I do care, but disassociation looks pretty damn attractive.

I don't know what to write, but feel like I should.

I had a request to do a session on anger management by one of two people who come to my community group, but it sounds like perhaps, in their case, the anger is justified? I understand you can't haul off and go punching people, but as of a few days ago it sounds like people at the place they're living are physically harming them and stealing their shit. And, of course, they can't just go live somewhere else. That's not how America works. *sigh* So: it feels dumb. Why talk about conflict resolution when the real solution (in my heart of hearts at least) is get the fuck out of there? I mean there probably is some point. Deescalation, etc. But fuck, man. You know? Yes.

Stress results in weird dreams. I'm surprised to say last night's stress dream involved fouettés. Fun how no matter how long it's been since I've taken a ballet class...stress about fouettés? Is eternal.

This game is pretty great, if you ever get the chance to play it. File under: things that shouldn't work, but do.

Someone I used to work with once said they don't believe ghosts can hurt living people because there are still white people alive in the South. I think about that every so often.

It's been pretty quiet this past week. More YouTube than usual, but at least, I suppose, I'm monitoring it while working on homework in the living room and having conversations about what's happening in the videos every now and again. Granted, those are somewhat limited in subject matter, but it's not rampantly unmonitored as it is at my MIL's house.

Speaking of: right before we went swimming yesterday at the Good Pool, my MIL texted S and myself to say that she doesn't want us using her middle name as one of the fetus' middle names. Instead, she would like us to use her first name. First of all: no harm in shooting your shot, but that's not really your choice, bestie (lol). Second: her first name is now mainstream culture/Gen Z/Gen Alpha slang for things that are kind of...meh. So no - no thank you. Third: hormones aren't helping with my unprocessed anger around, like, everything so while I didn't directly respond at all my first impulse was to say, "I'm sorry you've had that experience with your middle name, but I happen to like it a lot - it was even in the running for first name at one time! If you're truly uncomfortable with us using your middle name for fetus, then I'd be willing to pivot to FIL's mother's first name instead. Let me know!"

Anyway, S handled it and appropriately, so I'm pretty happy with the outcome. My catastrophizing drama queen brain had at one point spiraled to if I get any type of pushback whatsoever I'm changing the whole damn name. Because why? See: unprocessed anger. Mostly related to the audacity (MIL) and S being gone up until the day before delivery and doing the equivalent of signing me up for shit I did not agree to explicitly (which are good things and somewhat thoughtful! Except for that I am not fucking managing figuring out childcare and hanging out with people I don't know that are more his friends from AA anyway and just - bestie I am tired and I am trying to finish up grad school. I am not lonely and do not want more moving pieces to coordinate and following through with however much I may, yes, want to check out the coven across the park or go to an ecstatic/dance improv group at 11 on a Sunday - which were two of the activities).

I did actually get as far as contacting the mental health place I have a referral to and messaging them my insurance information as requested. And...that was it. That's the last I heard from them. Now, here's the thing (feel free to skip if I've already gotten into this; I can't fucking remember if I have or not): I'm pretty sure I will not have insurance past mid-May. Why? Because it doesn't appear as thought I can COBRA school-based insurance. I didn't resign or get fired! I just graduated! Which is what you want to have happen, right? Heck yeah. But also: no.

So now I'm probably not going to follow up with them anymore because I now need someplace that will just see me for a flat fee (hopefully), and just stick it out and pay out-of-pocket as far as things like initial pediatric appointments and postpartum followup appointments go, because S will not get insurance through work and, at least as of the last time I tried to do anything with the government marketplace S will also not provide paystubs in a timely manner, and makes too much for me or kids to qualify for a sliding scale pay plan anyway. 

Therefore (because I'm tired of saying 'so'), I'm kind of torn about how to address this.

• Do I have a lil' conversation via text (even though S frequently misunderstands me via text) and say: "Hey. I know you don't want to hear about this, but it is fucking important and I (and your kids) need you to listen and choose a response: you need to figure out if you want to pay for aaaaaaaaaalll of this (healthcare shit) out of pocket, or if you want to get insurance through your company, or if you want to provide me with paystubs to try to do something about it otherwise." 
• Do I just figure it out on my own as I have been doing this whole time? That hasn't made me feel the best about life, but it has been the most functional from a bottomline standpoint so far.
• Some secret third option?

Anyway, that's all I got for today. Happy Sunday. T-minus 12 days until dissertation, 14 until surgery. Wewt wewt.

Steps that turn into extra steps (multiplying exponentially) from here to the horizon

Things have been somewhat peaceful the last few days, although I'm concerned that I'll jinx it by naming it.

