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Sep. 29th, 2020 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardI've been doing pretty Not Well recently, which, well, on the one hand, whom amongst us etc., but on the other is...not great for me.
My hands are...not good. I'm genuinely not sure what's up with them -- I'm still having some wrist issues on and off, but I'm also having joint pain in my fingers that may correlate with increased humidity and pressure changes, since it seems to flare up on days when it's raining or about to rain. (I.e., yesterday and today have been pretty bad.) It's not gotten to a point where I can't actually use my hands, but obviously it's not great, either, because ha ha, I can't concentrate when I'm in pain. It also has me extremely freaked out, which is also obviously not great, and isn't helping my anxiety either. I've been hesitating on calling the health center about it since I was there a month ago for my wrists and what if they can't figure it out either, or say it's just stress, or...these aren't good excuses. (Also I haven't followed up on the PT referral I got for my wrists, and what if they're like "uh, you need to do that first," despite the fact that this is my fingers.) And I'm scared that there's just nothing to be done -- that it's never going to get better and will just get worse and I won't be able to write or knit or anything. ETA: I think I'm also starting to get some pain in my ankle joints? But I'm less sure of that and maybe it's psychosomatic.
My anxiety is up pretty badly -- how badly fluctuates based on what else is going on around me and how much it immediately affects me, but it's um. not at my pre-2020 baseline, which was even then not good. (My usual measure for judging how bad it is, aside from the obvious physical panic attack symptoms, is if I'm having flashes of things going wrong that are fairly concrete and fairly innocuous -- knocking my glass over onto my keyboard or my bed as I walk by, for example, which is something that really only started happening last year. Like, it's something I always had in the back of my head as a possibility, but it's only within the past year that I started having sensory flashes of it happening.) School stuff going wrong, another possibility -- I actually missed the fee payment deadline and paid it late, because I got the dates mixed up. I had official (digital) paperwork to file for my candidacy, required information from the department, and didn't get it back until the day before the deadline, which meant that I was in a tailspin of anxiety for the week between submitting it to the department and getting it back to submit to the graduate school, since missing that deadline would have meant losing my funding. House anxiety is back -- I had a moment of Fridge Panic a few weeks ago (it's fine), there have recently been some sounds that might be animals in the ceiling, and there are weird tiny bugs in the bathroom (occasionally other rooms) that I've never seen before. Plus, as you know, plague and America and my father is still in Thailand.
My ability to Do Things is shot. I'm not tracking super well (evident in how many of the daily progress reports I do on Tumblr involve some variation of the phrase "I have no idea what I did today"), and while I'm supposed to be doing dissertation research I...am not. Or I'm doing so very slowly. (I'm also currently less willing to type because, well, hand/wrist issues.) I've picked up some library books from the university library (pickup by appointment only), so I have those to read, as well as a lot of other things; my advisor wants me to do some writing but I can barely even read right now. I need to clean and organize my house -- I've had art that's needed to go up on the walls for months (years in some cases), but right now it's on the couch. I have some projects (cosplay) I want to work on and have most of the materials for, I just...have not.
I'm sleeping a lot. This is partially because I'm not self-regulating very well -- I've been consistently going to bed at 3-4 am and then getting up between noon-2 pm, which I hate, but can only really change on a day when I have a meeting of some sort that requires me to be up, and then I'll get up at the bare minimum amount of time to be presentable on Zoom. Which I did to some extent beforehand, but when those meetings had to be in person I'd have to be up early enough to also eat and walk up to campus, and these days, well -- I have Old English at 10:30 on Monday mornings and usually get up at 10ish, don't eat, and drink my tea while in class, usually on about six hours of sleep because I can't seem to change up my going to bed time. I had a webinar at 2 today and got up at 1:30 or so, and didn't even breakfast until afterwards, at maybe 3:30/4. (Though I woke up at maybe noonish and then just lay in bed hating my hands because my fingers hurt.) There just never seems to be a really compelling reason to wake up -- on Saturday I managed to fuck it up so badly that I made myself sick because I was in bed so long I got dehydrated. So I know that's like, bad, and a capital D depression symptom.
