Self-managing Rambles

Writing to myself which is now to everyone else, because for some reason I wouldn’t have done it otherwise

(Badly-written rambly stuff to make myself write)

Things I did to self-manage (I’m not saying I recommend any of them as I hated myself for most of them)

I’ve been really spacey trying to cope with a schedule transition – I find it difficult because it feels like everything suddenly changes and nothing makes sense yet everything keeps on going, which makes me feel like a sick ghost… but after a few consecutive evenings of recurring not-good-for-brain relapses of recurring behaviours, I knew I had to do something to avoid things getting worse than they need to and taking longer to turn around. These are some of the things I have been making myself do the last couple of days. I’m not recommending anything yet because it’s not been an enjoyable process, it’s just that writing this down here is actually one of the things that I’m making myself do. WHY DO I CREATE SUCH HORRIBLE PLANS

-Made myself be out all day the other day, to distract my brain. I was in the most unpeople-y mood and wanted to stay in. but I made myself walk around the park up until the evening as I knew I’d be sulking. (I was still sulking, just sulking in a park instead of in this little flat) (When I get like this, because I have an over-active imagination, my mind processes by making all the visuals super extreme and making me hear lots of stuff. It’s a process I usually have to go through but it’s not usually a process I enjoy – so I try to avoid it… but it has to happen eventually. It creeps in through dreamworlds, whether I am asleep or whether I am awake. I like to distract myself because I don’t like those things fixating on things around me that stop me doing stuff. I feel that walking around a blank park might release some of those things there instead of in a tiny flat onto my things. Walking around peopley places is annoying when I’m like this because over-active brain gets visually-chatty and says loads of stuff in my head in response to stuff I see).

-Allowed myself to stay in (how kind of me…) It wasn’t a nice experience, actually. but I didn’t want to go out either. so I stayed here the whole night and day and night. It was like having a weird lonely ball of pain in your throat and stomach which doesn’t let you do anything, but doesn’t let you sleep either.

-Made myself try to sleep. (I couldn’t… I didn’t.)

-Made myself clean/tidy… after hours of lying in bed trying and failing to sleep, my brain started repetitively saying ‘how much are you willing to let it escalate?’ over and over again, showing me flashbacks of other times I’ve been feeling unwell after a change or limbo-transition… until I couldn’t bear it any more, so I started tidying up the AbsoluteMess around me. Tidying can sometimes be a fun game but this was not enjoyable, there were helpless tears – because I kept finding stupid stuff and being like WHY AM I LIKE THIS (for example, I opened a Kinder Egg thing to remember that I had created a ‘kind-of inverted Kinder Egg’ by putting the foil in a little sphere in the middle and had broken the chocolate into teeny-tiny pieces to fit inside the orange plastic thing and then closed it and forgotten about it and just – why is this my adult life)

-Made myself shower. The glove trick definitely helped. (This might sound odd but I realised recently that wearing one rubber glove helps me be less sensory-angry when washing my hair – I think it’s because the shampoo makes my hand really dry and makes everything feel weird – but it needs to be just one glove because I need to be able to feel skin with the other hand as I’m quite dissociate-y floaty space-y and need to ground myself/remind myself that I am in my body). The familiar shower gel smells help. Annoyingly, I often do this thing where I find stuff I like near Christmas and then buy more after Christmas when it’s cheap, but I never buy enough and then it runs out and I can’t get it until the end of the year…

-Left the flat because I had to go to uni for a learning support mentor appointment thing. (THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT. The last two things wouldn’t have happened otherwise I don’t think, as I wouldn’t have needed to leave the flat. I’ve actually only recently started these sessions, because in Term 1 there was a delay with my DSA form so everything took ages to be sorted, and although I wish I’d had this from the start, I am so glad of it now… because it means I can regularly try to make sense of each week and figure things out in a way I haven’t been able to do on my own, but also is helping me to communicate those things, and think about the things I need to do in the week).

-Made myself go to The Cupboard, to begin the task of sorting my stuff out. (The Cupboard is where my stuff is from the show that I did – there is quite a lot of Stuff which I really need to get out of the way, and it was scary going to look at all the stuff because I wasn’t the one who put it all away – I had to get everything off the stage very quickly and was very lucky to have lots of people very helpfully help me, which I’m grateful for because I wouldn’t have been able to get everything tidied away in time without people helping me, and some of it must have been really annoying to clear up! However, it then makes it anxiousy for me to go and find my stuff in lots of places with no recollection of putting it in those places, and also going through all of the things brings me emotion-flashbacks which means unexpected crying outbursts BECAUSE I AM AN OVERDRAMATIC EMOTION-CREATURE)

-Made myself eat (not fun, for reasons I won’t go into right now), made myself drink. 40p for a PINT!!! (of soda water and lime)

-Made myself stay out the flat all day (and hated myself for it! but knew I needed to, to hopefully tire myself out so much that I can actually sleep. Interestingly, what happened was when it got nearer the time I would let myself to go get a bus home I actually got a bit excited for being allowed to go home – and that was a welcome hint of a feeling when I’m feeling like I do at the moment. I even found myself wanting to run, which I haven’t done in a while – this gives me hope for the start of a new routine soon…)

-Made myself walk home from the bus instead of getting another bus, for more walking… and to make myself look at the little bench that I really like looking at. When I arrived I was surprised to find it’s so much tidier here than before (as I tidied instead of sleeping) and this has helped a lot because I can see the possibility of a switch in routine (and I can also see the floor!). I’d changed the bedding on the bed and swept the floors and got rid of the rubbish and cleared the table.

-Made myself write this list out. because writing is like talking and the more I talk the more I can talk back at the brain-voices that talk to me. I think. or talk over them. or talk about them. I’m not sure, yet. I don’t yet know if it’s actually Doing anything but it felt important to attempt to write stuff out.

-Made myself open the windows. (but then allowed myself to close them all because the cars and sirens sounded SO LOUD on the road outside)

-Making myself put pyjamas on and go to bed. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep or if it’ll be a repeat of last night’s annoyingness.

I don’t feel ‘Better’ yet. but I think feel better than I could have been, I think. Does that make sense? I still feel the weird heavy pain-ball in my stomach and throat and body. I still feel floaty and confused and distancey-spacey-dissociatey-not-here. and on top of that now I have a giant headache from making myself be out all day and probably from not having sleep in a while. but, I’m reminding myself that some progress things happened today, like the uni session and the managing to go into the cupboard and the thinking-about-running and the tidying and I was out all day. and I’m trying to remember what I was like this time last year and just how amazing the change is from then to now. This is so much better than that in comparison – but I still have to deal with how I feel and I’m not writing this to complain, I’m writing this to try and figure it out, TO deal with it, or to try and write it away.

I’ll be away for some days which will be a change of scene, so I’m making myself write a list to leave on the table here for when I return, because that really helped me last time. What I do is I write out the days of the week that I’m coming back, and fill in things for those days, so that when I return it tells me what to do and I don’t feel as spacey. I hope I can get back into a good gym & library routine for a productive June before things get busy again.