oh dear

Mar. 4th, 2020 03:36 pm
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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My coworker is absolutely terrified about Coronavirus.

He’s a big dude, robust and healthy, strong. Maybe 43? Built like a bear. Really pretty sturdy. Lifts heavy stuff, gets the door, that kind of guy.

But he had whooping cough as a kid, somehow– he doesn’t know either, must’ve missed the vaccine or something? Don’t know; his mom wasn’t an antivaxxer or anything. But he had whooping cough, sometime in the early 80s. It happens sometimes.

Ever since, every time he gets a cold, it settles in his lungs, turns to bronchitis. He’s had pneumonia four or five times now in his life. Every ten years or so it knocks him flat, just a cold he can’t shake that settles in and builds itself a palace in his lungs until he’s weak and feverish and flat-out exhausted.

He is terrified of coronavirus. He’s not immunosuppressed, exactly, not chronically ill, generally in fantastic health– great blood pressure, good cholesterol, etcetera. But those scars in his lungs, from the whooping cough– he knows pneumonia will be the thing that kills him someday, we’ve discussed it before. I’m sure he’s not wrong. 

So I’m humoring him, as he goes nuts with the handwashing and sanitizing everything in our office. It’s a little annoying because he talks about it all the time, reads me the latest statistics from the WHO, asks me what i think’s gonna happen, etc. I’m like, I don’t actually want to dwell on this, but. He still keeps bringing it up.

Yesterday he finally admitted that his wife suffers from severe anxiety, and he can’t even breathe a syllable of this at home. At the moment, so far she’s oblivious and carefree about it, and he’s like, I can’t let on that I’m freaking out because she’ll freak out and I can’t do that. He admitted he went panic-grocery-shopping and stocked up on everything without telling her; she doesn’t know that he’s upgraded all the soap in their house, doesn’t know the freezer’s crammed full and the basement’s full of toilet paper and canned goods. She doesn’t know. He can’t tell her. Because she’ll worry.

So I’m trying to be kind, and let him worry at me, because I understand. But it’s a lot. 

ughh

Sep. 24th, 2019 01:22 pm
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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i got a lot of Anxieties today, and they kept me up last night, and i don’t know what the deal is! i hate that.

shoutouts to my peeps with Anxieties all the time, you have my complete sympathy, I don’t get this very much but it fucking sucks.

IDK if it’s worse when there’s some kind of reason. I don’t have any kind of reason at all and it’s freaking me the fuck out. Gross! Super gross. Ugh. 
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
Between the traffic ticket, the Potentially Letting Down of Farmkid, the Fucked-Up Line In That Fic I Wrote That Was Hurting People Every Minute while I was obligatorily offline, having to go to the garage twice to get them to fill out my traffic ticket form correctly, and then a misunderstanding where Dude didn't realize a planned few days off I'd asked him to take from work were next week (we discussed it months ago before he transitioned employers, back when the vacation policy was "whatever", so he clearly did not recall it; relatedly, every one of our social obligations is my responsibility at all times including reminding him of them and he is under no obligation to be pleasant even about pleasant things I remind him of, it is all A Sore Trial He Must Endure, yes even outings with his family!), and then this morning's confrontation with Nutty Truck Lady (pull your truck! forward two inches! you are taking up two spaces! oh my god! you did not need to let every employee and customer of this plaza know your Issues like that!)
... listen I know that isn't much at all, but I do so poorly with confrontation and like. social interactions in general. and most of it has resolved just fine, or like. just sort of went away and doesn't matter.

but it's a lot for my stupidly fragile brain, and I just want to sit here a moment and not formlessly anxiety myself into a State.

It's amazing how little difference it makes, whether the conflicts are important or not, whether they're with someone important to me or not, whether they're resolved or not-- they just hang on, somewhere between my ribs and my spine, sort of grinding, and it's like having to pee, or having a sore tooth, or something else entirely, but it's like something, and it's not like I can think my way out of it, it's just there

this grating little niggle of you fucked up, they're all mad at you, nobody's ever going to put up with you again, eventually nobody will talk to you

And it's like, you know, I had this delusion that I was a well-adjusted person, and maybe I am because I'm functioning just fine through all this. But all my spare mental space is spent on this whirring background process, like a computer running an illicit download behind the processes you're actually trying to get it to do, or something, just, there it is, your CPU's at 110% usage and you're not doing anything, it's making that weird grinding noise and the fan's been on for hours and you haven't so much as reloaded a webpage, why is the battery almost at 0? wtf?

