Patreon Letter: 28th February 2019

Hey folks, Jackson here! 

If you're keeping track, this is the Patreon letter I owe for my last weekend. Not this one. Where I owe another letter. Our hell peroid of a packed schedule continues, thanks everyone for being so understanding!

Anyway I don't have much to talk about. This isn't going to be the usual letter where I've watched a film or played a game and am going to proceed to talk about it. I've had a really hard couple months and they don't seem to be getting easier any time soon and I wanted to talk about it, I suppose. It's time for Mental Health talk. I apologise if this is indulgent, but outside of kinda incoherently venting on alt, I haven't had the space to talk about it. This is literally going to be me explaining my brain for a few hundred words. 

So, diagnoses are a weird thing. In 2013, I was diagnosed with Autism, Anxiety, Depression, and also a general shrug in the direction of ADHD and/or OCD. Which is a scary list I suppose but really what it communicates is that I didn't fit that well into any of the treatment boxes. Whole lot of fun stuff going on in my brain, is the point. At the time, depression was easily my most material struggle, but as time has gone on and I've adjusted to just being kind of normally sad all the time, that's changed. On a day to day basis, the most debilitating thing for me is my anxiety and specifically my OCD. or ADHD. or whatever the more specific diagnosis ends up being.

I can't focus. When I sit down to say, watch a movie, my brain is just on fire thinking about everything else and focusing on the thing in front of me is hard at the best of the times. This is why I'm so hilariously bad with spoilers, because I will just obsess over any meaningless detail and take any excuse to break focus. This was bad, but managable until just over two months ago when a new episode of more powerful intrusive thoughts started basically out of nowhere. I can pinpoint the exact moment it began, it was like I was a pokemon evolving into a new form of normal brain, which is very surreal and not really how brains usually work.

Anyway not only has this meant I have, since December, not been properly able to focus on anything like I would like, it also means that because my brain is working pretty hard during these times I form these intense connections between utterly unrelated things that usually go like this. [X] thought gives me anxiety attacks => "oh no i hope that doesn't ruin gundam" => every time i think of gundam i think of [X] => congratulations you now have anxiety attacks about your favourite cartoon!

This is, uh, bad. As a way to be. And it's so strange because it feels so foreign to me, it's not like those really bad teen depressive episodes where you could look at me and tell from my probably hilarious shaking and crying or what have you that this person is extremely a mess. It's separate from me, it's not breaking me down or a danger to my day to day health, it is simply preventing me from engaging with the life that I live and all the things that make my days worthwhile. I can't listen to my favourite song to cheer myself up. Because now that I've thought about my favourite song, my favourite song is ruined. 

Brains are fucking stupid, is my takeaway here. And this is untenable. I hope this doesn't cause too much more disruption to my Abnormal Mapping schedule because I really do love it more than anything and don't want to see it ruined by my own dang brain of all things. The main reason I'm writing this down, formally, is hopefully so I can write another one of these in six months, or in a year, or whenever, and see that I'm making progress in some form or another.

I have an appointment with the doctor next week. I'm hoping they can refer me to therapy that can help with this because boy I need some. This is something that has gone basically untreated for a long time -- my other, very light treatments have never focused on this specifically -- and I hope that I won't just be able to get back to where I was in December, but with help I'll be able to find a more stable way of being a human that I've basically never had before. I want to keep my expectations realistic but also remind myself that this is a serious health issue that has gone almost entirely untreated for years. It is not unreasonable to assume I will be able to do better with some help and hard work than I would be able to do with none.

So yeah. That's this letter, I suppose. A document of a first step. I hope the descriptions of the brain situation weren't too confusing, they really don't make much sense but if they were rational thought patterns they would just be called "thoughts." I will see everyone in the next few days with my next letter. I will not miss a podcast. And I will not let this stop me from enjoying the things that I love so much.

Thanks for indulging me on this one,

Jackson