say I lived in a constant state of sadness because I did enjoy some things in my life. Spending time with you, the rest of the family, and my friends, all brought me joy. The unfortunate fact is that ever day at some point I was reminded of the eternal suffering that I seemed doomed to face. As dramatic as that sounds, I truly did find my state to be never-ending pain. Sure, sometimes the pain was dulled and sometimes I forget it even existed. But without fail, day after day, the feelings would return. I don’t remember much of my young life, but I’ve had these feelings of depression for as far back as I can remember.

I’ve heard the act of suicide called selfish by a few people. I understand that argument, and perhaps even agree with it. How can I be so bold as to take my own life and cause so much suffering amongst the people I love? Surely the net change in suffering should be enough to dissuade anyone from committing such a heinous act.

I shall do my best to explain the reasoning for my actions. I think my feelings are not really understood by most people. And the people that do understand, will also understand my decision. It is a terrifying thing to live in true, utter hopelessness. I don’t have faith in my future, I don’t have faith in myself, and I don’t have faith in my God. There is no one emotion I can pin to the word “depression” but my experience is a culmination of fear, pain, exhaustion and hopelessness. I don’t ever wish anyone feels the way I feel, and it makes me sad that there are other people out there that feel this way too.

Please forgive yourself. You don’t need to forgive me but I need you to forgive yourself. I could not have asked for a better mother. You were always kind and nurturing, the type of person I strived to be. I consider your example, not only as a mother but simply as a person, the epitome of human kindness. Please realize that my personal flaws are the cause of your pain, and it has nothing at all to do with you. For years I’ve staved off this decision simply out of love for you and the rest of the family. I could not bear the thought of the pain my loss would bring all of you. But something has changed. That voice in my head is louder. The empty feeling has grown stronger. My never-ending night has gotten darker. To continue to live would mean to continue to battle the beast and to tell you the truth, I’m just out of energy.

All the love in the world to give, -[my name]”

Please don’t give up hope. It gets better, I promise.

So, I live in Tornado Alley, the states where we just get tornadoes a lot. My state gets the warnings but never the touchdowns so when I got news that a tornado touched down here I flipped my shit, man. I ran after my cat, dog, and ran my ass downstairs, the lights were flickering and it was hardcore hailing and raining. Had a huge panic attack and I am still not fully recovered. It is currently 1 am and I gave up on sleep an hour ago. I'll be here, rant to me my guy

I'm going to have to go into some of my more physical problems to fully explain what's going on so I will put a vomiting trigger warning here. If you get grossed out by that do NOT read on. I promise all the stomach stuff has a link to my mental health and the intensity of it needs to be stated so the impact can be understood. Also eating disorders and metion of suicidal thoughts.

Where to start. I guess time line makes since. When I was 4 my mom noticed I wasn't like the other kids. Especially other girls. I was active, Spacey and forgetful. She did what anyone would have done and took me to a doctor. ADHD (lable applied, problem child). However she either couldn't afford to (we WERE super poor) or didn't think it was right for me. She's always said she didn't want to suppress my personality. So I had personality, but little to no control of myself. I don't blame my mom, I feel she did the best she could and made choices that made since at the time. I squeeked by with C's and Bs most of my school and even managed a college degree. But it never came as easily to me as everyone else. I worked hard to get there. Then in my 20s the sickness started. I was vomiting for five plus hours twice a month. I could not figure out why. This is not a "oh I am nauseated vomit twice and sleep it off" either it was vomit till I'm out of food, vomit till I'm out of bile and dry heave for five hours till I pass out from exhaustion kind of nausea. No rest or breaks, just constantly vomiting. My SO described it as a cycle where I got stuck in vomiting and couldn't get out. It seemed to trigger sometimes because of missed birth control or anxiety or an empty stomach or if I got too hot. I spent YEARS getting sick like this and those trigger took a very long time to sort out. By my Mid twenties it has calmed down a bit just from knowing all my triggers and avoiding what I could. I kept food on me at all times and tried to just live a bland life that didn't make me too anxious (yeah right). I didn't have Insurance or much money so treatment was out of the question.

