Easter

Hubby has been officially diagnosed with ADHD- Inattentive subtype. I guess now I can’t get mad at him for forgetting and losing stuff all the time. Darn. It was one of my favourite pastimes.

Really though, I am glad that he is getting help for it. I hope he can learn to manage it better since it had been interfering with his work.

My supervisor asked me how my husband was doing and, for reasons I can not explain, I told her about the ADHD. She seemed really genuinely interested (her husband and daughter have hyperactive subtype ADHD) and she asked me a lot of questions about his diagnoses and our relationship.

I could feel myself getting redder and redder and I was visibly shaking. I didn’t expect her to be so interested, and I also didn’t expect that I would react so strongly. I don’t typically have physical symptoms outside of conflict scenarios. I guess I don’t usually share such personal information with people either.

She kept saying that I was so patient and understanding with him, but I don’t want to paint myself in this false light. I wanted to say “You think _I’M_ patient? You should see what he has to deal with!”. I was so paranoid that she would connect the dots and realize that there was something wrong with me.

It was definitely a weird situation. Serves me right for getting so chatty, I suppose.

We went to spend Good Friday with hubby’s family. It was a long day. We got lots of treats and leftovers to take home. His mum wrote us cheques as a gift, but she put down his last name on my cheque instead of my own. When Hubby and I married, I kept my last name, but his family always addresses me by his last name. I can’t tell if they’re being passive aggressive or if they really don’t remember my last name.

My sister has booked a flight to come down here and visit me in June. I think that will be fun. She’ll be here for nine days. I’m going to make a list of the things we should do while she’s here.

 

The week from hell is over.

It was exhausting and long, but I made it through without losing my job.

On Monday, my husband’s dog died, and two days later, his grandma died as well. I got Monday off to go to the funeral. The past couple of days have been spent packing up her house and trying to help Hubby somehow. I don’t think I’ve been successful at all because, in a lot of ways, I’m more of a wreck than he is. I probably cried harder than anyone else at the funeral and I barely knew her. I cry when I see other people cry and I get all wound up. I never want to go to another funeral ever again.

I needed to be the rock for everyone this week and I didn’t do a good job of that. I’m really more of a sandcastle than a rock. I can present the façade of a fortress, but it doesn’t take a lot to make me crumble.

Today is my first day back to work after my couple of days off. I’m worried that I did things wrong and my boss will be really mad. A big part of me just wants to call in sick and then never show up again.

Hubby has been doing ADHD testing and it looks like he is going to be diagnosed shortly. I feel bad for yelling at him for being such a disaster all the time. I guess it’s not his fault that he loses everything and is incapable of picking up after himself. I hope that we learn ways to help him get more organized. I’m hoping that he will listen to his therapist when he tells Hubby that his ideas are insane schemes and not actual plans. He rarely listen to me about it, but Hubby has this weird reverence for authority figures. He’ll basically do anything they tell him to do and like it.

Next week, I am working more than full-time hours again. I think that’s going to be the new norm. Should be interesting.

 

I have just had a couple of really bad days at work.

My boss yelled at me and I cried in front of a co-worker. I will never be able to figure out a way to keep that boss happy. I’m trying to pretend like it never happened, but it’s just one more thing that makes me scared of her. I work with her the closest of anyone and I get so anxious when we’re alone together.

A customer yelled at me yesterday. I was visibly shaking and I got sick after she left. There was nothing I could do to make her understand the problem at hand.

I’m probably just not cut out for this line of work. I’m too sensitive. But there is no such thing as a conflict-free workplace or a conflict-free life, so I might as well just keep showing up until I run myself into the ground.

I’ve gained a lot of weight recently because I eat junk when I’m stressed. I really need to start eating real food. And no, marshmallow bunnies are not real food. But they are amazing.

 

Beginning of the End

I’m so anxious about work tomorrow. It’s my first official day in my new position and the beginning of my full-time status. People are going to be relying on me a lot more.

I’m not going to get enough time off to recuperate anymore, so I’ll be far more on edge. I’m already feeling worn down.

I wonder if I could pawn off my full-time status on someone else. I could make it look charitable. One of my co-workers really needs the money…

I mean, I guess I really need the money too. But I don’t have to say that.

I feel so nauseous.

A big part of me just wants to quit and never look back. The desire to run away is nearly overwhelming.

