thoughts + ideas

i take an array of medications right now. i recently started a medication called aripiprazole, an antipsychotic medicine for my intrusive thoughts and mood swings. that's a scary word, antipsychotic. definitely one of the darker parts of the hollywood dilemma is that when they run out of ideas, they use mental illness as a motive for their villian. i wish mental illnesses were not reduced down to plot points and causes for paranoia in our everyday life, where we fear some psychopath come into our house and chop us into bits. yet psychosis is a real illness, as is psychopathy, and sociopathy, and schizophrenia. people who have these conditions need support and medication and therapy to help, not villainization. they, like me, simply have the unfortunate luck to possess a brain with altered chemistry, causing them deep suffering. but we do love a good villain. we adore a scapegoat, one person to blame when all goes wrong. but more often than not, the person who we'd blame is simp...

buckle up, folks. this read won't be a light one. my idea for this post came from me trying to get some old photos of myself from instagram for a tweet and i fell down a rabbit trail of rereading some of my old captions. most of the things i read were just happy nostalgia and memories of a decent life, but i became frustrated when i looked back to the time of my trauma. (i've said this before a few times, but please don't ask what the trauma was. it's not good to ask an individual that when they have PTSD, as it risks them dealing with flashbacks, nightmares, and other unsafe symptoms.) i grew up in my share of turmoil, particularly during my very early childhood and my teenage years. those years alone did not bring me the illness of PTSD that i have today, but the trauma i experienced as a young adult linked all of those experiences together and some structures in my brain drastically changed in how they function. here's a few of them in bullet point form (i love ...

I am sitting on the floor of our not quite empty living room. we are in transition. selling off and donating our belongings, packing up the rest. there is much to be done in the next five days. it seems to not be the time to consider these things that dance in my head, but I suppose that it's as good a time as any. I have been thinking about my queerness. I suppose it might be especially good time to be thinking about this. See, we are packing up our life possessions and memories to move back to our home state. and this state contain countless friends and family members - people whom I was not out to before heading to this beautiful, magical, terribly lonely state of Seattle. we've missed a lot of opportunities here in Seattle to build community, simply due to the fact of a global virus threatening the lives of us and all those we love; we wished we'd had more time. I have been thinking about my queerness. see, I was hardly out to myself before leaving my home state...

Insomnia induced thread: here’s some things I’ve learned as a result of my lived experience as a person with Mental Illness™️ (Please excuse any typos, and questions/clarifications are always welcome!) 1/x Context: I have had depression for about 5 years as of this summer. its strength has varied over those years but has been in my life in some capacity since May of 2015. I’ve had PTSD since January of 2018. It was only officially diagnosed 2 months ago. 2/x (footnote: I’ve also dealt with social anxiety my whole life, but that combined with my sensory needs & other life details have led me to believe that it is not a mental illness, but rather that I may be autistic. I’m currently pursuing an evaluation for that.) 3/x Ok, so onto the lived experience: Depression is a beast. It lives up to and exceeds its name. However it’s true strength can be obscured by many different things. 4/x I’ve had two major obstructions in my life to ...