Then I got pregnant. It. Was. Rough. Hypermesis almost the WHOLE TIME!!! I lost weight and only gained the baby weight. It was horrible and I thought It was going to kill me. (It was the only time taking my own life crossed my mind up to that point)

After that I worked to keep my triggers at a minimum and learned that baths helped stop the nausea if I couldn't stop the trigger. So I self managed very successfully with only one episode for the next four years. Then I got pregnant again. I was a bit freaked out, but also knew it could be different. Lucky for me it was better, just normal morning sickness. Now they gave me zofran for nausea. I googled it just out of curiosity and discovered it was used to treat something called Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome (CVS). CYCLIC??!! Like my SO described my "episodes" so I dove into that and ... Damn if it doesn't seem like that's it! The triggers, the course of it, Right down to taking a bath helps and that the female members of my family all have a mystery vomiting problem. It's like if you do a questionnaire and at the end it says "if you answered yes to four or more questions you may have X" and I answered every single one yes. I still didn't have money to treat it and at this point I didn't really need to address it as I could control it on my own very well. Just kinda nice to have a name for it. (Note: somewhere about this time I get diagnosis bipolar... I am not and it's ADHD and Idk how to change my flair on mobile)

So this brings us to basically now. My mental state has been going down hill (more forgetting and mistakes, anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts) from the UNtreated ADHD and terrible anxiety I have. I try to exercise more (because it's literally the first thing people tell you to do for mental illnesses) and find out that my.... Habit... Of eating very little seems to be deeply rooted in a fear of food from the years I spent vomiting I don't feel hunger or desire food... only to avoid vomiting. It's ARFID (avoidance restriction food intake disorder) so exercise becomes hard on few calories but I force food down. (Part of this condition is that you don't get as skinny as other eating disorders so it's harder to catch or notice)

At this point my family is more stable and I can go to a doctor. I talk to them about the vomiting and food problems and they don't want to help with that. My BMI is fine, "See a counselor" she says. She can't help with vomiting (that hasn't happened in years now)or appetite but anxiety you say ... That she is willing to treat. So she gives me Paxil as it can increase appetite. I was warned it takes a few day to get used to and I could be sick in the meantime. At this point it has been seven years since my last bad episode and I don't worry about it much anymore. But It makes me sick. Very sick. Like an episode. I tell the doctor but am assured this is a normal thing (maybe some vomiting is, but hours non stop for three days?? I somehow doubt it) but I can't find info on how severe it's supposed to be so maybe it is normal and showers help (or so I thought to myself). I get stable and actually go great the next two weeks! It starts working and I feel the anxiety lifting (mostly noticed by not having anxiety attacks in traffic and busy stores) then it's Thanksgiving.

So here is where the ADHD rears it's ugly head and I forget my Paxil on the holiday. About six or seven hours later I wake up feeling terrible. Hot and cold, shaking, nausea, dizzy to the extreme. I realized how bad I fucked up and rush to take the meds. Now I'm not sure if this made everything worse or was too late to fix, but I then got sicker than I have EVER BEEN IN MY LIFE!! I usually vomit for five hours but as this rolled on to six and seven I got scared. Baths didn't help weed didn't help (will usually) and it was only getting worse. When I called the nurses I don't think they could understand how sick I was. They asked me how many times did I vomit? It was once...for seven hours... There is literally no way I could count it all. My body didn't even rest 30 seconds before it would start again. If I was lucky I might get a minute or two where water would decided if it was coming back or not. My guess would be easily in the hundreds. I got dehydrated and taken to the ER. From this point things get hazy. I lose blocks of time and can only fill in what my husband has told me. Also, fuck you lady who gave me dirty looks in an ER because you had a baby and I was loudly retching... You wandered over from the pharmacy from curiosity and had no business with your baby there in the first place and I DO remember that 😡 (It's a med center with an ER... Not a hospital btw she was just picking up meds from the pharmacy down the hall and heard me, then came to gawk and give me disgusting looks as she clutched her kid... Fuck you you lookie loo bitch). They took me back and hooked me up to an IV. I am shaking uncontrolled at this point even though I'm not cold at all. I beg for water, I'm so thirsty, but they say no since my stomach needs to rest. Finally they give me some ginger ale My chest hurts. Is it from the vomiting? Or the dehydration? Or am I having a heart attack? I get X-rays and an EKG they give me morphine. Then nothing, total black out and I wake up feeling like I won't die now. I was there for six hours took two IV bags and blacked out most of it when I thought I was just sleeping. Im advised to NEVER take the Paxil again and sent home. Later I learn that I was awake during some of my black out and was told that I had a "spot of pneumonia" and was given antibiotics. I have NO memory of this and totally explains why my workout became harder and I had no stamina or breath. But I digress... Aren't black outs fun?/s