I know that’s a bad idea. Financially, it would be a disaster. Plus, I’d basically be ensuring that I never work again.

Still, the thought is very appealing.

 

Just wanna sleep.

I have work in three hours. Why am I still awake? I don’t mind saying, this is pretty bologna.

I found out that hubby has been seeing that girl in secret. When I work a night shift, they go out together.

Always, when he picks me up at work after my shift is over, I ask him how his night was. He always says that he sat at home and played computer games, or caught up on work at home. So… I guess he’s been outright lying to me about where he’s been for the past year. Awesome.

I don’t know why he feels the need to lie about it. It’s not like I’m going to be mad at him for having friends. But I will be mad at him for lying and sneaking around, so why bother?

At least it’s not just me he’s lying to. That girl sent him topless pictures of herself last year, and she asked him yesterday if he deleted them. He told her he had deleted them all, but he actually has them saved in a special folder marked “Personal” in his email. And I know he knows about them because he just made that folder a few days ago. If she only knew half the shit he lies to her about…

I really need to stop looking in his emails. It’s rude and invasive, and the shit I find makes me want to throw up.

Anyways. In other news.

My co-worker is leaving for another job, so I am being promoted to fill her position. I am also being made a full-time employee. I’ll get a small raise and better health benefits. I don’t really know a lot about it and it won’t be made official for another two weeks, but that’s what my boss said.

On the one hand, I’m excited for the extra money and I’m glad that my employer has enough faith in me to promote me so soon (although, there is really no one else to take the position. They’d have to hire someone totally new.) On the other hand, I don’t really know if I’ll be able to handle full-time work. As it is, I have a difficult time managing 30-35 hours a week.

I’ll probably take the job just to make myself useful. I hope that I am able to handle the additional workload and responsibility. I especially hope that I am able to handle it without having a massive freak out at work and panic-quitting like I usually do. I would actually like to keep this job. I’ve done a good job of making most of them think that I have it pretty together.

I can definitely feel my annual mental breakdown coming on though. I think this one’s going to be really special.

I honestly wish I had the guts to just kill myself and get it over with.

I’m tired.

 

Spy

I’m becoming one of those women I hate. You know the type: jealous, paranoid, spying on their partners. I never wanted to be that person.

Late last year, I learned about a fetish site that features local groups and I told hubby about it. We had been curious about learning more about the scene and it seemed like a safe place to do so. Hubby confessed that he had actually been a member for a few years already. I thought it was weird that he hadn’t told me since we are pretty sexually open with each other, but I figured he was just being shy and didn’t know how to bring it up. After he told me, he was really excited to have me join so he could add me as his wife. I didn’t really participate in the site, since it is mostly a forum, and I forgot about it until I got a notification in my email that hubby had upgraded to a premium paid account.

I logged myself on to see what a paid account entailed and was surprised to find my feed full of notifications of his activity: joining local groups, commenting on photos, and adding local girls as his friends. I also had notifications that he was carrying on private conversations with a few of them and I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned his new friends to me. It seemed like a strange thing to be secretive about.

Hubby has always taken great pains to password lock his computer at all times. He sometimes shuts his screen off when I walk in the room and he stops responding to his chats. I noticed that, recently, he’d been doing it a lot more. I thought that he was just being polite by paying attention to me when I am in the room, but now I was becoming paranoid that there was more going on.

For Christmas, my mum got us an iPad. We have to share it and there are no seperate users, so we share the same browser and apps. Sometimes, hubby forgets to log out of his email and Facebook.

Most of the time, I just log out and move on with my life. A few weeks ago, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on, so I read his Facebook messages.

I don’t condone what I did and I hate that I did it. I did learn, however, that he almost had an affair a few months ago with a female friend from university who he still keeps in touch with. She called it off the day before they were supposed to go through with it, not because he was married (which she was fully aware of), but because she didn’t want their friendship to become awkward if things didn’t go smoothly.

I don’t really know what I was expecting. A part of me was totally paranoid that something like this was going on. I didn’t expect it to be with that girl though. I knew that he talked to her a lot, but he constantly complained about her to me. According to him, she is incredibly needy and melodramatic, falling in love with men as soon as she meets them and chasing them so hard that she chases them away. She gets angry when her need for attention is not immediately met and acts petulant until she is apologized to, or if an apology is not forthcoming, throws a massive tantrum and storms away. They’d frequently get into fights because he’d completely ignore her messages because he found her too annoying to deal with. Often, he’d sooth her ego by telling her that his internet connection dropped or that he had to get something out of the oven or some other excuse.