Yesterday's sun has turned into overcast and resulted in some light snow. I continue to be not very good at getting L to school on time, but she hasn't overtly shown any discomfort with this. We are only 2 days in, though, I suppose. S is having a good-ish time in Cordova. Last night he said he intends to get back the day before I'm supposed to go in for surgery. Which is scheduled for 5:30 AM the next day. I've been telling the fetus she needs to stay in until at least the afternoon of May 1st. After that it is whatever. But she is tracking at exactly the number of weeks I allegedly am, so unless she gets a wild hare, so that's good.

I'm trying to focus on appointments this week, wrapping up capstone things for on-site this week and getting all the presentation stuff ready next week since I'm having my defense nearly a week earlier than anyone else.

On my list today are:

- verifying: did I get a prescription for the vaccine I'm supposed to get this week?
- eye appointment. Bleh. Bleh because the place I go is a little bougie and the front desk people are always stressed out there's always a little bit of miscommunication between the provider and the front desk person resulting in no followup appointments being scheduled for the main issue I have anymore which has something to do with my eye pressure threatening to be too high. Whatever. It's time. Get. It. Done.
- getting the damn RSV vaccine; if by some crazy random happenstance I can't get it that is one of maybe 3-5 reasons why I wouldn't go to graduation.
- a nap
- finishing a lecture
- picking L up from school
- dropping L off at my mom's house aka her least favorite place to go; and I just...kind of don't blame her? They have great qualities, but, yes, the passive aggression has gotten real real over the years and who wants to be around that? Nobody, that's who.
- doing some acting for lab this evening. Fun! I don't have to grade! Not that I mind grading, actually, but I should probably do other writing more closely related to shit I have to get done this week.
- light chores. For they are always with us.

Finally, a quote from Vicky from The Good Place if I may: "Acting is reacting, and reacting is pre-acting, but pre-acting? Well, that's just being."

Black cat energy? Or just plain 'ol toxic?

My energy, though it hasn't been "in whack" per se for years, is officially "out of whack" as of yesterday. Wiggedy whack. Around 3:00 PM I just hit a wall and subsequently stayed at Site One for another 2.5 hours because I had to. Following that I crawled home and laid down until basically this morning. Woke up around 5:00 AM, had some coffee, and remembered that I have a big, scary, pre-test due tomorrow that if I do not achieve at least a certain score on I will have to pay re-take. And if I don't pass that one, I will not graduate. Ah, yes. There's the stress response that drives me (you? Us all?).

There's this function that's kind of like a filter and kind of like tunnel vision that kicks in at times of extra fatigue which means I can only perceive one task at a time. Yesterday that manifested in not responding to an extremely kind text message for 8 hours. *sigh* 

What if...I really honed-in and tried to take the focus from longer term to short term. Like, moment-by-moment, maybe? And considered the things I am doing and saying and whether these are in alignment with my actual values. One part of me really thinks that could go some way towards reducing moral injury (a concept I don't remember hearing about prior to yesterday). Another part of me thinks that's well and good, but you forget shit on the daily already and it doesn't seem super-likely that this strategy will go any way towards...making that better. You know what? There are way more than two wolves inside me.

Anyway. Some things lately of neutral provenance:

• Doing tarot pulls for if I do versus don't go to graduation, and the cards being kind of...unhelpful. Cards: "If you do go, then you will experience the high of celebration and the crash of being unable to focus on anything but the parts of the decision you regret. If you don't go, you will be resentful of the fact and feel constrained by life circumstance as per the usual." Y-yeah. I know. That's just, like, how my brain works. I could have told you all that. ...you got any actual clarity for me, or...? Perhaps there is some secret third option.
• No fear of hitting hours this week due to being at Site One for an extra day. Things are pretty much set up for next week group and 1:1 session-wise, so I just have to figure out the last week. I also have to determine how Site One wants their toolbox set up. Site Two's is kind of already in-process of getting set up, so that's fine. But otherwise I need to finish (not in order of priority) an interview synthesis, grading for two things, an abstract, a poster, and a Sway portfolio. Oh, and I guess feedback forms for two...three sites?
• Just trying to keep this total unicorn of a person in mind while I'm here in the home stretch. Also it's not a home stretch. It's an infinite series of innings! If I know anything about baseball. Which I don't. Unless that metaphor is about racing. You know what? I'm not looking it up. Because not only do I not know anything about baseball, I also know nothing about racing. Uh...here's a song about that.

[redacted]

I am. So tired. Of my brain. I don't want to feel this way. I really don't.

Twenty-six days 'til surgery.

Five days 'til S leaves for Cordova until...unsure how long?

Four days until I have to take the first full-length NBCOT practice exam.

Three days until L's last drum lesson.

Three labs left until the end of the semester.

Three and-a-half weeks left until I defend my capstone.

Two weeks left at capstone sites (not counting this one).