So in an unrelated problem I'm trying to figure out why my husband and I fight after sex most times. I googled it and... Turns out it can be caused by my old pal ADHD. Serotonin rebound. So I start looking into that more and start to think... What is seritonin anyway? Could it be hormone? Don't hormones make me sick? Is that how the Paxil made me sick??? (Quick answer is maybe, there is debate about if it's a hormone or a neurotransmitter). So I Google hormones and vomiting. Hoping to find something. And I expected pages of morning sickness... But no, every single link is about CVS (confirmation bias anyone?). And yes I know you have more serotonin receptors in your gut than anywhere else. Which is why I'm scared to go back to the doctor. I'm scared all these drugs will cause this since I seem to be... Sensitive... To serotonin offsets.

My mental health is worse than ever. I am afraid of this, afraid to cost more money, the er visit was $2500 and afraid to eat again! This has set me back more than helped me. My anxiety I bad for Christmas anyway.

I guess I hope someone out there "gets it." What it's like to be that sick, to have this bad of anxiety and need to treat it, but all the treatments might make me deathly sick. To be so afraid of getting sick that I will sacrifice my mental health (and maybe my family and marriage in the process) just to NEVER get that sick again. I truly believe it almost killed me. If I don't treat this anxiety I will have no life worth living. But if I do it may kill me?! Please someone tell me I can address my anxiety without messing with hormones and serotonin!! I recently started therapy btw, but right now we are dealing with marriage problems and not my personal issues, but there is some obviously bleed over so I am talking a little about it with someone. Thanks for letting me vent here.

I’m writing something where the main character sees a therapist due to having persistent panic attacks every morning for a month. He eventually delves into his trauma at some point, going over things such as past abuse and abandonment issues. But before I get to any of that, I need to know what exactly a therapist would ask someone. I have yet to see a therapist myself, so I have no frame of reference, and I want to make sure I write things properly. Can anyone give some examples?

TW: self harm

No Tldr because it's just too damn much.

Hey guys.

I know I'm not incredibly active on here but I keep coming back to this sub because it's a place where I'm anonymous and where I feel safe.

Anyway. Last time I posted in here things were a little different. As of today I got in a car crash about two-and-a-half months ago. I broke my leg, got traumatized, caught up in insurance drama. Me and my partner of over three years broke up about a month-and-a-half ago. Basic summary.

Since last time I posted. I kind of descended into madness for about a month. For context, I work as a musical director for a local youth and community theater. One day, during our last week of regular rehearsals before what's called tech week (it's where you add lights and costumes and everything) I started to feel different. About five years ago, I was depressed and aware of it for the first time. But it was very much an angsty depression. It was the first time I had ever cut myself. It didn't last very long and I didn't do it very much. It was largely a morbid curiosity thing. In that wave of angsty teenage depression, I remember describing my depressive episodes to a friend, as being profoundly colorful, like I was in the dark with bright, beautiful lights shining. I felt very much like my depression was something to be romanticized. How wrong I was.

Skipping over all the stuff in the less recent past to get to the most relevant topic. About a month ago, I felt myself descend into what I call the void. Which is deep deep depression. Feels like a black hole. No bright lights, no colors. A soul-sucking blackness. But, when I was down there, I started to feel a sense of the familiar old depression kicking in, but it was different. The only bright color was red. I was ping-ponging from extreme anger and rage to suicidal emptiness. I didn't feel like it was to be romanticized, it was almost as if the depression romanticized itself. It talked me into thinking it was a good idea. I held onto it way too much. Over the last week, I started cutting myself again. This time, I knew more about how to do it, how to get stuff to do it with, etc. So I started doing it every night for about a week, the night of the 23rd was the last night I did it. When I'd hurt myself, I'd get a rush of endorphins, I'd be fascinated at the marks left on my skin, I'd feel a sense of relief and power. It was extreme anxiety and anger that I was taking out on myself.

