Stolen Therapy

Someone stole my therapy appointment today. I saw it happen.

I’ve been out of therapy since the beginning of August. I’ve been trying to get back in it since the beginning of September when I had my little freak out.

I had finally had an appointment scheduled for this morning. I dressed in a cute outfit, which is very much in contrast to my routine ‘stay inside doing homework outfit’ that is typical of my Thursdays.

I wasn’t at all familiar with the neighborhood his office is in (despite the location being close to my home) so I left early. And by early I mean I allowed an hour an a half for what turned out to be a 20 minute trip.

I have a thing about not entering therapist offices more than ten minutes early (earlier feels invasive on my part), so I walked in circles around the area and killed a lot of time in a coffee shop.

Finally, 10 minutes till the appointment I went into the waiting room and I sat down.
A few minutes later a man, probably late twenties early thirties, enters the waiting room.
‘Do we just wait here, or..?”, He asks

I shrugged and said ‘I assume so, it’s my first time here’
It was clearly his first time as well.

Then commenced the awkward situation of being in a small waiting room and attempting to avoid all conversation and eye contact. I stared intently at the generic waiting room art.

At Noon, my time for the appointment. A guy walks out of an office. ‘Is one of you here for Dr. X?’
The waitingroom man says, “Yes” and follows the guy into an office.

I have a auditory processing disorder. One of the things that means is that I have a lag time for understanding auditory info. So basically I didn’t understand the sound part of what happened until after both people were gone.

Dr. X was the doctor I was there to meet with.

I sat there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened. “Maybe they’re only meeting for a couple of minutes”, “Maybe he accidentally double booked”, “Maybe I was supposed to show up last week”, “Maybe my appointment is later today”, “Maybe I showed up at the wrong address and it happens to be the office of another psychiatrist who happens to have the same name in the same general area”

I felt  uncomfortable,like I shouldn’t be there, even though I knew my appointment time was correct. I’m very careful about these things. I check and recheck when writing it down. I read it back after writing it down as well. The probability of me writing the wrong time down is very small.
Ten minutes of this and I went into the hall and called my parents. I watched the door to see if this man would leave making my appointment available again. Twenty minutes past, against my parents advice that I should either phone the therapist or knock on his door, I left to go home.

I’m so busy. I’m juggling full time school, an internship, leadership roles in extra curricular activities and maintaining my ridiculous GPA standards. I hardly had time for this appointment. I especially I don’t have time to sit in an waiting room for an hour to wait for an appointment that isn’t happening.

I forced in into my schedule. Because I need it badly. My word repeating is at an all time worst. I’m terrified my neighbors can hear, because the volume is much too loud. Every night I pick apart my day and beat myself over every awkward imperfect interaction. There are a lot of them. One thing I am good at is creating awkward moments.
I don’t have time to sit in an waiting room for an hour to wait for an appointment that isn’t happening.

I cried my way home. Wow that’s a cliche sounding line. Sorry about that.

I didn’t feel comfortable calling the therapist. I considered not doing anything, just forgetting about this therapist so I could avoid the awkward interaction that would result from confronting him about this issue.

I whined to my Dad a lot on the phone and finally I agreed to let him call the therapist. I gave him permission just to gather facts, not to make a new appointment.

Here’s what happened:

-That man didn’t have an appointment at all. He’d just shown up. He wasn’t even already patient. He was just a person who showed up.

-The therapist hadn’t checked to see who his next appointment was with before going to fetch someone from the waiting room.

-When that man was able to react faster than me, he stole my appointment (Who does that!? Did he think therapy was just some sort of drop in thing?) and it took the therapist a significant part of the appointment to realize what had happened.

-Then the therapist went into the waiting room to look for me, but I was long gone.

I made an appointment for next week. I’m willing to give this guy another shot, though I’m not pleased about the whole situation. It threw off my homework schedule badly, because I was too upset to get work done. The only work I got done today was the work I did before I left to go to therapy.

In all my hypothetical situations I wondered about in that waiting room, the idea of someone stealing my therapy appointment wasn’t one that would have ever occurred to me.

24 hours

It’s scary how fast things change.

