I think my brain chemistry has ironed itself out from the shock it received from the anesthesia drugs and the surgery itself. It occurs to me that one of my friends was quite right to suggest that general anesthesia doesn't actually keep you from feeling the trauma of surgery; it only keeps you from remembering it. At least, consciously. I think if your brain doesn't remember it, your body does. I actually scoured the Internet looking for studies about post-surgical trauma, and came up almost dry. Chalk this one up to one of those things I would have done a thesis on if I'd ever gotten that far. Ah, well. Consolation, today, is making progress in my veterinary assistant studies. At least I feel like I'm accomplishing something.
My new shrink finally asked me what my treatment goals are, yesterday. Here's one, and it's a big one: I want to be able to finish what I start. I know damn well I was milking being a student as a way to survive without actually having a real job. Had the money not run out, I would probably have continued forever. My fatal flaw was not being able to stick to one subject, and there are reasons within reasons for that.
Reason, the first: I'm a fatal perfectionist. If I messed up one test, got a low grade on one project, in any class, I would just give up. I wouldn't seek help from tutors, or talk to my teacher about difficulties I was having. I would just drop the class, and I would hate myself for it. This perfectionism problem goes all the way back to early childhood. I began to learn to play the piano when I was four years old. By the time I was six or seven, I was able to play most anything I heard, by ear. When I made a mistake, though, I would become enraged. I would slam the cover down on the piano, and bite my hand until it bled, all for one wrong note. This was likely because so many things came so naturally to me that, when I encountered something I could not do perfectly the first time, I assumed there was something wrong with me. I interalised this, and it remains a problem to this day.
Reason, the second: Physical disabilities and pain. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia when I was 14. I've lived almost all my life with chronic pain, and it's exhausting. Fibromyalgia, itself, comes with a host of other symptoms, including IBS, headaches, apparent allergic reactions that come and go, serious sleep disturbances, and, of course, constant fatigue. The degenerative disk disease began in my early twenties, as did arthritis in my knees. Even early on in my ill-fated college career, there were some days, some weeks, that I just could not get out of bed, or I missed class because of an IBS attack, or I couldn't concentrate because of "fibro fog," or a headache. All of these are invisible illnesses. I felt that even if I tried to explain it to my professors, they probably wouldn't believe me, and at the time, I did not have the resources to see a specialist.
Reason, the third, which should be abundantly evident by now: Mental illness and learning problems. I'm bipolar, and I also have ADD. The problem I have always had is that the medications used to treat ADD worsen my anxiety and manic or mixed episodes. The medications used to help my bipolar and PTSD worsen my ability to concentrate. It's an evil little catch-22. For most of the time I was in college and university, I muddled through with no medication or just an SSRI. It wasn't enough, but all I had at my disposal in terms of mental health care was a local sliding-fee clinic that was always packed. They mostly treated people in extreme poverty and dual-diagnosis cases. I was constantly asked if I was on illegal drugs or drank alcohol. I guess because I didn't, I was a low-priority case. When I finally got to see the psychiatrist, all she did was double my Lexapro. This worsened my anxiety to the point which caused me to drop down to part-time that semester, and, eventually, lose my financial aid entirely. My student loans were in default for years.
Reason, the fourth: I am literally interested in everything. The universe is an amazing and terrifying and beautiful place. Were it not for my weakness in math, I may well have gone into astrophysics, or molecular biology, or neuroscience, or meteorology, or any number of the "hard" sciences that require one not to have failed algebra three times in high school and managed to avoid maths altogether in college. ("I'll do it next semester...") I always scored high on science reasoning tests, and did well in biology, anatomy and physiology. Concepts, I could grasp easily, but calculations were another matter. The last thing I studied in college was journalism, because I felt that if I could not actually become a scientist, I could write about science, interview researchers, and let the world know about new discoveries. Did I care about Greek life at Kent State? Hells, no, but I'd write about it if it meant that my name got out there, and my writing recognized as good.
Looking back over what I wrote, it sounds, to me, like a bunch of lame excuses. If you could see the bruises from where I've beat myself up over all of this, I would look like I'd been in a fight with a pack of angry hyenas. There are a few physical scars, from where I used to cut, a faint ladder of whitish lines on my right arm. I say I don't want people to feel sorry for me, but at the same time, I crave understanding and validation, like any human being. I don't want to be exonerated from my sins. Philosophically, I don't even believe in the concept of sin. Yet, I can't forgive myself for wasting a good chunk of my life for no real-world gain. My mind keeps saying, "if only," and the clock keeps ticking. I don't know why, but I've always had this sense that I will not have a particularly long life. I've probably lived at least half of it already.
What are my goals in terms of treatment? I don't want to waste the second half of my life.
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