Major Depressive Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Anxiety Disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Any one of these as recognized within the DSM is or can be debilitating. Try navigating through life with all of them, like me.

It’s not a secret that I have multiple mental health diagnosis, and I am not ashamed of them.  I actually take a level of pride in the fact that with all of these issues, I am still here – still standing and still moving towards restoring my  family.

I worry though as the stress of the upcoming change increases.

I’ve been without medical insurance since August. I’ve benefited from societal structures and the ACA and charity. I’ve been able to maintain my medications and prescriptions but not therapy.  Therapy is just as important as my medications, even though my medications are the primary reason I am still here.

Medication gives me a floor to stand on, a level place I can plant my feet and exist.  Medication doesn’t eliminate the manic highs but it does prevent the lows from returning to 2014 levels.

Therapy though is where the real hard work happened.  Therapy is where I learned to cope with my behaviors and learned ways to alter them.  I’ve clung desperately to those methods these past weeks, but the closer move in date gets the more I find myself reverting to a place where normal existed – in the gloom.

I know I am gonna push through this but I don’t know what happens on the other side when I get there. I pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. I spent six years pushing. At the end of that pushing was a bad relationship and a vengeful woman and the beginning of the past two years of my life.

I understand that I need to be back in therapy.  There is so much work to do if I am going to maintain my progress. I just don’t know if I will be able to go to therapy.

I can’t afford insurance either through my employer or through the ACA. I make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. And that leaves me in a mental health limbo where my medication floor is the one thing keeping me from breaking.  I am bending in ways that I did not know that I could but I am here – unbroken for now.

I’m even looking at some of my behaviors and recalling how I used to manage them.

As I sit and type I am reminded of my 20’s – in the years post Gei and pre-Clyde. I don’t necessarily think I will go back there…. but I know how comfortable those old clothes feel.

And feeling is something that is and always will be dangerous for me, Aphrodite.

I learned in my childhood that feeling was not something you expressed, or told people existed because that is the way they find you and hurt you.

In my youth my feelings were often connected to my relationships, while almost none of them were healthy relationships they existed.

Today I’ve spent over 40 years suppressing emotions and not allowing myself to feel because there is only 1 place I’ve ever felt totally safe to have emotions. When I say:

I.NEED.

I am saying I need someone here with me to inflict pain upon me to give the tears permission to flow, the sobbing to happen and the breathing to be jagged.

I need welts and bruises that linger so in the days after I know for that one period of time I was alive.  So alive.

Tonight though I am just gonna watch Scandal and forget for a moment that this is a day off without pay in the weeks before I need to start buying furniture. I’m going to give myself this day and not allow it to turn into a week.

 

or more.

 

Aphrodite Brown