A month ago I was having a perfectly fine uneventful day. It was the last day of my week off before school started. I was feeling wonderfully relaxed.

Then I checked my mail. I’d previously requested my records from a partial hospital program I had been to several years ago. They’d arrived. I wanted them more for my obsession with recording keeping and possessing anything anyone has ever  written about me and storing it in my filing cabinet than anything else. There was some curiosity about how they would write about the part where I was forced to take off my pants despite clearly refusing, but mostly I planed to skim through it and file it away.

First couple of pages, nothing too exciting.

Third page. “Hey! They got my age wrong. Typical.”

I read more. “Wait a second. I don’t have schizophrenia. ” I looked at the top of the page. It had someone else’s name on it. It wasn’t about me. There were 3 pages of someone else’s records in the middle of my stapled packet.

To say I was not pleased would be a major understatement.

Confidentiality is a major hot button issue for me. If they were careless with this person’s info maybe they were or will be careless with mine?

I work very hard to keep my privacy. I don’t have any close friends and especially not at school. I can’t trust anyone. If someone gets too close they might find out how crazy I am and somehow that will lead to my school finding out, because no one can keep a secret and that will lead to me getting kicked out of school again. I know it’s paranoid, but I have to protect myself. No one else will.

This reactivated and exacerbated all of my fears about my privacy being violated, anger towards health professionals who have been sloppy with confidentiality in the past, anger towards people who have used my personal information against me. I had just an overall sense of powerlessness, anger and feeling overwhelmed. I can’t put it into words that do it justice so I’m just going to stop trying. Point is I was extremely upset. I’m getting teary now a month later writing about it.

It took less than 24 hours for me to fall apart. The day after getting the letter I called the hospital. It took talking to 3 people at the hospital to get someone who understood what it meant when I said “HIPAA Violation”. One person said “Hippo Violation?” and tried to transfer me to security. No joke. Class act they’re running. They fed me a “We’re taking this seriously” line.

I was having cycling panic attacks. I’d taken my maximum daily dose of klonopin and it felt like I hadn’t taken a thing.

So what next? Clearly the logical step is to take a bunch of painkillers, right? Of course. So I did that.

And well I had a box of nicotine patches I’d been hanging onto for over a year just this sort of occasion. I’d thought about throwing them out before, lucky for me I still had them. I put all of them on from the previously unopened-box.

I lay down in my bed for awhile. I’m not sure how long, maybe an hour. I decided I’d made some bad decisions. I took off the patches and made myself vomit up as much as I could. I was extremely dizzy. I realized I had no mouthwash. I zig-zagged my way over to the store to buy some. Came back, vomited some more (this time without the help of fingers).

I felt significantly calmer once the dominant problem shifted from emotional to physical. I went to sleep for the night. I was still a mess for the following 2 weeks,but that first 24 hours was the worst part of it.

It is terrifying to look back and see how quickly things escalated. At the time it felt like much longer than a day. It’s scary to know that no matter no stable I am for how long these things can still happen out of nowhere. I’m always at risk that one day I could be fine the next I might kill myself.

—

This is the end of the post, but here’s some more writing anyway. I didn’t want to get bogged down with extraneous information that isn’t about the point of the post, but here some is.  I didn’t want this swept under the rug. I wanted to throw everything at them and not let them get away with it. I called more lawyers than I could keep count of and each kept referring me to another lawyer. I kept calling them until I reached one who never returned my call. A lot of this lawyer-calling was more related to my past school issues than my present issue. I was extremely lenient with my school. I could have been significantly more aggressive, but opted for gentler methods because I wanted to preserve my relationship with the school.

Ultimately it turned out that part of the other person’s file had been put in my folder my the social worker who had done both of our intakes. None of my pages were missing from the file (or so they tell me). They said they’d “talk” to the social worker. So wrist slapping, basically. I get it mistakes happen, but these mistakes can have big consequences.

Oh yes I should have gone to the hospital. Blah, blah, blah. Don’t anyone dare lecture me. I’d have gladly gone to get checked out physically  at the point where I’d vomited things up. But I didn’t want to be trapped there and risk messing up another semester of school. I know okay, priorities, maybe ours are not the same. School trumps physical health. And also wasn’t exactly feeling very trusting about hospital’s abilities to keep my confidentiality so no way was I going to risk telling them more information.