...there have been intermittent conversations lately about feelings. S's and mine. Nothing new on my end except for gradually increasing anxiety about postpartum. Postpartum was hell last time and (I feel) will be hell this time too. This tends to be dismissed by care providers, friend, spouse; you've got this! Cool cool cool. Love the confidence, still quite concerned about postpartum psychosis especially given *gestures broadly* all of this. "All of this" being in large part about S's difficulty emotionally supporting me as is, much less under...more stress.

That being said there is some ambivalence at play. I am highly concerned about his capacity to be a supportive co-parent and partner to me in situations of escalating stress, because any conversation I try to start about my feelings quickly turn into him talking about himself. And this isn't unexpected. It's just...who he is. It's just a bad setup all around, because I have a lot of trouble self-regulating lately (always?), am pretty BPDey at the best of times, and according to him I can't curate my tone or words in such a way as to not sound dismissive or patronizing. This morning he compared me to my father. I told him that I called the Crisis Hotline a week ago because I didn't feel like I had anyone else to turn to in that moment, and he was just like: "Yeah. Later that day I called [sponsor name] because I needed to talk to other people too." the undertone being that maybe I should try that. 

So I just stopped talking. Not in a silent treatment way (I don't think), just in a *concludes conversation, goes upstairs to do chores/cry/watch Girls5Eva* way. Which could be the same thing, I don't know.

I have other thoughts, but they are kind of a mess, to be honest. I need to stop now and get ready for lab.

Heartbreak Is One Thing. My Ego's Another.

Things are a lot better today. Sunshine. Sammich from a sammich shop (one of the few identifiable cravings I have). S addressing a little bit of the last five days’ nonsense this morning. Very nice dental hygienist this morning. So much so that I think I’m permanently switching to Fridays for dental cleanings. And now, waiting around at site 2! If no one shows up for this group I won’t evict the two men having a meeting in there at all. 

There are two things that OTs are kind of known for (I take it; to me the association was always pediatrics until I started digging), and they are cooking/baking and gardening. Those are two things that I'm not really about - at least not these days. I do remember a time when I used to bake and cook. Baking in my teens, mainly; cooking in my 20s. Gardening when I was a child, but mostly because my dad told us kids to go do it already and what were going to say - no? There have been a few forays since then but I mainly fail at those types of long-term systems maintenance things which probably means they're really good for me, actually, and I should do them the most. 

My sensory system, however, doesn't like them. There's a tool called the Sensory Profile (not creative, but very descriptive) and while it's mostly (in my experience) used for kids, you can use it for adults too and it tells you where you fall in relationship to a normed group of people your same age (it's not divided by gender, though) as regards four types of sensory processing styles. What are they? Thanks for asking! They're: sensory seeking, sensory avoiding, low registration, and sensory sensitivity and once you take the test you find out if you're much less, less, about the same, more, or much more like people in that normed group I talked about in relationship to each um...sensory processing style.

The thought is that if you know that information about yourself then you can kind of hack yourself into being higher functioning or just, you know, feeling better in the world, or (I suppose) requesting accommodations for yourself. It's not a perfect measure but it's the best one out there to my knowledge. Here's the thing though - I think there might be a relationship between sensory processing and addiction. And now that I'm at the end of my capstone I'm kind of out of time to explore that in-depth, but I do want to bring it into some of the interventions I'm doing one-on-one with people here at the end. Because what if someone scores...I don't know...Much More Than Others on sensory sensitivity. Wouldn't engaging in certain types of addictive behaviors or substances level that out? Or what if someone else scored Much Less Than Others on sensory seeking? If I were going forward with this much longer I'd probably start looking at that and try to design a large-scale study to see if there are any correlations between types of substance use/psychiatric diagnoses/sensory processing style.

So if anyone out there is looking for a capstone...there you go, and get on that IRB approval.

Not so great things:

- The dude throwing an almost-empty pack of lucky strikes at a woman on the sidewalk. Hey! Don’t do that.

- Dreams about my grandmother and how her friends were…shitty? Odd dream. She was on some sort of space cruise and I was trying to help her out mobility and ADL-wise, and her friends were just running laps around her and not even stopping to ask her how she was.

- During one of the last groups in which a person attended, he (the person) was talking about things and stuff and in the background, outside the window, someone was dumpster diving. I assume for needles (there is a needle exchange in this building)? Distracting.

Neutral things:

- Running into Sc, my ex (surprise!), at Site 1 a few days ago. Not negative, not positive, just A Thing. 'twas 12 (...damn) years ago since we dated and we're both professional af, so that's good. What a long. Ass. Time. Ago that was. 12 years, that is.

- Piecing together my final presentation for my degree. The process really...does work? Like, actually? And there are a lot of pieces of my project that seem kind of like they (the school) are just trying to get free labor from students, but that's kind of part of the deal with academia. Right? Right. As long as they approve the hours.

