Sometimes I think the internet is bad for me, that I spend too much time on it, that maybe it exacerbates my problems instead of helping.

On the other hand, when I have bad nights I will sit and click through tumblr and realize I am now focussing on geeky slashfic or a funny story about someone accidentally buying a giant squeaky duck toy, and for a little while I'm not fighting the urge to hurt myself or worse.  Without the internet I would just be sitting here alone with that urge and that would be worse.

Lost people

Woke up and cried again today.  This is getting to be a theme.  This time my ex wasn't the trigger, it was C.  I popped to the shops before the barbecue to grab some bits and pieces yesterday and she was there.  Long story short she was my friend and now she's not.  I've never gotten any closure on it because the last time I spoke to her we were good friends, hell last time I saw her I spent christmas at her house, with her and her husband and her daughter, and she made it clear I was part of the family.  We'd never fallen out, she'd never expressed any issues with me.  Her husband had been my best friend for a very long time and we'd progressed to being in a poly relationship, although that hadn't worked out and we were back to just being friends.  He wasn't taking it very well though, and things had been strained.  After christmas there was an incident and I said I needed space from him for a while.  I went away for a couple of weeks.  By the time I got back C hated me and didn't want me to be part of their family any more, didn't want me to have contact with her daughter or her husband.  W (her husband) told me about this.  I never got to speak to her about it.  I was just told that she no longer wanted anything to do with me, and whilst he had won out on being allowed contact with me and for me and him to try to rebuild our friendship it took a lot of arguing, and she basically saw me as the freaking antichrist apparently.  Which was very hard to understand given the last time I saw her she was so clear on the fact that I was family.  Either she'd been hiding having problems with me very well for a long time, and me wanting space from W was the last straw, or... *shrugs* I know she'd had a hard year, both with health problems and relationship stuff with W, as far as I can tell she suddenly decided all the latter were my fault, despite having been fine with it all at the time.  I made it very fucking clear that if she was ever uncomfortable with anything between me and W that I would end it, no question.  She insisted she was fine with it and that she was glad it had happened and she thought it was good for their family.  Hell, she was talking about me maybe moving in with them one day or me being a surrogate for her and W to have a child, shit like that, at points.  So either she's a very convincing liar or something changed, and I don't know what.  I feel like I'm missing some important piece of the puzzle, but I don't know what.

Anyway, I saw her outside the shop yesterday.  I focussed on using my phone and pretended I hadn't seen her when I went in, to avoid the awkwardness of her blanking me or whatever would have happened. I don't know if she even saw me.  But it made me really sad.  And today it came back to me and I found myself imagining us meeting and me not blanking her and us ending up talking and it all turning out to have been some huge misunderstanding and us hugging and it all being okay... even though I know that's not what's going to happen.  It's been made clear to me by mutual friends that I am dead to her, essentially, and so me going up and saying hello really would not have ended that way.  And I just started crying and crying.  I miss her.  She was my friend and everything's been so focussed around all the drama with W that I feel like everyone's ignored the fact that I lost a friend and I don't even fucking know why.  I mean, clearly it was something to do with everything with W, that she felt betrayed by me pulling away from him or mad that I'd hurt him or felt betrayed by them letting me into their home for christmas and me then pulling away, but none of that really makes sense on its own, to go from family to I never want to see you again and I never want you to have anything to do with my entire family ever again.  It hurts to have someone who cared about you decide you're basically evil.

I also miss their daughter like crazy.  I've cried so so much over missing her.  I'm allowed to see her again now, if it's with our mutual friend who looks after her, but I haven't seen her to arrange it yet for various reasons.

But missing C led to thinking of my sister who's also in the last year decided she wants nothing to do with me.  That really really fucking hurts.  And again over pretty much nothing.  There was this stupid thing over G+, when she told me how fibromyalgia isn't a serious disabling condition and I could control it with exercise if I just tried, and how she *wished* she just had such a mild condition like that that she could fix so easily, instead of having arthritis as well, which is a *proper* disease.  I disagreed, provided sources, pointed out the errors in the article she linked about fibro and exercise, and said that I had no interest in playing the 'whose illness penis is bigger' game.  Which I thought was pretty restrained. But apparently this was me bullying her, and I sicced all my friends on her (some of my friends also posted on the open G+ thread to disagree politely with her - this all started from me posting a '10 things not to say to someone with fibromyalgia' thing, and her immediately posted to say most of them).  Anyway. I figured this was just a stupid little falling out and things would be back to normal soon after - we're not close, we see the world very differently, so our interactions are mostly birthday and christmas cards and presents and small talk when we see each other at family things, when she makes thinly veiled digs at me and I try to find non-controversial areas of interaction or avoid her.