Mom’s Medical Fears

When I got my first period my Mom told me I might have Cancer. I was in a Disneyland bathroom, the one over by Adventure-land, near the Indiana Jones ride. I told her there was blood on my underwear. Panicky, she bought me a pad from the machine. Outside the bathroom there was frantic conversation between her and my Dad, with her saying it was too early for my period to start. ‘Do you think she has cancer? I think she has cancer! We have to bring her to a doctor!’ My Dad was able to placate her, something he used to be better at back then. I think he’s worn out now-a-days and doesn’t try as much anymore. I continued my day at Disney and did not have Cancer.

One time my Mom ordered salmon at a restaurant. She had eaten salmon many times before. That night she got food poisoning. She decided it wasn’t food poisoning and that she was allergic to salmon. Whenever she gets sick after eating something she says ‘oh it must have been cooked next to some salmon’.

One time my mom asked me if maybe adderall had made me gay.

In elementary school I bought a bar of handmade rose scented soap at a craft fair. I brought it home and showed my Mom. She said I couldn’t use it. “What if you’re allergic to it?” Instead, I could keep it as something decorative.

The bar of soap sat in my room at my parent’s house in the same spot up until a month ago. I had to pack everything up. They’re moving. I took the bar of soap with me to my new apartment. I washed my hands with it, even though I prefer liquid soap. I didn’t have an allergic reaction.

Searches

I swear I’ll write a post here again eventually. Therapy 3x a week was using up all of my desire to talk about myself. That’s over now though. I over-use the word though.

A quick question. I keep seeing in my blog stats people finding me by searching my user name. I don’t know of anywhere where my username would show up without a link back here. So I can only conclude that people had already found my blog and are googling me trying to find out more about me than what I’ve already written here. This freaks me out. This blog is anonymous for a reason. I don’t want you knowing more than I choose to share here. It makes me not want to write anything, feeling like people are trying to pry and access more info than I’d like to give, that maybe this isn’t a safe means of expressing myself. Not that I don’t google everyone, myself. It feels different when it’s towards me. I’m open to suggestions of less paranoid reasons why people might be googling me.

Oh and I’ve moved into an apartment with a buzzer. I guess I’ve become what I hate:P

Buzzers

I hate when therapists have a buzzer that I need to ring to gain access to their office.
I generally have a bit of pre-therapy anxiety, the buzzer exacerbates the situation.

I hate being late for things, but I also have a rule about not being more than 10 minutes early for things. Any more than that and my early-ness can seem excessive to an onlooker. I need to be early so I don’t stress about being late, but I don’t want people to notice how early I am. I tend to show up for therapy (among other things) early and walk around to kill time. It is important to maintain sufficient distance from my destination (1 block at least). I wouldn’t want my therapist to spot me near his office an hour before the appointment.
When an office has a buzzer it means announcing exactly when I show up. Are they noticing how early I show up? Am I being rude by announcing my arrival 10 minutes early rather than 1 minute early?

If I sneak in, past the buzzer door, behind someone else will the therapist think I haven’t arrived yet, leaving me waiting in the waiting room indefinitely?

I worry about pressing the wrong button and buzzing someone else. I’ve done that before. I had a class where the professor held classes in her apartment (I know, weird right? She was a strange lady, always giving me free hair product. She had cats though so that was awesome) We had to press the buzzer to get in. Once I accidentally buzzed one of her neighbors. Very embarrassing.
I have to check and re-check to make sure I’m pressing the button corresponding with the correct name. Sometimes the list of names is far from the buzzer, allowing more room for potential errors and therefore more worrying.

Once I got my belt from my coat stuck in the door of a therapist’s office that had a buzzer. I tugged hard trying to free the belt and eventually had to get buzzed in again to free myself. There were moments where I considered sacrificing the belt to avoid the extra buzzing, but I worried she’d notice the belt left behind and comment when I arrived next time missing a coat belt. The belt has since been lost after a dry cleaning trip. It just really didn’t want to be on my coat. It’s a shame since I picked it out because of the belt. I felt a coat with a belt produced a better silhouette.