Super annoying!
dragonlady7: An image of a hand-engraved sign nailed to a birch tree, reading "Don't Insult The Witch" (witch)
So the water heater installation guys' other job for today was on a rooftop, and given the sustained winds of 30mph with gusts up to almost 60, and the three-inch layer of impenetrable ice frozen from slush on every single surface in the world, they opted to do our nice safe basement job instead.
I can't imagine doing a rooftop ANYTHING in the winter, but ESPECIALLY not on a day like today; I almost got blown down the driveway when I ran out in my clogs to move Dude's car so I could drive mine. Clogs got no grip, and so when I planted my feet not to get blown over, the bulk of my whole self kinda caught the wind like a sail and I was like welp here I go. I didn't fall, I seem to have really good balance despite all of *waves hand at self* this and my inability to consistently remember that I live in a physical reality, but that's mostly just practice and muscle memory. I definitely traveled down that driveway at a clip I had not intended.

(I was glad not to be walking, an hour or so later.)

(As I had anticipated, I dozed off on the couch at about 5:30, and then Chita woke me up at 6, 6:15, and 6:30, so I got up and moved the car and made coffee, and I'll be a fucking zombie today.)

Dude and I discussed it; he slept a little better last night because he's sort of burned out on being anxious about the wind, but I apparently have an infinite capacity to be fucking anxious. He was like "yeah I worry about things blowing away" and I was like "I have formless heart-racing anxiety about everything and the only relief is that it's so bad I don't actually have time to worry about the things I normally constantly worry about [social injustice, nuclear war, my own economic precariousness, mean things someone said to me in fifth grade, that sort of thing] so honestly just panicking constantly about nothing is kind of a relief" and he was like "gurl" so. I did get a hug this morning, at least, though i wasn't expecting it because that's not his style but he was clearly quite tenderly concerned for me. Aw. (I was in the middle of something and did not understand what he was trying to do and nearly smacked into him and it was the most awkward hug ever but it was very sweet.)

Oh speaking of getting a poor night's sleep, yesterday my coworker came in and confessed he'd slept very little because he'd been up half the night in a Wikipedia spiral. Guess what it was about! You'll never guess.

Did Jim Morrison (of the Doors)'s Father Start The Vietnam War? The answer may surprise you!

That's the closest I've come to a shitpost all month and it's not even properly a shitpost! Though, sometimes I feel that's really the thing that distinguishes a stellar shitpost, when the absurd nonsequitur turns out not to be.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
via http://ift.tt/1IckjDX:
ugh i got a nonspecific creeping dread. like i did something wrong, or said something horrible to somebody, or maybe i got in a fight today with someone i care about. 

only I didn’t, there’s nothing particularly wrong, and I haven’t had any fallings-out with anyone that I can recall?

so like– ugh? Fuckin’ Anxieties. I am so done with you, anxieties. 

I been holding off the Mental Badnesses with various combos of holistic medicine shit and like self-care and like relentless giving-no-fucks after I lack-of-executive-functioned my way cold turkey off SSRIs last spring (PSA: DON’T DO THAT), but it might be finally getting to me. This is most inconvenient, I really don’t have time for this. 

Especially since the only actual thing I really *do* have to dread is the fact that my application for health insurance keeps alternately erroring out and sending me updates that I need to update a thing that I then go to do and it errors out? So I don’t have health insurance and apparently can’t get it? So it’s not like I *could* go back onto meds for this. Fuuuuuck.

A friend posted on Facebook about depression and was immediately told to try yoga. I did not commit murder. That’s about the only upside to a critical lack of serotonin; there’s no way I could collect enough executive function to actually commit a maiming. 

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