healing really isn't linear
I woke up yesterday feeling, as I put it in a moment of overwhelming despair, "the weight of my cumulative life experiences bearing down on my throat."
This was after a two-week stint of sticking to a fairly regular routine (I've never had routine in my entire life unless you count the sensory overloading rigours of a school day). Yesterday felt like a relapse.
My intrusive thoughts are terrifying and distressing, and they assault me when I least want them. Yesterday I was besieged by them.
And then yesterday when I woke up on the other side of yet another missed deadline for my research work (academic life is even more isolating when you're doing it part-time with no coursework to support you, who would have thunk), I felt like the biggest failure.
I don't have a lot of time to write now, because I have to get back to completing work for said missed deadline, but I think it's really important that I document this part.
I reached out. First of all, to a therapy app. Which felt semi-useless with its canned responses, so then I moved to an AI. (And whatever faults AI therapy may have, I cannot deny that using it yesterday was singularly effective.) I unburdened myself about feeling overwhelmed and isolated, and it gave me a structure to follow.
I feel less lost now.
Once I felt like I had a slightly stronger grasp on my flailing psychological state, I reached out to a close friend who had told me earlier that we could spend some time in the weekend together. And we did :) Being around my friends was the balm my soul needed to stop feeling like I was alone and unworthy and a failure.
I was struggling. But that didn't make me a failure. I could pick myself up. Immersing myself in the literature as well, just made me feel a little bit more passionate again. Like there could be a point to what I'm doing.
And hey, I've completed some really impressive projects in the past. All I've ever been missing is the planning portion of it – before I started at my job a few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to project manage myself out of a shallow ditch. Now, though, I've got a few more resources to hand. (AI is definitely one of them. After years and years of thinking "wtf is wrong with me that I cannot do basic things", I can finally outsource basic things and jump straight to the complex shit I'm good at.)
Okay, so here goes. Again, with feeling.