The first time I tried discussing the problem of buzzer with a therapist who had one, she took it a little personally. So I dropped the subject. I didn’t meet with her very long. It might have lasted longer had there been no buzzer.

I later met with another therapist in the same office building. He and I came to the agreement that I’d sneak into the building behind someone else. He didn’t mind, apparently he too hated the buzzer. His reason was different. Often he didn’t hear it and wouldn’t know people were waiting. This method of sneaking in helped, but still was stressful. I’d very slowly preform tasks that made me look busy, like I wasn’t trying to sneak in. I’d slowly unwrap my scarf or look at my ipod or phone. I needed to show up more than the 10 minutes early to allow more time to sneak in. But sometimes I’d get in the building way before the appointment, meaning I needed to walk slowly up the stairs to avoid arriving in the waiting room more than 10 minutes early.

I don’t have a id card to get me in the building for my internship yet. For at least a week more I have to get buzzed in to enter the office. To complicate matters not everyone works there every day. I have to buzz multiple people (Many who I hardly know yet. I worry if I say my name and ask to be let in they’ll be confused about who I am.) to find one who is there who can let me in. I’ve been working to avoid this by showing up during the morning at peak arrival hours so I can follow someone else in. It’s in a nice neighborhood and I’m sure I could find fun places to eat during my lunch break, but I’ve not been leaving the building for lunch because I don’t want to be re-buzzed in.

I returned to therapy Tuesday with S.M. He got a new office. I was taken by surprise when, after making the appointment to meet with him again, I learned that his new office has a buzzer. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could have become a buzzer person in the past year.
It amazes me that even with the amount I worry, situations still manage to come up that I hadn’t foreseen.
I stressed a lot about the buzzer. It ended up being the least bad buzzer I’ve encountered. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a buzzer (Wait and see, I’ll turn the word buzzer into an offensive adjective) but I’ve seen much worse. This one was interesting in that I pressed a button to scroll to his name (first one on the list) and then pressed the call button. I like that I only have to see one name at a time and that his is the first. Less worry there about buzzing the wrong person. Other worries are still there but cutting out one problem helped. It also helps that this is my favorite therapist and I appear to have come down with a bad case of idealization. If he were a new therapist with the same buzzer I might be more critical.

Today at the end of my appointment I walked out of his office, through the waiting room, outside the waiting room to the elevator. My therapist followed shortly behind me and said “Here let me show you something” and then showed me the code I can use to get into the waiting room. No more need for a buzzer. Leaving me puzzled about why he did this.
-Did he remember that I have trouble with buzzers? I only mentioned it once to him, briefly(On the phone during a time I wasn’t even meeting with him and just wanted records). I’ve been assuming he forgot about it. I hadn’t talked about my stress over his buzzer, because I didn’t want to be rude. I’m sure he didn’t choose for the office to be designed with a buzzer. Did he offer it without me asking because he knew I wouldn’t ask?
-Does he tell the code to all his patients? If so why didn’t he just tell me it on the phone when I made the appointment. Why wait till after the second session? And why after I already left his office?
-Can he tell if I’ve just used the code? and if so maybe it’s a sneaky way to see if I show up earlier when I don’t need him to buzz me in. I won’t fall into that trap:P 10 minute rule still applies.
-Maybe he thinks he’ll run a little late some day and then without the buzzer I can let myself in even if he’s not there yet.

I guess it’s a sign he’s not worried about me breaking into the waiting room or something. :P
I’m going to think of it as that he remembered my trouble with buzzers and view it as a nice gesture. Perhaps I’ll get an explanation about it at my next appointment. Probably not though. And I doubt I’ll ask. Maybe I will. Or maybe not. He’d probably tell me if I asked, but that would require actually asking.

Relationships, Dating, Sex

All names in this entry have been changed.

In late elementary school there was Sam. We played soccer together at recess. He liked me. I don’t remember my feelings for him, but I didn’t have a problem with him. I gave him my email address, which was also my mom’s email address. I didn’t have my own yet. He sent me something that I gather was in some way sexual. I never read it. My mom got to it first. I wasn’t allowed to talk to him anymore.

