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Sunday, July 6, 2014

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Panic

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It's an Ativan day. The panic set in early as a kind of paralysis over cleaning the apartment. The place is a mess and my mother is coming to visit me on Sunday. How can I help myself become the person who can keep a place clean and presentable? How did I used to do it? What demons in me right now are making it impossible to get certain things done, what's the blockage I'm experiencing? If I figure it out, I'll let you know. But it was an Ativan day.


Joey says mom isn't going to care about the clutter, she just wants to see me. But it's about more than that, it's about how I get paralyzed now over certain things like certain phone calls, official paperwork, cleaning.

It feels like the progress is two steps forward, one step back, all the time. Any progress I make from here will have to be overcoming this obstacle over cleaning. I can't just keep taking Ativan. I feel like it was just a wasted day and it's making me bummed out. I'm going to have a better tomorrow.

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1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Consider a thought experiment: you wake up one morning to find you are the only human. You can survive easily enough - the environment is fine, there's more preserved food and stored energy than you'll ever need in your natural life. But there's no more people. Now, take what you consider to be the sum of your mental illness. How much of the illness remains after, say, six months of no people? This thought-experiment is designed to isolate components of "true" illness from the "social elements" of illness. I have observed that the vast majority of your complaints revolve around your social identity - the loss and the need for work, behavior and attitudes when dealing with social situations, other peoples' expectations and impressions of you, and the rest. Would you suffer anxiety about a messy house if there were no other people, and never would be? Would you have a problem with the supermarket if there were no other people on the earth? The more you can answer "no" to these questions, the less likely it is you suffer from a "mental illness," and more likely that this is a consciously-created spectrum. This is not to say it is voluntarily created, but it is to say that you can take conscious control of it.

5:53 AM

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