I'm not very good at using this platform as therapy, am I. Well, my online name is something I've used forever in lots of communities, and it's the same name but different sides of me everywhere. Mostly the public me is fairly weird, but not actually that noticeable. It's not just my online-me, though, I'm Daonie Sidhe in real life more often than not too, even though it's not my legal name. It's the name I use for nearly everything that doesn't involve producing photo ID. And because I'm a chronic oversharer, people can construct a pretty detailed picture of me, though with details bleeding in from others who use the name as well.

D. Sidhe is schizophrenic, that's public knowledge. And fat, there's been no real attempt to hide that. Female body, largely queer gender, mostly lesbian bisexual. Chronically unemployed, migraines more days of the month than not, a headache I've had for over half my life, an age that can be reasonably set as middle, birthday on Labor Day, a pagan and a prole and a liberal and a feminist at heart, cynical, chronically depressed, medicated to some degree but not terribly successfully, cat lover, long term partner but basically polyamorous and an ex-drunken slut, a bleeding heart, and a love for nature documentaries and monster movies.

Other stuff sits in its own sphere and doesn't escape much to the other Sidhes people know, but there's generally not an attempt to hide it and if anyone cared they could reasonably accurately track me across my fanfiction communities, my conspiracy enthusiasms, my online gaming, groups for my migraine issues and my crazy issues, the people with whom I chat on IRC, the blogs I comment at, and a wealth of other hobbies all strung together under the one name. My online gaming groups probably don't know about my politics, my political bedfellows don't know about all my crazy, the people I send cranes to don't know I write slash, and the places where I gush about my cats generally don't hear about the migraines. But sometimes I meet the same people in more than one place, and they do know more than one me, and that's fine, really. D. Sidhe is mostly not hiding anything, but does attempt to minimize situations where people will learn things about her that they don't want to know. I also don't want to be connected back to my partner, who suffers enough for loving me and doesn't deserve to be unexpectedly outed.

And I guess that's why it's hard to use this as therapy. There's a lot I feel like I shouldn't say. It's kind of interesting, though, that I have the same problem with real live shrinks, too, and doctors in general. There are things I can't share with them unless I'm willing to have them sidetrack everything for years to prove I've actually dealt with certain things.

Just as a small example, I lie to every neurologist and GP about how much caffeine I drink. I do that because without four or five cans of caffeinated diet soda a day, I get suicidal. Like, bleakly, darkly, near-catatonic, can't focus on anything but an overdose of pills suicidal. Not withdrawal, this will go on starting a few days after I quit drinking it, and will last until I start again, two or three episodes a day of this, for weeks, and with no prospects of ending. I don't like to do that, so to whatever extent the caffeine raises my blood pressure, I'm willing to make that trade off. But I don't want to explain this to the doctors, who haven't yet been able to adequately medicate or treat my depression, and who spend a lot of time asking searching questions about am I suicidal.

Which is a question you shouldn't answer in the affirmative, because it's likely to get you a couple weeks of "supervision". It also means you lose pretty much any say in what medications you will be taking. I don't consider being forced to take antipsychotics that make me actively suicidal while being prevented from doing anything about it much of a win. Part of the reason I'm not dead yet is that I know if it gets worse, I have that option. "Worse", of course, being one of those fractal things. It can always get worse, so no matter how bad it is, it's still not as bad as it can get. Somehow, that's comforting. Or else I'm just crazy.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes shrinks decide all your problems are emotional, and refuse to treat you for anything until they rule that out. I tell this story a lot, but I had a shrink who was convinced my migraines were due to repressed traumatic memories, and felt that I should stop taking migraine meds until we worked it out. I get migraines from things that commonly cause even people without PTSD migraines, things like peanuts and raisins and certain cheeses and the smell of cigarette smoke and wine and popcorn, and from fluorescent lights...

We spent three weeks with me bringing in literature on the subject to convince him that I don't have "repressed raisin-related trauma" and that lots of non-crazy people get migraines from them too, so let's pretend I'm normal and treat them the way normal people do. You know, with meds. The whole thing sucked so hard I started lying to future shrinks about even more of my baggage to avoid the subject altogether. Which, okay, isn't all that helpful, but there you go.