In middle school there was Jay. We were friends. He wanted to be more than friends. I kept thinking the boundaries were clear and then he’d break them. I’d not talk to him for awhile, then eventually he’d apologize and we’d be friends again. I’d hear rumors saying that he and I were dating and get upset. It eventually became apparent that he was the one starting them. This dynamic continued into early high school. He invented a cousin who supposedly had a crush on me. Supposedly his cousin had met me a number of times, but for some reason I couldn’t ever remember him. Probably because this cousin didn’t exist. Jay would make sexual advances toward me on AIM and when I’d get mad he’d claim his cousin had hacked his screen name and apologize. Jay also was focused on converting me to Christianity, despite my clear disinterest. He’d say things like “I want you to be Christian so we can be together in heaven forever”. It was pretty creepy. Eventually I stopped putting up with him, but I should have broken off contact much sooner.

My freshman year of high school I had my first, and only, official boyfriend. Matt and I dated for 6 months. He went to a neighboring school and neither of us could drive, so I only saw him about once a week. I believe if we’d gone to the same school the relationship would have been significantly shorter. Everything was drawn out because our interaction was so far apart. I hadn’t yet realized I am gay, because I hadn’t yet realized what it meant to be sexually attracted to someone. I viewed Matt more as an accessory than anything else. He’d always want to talk on AIM between our dates. He was the emotionally needy one, and I the emotionally detached. On our dates we’d usually see a movie, there was minimal talking. He didn’t believe in sex before marriage which worked very well for me since I didn’t want to have sex with him. I did confide things in him. I told him about my self-injury. Years later I learned he’d been sharing things I confided in him with friends at his school, thinking I’d never find out, because I’d never meet them.
At some point he decided he could fix my depression by giving me an orgasm. He presented me with this idea and I shot it down. Eventually I was talked into it, through a bit of deception. He told me he also self-injured. Somehow that made me feel more of a connection and decide to go along with his idea. The whole situation was incredibly awkward. I didn’t know what was going on. I was very naive. Lots of awkward fumbling around in each others pants, never removing our underwear. I later realized that I didn’t have an orgasm that night, but that didn’t stop him at the time from telling me I had. I’m pretty sure he broke my hymen with his finger then, but he doesn’t think he did. Later when pressed for more information he backpedaled his statement about self-injury. He said he’d gotten hurt accidentally and just hadn’t been bothered by the injury. Not the same thing!
There was a period of time where he didn’t get a lot of sleep. He became paranoid. He was worrying that I would run off with a certain Japanese rock star and abandon him. Looking back I realize this was likely a reaction to him realizing he was much more interested in me than I was in him. Around this time we broke up, on AIM. I was fairly unaffected by it and I’m told he moved on not long after.
Years later at a high school graduation party I saw him for the first time since before the breakup. We talked, things were a bit awkward, but civil. He had heard that I’m gay and worried for a time it was his fault. It’s not. We friended each other on facebook. He now lives less than 10 blocks from me. Occasionally we get lunch and/or play video games. There’s always a bit of awkwardness, I don’t feel 100% comfortable being alone with him. He’s been respectful though. I don’t like that when we eat places it’s a battle to split the bill. He always wants to pay. That feels too much like a date. I do like free food though and he tends to take it personally to not accept him paying. I’m never fully clear about if he does this with all his friends, as he claims, or if our history is a factor. He pays with credit card, so I battle him by picking places only accepting cash and then I pay for both of us. He’s a nice guy, despite some issues we had when dating. I can see why of all guys to date I picked him. He’s very meterosexual.

After coming out of the closet I went to a lot of youth pride type events. ‘Youth pride event’ is code for ‘All the queer kids hook up with each other event’. I’d go to a dance, see everyone pairing up and feel left out. So I’d find someone and we’d start kissing. Numbers would be exchanged and then nothing would ever come of it.

I had a friend, Kim, who I went on a couple of dates with. We mostly sat in coffee shops and checked out other girls together. I’m pretty sure that’s not how dating’s supposed to work.