But this time she persisted, she didn't send christmas cards or presents - I sent hers as usual, via my mum, and my mum reported back that my sister had been very surprised, as she thought we were having some kind of feud or something, but that if I wasn't going to be petty she wouldn't either. Then she got pregnant and didn't tell me, I found out eventually from my mum.  She set up a website to put all the scans and then later baby photos on, and instructed my parents not to let me know about it (my dad let slip).  She didn't tell me when the baby was born, again my mum let me know, and I didn't see any baby photos.  I finally met the baby when I came down to visit for my dad's birthday, but she didn't let me hold him.  She didn't send a card for my birthday.  I asked my mum for her address so I could send presents for my nephew and my mum embarrassedly told me that actually she didn't think A would want me to have it, so if I wanted to send anything it would have to be via mum and dad.

I KNOW that she's the one who's acting like a kid here, I know this all started with her saying hurtful things to me, I know it's not me in the wrong here really.  But it still hurts and I still miss her. I don't like her very much, she's often a pretty unpleasant person. But she's my sister, and I thought no matter what she would always be my sister.  But apparently she's decided she doesn't really want to be my sister any more.  My mum says she disapproves of the choices I've made in life. I'm not sure which choices those are.  I think the ones where I didn't just buck up and get over my fibro and get back to work probably.  I know she disapproves of me roleplaying and stuff - it's kids stuff and I should have grown up by now.  I don't know what else. She pretty much just disapproves of me. All of me.  She's never liked me. She's done nice things for me, but her attempts to reach out to me when I was younger were always attempts to fix me, to teach me how to be better, how to be more like her.

I still can't help feeling guilty though, feeling like this is all my fault.  I pushed her away.  She knows I don't like her just as I know she doesn't like me.  As a kid I was always closer to my other two sisters and I didn't really hide it.  I've fucked up and forgotten her birthday and shit like that lots of times (I also forget other people's birthdays, it's not just hers, but yeah it was probably hers more often than others). I haven't always responded so well to her attempts at friendship (generally cause they were so full of her judging me and trying to fix me, but still).  My other sister put a thread up on g+ with a limited circle complaining about some things she'd done (which were pretty fucking out of order) and how frustrated she was and part of my response was that I'd given up on her.  'Cause I kinda had, I'd given up on her ever understanding me or acting in a way that I would want my sister to act. That doesn't mean I'd given up on her being my sister though, or that I'd stopped loving her.  It turned out she'd messed up and my sister's partner could see the whole thread.  He agreed not to share it with her cause he thought it wouldn't be helpful for anyone, but I'm worried in case he did and she decided to give up on me because of that.  And my little sister S said that when the whole G+ thing happened A (the sister in question) had mentioned an e-mail one of my friends had sent that she considered me to have been behind.  I haven't been able to find out who sent it or what it said or even if it really existed (S wasn't sure if she'd just misinterpreted A talking about the G+ comments) - but I worry about what might have been in that, if that's what's caused all of this, given she thought I was behind it.

I don't know. I just know that she's my sister and I don't want her to hate me.  I still love her.  I may not like her very much but I still love her, and I don't think she loves me any more.

The last time I saw her before everything fell apart things went really well, too, the best they've gone in a long time.  She'd arranged this birthday party for my mum's 60th, and we all came down, all the family and friends, and I helped out wherever I could, and me and A actually got on pretty well, she didn't snipe at me for the whole day, and I remember it felt so fucking nice, I was so glad to have us actually feel like we were on the same side for once, like she didn't despise me for once.

And then it all went wrong, and it doesn't feel fixable this time.  I'm trying to just be the mature one, to wait it out, to still get her birthday and christmas presents, to still make things for her son (my nephew - I want to be part of his life, but I'm pretty sure a big part of this is that she doesn't want me to in any way be a potential influence on him - she thinks I'm a failure and she doesn't want him to be like me).

Anyway.  I've been crying on and off for the past 2.5 hours because of C and A and just generally all the people I feel like I've lost in the past year or so - W is still technically my friend but nothing like before, and my ex, and C and A and C+W's daughter, and I'm still mourning the loss of Y - my best friend from school. I feel like I'm trying so hard to do the right thing and to be a good person but I still just keep losing people because of who I am.  Which is reinforcing my feeling of being a complete failure and pretty much worth despising right now.

Passing protractors

This isn't about crazies, but I just wrote it for my G+ and it occurred to me that it would make sense to share it here too:

Y'know, it's funny the memories that stick. Tiny little things that were important.  In my Year 9 SATs, around 13 years ago now, John passed me his protractor.

