Entries tagged with sadness

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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.

Current Mood: okay

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Oh hai!

Hi! Sorry I was away for so long. I was having some pretty rough times, mental health-wise.

In fact, I was too depressed and anxious to figure out how to renew my medicine for dealing with depression and anxiety, so I didn't.

As it turns out though, that's been mostly a good thing, to my great surprise.

I'd thought for a long time that I needed to talk to a doctor about changing my doses or medication because what I was on wasn't doing the job. But even though I'm in Canada where medical care is much more affordable than the US, there are still costs and complication because I'm just a visitor so I don't have any coverage. I didn't have the spoons to navigate that.

Now that I've been off of those medications for a few weeks, my brain is different. My mental state is less stable, and I have more trouble managing frustration and anger at times. However, I'm also finding that I have been more productive more consistently than I have in literally years. It's a mixed bag, but it's been more positive than negative so far.

I still want to talk to a doctor about brain meds. However, the wait lists for psychiatrists in Saskatchewan are very very long (6 months to a year) and while the GP I saw some time ago as a walk-in is willing to help me experiment with meds (I think), the situation there is going to be me saying "I want to do X" and him probably just going along unless it seems like a really bad idea and what I'd really like is someone with psychiatry training to help me navigate these things. So for now, as long as the situation seems managable as is, I'm going to go along without brain meds.

I also, at the same time I stopped looking at LJ and Dreamwidth, stopped going on Facebook. At all. Folks, that has been a very very good decision. I think I'm done with Facebook.

But I would like to be here more. Because, honestly, I'm feeling pretty lonely and sad a lot of the time. Even if the weather was better (I hate the weather here *so* much), Covid would keep me from trying to make any local friends, and I've never really figured out how to maintain relationships well online so I have essentially no social time these days and haven't for months. It would have been nice if things had gotten better after moving somewhere where I speak the primary language, but no dice. Maybe when the weather is warmer I'll be able to try to do things outside with people other than my partner, who really and truly is an awesome partner-person, but it would be nice to see another human's face once in a while, you know?

Anyway, more here to follow. I want to write about things like my work on applying for Canadian permanent residency and the 40-something punk-rock-looking guy in my online class who went on a totally unexpected anti-McCarthy, anti-Cold-War-homophobia history rant that made me love him a lot.

Oh, and gender transition stuff too, probably? Like, I'm still doing that.

Current Mood: sad
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1318894.html

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(no subject)

I'm feeling sad at the moment about this response to a recent post I made.

"I am committed enough to queer freedom to be available to random passing people as I am my own beloved friends and family."

It makes me feel like people see me as someone who doesn't care. Who isn't committed to wanting things to be better.

Do you see me that way? Am I making things worse somehow when I want to make them better? That thought hurts me too.

I feel like maybe I'm bad at this stuff. When, in various situations, I upset someone by asking them their pronouns, and I'm dismissed and rejected for expressing my concerns about trans-phobic language, and am seen as uncommitted to queer people's well-being, and when I never seem to have any feedback from people saying saying things like 'I see what you're doing and you're helping, or at least trying to help, and that means something to me...it makes me wonder if I'm helping at all. Maybe the care I feel isn't being expressed in actions that make a difference for anyone and I need to rethink them.

Maybe that's the kind of feedback people get from memes and that just whooshes, unheeding, past me.

I'd just...like to know that I'm helping, at least a little.

(Please don't say anything negative about anybody else, including anyone who I'm referring to here. I know that we're all trying to help in our own ways and that's important.)

----

I had so many reassuring comments to this on Facebook from people I care about and respect. That really helps. I wish I could share them all here.

Current Mood: sad
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1264908.html

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(no subject)

I finished reading the architecture book and grabbed another one on the way out the door from the stack of interesting stuff that I took home during weeding. I read the introduction of Thomas Gieryn's "Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line" on the train and concluded that I can't read it right now.

This is the kind of book that was deeply important to me in my academic path. Why do people think about science the way they do? What makes it credible, or incredible, to people? How do the socially constructed elements of science affect/effect belief and, at least as importantly, policy?

But I think reading this right now is just going to make me angry and sad. I'm not up to dealing with that yet. I'm glad that I'm reading again, but maybe I should stay around the shallows for a while before jumping into the deep end of epistemology and trying to understand how people form beliefs about things that are important to me and that so many people are just wrong about.

Reading things like this hurts for numerous reasons.

So next is going to be Mario Salvadori's "Why Buildings Stand Up: the Strength of Architecture" (As well as Matthys Levy's "Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail"). I think that will be a good next step from Edward Allen on my way toward getting back to Condit's book. I'm gonna order them today!

Current Mood: sad

Entry tags:

family,
sadness

In Which I am Unreasonably Melancholic

I get nostalgic and even melancholy about the strangest things.

I went downstairs this morning and my parents were using the WiiFit. They made some space in our usually cluttered living room to have people in the house on New Years' Eve. Since there was open floor in the center of the room, my mother (because I'm sure it was her rather than my dad) got the things set up and was weighing she and my dad. (She tried to weigh the dog, too, but he wasn't being cooperative.)

The Wii has a really cute-ified interface. Maybe you know it. Little cartoony character versions of all the people in the house line up on the screen and you pick one to tell it who you are. It even knows Wonka, the dog, is a pet, so it tells him to "ask his owner" to do tasks.

It also says things like "I haven't seen so-and-so for a while," or offers reminders of people's birthdays. This is sometimes problematic for me. Not all the time, but often enough that it keeps me from using the system. How is it problematic?

I can't help but think of the array of little people as a snapshot of the state of my life. This is all my family; the people who share my house with me. People I care about a lot. And someday, I'm going to move away from them. Or one of them will move out. Or something else will happen and one of those people won't be here anymore. But that little cartoon version of them will still be there, treated like family by a game console that wants to know how they're doing and why it doesn't see them much these days.

I get emotional about endings and changes. The dissonance between the inevitable changes in real life situation vs the static nature of the loving sharing of living space that the Wii displays is jarring. It makes me think of how little time, in the end, I will have the opportunity to be with these people that I love before we part to follow our different paths. It's especially hard knowing that it is fairly likely that I will be moving far away in less than a year. It hurts.

Not to mention that, though I assume someone has removed him from the system by now, it reminds me of the Wii asking my parents why it hadn't seen our housemate around a month or two after he was struck by a car and killed. I didn't even experience that myself and it still stabs me in the gut to think about.

And now I find myself missing people in my life who I see every day. Or more accurately, I think about how much I'm going to miss them in the future and it's almost the same thing. It's unpleasant. And it makes me glad I spent a while last night playing a game with some of them.