I'm trying to go for a walk every day, which has been mostly successful even on days when it's raining (and it's been raining an unusual amount this past couple of months), but I know I'm still not getting as much physical activity as I would have done before, when I was walking up to campus and back almost every day. There's a lot of workouts on YouTube, I guess, and I should have access to my mom's Jazzercise streaming subscription -- I know the fact that I'm at my dining table on my laptop 90% of the day isn't helping anything.
I'm also...not interacting with anyone outside of Zoom, or those brief interactions at the grocery store or the farmer's market. I live alone and don't have any close local friends, and for that matter, even my caucus ignores me when I say "hey, let's hang out on Zoom," which was last week and getting zero response from them seriously shook me. Even last fall when I was working on my portfolio I knew not having human interaction for a while would drive me up the wall, which is why I ended up auditing a class all semester, and now it's...worse, because there are zero options. (I'm not even having social distanced hangouts because I DON'T HAVE ANY LOCAL FRIENDS.) And my mother is on the other side of the country, and my father has still trapped himself in Thailand, and all my plans got canceled -- I just feel a bit like I'm on the verge of meltdown. I'm trying to decide whether to go back to Washington for a month or two, and if so, when -- I don't want to be there during the election if my father is there, but ha, he's still in Thailand. I don't want to travel over the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays for obvious reasons. I'm anxious about leaving this house for any extended period of time. Also, plague. There's been some conversation with an out-of-state friend of mine about her either coming to visit during election week so that no one's alone during Oh God, That; we were talking about going somewhere (and being Very Very Careful) but given that Florida just lifted all of its covid mandates...perhaps not. We'll see.
I just feel really bad generally because nothing is getting done and everything is on fire and my hands hurt and most of my coping mechanisms are off the table because my hands hurt and just...everything is bad. I did type all this, so like, I can type.
I've been buying a ridiculous amount of candles lately.
My hands are...not good. I'm genuinely not sure what's up with them -- I'm still having some wrist issues on and off, but I'm also having joint pain in my fingers that may correlate with increased humidity and pressure changes, since it seems to flare up on days when it's raining or about to rain. (I.e., yesterday and today have been pretty bad.) It's not gotten to a point where I can't actually use my hands, but obviously it's not great, either, because ha ha, I can't concentrate when I'm in pain. It also has me extremely freaked out, which is also obviously not great, and isn't helping my anxiety either. I've been hesitating on calling the health center about it since I was there a month ago for my wrists and what if they can't figure it out either, or say it's just stress, or...these aren't good excuses. (Also I haven't followed up on the PT referral I got for my wrists, and what if they're like "uh, you need to do that first," despite the fact that this is my fingers.) And I'm scared that there's just nothing to be done -- that it's never going to get better and will just get worse and I won't be able to write or knit or anything. ETA: I think I'm also starting to get some pain in my ankle joints? But I'm less sure of that and maybe it's psychosomatic.
My anxiety is up pretty badly -- how badly fluctuates based on what else is going on around me and how much it immediately affects me, but it's um. not at my pre-2020 baseline, which was even then not good. (My usual measure for judging how bad it is, aside from the obvious physical panic attack symptoms, is if I'm having flashes of things going wrong that are fairly concrete and fairly innocuous -- knocking my glass over onto my keyboard or my bed as I walk by, for example, which is something that really only started happening last year. Like, it's something I always had in the back of my head as a possibility, but it's only within the past year that I started having sensory flashes of it happening.) School stuff going wrong, another possibility -- I actually missed the fee payment deadline and paid it late, because I got the dates mixed up. I had official (digital) paperwork to file for my candidacy, required information from the department, and didn't get it back until the day before the deadline, which meant that I was in a tailspin of anxiety for the week between submitting it to the department and getting it back to submit to the graduate school, since missing that deadline would have meant losing my funding. House anxiety is back -- I had a moment of Fridge Panic a few weeks ago (it's fine), there have recently been some sounds that might be animals in the ceiling, and there are weird tiny bugs in the bathroom (occasionally other rooms) that I've never seen before. Plus, as you know, plague and America and my father is still in Thailand.
