SOMETHING IN THE WAY

A hop, skip, and a jump in my care, coupled with the clouds and the cold have left me spinning out a bit. I did make contact with someone who will be a member of my care team, but not a psychiatrist yet. Changing your care team from one coast to the next isn’t exactly for the faint of heart, especially if you’re in a suburb and don’t drive and the only people you know have jobs (family) so they’re not around all the time. I still have panic attacks about what the psych wards are like here (we can go ahead and assume that I’ll need to be hospitalized sometime in the future while I’m here).

I try to get out most days, to walk around the lakes and find the geese and their goslings. I got to pet the smallest ones the other day, but had to cut my travel short because of a sudden onset of paranoia, believing that everyone around me was playing some part of an intense entrapment plot.

Lessons to be learned (again): keep your care continuous. I’ve wanted to go to the hospital every day for the past week, but without having a care team set up here, I feel stuck, and when I do finally get a therapist, I’m frightened by the sheer thought of how to “begin” telling the tales of my trauma. I try to remember that the Suicide Hotline is not just for feeling suicidal: they’re there to listen, but it’s like basically the same problem: where to begin. It feels so incredibly difficult to even start a conversation regarding my mental health, with anyone, after roughly a decade of therapy/hospitalizations (I’ve had at least four different psychiatrists though, so maybe it’s not as bad as I think).

On the plus side, while I may be fearful of the Suicide Hotline to talk, I’ve called 911 on myself several times before, so I can share the immediate tales that have me riled up to strangers, for sure—but that’s always been in the back of an ambulance.