At pre-college there was Molly. It was again one of those situations where I naively wanted just to be friends but she felt differentially. I have a small lag time with processing auditory information. A lot of times pretend I understood information before I really did. I’ll hear sound and know an response is needed and will smile and nod, while still working on understanding the sound. I made the mistake of doing this when she asked me if I wanted to go out on a date sometime in the future. Not wanting to hurt her feelings, since we were friends, I decided to deal with the situation by not backtracking on my earlier response and just making sure the date never happened. Pre-college would end eventually and all would be fine.
One day we went out to lunch, not a date, and she asked me if that could count as our date. Feeling trapped, I decided to go along with it, because then at least the date would be over with. Then she kissed me and next thing I knew, we were making out on her bed. I won’t deny I was enjoying it for a bit, but then I panicked and spent the rest of pre-college hiding from her.

My freshman year of college there was Rachel. I met her via Craigslist. I made a post that started off by saying, I am a self-injurer. I figured I could get that part out of the way while I was anonymous. If someone had a problem with that, they didn’t need to reply. The rest of the post was filled with fun random facts out me to offset the self-injury information. Rachel responded, also referencing a history of self-injury. After googling her email to confirm she wasn’t a serial killer, we went on a date. Then we went on another date. The day of the third date, I was feeling depressed. I considered canceling, but decided going would be better than staying home to mope. We got sushi and were having a good time. She had an errand to do after and I tagged along because I was enjoying her company. She invited me to her apartment to watch a movie. I accepted the offer. I didn’t realize this meant having sex. If I’d been watching this interaction on TV it would have been obvious, but in my real life where I’d not had any physical contact with her besides a hug, it didn’t occur to me. We ‘watched’ a movie in the sense that there was a movie on, but neither of us was watching it. We kissed, a lot. I was enjoying myself. Then she misinterpreted a hand movement as an attempt at trying to remove her shirt. So that came off and well if her shirt was off, then mine should be off too, right? So then there was no clothing. I was feeling out of my comfort zone, but also curious. Things, kept progressing. I’m sure if I’d said I wanted to stop that she would have. I wasn’t pressured. I just never said no.
Post- sex conversation was about Cascading Style Sheets and other areas of web design. I think this is an excellent sort of post-sex conversation. I headed home, trying to process the past few hours. I ruminated excessively on it. Also keep in mind that I’d been feeling depressed prior to the date. I felt overwhelmed and panicked. I wish I could better describe it, but I don’t fully understand my reaction still. A week later I was hospitalized for the first time.
Rachel visited me when I was in the hospital. It was really nice of her. She didn’t know the role having sex played in my being there, I never told her. Her visit helped bring me a bit back to reality. I’d forgotten how nice she is and had been viewing her as threatening. Then I was kicked out of school for the rest of the semester, so I wasn’t living near where she lived.
When I returned she’d left. Then I left to transfer to my new school and she returned. She invited me to visit her. I mentally prepared myself. I knew we would have sex and I wasn’t going to let myself freak out about it. I was going to enjoy it. And I did. It wasn’t the most amazing thing ever, but it was some fun.
She suggested changing our facebook relationship status. I was thinking “It’s complicated”, since we were living far apart. Somehow it became “In a relationship”. Once it’s on facebook it’s official.
We made plans to visit each other. None of them happened. We hardly communicated. I was fine with the minimal communication to an extent. I so easily feel suffocated. I didn’t feel suffocated here. A girlfriend located over 4 hours away with conversation less than once every 3 weeks. 5 months into the ‘relationship’ she sent me a facebook message breaking up with me. She pulled the classic ‘it’s not you it’s me’ and cited the lack of communication. I wasn’t suprised or terribly upset. I adjusted my facebook status and that was it.

I’m not interested in dating anyone at the time being. It doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Outgoing Introvert

The other day one of my professors described me as ‘outgoing’.

I consider myself very introverted. On the surface the two terms might seem contradictory, but I think together they describe me accurately; despite Definr listing ‘outgoing’ as a synonym of ‘extroverted’.

I view being introverted as having a lower need/threshold for social interaction than extroverts. It is a separate trait from social skills, being socially anxious or talkative.