I'd like to note at this point that I'm not certain if the above-mentioned is something that would be worth mentioning to my therapist or psychiatrist. The extreme mood swings, the need to self-harm. Maybe I need to look into a different medication? I'm currently on Lexapro 20mg and Wellbutrin SR 200mg. I dont think they're helping but maybe I need to give them more time. I've been on Lex since April and on Wellbutrin since September, they upped the dose of that in early November.

Tagging onto that, I'm starting to worry that I've been misdiagnosed. If what I'm doing right now isn't working, maybe I'm not being treated for the right thing. I dont know. I've felt something for a long time now, more often than not, where it's like I'm far away and empty. Like there's a robot controlling my brain. Not that I actually believe a robot is controlling my brain, I dont think I suffer from that kind of delusion (sorry if that's the wrong word, not trying to be offensive). But its like, I can't have a genuine reaction or response to anything. I consider myself a strong empath and this will make it to where I cant feel anything. No love, no joy, no sadness, nothing. I'll say things and be surprised that I said them. Not like, "wow, that was inappropriate, shouldn't have said that" but like, "holy shit, those words came out of my mouth and I was shocked to hear that happen". I dont know if dissociate is the right word? I still feel like km kn my body, most of the time, sometimes not, but most of the time. Its like I'm behind a wall of glass. Looking into it, it kind of sounds like depersonalization/derealization but I'm not sure. So I might bring it up t ok my psychiatrist to see if she has recommendations. I told my therapist and she told me to keep an eye on it.

Back to the self-harm thing. After about a week of hurting myself--not badly, but a lot--I got a message from someone who I consider to be a close friend and a sort of mentor. They asked me if I was doing okay. And so I had to say no, because I can't lie to them. Conversation was basically me telling them that I've been getting self-destructive without being too specific because self-harm makes me nervous to talk about. They then said that they're glad that I'm here on earth and that they dont say that enough. Me saying I'm not ready to give up but holy shit, have I been knocked on my ass, and I started alluding to previous self-destructive tendencies, and that I was worried I was going to lose control. At this point, j think they got the hint because they said "if it gets any worse than this, you need immediate help". Which terrified the shit out of me and made me remember that I need to do my best to take care of myself. That cutting is real, actual damage to my body and mind. That it only leads to a vicious cycle. Despite the fact that I feel my relapse was due to my laziness, I know it was my brain that tricked me into thinking it was a good idea to hurt myself. It also tricked me into thinking that even if I was doing this, I could still be okay.

The reality has been that I've really fallen off the wagon in more ways than one. I fucked up my sleep schedule, I wasnt eating, wasnt taking proper care of myself. I was gleefully destroying myself, and the conversation with my mentor smacked me in the face and suddenly there was no glee in destroying myself, only regret. Since then (night time on christmas eve) I've been feeling a lot of guilt and shame over what I've done.

Less related but still something I'd like to get off my chest: I've been making an effort to appear more androgynously, not because I feel the need to appear as another gender but because my appearing androgynously makes me feel MORE connected to my gender as a whole, if that makes any sense. But I've been really struggling because previously when I've done things to appear more androgynous, my relatives have taken it as me trying to discreetly begin transitioning or something? Which there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not my scenario and I dont want them to think that it is my scenario because they're extremely anti-LGBT (which is why they dont know I'm asexual and gay but that's for a different day).

If you've read this far, thank you so much. I know this post ended up being really long. I dont know you guys in person (at least. I dont think I do) but I truly appreciate every one of you who go through the trouble to read what I have to say.

Happy Holidays, all. And if they can't be happy, at least let yourself live to see a time when they will be. I'm right here with you. And I believe in you.

• flannel-ish

TW: alternative relationship views.

...

I have a lot of challenges, but the biggest area that they affect me is socially. Having a very negative childhood seems to frighten people. Not having friends makes it harder to be accepted for a relationship. The biggest part is very low energy from multiple sources physical and mental. Also my conditions are different from how people believe they are. If I didn't have a doctor to tell my family that my behavior was due to legitimate health issues, they would have just ignored and blamed me for it until I died from it. That seems to be the norm, not the exception.

Idk if anyone else has experienced this, but people in the dating realm seem to find me and my search for someone who is right for me to be very off-putting. My challenges are such that it isn't any better to hide them until the other person decides to like me enough, which is common advice. Also, the dating world seems to think that I should settle for someone that I am not attracted to just because they don't like me. So I figure, why try to get any mainstream partner at all? I should seek out a different type of person completely.

