Night Fear, In-person Work Stuff Again

I heard a noise last night, around 11 o' clock, that sounded like two sharp raps on the apartment door. I got out of bed, found clothes, looked through the window, and opened the door. There wasn't anyone there. I'm thinking now that maybe it was something the cat knocked over.

I had medium-high intensity fear for a while after, and it was keeping me from sleeping. I got up again and rechecked the lock on the door. I closed the blinds behind the trans flag I have in front of the window for fear of being targeted because of it. I cuddled with and talked to Miriam for a while, and then tried to concentrate on the feeling of the dog lying against my side.

Eventually I got to sleep, but I'm up super early: even earlier than I'd planned.

Miriam needs to start going to an in-person meeting once a week starting today, so we're both getting up earlier than usual so I can drive her to the campus. She hasn't been regularly working in person since Covid really got going in early 2020 after our move to the Netherlands, so this is taking some getting used to.

It's just a few people, and she'll be masking and coming back after the meetings, so we're hoping it will be safe enough, and she doesn't really have a choice.

Fucking Fire Shit

I finally bought a decent hanging file box. After the fire, I bought the cheapest accordion-fold paper organizer I could find and have kind of regretted it since.

I needed a folder to put all the shit related to the fucking fire in before it gets potentially further sorted, so I created an appropriate label yesterday.

Yeah, it's kind of dumb, but it's kind of cathartic too. I'm not good at feeling anger, and I think feeling some anger about this is justified and healthy.

More Anger

There's another thing I'm angry about. Miriam doesn't deserve to have the pain she does. As she got ready to go in to the university today, she debated whether to take her laptop with because carrying something as light as a Macbook Air might cause her pain.

Beyond Covid, she's scared of being in the office because at least at home if she starts having significant back pain, she has options. The chronic pain she has is increasingly disabling. I miss going places with her: even something as simple as grocery shopping. Now, she can't be sure whether she'll be up to that much walking on a given day, and if she does it could cause a flare-up that hurts her for the rest of the day. She can't do much cooking a lot of times because she can't stand up that long.

I am so angry at the medical system that has failed her, both in diagnosing and treating the actual illness *and* in providing support for her symptoms. But I'm angry, too, that this is happening to her, and there's nowhere to direct that anger, and it makes me so sad.

She likes to send me screenshots of questions that Fearless, her finch-friend in a self-care app, asks her sometimes. Yesterday, Fearless asked whether she likes to go on adventures on weekends or whether she likes to stay home. She wrote back that she loves to go on adventures, but she usually isn't feeling well enough to go out.

I don't know if she's still thinking about that particular question, but I am. It's been hurting this whole time since she showed me. I'm hurting for her that she can't go out and do or see things. I'm hurting for me that when *I* go out and do or see things, she can't come with.

I hate this all so much. And there's just nothing I can do to fix it. I was thinking about this on the way home from dropping her off, but I managed to wait until I was home before starting to cry.

I wish there could be at least a little excitement and adventure in her being at work in person for the first time in years. Instead, there's just fear and pain and sadness.

And We Have a Friend in the Hospital with Psychosis

I think I also haven't mentioned that one half of the couple we stayed with after the fire is in the hospital as a mental illness inpatient as of a week ago? Maybe two? What is time anymore? Said person uses they/them pronouns, so I'll do my best to distinguish between the person I'm talking about and the couple as a whole.

I've never been close to anyone with that level of mental illness before, and with Miriam and I already dealing with our own anxiety/depression/trauma, it's honestly kind of alarming to be reminded of how fragile our brains can be. They have been dealing with a combination of CPTSD, chronic pain (which they were self-medicating with a large amount of cannabis), and a recent miscarriage that they blame on having caught Covid. Meanwhile, their partner works at a hotel as a desk manager and is being pressured to not mask at work anymore, so what with them feeling like Covid killed the child they were carrying, that's causing a lot of friction.

They asked us over to their house one afternoon, after they and their partner had a verbal fight that ended in him staying in a hotel and talking about moving back to Ontario. We, and a couple online friends, kept them company as they panicked and cried and talked in ways that were sometimes difficult to follow about everything that was going on. They said that their therapist had suggested they be admitted to the hospital, and given how they were feeling and behaving, we and their friends encouraged them to do so.

So they tried to check themself in, were refused, and then walked home from the hospital at like 2 in the morning because they didn't know what else to do I guess. Miriam and I were awake, staying up late in to the night in case we were needed, but they weren't functioning well enough to contact us. Miriam and I kind of ended up communicating with a few of their family by phone or Discord that night too because we were local and knew what was going on. Their mother flew in from Ontario to help, and their partner came back from the hotel, and in a few days they went back to the hospital and did get checked in that time.

Their partner has been giving us updates and told us that their diagnosis is "full psychosis" and that he should expect them to be in the hospital or facilities for "a long time."

I'm not clear on exactly what full psychosis means and am keeping in mind that this is being filtered through a non-medical third-party (their partner) who isn't always the best at communicating. I'm also not clear on how long a "long time" is. Months? Years?

We were able to go in to visit them a few days ago, and they seemed mostly coherent, though they also expressed they were having trouble with thinking that other people they know are in the ward with them, though they know they aren't really there. Their partner says they have good days and bad days and we were there on a better day. It does seem like things are improving though, as they have been given the ability to go out to do things with their partner during the day for a few hours sometimes, and the two of them were able to take their dog to the dog park and have a nice time.

So I think that whole thing has been weighing on me too. It's a little hard to tell whether and how much because there's SO FUCKING MUCH going on right now.

Moving Expenses and Taxes

I guess we didn't have enough stuff to deal with because Canada Revenue Service is disputing our moving expenses Miriam claimed on her taxes. Any actual paper receipts we had are gone in the fire, and her address was incorrect with the government because of our temporary housing, so we're like 2/3 through the period we have to respond and only just learned the details of what we're supposed to respond to.