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.