My ability to Do Things is shot. I'm not tracking super well (evident in how many of the daily progress reports I do on Tumblr involve some variation of the phrase "I have no idea what I did today"), and while I'm supposed to be doing dissertation research I...am not. Or I'm doing so very slowly. (I'm also currently less willing to type because, well, hand/wrist issues.) I've picked up some library books from the university library (pickup by appointment only), so I have those to read, as well as a lot of other things; my advisor wants me to do some writing but I can barely even read right now. I need to clean and organize my house -- I've had art that's needed to go up on the walls for months (years in some cases), but right now it's on the couch. I have some projects (cosplay) I want to work on and have most of the materials for, I just...have not.
I'm sleeping a lot. This is partially because I'm not self-regulating very well -- I've been consistently going to bed at 3-4 am and then getting up between noon-2 pm, which I hate, but can only really change on a day when I have a meeting of some sort that requires me to be up, and then I'll get up at the bare minimum amount of time to be presentable on Zoom. Which I did to some extent beforehand, but when those meetings had to be in person I'd have to be up early enough to also eat and walk up to campus, and these days, well -- I have Old English at 10:30 on Monday mornings and usually get up at 10ish, don't eat, and drink my tea while in class, usually on about six hours of sleep because I can't seem to change up my going to bed time. I had a webinar at 2 today and got up at 1:30 or so, and didn't even breakfast until afterwards, at maybe 3:30/4. (Though I woke up at maybe noonish and then just lay in bed hating my hands because my fingers hurt.) There just never seems to be a really compelling reason to wake up -- on Saturday I managed to fuck it up so badly that I made myself sick because I was in bed so long I got dehydrated. So I know that's like, bad, and a capital D depression symptom.
I'm trying to go for a walk every day, which has been mostly successful even on days when it's raining (and it's been raining an unusual amount this past couple of months), but I know I'm still not getting as much physical activity as I would have done before, when I was walking up to campus and back almost every day. There's a lot of workouts on YouTube, I guess, and I should have access to my mom's Jazzercise streaming subscription -- I know the fact that I'm at my dining table on my laptop 90% of the day isn't helping anything.
I'm also...not interacting with anyone outside of Zoom, or those brief interactions at the grocery store or the farmer's market. I live alone and don't have any close local friends, and for that matter, even my caucus ignores me when I say "hey, let's hang out on Zoom," which was last week and getting zero response from them seriously shook me. Even last fall when I was working on my portfolio I knew not having human interaction for a while would drive me up the wall, which is why I ended up auditing a class all semester, and now it's...worse, because there are zero options. (I'm not even having social distanced hangouts because I DON'T HAVE ANY LOCAL FRIENDS.) And my mother is on the other side of the country, and my father has still trapped himself in Thailand, and all my plans got canceled -- I just feel a bit like I'm on the verge of meltdown. I'm trying to decide whether to go back to Washington for a month or two, and if so, when -- I don't want to be there during the election if my father is there, but ha, he's still in Thailand. I don't want to travel over the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays for obvious reasons. I'm anxious about leaving this house for any extended period of time. Also, plague. There's been some conversation with an out-of-state friend of mine about her either coming to visit during election week so that no one's alone during Oh God, That; we were talking about going somewhere (and being Very Very Careful) but given that Florida just lifted all of its covid mandates...perhaps not. We'll see.
I just feel really bad generally because nothing is getting done and everything is on fire and my hands hurt and most of my coping mechanisms are off the table because my hands hurt and just...everything is bad. I did type all this, so like, I can type.
I've been buying a ridiculous amount of candles lately.