We were taking the higher maths paper and there were only about five of us.  The school hall was set up to accommodate a regular sized exam, so it was full of tables and chairs in rows, and there was a weird atmosphere when we got there.  Me and Jenny and John and I don't remember who the other two were. John was the undisputed maths genius of the year.  He was just John the rest of the time, lanky, spotty, his voice had been mid-breaking for what seemed like forever, he wasn't popular but he wasn't picked on.  He was part of the group. But everyone know he kicked ass at maths. The rest of us were just the people that were top in everything, we had no special aptitude for maths in particular.  

We didn't hang out as a group, and it felt odd to have just us few together for an exam.  Me and John weren't really friends.  I don't mean we disliked each other, or even that we were in different friendship groups.  We were in the same friendship group, we just... never really talked.  I had a bit of a weird relationship with boys back then still anyway - they were kind of an alien species, and I mostly had crushes on them from afar - but I had a friendship of sorts with Chris and Nicky and Dave.  We could talk about stuff sometimes, I walked home the same way as Chris and Dave sometimes, and me and Nicky even had long phone conversations.  But me and John never clicked.  He was painfully shy, which didn't help.  He was friends with Jenny though, they hung out all the time. And I still hung out with Jenny quite a bit then too.  So sometimes the three of us would hang out. But somehow it was still me hanging out with Jenny, and John hanging out with Jenny.  Just at the same time.  

So it's the day of the maths exam and we're in the room between the cafeteria and the hall, where the cubby holes and coat-hooks are, putting away our bags and getting out our calculators and pencil cases.  I wasn't really well prepared - organisation wasn't my strong suit. Nor was pretty much anyone.  We'd had so many exams over that week we'd gotten kind of blase about them.  I had writing implements and my calculator. I might have had a pair of compasses? Not sure.

The time came, and we filed in in silence, John first, then me and then the others. They'd placed the papers on a single column of tables by the exit.  It didn't feel like a real exam, given how few of us there were, and the teachers weren't really treating it as one either.  They told us no talking, no mobiles, but didn't bother with the spiel, just let us sit down and get on with it. 

So we did.  And halfway through I hit the question that required a protractor.  We never needed a protractor.  It just didn't come up.  Ever.  But bam, there it was.  So I left it for the time being and moved on. I was about three quarters of the way through when I heard my name whispered and looked up to see John looking back at me. He looked back to the front and then nonchalantly passed his protractor back to me.  

The teachers weren't paying attention, and christ, we were hardly cheating anyway, but it FELT like such a huge deal.  They made a huge fuss out of telling us ANY communication would lead to being failed not just for that exam, but ALL of your exams, just in case you'd cheated in them too. And it just didn't seem like John to take a risk like that, especially not in maths, and especially not for me.  

I took the protractor.  I used it.  I passed it backwards.  It travelled down the whole group, as no one but John had remembered to bring one.  I don't know if the teachers saw but didn't care, or if we were sufficiently sneaky about it. But not a word was said.  

I just remember that feeling of suddenly being linked.  We were now a group.   It was pretty fucking rare at that point for me to feel properly part of a group, not just tolerated, not the outsider.  We were all in it together.  And John made us that group, and made me part of it.  And that meant a quite disproportionate amount to me, so much so that I still feel happy when I remember it.  Hell, so much so that I still remember it, despite my sieve-like memory, despite not knowing what I got in that exam, despite having had to piece together all the external pieces of where it was and why and what was happening.

It's just one of the moments that mean nothing and a great deal all at once, so I thought I would share it with you all.

Sorry for lack of updates.  I've had ideas for posts sometimes but haven't been able to put any words down.

I was remarkably stable for a few weeks - not entirely sure how long, but much longer than usual.  Definitely doing the best I've done in a long time.  Kept my flat relatively tidy (by my standards), was getting up and getting dressed most days, wasn't having suicidal dips or intrusive thoughts about self harm.  So it was good timing to get the letter through saying I've been found fit for work.

Well, I suppose there's no good time to get that letter, but it could have arrived at a much worse time.  As it was I was upset and angry, I cried and I ranted, but I didn't sink into despair like I would have done a couple of months ago.  I managed to research appeals, rang and requested the form and the report and requested a reconsideration, and began filling it out.