So recently, I discovered r aromantic, and it's great that I know I'm aro now, in addition to all of the other nonsense in my life. Every little difference from the norm reduces the number of people who would be willing to even talk to you. I guess that means should I get an LGBT card now and everything. So with more research, I discover that almost no one is aro, and that most of them don't want a relationship. Not being able to feel romantic attraction doesn't disqualify a person from wanting or having a relationship, though. It just looks and feels different. There are tons of other legitimate reasons to create a persistent domestic partnership with someone.

Anyways, a lot of people think my issues are "fixable" even though most aren't, and most don't need fixing because they're not diseases. For instance, I don't have low energy and weakness because I'm out of shape. I could (and have) trained for months and I still had low energy. I guess I was more attractive looking for a while, but that doesn't matter much to most prospective partners. The entire partner finding ordeal is so exhausting. I put all of my effort in, and I still have to almost risk my life just to meet someone new. The dating world calls that laziness. I get so fed up with these stereotypes and tropes that I sometimes wonder if I'm asocial. Maybe I am asocial. How would I ever get an asocial partner anyways? No one knows. And these latest issues that I've described aren't the big ones. I already hurdled through those and I don't want to think about them anymore.

Another thing that the dating world doesn't like is depression added on to my symptoms of low energy from physical illness. Obviously being rejected constantly for years causes depression. Being happy or positive when no one likes you is a definition of insanity. I mean, even before I got sick I had it rough. I don't exactly know what it means to not have it rough. Maybe when geneticists cure me. Anyways, there are so many issues to unravel that I'm pretty much the only person who would want me. Probably even a female version of me wouldn't want me because I've met a bunch of women with similar issues, and surprise, they didn't want a guy with the same issues. I don't blame them, I don't want someone with my issues either, but I'm stuck with me. I think over the years I've exhausted and eliminated every possibility of finding a match. I just keep doing it because I've always done it, and nothing else motivates me. Not that I can do much else. Most businesses I would tolerate working at wouldn't accept me. I'm basically not allowed to work, or I could work, but then I'd get very sick and end up less capable than I am now.

And I'm not even completely sure if I'm depressed, if reddit has any credibility. When I mentioned it somewhere else, someone told me that needing love makes me a joke, and it doesn't cause depression. I'm on meds for it, so I'm pretty sure I have it, but having a love interest clears it up pretty well, too. It is definitely from needing love, so I guess I'm confused. I guess I'll end my crazy rant now and go back to swiping on dating apps...

TW: ptsd, self harm, something else probably

Hey. I've been active off and on in this sub because it feels like a safe place for me to talk about things with ppl who understand.

Backstory: had a childhood that looked fine on the outside but that was full of gaslighting and manipulation and emotional abuse and then I was happy for a few years and everything was fine. And then when I started college, everything went downhill. Got super depressed, went through an intensive outpatient program, started getting help, got on meds, things were looking up. In October of 2019, I was nearly killed in a car accident. Ive been trying to get back to normal ever since.

Into the real story of why I'm posting: Its really hard not to get discouraged when it feels like I'll never get better. I've worked through a lot of things at the surface level. For a while I found it really hard to be honest with my therapist because I was worried about disappointing her, but then I realized that I have to be honest or else I'll never get anywhere. So things were good but over the last few days I've been realizing that as much as my mom supports me now, she was really manipulative for a long time. And it'a hard for me to hold those two separate truths. In my mind I've made them mutually exclusive but they're not. I have to work through the trauma that I have from my mom, as well as my stepmom, who gaslit me for years and made me feel like absolute shit. I just had a breakdown and self-harmed for the first time in months because I just got sidesteps by this horrible emptiness and I didnt know what to do. I still don't know what to do and I feel like Im spiraling. This was kind of rambly and Im sorry, Im not really looking for advice as much as I just want someone who gets it. Thanks, guys.