I can understand why my professor would think of me as outgoing. I talk a lot in class. Probably to the point where it’s annoying to classmates. In the moment I don’t appear anxious. I beat myself up after about everything I said awkwardly when I get home, but in class all is good. I am smiley, bubbly and engaging.

What she doesn’t know is that the talking I do in class is the majority of the social interaction I have in an average day. Most people consider class to be disruptive to their social life, for me it is my highlight.

I like to think that I give the impression of having a lot of close friends, that all the acquaintances I interact with think I have many close friends; I just happen to not be as close with them in particular. I think I succeed fairly well at this. I am on good superficial terms with a lot of people, it gives the impression of greater friendships than I really have.

I do enjoy social interaction, it just wears me out a lot. I can’t keep it up for as long. I need to be by myself to recharge and organize thoughts. I love how college is broken up into pieces. I don’t usually have things planed straight through 9-5. Usually I am able to head home in between classes.  I believe this recharge time is one of many factors explaining my improved academic performance in college compared with high school.

Sitting in a room quietly with a person next to me consumes more energy than sitting in the same room alone. I don’t know if this is how everyone feels, but I know having a lower amount of social energy to use makes this type of energy expenditure more signifigant.

After a long chunk of social interaction I badly need to be by myself. Living with my parents, many fights between my Mom and I occurred from her inability to respect this need of mine. Usually this resulted in me screaming to be left alone, while she persisted with asking questions about how the day had been. She knows, I hope at least, that given an hour or so alone I’d be up for talking, I just needed my recovery time.

I don’t mean to give the impression I don’t get lonely. That’s not true. I do. Sometimes. Usually I’m not. Quitting therapy initially created loneliness. Losing 2 hours a week of talking was a very significant dent. I was able to make some adjustments in my schedule to fix the problem.

I also don’t mean to give the impression that social anxiety isn’t a factor at all for me. It plays a role, a more minor one, but a role nonetheless. I just believe that it is a separate trait from introversion. My problem is more anxiety in general and some happens to fall into the realm of social anxiety.

The most important thing for avoiding social anxiety for me is structure. I need a clearly defined role. In class I don’t feel anxious speaking. I’m expected to be there and to speak, my participation grade depends on it. In a job requiring interacting with people it’s the same way. I know what I should be doing and have no problem doing it.

On the other hand, If I spot an acquaintance in the cafeteria I’ll likely smile and say ‘hi’, but I won’t join him/her unless directly invited. I’d worry I was invading their space. The role is less clearly defined.

I like the internet, because it allows for controlled social interaction. If I need a break all I need is to go to a new webpage.

Being a secret introvert can be useful in comparison to being a non-secret introvert. I feel my mental health problems are less likely to be suspected. The loner image is generally not positively viewed and makes one open to suspicion.

I’ve always been introverted, but there are life events that have added to my isolation. Having friends over to my house was a stressful experience. It wasn’t so bad in elementary school, but in middle school problems began with the way my Mom would behave when I had visitors. The details are for another post, but long story short, in early high school I decided it wasn’t worth it to have friends over. I had a lot of people I socialized with I school, but the majority of the friendships (there were some exceptions) were superficial. I feel like this caused me to miss out on some of the typical experience of gaining closer friends.

My experience of getting kicked out of school for mental health reasons also contributed. In the over two years since that happened I’ve become significantly more withdrawn. I feel terrified of the situation repeating itself and hide much more than I hid prior to it. Directly following that situation I had my trust in a couple of friends shattered. My ability to trust has been badly damaged. I hate it. I want the limits I have with social interaction to be only from my introversion, not because of my paranoia.

I made a friend recentlly. It’s exciting. I like her a lot and we share many interests. But there’s a limit for how close I have ever let her get. We may get to the point where it seems to her like it is not a superficial friendship, but for me there will always be a limit of what I can share.

My outside doesn’t match my inside.

Whoops, I got a little off the introversion track at the end there and more into trust issues, oh well. I’m sure you can deal with that.

General life update stuff:
-I finally called my old therapist who is awesome and made an appointment. He was totally fine with me meeting with him, even for only the summer. It’s a relief.
– I got into an honors psychology society thingy. Yay.