As it turns out, the complaining was a two-way street, because he’d been complaining about me to her all along and now she completely hates me. She trash talks me all the time, saying that I am too lazy, immature, and selfish to get proper care for my mental health problems. Considering that she has substantial mental health problems of her own, I thought she’d be more sympathetic, but she only has sympathy for her own symptoms and situations. She even banned him from talking about me at one point because I made her so angry that she couldn’t stand to see my name. She speaks of me with such vitriol that I physically shake when I think about her now. It’s a lot of hate from someone who my husband considers one of his closest friends, and I’m honestly not sure how to handle it.

I also found out that they’ve been hanging out in secret as well, which was annoying. All those times he was late home from work and blamed it on traffic, he was driving her home. Whenever he went out in the morning for a “quick errand”, he was out for coffee with her. It just seems so pointless. I don’t care if he goes out to hang out with friends. I never have and I’ve made that very clear. So, if there was nothing going on, why lie about it?

Still, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. We had talked about swinging and open relationships in the past, but it wasn’t something either of us felt ready for and it definitely wasn’t something we were going to attempt without sitting down and really talking about first.

Even so, I thought maybe he was misguidedly trying to spice things up by being spontaneous, so I clarified with him. I asked him point blank if he had ever tried to sleep with another girl since we’ve been together, and he swore up and down that he never had. I said “never?” and he insisted that he would have asked me first, like we agreed upon. I told him I wouldn’t be mad if he just told me and he said again that he’s never gone after another girl.

At this point, I was crying and upset. I told him that I knew he was lying to me. He looked hurt and said that he wasn’t lying. I said that I knew he tried to hook up with a girl last summer and he said “No, I didn’t. What girl?”. When I named his friend, he sighed, looked at the floor, and said “yeah…”. I asked him why he would lie to me, and he said he didn’t know. He promised not to lie to me again, but I took it with a grain of salt.

Since then, I haven’t been able to trust him. I haven’t said anything to him about it, but whenever he’s late, I think he’s with her. Whenever he’s alone in his room, I think he’s chatting with her about me. It’s making me crazy. I don’t know what he’s waiting for. If he wants to leave that badly, why won’t he just go?

Tonight, he forgot to log out of his Facebook again and I saw that he’s still chatting with her about me. It’s the same old stuff. He’s mad at me for going off my medication and she says it’s because I’m too lazy to make a doctors appointment and too immature to do anything for myself. That I can’t do anything without him.

It honestly makes me wonder where she’s getting this stuff. Are these things that he’s told her or are they conclusions she’s coming to on her own? And if they are things he’s saying about me, what does that say about what he really thinks of me?

One year ago, I thought I’d finally found someone I could feel comfortable with, and now I feel sick whenever he has a private conversation with someone. What the hell happened? Did I drive him to this? Is this how all my relationships with people are bound to end up? I was an idiot to think that anyone could really love me.

 

Chipmunk Cheeks and Robot Brains

It’s been awhile. Again. I guess a lot has happened since I last wrote.

I’ve been to see the new T five times now. She’s nice enough. It was awkward at first, but I guess I’m warming up to her a little. We’re working through this social anxiety booklet she had me buy. It’s a lot of that CBT stuff I did with my first therapist, but she’s not so rigid about it. She has a much more eclectic style, which I find appealing. She referred to a lot of the spiritual healing stuff that I don’t like as “hippie junk”, so that did a lot to endear me to her.

I’m not really sure where we’re going with these sessions though, since most of the sessions seem to revolve around picking various things I’m afraid of from long lists. I don’t know what she’s doing with the information. I don’t think she’s writing it all down.

She’s known as one of the best psychologists in the city though, and she has a very busy schedule, so she must have some kind of procedure.

Though, the very first session, she had me fill out a form that said she could get all the notes about me from the EAP-T. The second session, she forgot that she got me to sign it and tried to get me to fill it out again until I reminded her and she found it. It’s been a month and a half and she still hasn’t contacted EAP-T. Is that normal? Am I holding her to an unrealistic standard if I think she should follow through on that? I don’t even know.