I think it might have disturbed the stability I'd achieved though - my mood dropped over the following week. Still not as badly as it's done before, but I was tearful a lot - not over the ESA decision, other things.  Mostly over missing my ex - we've been broken up nearly a year, but it was a four year relationship and we were very serious - we were trying for a baby just before everything went wrong.  I think it was for the best we broke up, and we've remained friends to some extent, but sometimes I just miss him like crazy.  Over the past week I've found myself weeping pretty much out of nowhere over missing him at least four times now.  I think that's less about missing him and more about my mood dropping though - I would be weeping over something else if it wasn't him probably.  Anyway, things have been less good.  The flat had started to get messy anyway for Reasons, and over the past week my ability to tidy up seems to have disappeared and it's turned into a pigsty.  My ability to do anything productive seems to have vanished.  The urge to self harm came back.  My self esteem dropped - I realized that I didn't understand how anyone could actively like me - I mean, I could be convenient, I could listen when someone needs to talk, and I can be not-unpleasant to be around, but I'm not actually interesting or funny like other people, there's no substance to me.  Mostly people stay around because they pity me because I'm crazy now.  There's no way my ex could miss me because there's nothing to miss.  I managed to identify this and that it sounded like crazies, but at the same time I couldn't find a way to believe it wasn't true.

Today though I seem to have come up - I've been in a somewhat silly mood.  Still not able to do anything *productive* really, but very excitable and enthusiastic about other things, pissing about on the internet and putting lots of ALLCAPS POSTS ZOMG and talking SO MUCH and faster and singing silly songs even though we were in public and so on.  My pain and fatigue are still flaring though, which has put a lid on it somewhat.  I wanted to skip and pull my boyfriend along by the hand and dance around like a mad thing and talk about all the things but I hurt too much and now I'm lying down resting and I feel very tired and I have a headache and I've calmed down some.

Again, not nearly as bad as it gets, and my brain feels fast but not really racing and tangled yet.  It's still at that kinda nice stage.  Although I'm a bit concerned about tonight - I've got a game with friends (Serenity roleplay) and I know I'm going to be silly and unable to concentrate and won't take things seriously and the gm will get annoyed with me :/ Pain makes concentrating difficult *anyway*, this really won't help.

Ah well, see how it goes.

Kicked off ESA

So the letter finally turned up. I have been awarded either 6 or 0 points, depending on where in the letter you read (it contradicts itself), and found fit for work and my benefit stopped.

I raged and cried and raged some more and then I wrote a song. It's dedicated to the DWP, ATOS and the Tories.

It's called 'Fuckweasels'

(And yes, I will be appealing - the list of reasons included lots of blatant lies that directly contradict the evidence I provided and the answers I gave to the assessor.)

It's been over a month now. My fibro flare-up seems to have ended, and all the bruises are long gone.  My tooth is nearly back to normal (it's not wobbly any more and only feels a little odd when pressure is put on it, and I don't taste blood in my mouth often any more).  My mood is pretty stable, comparatively.  I'm far from sane, but I'm about as good as I've gotten in quite a while.  I think it's only been a few days though, I'm not sure.  I know my mood's been low and high at various points over the past month, so I haven't stopped swinging or anything, but I am at least getting some relatively moderate periods, and on the whole I've been better than I was.  I've been unmedicated for this past month, and I'm still undecided about what to do about that. Given I tried to kill myself it seems sensible to try upping my meds, but given I've been the same or better since coming off them I can't help wondering if I should stay off.  On the other hand, my moods are still swinging, and sooner or later I'm likely to drop back down badly again. It might be sensible to go back on meds now and start ramping them up.  I was on a potentially sub-therapeutic dose before, only 300mg carbamazepine daily, when the normal lower end for bipolar disorder is 400mg I believe, so it might be worth going back onto them but at a higher dose.  I'm nervous of doing anything that could affect my mood while I'm doing better though.  I know I should go see my doctor and let her have some say in this, and I do need to go back, but I'm nervous of going without knowing what I want to happen.

It might sound silly, but I'm nervous of going back now I'm doing better in case she doesn't believe how bad it was.  It would have been best if I could have gone back right after, when I was so obviously a mess, but I couldn't cope with it then.  It's how it pretty much always works, I can't cope with seeing a doctor at the time when I probably most need to, so they never really get how bad it is.

My friend has been to Mind for me, and she's arranging a meeting for me with them at the beginning of next week.  They might be able to help get the fee for obtaining my notes down, and they can help me make my complaint. I need to bring notes on what happened.  Which means going back through the posts I wrote on here and writing a concise version.  I'm kind of nervous about it, because I know reading it all through again is likely to put me in a bad place, mentally.  But it needs doing, and better to do it while I'm in a relatively stable place than have to try to do it once my mood's really low again.  Probably best to leave it for tonight though.  Do it tomorrow or Sunday, in the afternoon, I guess.

My mood's in a melancholy sort of place at the moment.  I've been relatively stable lately, compared to how bad it gets, but sometimes I just feel very down and lonely, but in a peaceful sort of way.  Not a desperate angry despairing down, just a deep sad wish for something more, for my life to be better, for life to be better, to be not broken, to be not alone, to have some idea of how to pass my life in a way that will have meaning for me.  To be not crazy.

Sometimes I feel like I accidentally fell off my life and I don't know how to get back on.