- H intermittently dropping down in my pelvis for fun and profit. Another mom at school pickup yesterday said that since I'm scheduled for a c-section anyway even if I go into labor early they should still give me a c-section and so not to worry about that. Hope she's right.

Just For Today

I couldn't tell you what the deal is today, just that there is one. A small recurring theme of the past five days has been stress + hormones + anxiety + S = meltdown/crying (usually in a restaurant). This morning so much so that I ended up calling the crisis hotline for the first time in my life. And I don't necessarily think that's a reflection on things being So Bad, more that I just absolutely wouldn't have permitted myself to ask for help in times past. But I'm allowed to. And so are you. We're allowed to.

And yes, okay, early morning was pretty good, but after that and for the above reasons, today is just...shot, pretty much. I'm trying to tease out what my part in all this is, and I think it's that I dysregulate so quickly. There's also the piece where if I am stressed it's important to me that S not add to the stress, which is inevitably what happens even when not meant. Blarg. Well. At least all this is probably good in terms of getting me primed to play the Wild Card role in the practicum this afternoon. *sigh*

• 1 missing item report filed for Disneyland
• 1.5 lectures watched
• .25 of the nursery tidied (sort of)
• 1 OB appointment attended (with S)
• 1 pickup order completed
• 1 lunch with S
• 1 meltdown in the car
• 1 brief conversation with a person on the crisis hotline

To do:

• call my insurance to see what hospital they want me to use even though there are only two options in town anyway because the front desk was hassling me about it 🤷
• chip away at my home administration to-do list because I have just enough executive function to do that; but I can't write coherently and feel too shit to listen to lectures while doing chores 🤷
• try to study for the NBCOT

Things I fucking hate, but it's just the way it is/the stress list:

• L will not be going to any summer camps this year because I will definitely not be able to send her and it's not a priority for S; I haven't told her yet because I feel like shit about it; but bad news doesn't age well, amirite?
• I don't think there's a way to cobra my benefits to extend through the summer and even if there were there's no way to add my dependents to my current insurance and S can't or won't apply for insurance through his job; and he makes too much money for us (me and the kids) to qualify for medicaid (if that's even still a thing); and also he won't send me his pay stubs, so I can't, like, followup with any government agencies or anything.
• I keep getting well-meaning referrals and ideas about places to go for mental health support when what I probably need is someone sitting next to me and doing it with me or for me - which isn't a cute look when you're 40 later this year but it is what it is.
• Handouts. Please stop giving me brochures and handouts. It's just doomed from the start and I can't know how to organize any more handouts.
• I probably will have to cancel going to graduation, and probably because of budgeting for postnatal doctor's visits for H due to all of the above nonsense with insurance.
• Post-partum wasn't easy the first time and it's not really looking any better this time around. At least, I don't feel that way today. Maybe tomorrow things will look better.

Things will be okay. Things are better than they have been.

Take it either from or off the top

No Kings protest today (take 3). Am I going? Not this time. I have a strict one parent at a time policy on activism and current events have done nothing to change my mind on the matter. 

34 (?) weeks today and little old ladies keep telling me that I look like I’m going to “pop”. Well, let’s hope not, Janice, because I am busy with shit and things that don’t even involve newborn preparedness but if you’re trying to express sympathy for my physical discomfort thanks, yes, I AM feeling pretty fucking physically uncomfortable. 

My latest big scary presentation went pretty well, and that’s good. Leads me to believe that I might, indeed, get my doctorate here soon. Take THAT, Belhaven. I guess? And the more groups I do the more comfortable I get so mission accomplished there! Everything else is just lagniappe. I am, unfortunately, not my best self (and haven’t been for the last 9 months), but I’m not really sure what that means anymore and am firmly camp just do the damn thing. Whatever the fuck it looks like. Like Melissa Joan Hart said. On Clarissa Explains It All.

Brief conversation this morning in which S had evidently not grasped that the current plan is to fly out 9-ish days post-c-section. He keeps gently advocating (versus aggressively steamrolling, so this is a huge improvement) for not going. He said that maybe could go without the baby? I said, what, no I can’t leave a baby 9 days after birthing it. That would just be incredibly bad. Then he said that he thought we were going 4 *weeks* after birthing which…still isn’t doable, so idk man. I am very aware that Shit Might Happen that makes it impossible to go to graduation but by god I am going to try. Even though it truly isn’t a good idea!  Short list of preventative things:

- airports are shut down because of government shutdown

- natural disasters (tons to choose from)

- something goes sideways with surgery or recovery with me or H

- L or S gets deathly sick

- mother-in-law has health emergency such that S can no longer come and somehow my mom isn’t able to step in

- some other variation on war

- some secret seventh thing

…and thats the way the news goes!