She’s going away until March, so I won’t see her again for nearly a month. That’s annoying, but also a relief. Since transit went on strike, I have no way to get there anyhow.

I’ve stopped taking the Effexor I was on. I was forgetting everything. I couldn’t even remember my address and phone number when prompted. I was making stupid mistakes at work. I was losing things. It was completely unlike me and I hated it. I could handle the flat affect and sexual dysfunction. The insomnia wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t totally unlivable. But I will absolutely not take a drug that makes me stupid. I can’t be that person.

I never did go back to the doctor. I just stopped taking the Effexor by myself. Hubby keeps pressuring me to go back and try another drug, but I am tired of feeling like a lab rat. That doctor doesn’t even like me. She barely knows me. She’s in the room for five minutes, picks a random drug off a list, writes a scrip, and leaves. I don’t want to risk the side effects again. What if people at work ask me about it? Anyways, I’m uncomfortable going back there. She’ll probably be mad at me for stopping another drug without her permission again. I don’t want her to think I’m being difficult on purpose. I just can’t handle going back there right now.

I got my wisdom teeth taken out a month or so ago. That was pretty gross. haha I ended up getting dry socket on one side, which wasn’t fun. The dentist stuffed the wound with oil of clove and it made my mouth taste like a christmas candle for two weeks. Pretty nasty. On the upside, I no longer bite myself in the face when I chew. On the downside, I have these bizarre pockets in the back of my jaw where the teeth used to be. I’m hoping they’ll grow in over time. Presently, stuff gets stuck in them and it drives me up the wall. It’s so gross.

My direct boss has been in a really terrible mood these past few weeks and she’s been mean to me. When I was on the drugs, it didn’t bother me so much because I had no emotions, but now I feel like crying whenever she’s around. I wish I could get all the benefits of robot feelings without all the other side effects. Then I’d be invincible.

 

Referred

I saw EAP-T for the last time today. I came in and we briefly talked about how I was doing. We talked a lot about the side effects of the new anti-depressant I’m on and she encouraged me to talk about it with my doctor, so I guess I’ll do that next week.

Then she started asking me about work and how I am handling it. I mentioned some things I was concerned about and she asked me a series of questions about other things that concern me in my daily life. She said that she thought I was experiencing a great deal of social anxiety and I agreed. She said that she no longer thought that the daydreaming was about DID and that it was more of a coping mechanism to replace social activity.

It seemed like a good a time as any to introduce the information I had brought in. I was supposed to print off a bunch of my blog entries for her to read, but I didn’t have access to a printer. Instead, I hand-copied some information from the internet for her to read. I had copied down the symptoms of Maladaptive Daydreaming, as well as the names of the people studying it and the names of the articles they had written on the topic. I had the DSM-IV criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder, and I also copied down the section on the Self-deserting Avoidant from the book Personality Disorders in Modern Life by Theodore Millon.

I told her that Maladaptive Daydreaming was actually commonly associated with people who had OCD, AvPD, autism, and Schizoid Personality Disorder and that the symptoms of AvPD really resonated with me.

I was really nervous about giving her the information because, in my experience, professionals get really offended and angry when you try to give them tips, but she was actually really relieved and happy. She said that she had been doing some more reading these last few weeks and she was about to bring up AvPD, but she was worried that I would be upset about it. She had already picked a psychologist to refer me to, a woman who specializes in personality disorders and DBT. She is going to request that I get a formal mental health assessment and diagnosis and that I receive long-term treatment.

So, now I am going to see this new woman. She works even further away than EAP-T does, so it will be a pain in the ass to get there. I’m hoping that she is nice and that it will go well.

In other news, our car is really broken and needs lots of repairs. It will be very expensive and I don’t know how we’re going to afford it. Oh, the car. Why must you forsake me?

I have work tonight, but then I have tomorrow off. I’m hoping that I can sleep in. I was supposed to sleep in a little today, but the cats scratched on my door at 6am because they hate joy.

 

Home alone

It’s that time of year again! I’ll be at home plaguing it up for the next few days. It feels like I’m getting strep throat, but the doctor I saw at the clinic yesterday said it looks more like a virus. We’ll see. Hopefully it’ll clear up soon because I don’t want to miss too much work.

Hubby left for a work trip today. He won’t be back home for a week so I am on my own for the first time in ages. It’s nice to be able to do what I want without worrying about disturbing anyone.

