I was supposed to go to Philly this weekend, but shit hit the fan with M yesterday and I canceled my train tickets. Shit hitting the fan wasn’t exactly a surprise — I knew it was coming. I just didn’t know how soon it would happen.
We’re done.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had to cut someone with a PD out of my life. It just sucks more-so than in the past because I care about them. I also know that there’s no possibility of repair once I’ve been identified as The Villain in their story. So I’ve just got to keep moving forwards.
Today I feel deflated, particularly since panic hit late this afternoon. Apparently I ate something I shouldn’t have, because I’m having a reaction to it. My health anxiety is a lot better than it’s been, but this really knocked me off center. As a result, I’m staying home instead of seeing a show I was really looking forward to — as well as missing seeing a person I was looking forward to spending time with. Oh fucking well.
Apart from anxious and frustrated (the usual suspects), I don’t really know how I feel. I’m sort of…empty? blank? uninspired? K-Pop Demon Hunters is playing on a loop because it’s become a comfort movie, and it doesn’t require much of my attention. What’s frustrating is that I was on such an upswing and then this afternoon happened. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to pick up where I left off — fingers crossed.
When I decided to cancel my trip yesterday, the relief I felt was huge. That hasn’t changed, although now I’m left wondering how to spend my weekend. I’ll probably end up seeing a show tomorrow night — so I guess I should secure tickets tonight. Then, on Sunday, K is coming over to try out my new mini projector (which I ordered last weekend when she was over and we were in the stratosphere). I also just ordered a screen to hang on my bedroom wall.
I’m trying to find the balance between being a human with chronic health issues and just…me. I don’t know that there’s actually a line delineating one from the other. I used to see it as more black and white: I was healthy and then I was sick. But I’ve come to understand that my Venn diagram of health & illness looks more like this:
Before I was “Sick,” I was “Sensitive.” I felt everything to the point that I learned to dissociate as a way of life. At the same time, I experienced meltdowns that were just attributed to me, my personality. It’s only in hindsight that I began to understand the meltdowns as what they were: symptoms of PANS/PANDAS. Same with the OCD that started seemingly overnight. For a very long time, my “mental health issues” were treated as though they were divorced from my body. Until, of course, the illness began to manifest more physically. But even then, when I knew something was Really Wrong, doctors dismissed my concerns as symptoms of mental illness. It took years of seeing specialist after specialist to finally land on a couple of diagnoses that made sense of my life up to that point: Lyme Disease & PANS/PANDAS. Then, instead of viewing my problems as in the realm of mental illness, I viewed them as firmly physical in nature. It’s only over the past decade or so that I’ve come to understand the complex interplay of mind & body that lead to where I am today. It started before I was even born and there was no single variable that could be changed that would have lead to a significantly different outcome. A lot of what healing has been for me is uncovering the beliefs I had about health/illness and unlearning them. It’s been about embracing both/and. I experience chronic health issues and I’m a whole person in my own right. I’m not broken, and I’m in the process of healing from things that were always present within me.