Anyway, that's why I don't currently have a shrink, and why I can't seem to use this as my shrink, either. We'll see which breaks first.

Almost forty eight hours and I'm still here.

I keep reminding myself that basically the dividing line for me between "very stressed" and "suicidal" is a matter of unbalanced brain chemistry. All of my legitimate reasons to be depressed and stressed are essentially in the past.

Taking painkillers makes sense when you hurt like hell, as an analogy, but is stupid when the wound has healed and you're just upset because you still remember how much it hurt. That's kind of where I am now. I had some good reasons to want to die when I was growing up, but mostly I fought like hell to stay alive back then. Now that my reasons come down to "My brain doesn't work right", I seem to have stopped caring. It's irrational, and I know that. Surprisingly, reminding myself that my depression and my stress are largely irrational keeps me from doing irrational things about it. At least from one day to the next.

I've spent the last twenty years not deciding to live, but distracting myself from a choice every time I think about making one. The same part of me that reminds me that zombies aren't real so those must be hallucinations is what reminds me that logically, doing anything drastic about my irrational depression would be irrational.

It's weird, but you can get pretty damned far down a road by only looking down at your own feet.

So here's me again, not so much promising that I won't do anything stupid and irrational as determining that it won't kill me, so to speak, to hold off on doing anything stupid and irrational for another twenty four hours.

Mostly, I think, it's a combination of undermedication and PMS, which brings with it the traditional gifts of migraine and TMJ but also the bonus gift of nasty TMJ related toothache. Which could turn into a need for a root canal, I suppose, but that's kind of like renovating the porch on a house that's falling off a cliff.

Those should go away if I can just ignore them long enough, and maybe even take the toothache with it, who knows. The medication issue is something entirely different and involves finding a new shrink. Boy oh boy am I eager to do that.

What won't go away, though, is my genetic family doing stupid things again. I'd explain, but it would involve outing myself in new and exciting ways even for me. Hopefully once the PMS goes away and I get a little perspective, it'll all seem amusingly stupid rather than depressingly stupid.

Oh yeah, and it's my partner's 40th birthday. Birthday requests have involved no singing, no cake with black frosting and Over The Hill candles, and please could I not kill myself today. So, we're trying.

Happy birthday to my partner, a very long-suffering person who I can't believe hasn't fled the state to live under an assumed name in the hopes I won't follow.

"Why does this keep coming up? It's not like things are bad."
No, it's just that it doesn't feel like the inside of my head is getting any better, and it's been like that as long as I can remember. If you fail at something for years and years, don't you get to a point where you hate it and you want to quit, even if you're too damned stupid to?

Something kind of comforting about being awake in the middle of the night. I guess it's because no one's really expected to be sane or functional at four AM anyway.

I'm still here.

Funny that I forgot I wrote that. I keep thinking this is here just for me to make promises to myself to still be here tomorrow. Today's one of those days where I need to make that promise.

Less than a week after Tora died, we had to have Nagi put under for a five hour surgery on her hip joints. She came through perfectly. She's still half shaved, but it's growing back, and she's a lot less neurotic than she used to be. Amazing what an absence of chronic pain will do for your personality, I guess.

But I keep dreaming about petting Tora, and waking up sad.

I had another dream two nights ago which is affecting me, I don't know that I want to describe it, because that'll make it worse, I think.

My partner's got a new job. We can't really afford for me to find a new shrink. And I gave up on the antipsychotic on Veterans' Day, it's almost a funny story, I guess, in the way that you can pretty often make horrible things funny if you just don't care about them enough. It might be why my dreams are really turning on me again lately, but I've always had horrible nightmares, it's why I don't sleep.

Anyway, in addition to twenty-four-hour promises, I guess this can be my new shrink. I can't imagine anyone's reading it, but I can tell myself someone somewhere is so I'm not just promising myself. That makes it about the perfect place to be the mes that I try hard not to be in front of people whose opinions I care about. Lame, I know.

Anyway, I'll still be here tomorrow. Nothing's off the table, but it's not like if I don't in the next day, I'll never get a chance to. So I can spend a day saying I said I would wait, and who knows, maybe it'll get better.