Be seeing you, Jack.

Self-indulgent rant commences.

Things I Dislike:

• Putting on extra clothes to go outside
• Apples that are more sweet than sharp
• Meds that make me feel sleepy but don’t make me feel rested
• Badly made coffee; bean quality is an issue, yes, but so is grind in my cup
• That I somehow lost the pillowcase for my new sheets in the course of crossing my room
• That I don’t know when exactly I can fly out to visit C (taking a page from aubade’s book, here)
• That I have to fly out to visit C, or visit C at all, when she should just be here
• That the half-dozen places I painstakingly wrote long emails to in order to volunteer for them, in any capacity, have yet to respond to me after a month; rejection during job-hunting is one thing, but this is just upsetting

This last month or so has been a very strange and chaotic jumble of events and emotions, so rather than my usual exploration of a single symptom I am going to ramble on about the general state of things.

For the last, say, six months, I’ve been generally asymptomatic, or as asymptomatic as I could ever expect to be. My medication seemed to be doing a pretty decent job at minimizing my compulsions and getting me ‘outside my own head’, as I describe it, and as such my mood was really good. I was making a lot of progress, or seemed to be, on dealing with various ongoing issues and was even getting ahead of the curve on some.

Then, about 6-8 weeks (yes, I’m making a vague mailing time joke) ago, everything stopped working. It was as if I’d been walking on the sunken plateau of a Caribbean beach, and reached the point where sand abruptly drops off into abyssal sea. I lost my footing, and my motivation, and my good mood, and have no idea why.

There’s a common issue in seeking help for mental health issues, where one becomes so eager to improve that they begin to falsify their progress. They might not do this consciously, but it’s a slippery slope - since a lot of the improvement is based in how you perceive things, there’s a constant struggle to be honest with yourself and distinguish between improved outlook and wishful thinking.

I’m not sure whether I was convincing myself that I was doing better than I really was, or whether this is yet another complication of my meds. If it’s the latter, I guess I can trust myself a bit more to keep pace with things, but it likely means switching to some other regimen, and going through the ever-entertaining rollercoaster of withdrawal and acclimatisation.

In other news, last week I submitted a short story to a publisher, for the very first time. My OCD desire for things to be absolutely perfect, and to not commit to anything without ensuring I’ve done everything possible to make it perfect, means that this is actually quite a milestone for me. Normally, I’ll sit here rewriting and revising a story and spiraling into deep anxiety, until the deadline passes and I feel that peculiar mix of relief and disappointment that I know so well.

I don’t know whether anything will actually come of that story, and I wasn’t entirely happy with how I wrote it, but the important thing is that I’ve crossed the threshold and should be able to submit things with far fewer nervous breakdowns. The story I’ve been working on since, Lemon Bees, is shaping up quite nicely so far. I hope it gets published, somewhere, though my muse has suggested that I convert it to zine format and self-publish if no one accepts it (or even if they do, and haven’t purchased all rights). Getting ahead of myself a bit, I know, but it’s exciting. Progress!

I promise I’ll return soon to our regularly scheduled Very Special Episodes of mental health.

Hm.

This blog is not intended to be a politically-focused one, though naturally many topics I may discuss here will blur the lines.

As many of you, hopefully all of you, are aware, the G20 Summit in Toronto this weekend past had a number of regrettable incidents. This video is not particularly clear, and there are others shot from above that show clearly the distribution of the protesters and the police and the actions of both.

I’m posting this video here because I would like to ask, of the handful of people who follow me, that it be reposted. What is being displayed is a police tactic called ‘kettling’, where crowds of protesters are surrounded by police without opportunity to withdraw, and then held there for hours. On occasion, police will rush into the crowd and arrest those that they can grab, while dispersing whatever formation the protesters have fallen into. This is, theoretically, supposed to limit chaotic movement of protesters and prevent harm to property and citizens. Property and citizens, in that order.

No matter your opinions on what the protesters were doing, or on the act of protesting itself, I would like you to watch this and ask yourself how this tactic, used on peaceful protesters singing (albeit badly) our national anthem, diminished chaos and the possibility of injury.

I was at this protest, but prevented from reaching the main group of protesters by a second cordon of police. I was dressed inoffensively, behaved politely, and was only carrying first-aid supplies in order to help anyone who might be injured during a tactic such as this. We were prevented from exercising our right to assemble, and what I believe is my right and duty to assist my fellow citizens.

Please, repost. You don’t need to include my comments here, and feel free to respond to it however you feel, but I would like this to achieve wider recognition. Thank you.