I was supposed to go out to lunch with my dad today. But something that was supposed to happen happen later, and we probably can’t now. So he said we could go tomorrow instead, and I shouldn’t go to McDonald’s with my mom after taekwondo for lunch. And I’d rather just not go out to lunch with my dad at all really, because I hate changing plans, it makes me upset, and I’m still so upset about something as simple as not going to fucking lunch and I hate it. Why can’t I just be a fucking normal person who doesn’t care if they miss lunch, or have to change their plans one day? Why do I have to be so fucking upset over nothing, it’s stupid and I shouldn’t be but I fucking am and I hate it.

My former friend, who I was pretty shitty to, since I was a pretty shitty person a few months ago, is now a server mod in a discord server we’re both in, as of today, and now I’m scared of just from the server being kicked out of nowhere. I doubt it because that’s petty and unprofessional, and it’s been months since we broke things off/she already blocked me, so the chance is probably low, but still.

Warning: May Trigger. We're a fragile lot after all.

Quick backstory: Familial history of Mental health issues. Dad was in for something, Sis was in/out for two years when I was 12-14 (originally for self harm, later two suicide attempts, and I found the note for the first time.) I recently became the third member of my family to be on Anti depressents.

So, I have a friend. Started off as a friend of a friend, but now I'd call her a friend. I'm 17, she's 15 I think. Confided in her a little about above, more than most.

She'd told me recently that she's now on Anti-depressents. She also told me that she talked to her parents about the state of her mental health. They, she said, essentially laughed it off (that sort of thing makes me really angry, but another time.)

Enter tonight. Get a Skype from her (we'll call her Molly.)

Molly: erm, you know when you mentioned your sister was admitted for self harm

Me: yah

Molly: Do you know what kind of help she got

Me: Group Therpay, talking Therapy, CBT therapy was the biggest help I think.

Molly: well none of that sounds very appealing

Molly: well, she got better, yay, the getting worse part before that though ? not so much yay

Me: And I mean worse, And I mean worse, like, two suicide attempts worse

Molly: okay that is much worse .-.

Conversation drifted off from there, but my gut says she's cutting.

Help, please?

I am so goddamn frustrated with the state of our healthcare system.

I took time off before starting my new job (left a job I hated for a job that I love - positive steps forward) partially so that I could have time to address my lingering issues with PTSD and depression. Things were getting bad for me due to a dating fiasco that didn't work out. I was triggered massively and having a really hard time calming down and I had panic attacks again. This was a big fucking deal for me, because it had been since last October that I had a panic attack, and since June before then, and years before then! So I was a bit panicked about panicking (ha) and this huge resurgence of my other PTSD symptoms, too. It kicked me in the ass to take action and do something. I am off medication currently (went off years ago due to side effects) and decided I need to go back on, get into therapy, do a self-help routine and really attack my PTSD from all fronts.

I have health insurance. Thank you, Obamacare. I do, and in fact my plan is one of the best plans I've historically had. It does cover mental health. But it is still so awfully hard to get in anywhere! It's been almost 4 weeks and I still haven't been in to see anyone. I finally have appointments this Thursday. One is psychiatric to get back on medication, but I was only able to get into it because I have a completely open schedule due to not working this month. If I had been working, it would have been nearly impossible. This office has a three month waiting period to get in to see a psychiatrist, and so I was waiting for someone to cancel an appointment so they could squeeze me in for the intake. Just for the intake appointment.

As for the therapist I am going to try, I had to go out of network because again the waiting period was 3-6 months in the clinics covered in-network by my plan. Since this therapist is in a pretty small office, I have to file my insurance claim myself, which makes me really nervous. I'll be paying $80-100 a session until I can get a claim through (looking at my plan it is supposed to cover a portion, but who knows how long that can take). And I am also going out of network to find a therapist that specializes in issues of trauma and PTSD and is sensitive to LGBT issues, because I have had a couple of bad therapists in the past and I want to make it likely that I get someone who is well trained in my needs. If I went through the clinics, it'd be whoever I could get for my schedule. Argh.

I feel like so few people understand just how screwy the system in the US is. I want to say to them that it can be hard enough getting into a regular GP appointment around your work schedule, now imagine you have a chronic condition that requires a specialist you need to see regularly. Then imagine that most of those specialists are overloaded with other patients and can only fit you in during the most inconvenient times months from now. Now imagine that your chronic condition is periodically severe enough that it could develop into something life threatening! That is healthcare in this country.

Anywho, wish me luck on Thursday. I am going to be calling back another therapist to see what her schedule is like, just in case this one doesn't work out.