Self-Injury

I was a freshman in high school. I sat in a bubble bath with the shower curtain pulled shut, adding an extra layer of protection added to the closed, but unlocked bathroom door. The lock didn’t work. Few of the locks in my parents’ house worked. At any moment my mother could rush into the bathroom unannounced.
At the time she was occupied screaming with my father about something, most likely related to my above average, but not up to her standards, academic performance.
I needed the shower curtain shut so she couldn’t see me with a shaving razor in my hand slicing open my leg, watching the blood mix with the bubbles.
The first dozen or so times I did this are mashed into one entity in my head. I want to know, what was different about that night that made me cut my leg open instead of just crying? At the time it didn’t seem at all significant. Now I wish I’d written something down.
I love having records of things. Without records I feel like maybe something didn’t happen. I want a physical representation of experience. I document. I write, I take photos and I make scars.
Scars leave records. A scar is easier to live with than remembering the details of why I have a scar. For this time period I have neither. The scars have faded and I wrote very little down.
Within weeks of the first injuries to my legs I began taking apart shaving razors. I didn’t want to keep all that plastic designed to “help” prevent me from cutting myself. Each shaver gave me three little blades. They were so tiny and seemed delicate. I hid them in a makeup compact.

It’s over 6 years later now. I still do it. Not as often as in the early days, but often enough that I identify as a “self-injurer”.

I don’t feel the same way many do about self-injury. I don’t think it is a bad thing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it is a wonderful thing. It has flaws. In moderation, I think there is nothing wrong with self-injury. I don’t want to stop. I just want to stop the feeling that make me want to do it.

I used to be one of those people who mentally beats themselves up after self-injuring. No more. I’ve enough other things to mentally beat myself up over. I don’t need to add another.

I have never needed stitches. I have never lost a dangerous amount of blood. I have never gotten an infection. I am careful.

Much of my therapy has been a struggle. I want to not feel upset enough to want to cut. They want me to stop cutting, without fixing the underlying problem. The priorities are different.

Those same therapists will advocate the use of klonopin when I want to cut. I consider klonopin a worse way of dealing with stress than cutting. In my hierarchy of not-so-positive-ways to deal with stress klonopin rates worse than cutting. When I cut I can see the damage being done. With klonopin I can’t.

I wouldn’t advocate it to others. I realize there are negatives. I have scars. I deal with the pain the following days. I consider these negatives to be acceptable for me. I realize most people dosn’t feel this way.

I also realize that most people who self-injure consider it a struggle. For me the struggle is what leads up to the self-injury, not the self-injury. But I do support those who feel differently.

Self-injury helps me stay alive. I can short curcuit negative thoughts spiraling downward. I can prevent my mental state from further deteriorating.

In my first hospitalization the doctor drew a picture of my cuts. It’s in my records It amused me quite a bit that going to med school resulted in her drawing a picture of my cuts.

scanscarrealcropped01

I believe on the right is supposed to be a drawing of the bruise that was on my hand from punching the floor.

The tic-tac-toe one is my 2nd favorite, the first being the skull. The tic-tac-toe one has some faux symbolism that’s so corny I can’t even say it with a straight face. “The X’s represent life. They won before I could make a move” See it started out one day I decided to do a tic-tac-toe board. No particular symbolism or anything. It’s hard to make curves with the knife so I just made Xs, no Os. I cut over the same spots many times. Eventually I gave that meaning to it, despite the original purpose being visual, not symbolic.

Visuals are important for me with self-injury. I have to see what I’m doing. If I punch a wall I need to see the bruise. Otherwise it is not as effective.

I like the skull because I think it is cute. One the left leg cuts must be parallel (the skull is the exception). The right leg allows chaotic criss-crossing cuts.

I’m rambling now so I guess I’ll stop. I’ll just end things by saying that for me self-injury is helpful. Often times mental health professionals ignore its adaptive function and try to eliminate it without fixing the problem or understanding it. I fight them every step of the way. And then I get labeled as difficult. They worry excessivly about the risks, not realizing that I am careful. If they paid closer attention they’d realize that my anxious, obsessive traits carry over into my self-injury. I’m much more likly to panic and over react thinking a cut is far worse than it is than I am to underreact.