I’ll probably go stir-crazy in a few days though. haha I have to wait for hubby to get home so we can watch our TV shows. Since all I’ve been doing lately is watching TV, I don’t know what to do while I’m waiting for him to come back. Maybe I’ll watch movies or play video games or something.

I finally got a call from EAP-T this morning. I haven’t seen her since she accused me of having multiple personalities. I guess there have been some scheduling issues, but her communication has been terrible. When I left on the 15th (a Tuesday), she said she’d call me on Thursday or Friday to schedule our next appointment. She didn’t call me until the following Tuesday night. When I called her back on Friday (when I got my work schedule) to give her my availability, she took eight days to get back to me.

I dunno. I think that’s just bad form. I know I’m being perfectionistic and holding high standards and all that shit, but that’s just how I feel. I was feeling really rejected and angry and I wanted to ignore the message, but I know that’s just the passive-aggressive side of me being a bitch. I did call her back and accept the appointment for Wednesday morning, so we’ll see how that goes. I’ll probably be over it by then.

The side effects of the Effexor seem to be backing off a little, so that’s good. I may actually be able to sleep through the night by next week! Or eat as many as two meals a day! Ooh la la.

 

Difference of opinion

In response to sanityisknocking’s question on my DID post, this is my explanation of what happened with EAP-T. I am feeling a little more emotionally removed from the topic now and I think I am in a better place to write about it, so here goes.

When I came to EAP-T, I brought her the letter I wrote which I sent to EAP services so that I could be referred to her. One part of that letter reads: “Currently, I spend most of my time daydreaming. It is something that I have been doing since I was a child. These are not fleeting, passing daydreams. They are elaborate, long-term constructs. It’s sort of hard to describe. I guess you could say that I have a group of imaginary friends, which is sort of sad for someone my age, but there you go. The daydreaming makes my time awake more bearable and the characters in my daydreams are woven into every part of my life.”

She asked me to explain further, but I didn’t really know where to start. She asked if I was myself in these daydreams and I said no. She asked me if I was a male or female in these daydreams, and I said I was a male.

I explained that I played the part of a character from a TV show that I like and that I interacted with other characters from that show and other shows/books that I enjoy. I didn’t really believe I was that character, but that I acted as a sort of place-holder for him. I acted out his parts and imagined the parts of the others.

It takes up hours and hours of my day. Every time I am alone, I am in this fantasy world. When I am in public with my headphones on, I am in my fantasy world. When I am sitting quietly in the car with my husband, I am in my fantasy world. I probably spend 80% of my waking hours daydreaming in some form or another.

I also said that I clearly knew the difference between reality and fantasy and that I never got the two confused.

She said that she had never heard of anything like that before and I said that I had a pretty good idea of what it was. I have been on many sites online talking about something called “maladaptive daydreaming”. The people on these sites talk about the exact same issue and it is something the psychiatric world is only just starting to pay attention to. I told her to look it up, but she didn’t. She just told me to stay off those sites for the meantime.

Next, she pulled out a book about diagnosing mental illness and asked me if I’d ever heard of “multiple personality disorder”. When I said yes, she started reading me the diagnostic criteria and asked me how I felt it related to me.

She said I had two personalities with different beliefs and lifestyles. I argued that no one “took over” my body and that it was me the whole time. I could control when I go in and out of it. She insisted that wasn’t relevant.

She said that the personalities can be different ages, different styles of dress, and even have different genders and then looked at me meaningfully. I insisted that I wasn’t having memory problems. All of my time could be accounted for. She said that it’s not necessary for people to lose time in order to have DID.

She said that people with DID often struggle with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Well, yeah. So do a lot of other people. You don’t need DID to be depressed.

After she was done reading the book, she asked me what I thought. I insisted that I knew that I didn’t have DID for all the reasons I stated above. She said that she understood what I was saying, but that she still thought I had DID and wanted to explore it further next session. That was the end of that.

I am thinking of printing out the criteria for maladaptive daydreaming to bring in for her next time. I don’t know if she’ll even consider it to be a real thing since it is still being researched and it is a pretty new concept.

Also, I am really unsure about bringing information in because she might get mad that I am telling her how to do her job. I don’t know if something like that is okay.

What do you guys think? Is it okay to tell your therapist what you think you might have and bring in information to back you up, or is it better to just answer their questions and let them draw the conclusions on their own?