![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI suspect the real first was that I stopped being able to read, to put my mind into a story.
I stopped taking a real interest in gardening, whether that was a symptom or a cause who's to say? I'd been gardening since I was 5. I built greenhouses in short-term rental homes.
My motivation got lower. I got irritable and no longer liked people; I'd always been interested in and fascinated by them once I realized they existed. I didn't look forward to anything involving people.
That was school, leaving school helped a bunch and I stabilized but didn't really recover. When my work situation changed the slide downwards continued:
The first real warning was that my memory wasn't great. I used to be able to remember everything coming up in the next couple weeks plus the broad outlines of the next year. I lost that slowly over two or three years until now I can't remember what's happening today or tomorrow even if I've looked it up repeatedly.
Then I started forgetting words. All my life I "talked like a dictionary" but now some days at least half my nouns are "thing" and frequently many of the verbs. Obviously this doesn't show up in writing because I can fix those things.
I started to get moments, several seconds to half a minute long, where I lost context for everything and just could not remember what was going on.
I was told that's just what happens when you get older but my functionality now is significantly lower.
I stopped being able to juggle demands as well. I used to be able to play one thing off against another, to have several projects on the go so I could escape the demands of one by working on the other. I had little strategies all the time: I'm going to the kitchen to listen to a podcast, the dishes will get done while I'm there. I'm going out to feed the animals, look I fixed the fence. More and more and more I just stopped doing things at all.
I was told everyone did that during the pandemic.
I started switching words for their antonyms in my speech. Sometimes I'd notice, sometimes not. It was the pandemic so I could correct it because I mostly write, but in speech it was really noticable.
I stopped being able to type accurately. My fingers no longer hit the keys in the correct order. Most commonly words reversed, this isn't one finger moving a titch too fast but is instead my mind triggering things in the wrong order without me knowing.
I'm starting to lose my ability to spell. I've always been able to look at a word and know if it was spelled right, with a couple notable exceptions. Now sometimes I look at even common words and reach for that knowledge and sometimes it's not there in either my head or my muscle memory.
And now my functionality is at the point where I frequently choose between the two most necessary demands: doing any work-for-pay in a day or eating before evening in that day. I have limited energy and I can do one or the other.
I'm reasonably sure that with a month off I could build myself up to background eating and sleeping so work could be reintroduced without sliding further back. A week off at a time stabilizes me for a month or two, though less and less as time goes on. I don't know what would take me back to functionality. Six months? Certainly fieldwork, as opposed to only deskwork, really does help.
This is the context in which my employee assistance line doesn't have staff to can handle someone who needs a counselor "sensitive to gender" (though after the second time through that in two years they have been reported and have now found someone for me to see in a month, we'll see how they are) and my doctor is booking six weeks out.
What would you do? What should I do?
Edited to add: I've started gardening again because I don't care what it costs, that's something I won't have taken from me. Maybe if I didn't garden I could slow loss of the work/food energy issue but that's not a choice I'll make. I will lose everything but the garden if need be.
I stopped taking a real interest in gardening, whether that was a symptom or a cause who's to say? I'd been gardening since I was 5. I built greenhouses in short-term rental homes.
My motivation got lower. I got irritable and no longer liked people; I'd always been interested in and fascinated by them once I realized they existed. I didn't look forward to anything involving people.
That was school, leaving school helped a bunch and I stabilized but didn't really recover. When my work situation changed the slide downwards continued:
The first real warning was that my memory wasn't great. I used to be able to remember everything coming up in the next couple weeks plus the broad outlines of the next year. I lost that slowly over two or three years until now I can't remember what's happening today or tomorrow even if I've looked it up repeatedly.
Then I started forgetting words. All my life I "talked like a dictionary" but now some days at least half my nouns are "thing" and frequently many of the verbs. Obviously this doesn't show up in writing because I can fix those things.
I started to get moments, several seconds to half a minute long, where I lost context for everything and just could not remember what was going on.
I was told that's just what happens when you get older but my functionality now is significantly lower.
I stopped being able to juggle demands as well. I used to be able to play one thing off against another, to have several projects on the go so I could escape the demands of one by working on the other. I had little strategies all the time: I'm going to the kitchen to listen to a podcast, the dishes will get done while I'm there. I'm going out to feed the animals, look I fixed the fence. More and more and more I just stopped doing things at all.
I was told everyone did that during the pandemic.
I started switching words for their antonyms in my speech. Sometimes I'd notice, sometimes not. It was the pandemic so I could correct it because I mostly write, but in speech it was really noticable.
I stopped being able to type accurately. My fingers no longer hit the keys in the correct order. Most commonly words reversed, this isn't one finger moving a titch too fast but is instead my mind triggering things in the wrong order without me knowing.
I'm starting to lose my ability to spell. I've always been able to look at a word and know if it was spelled right, with a couple notable exceptions. Now sometimes I look at even common words and reach for that knowledge and sometimes it's not there in either my head or my muscle memory.
And now my functionality is at the point where I frequently choose between the two most necessary demands: doing any work-for-pay in a day or eating before evening in that day. I have limited energy and I can do one or the other.
I'm reasonably sure that with a month off I could build myself up to background eating and sleeping so work could be reintroduced without sliding further back. A week off at a time stabilizes me for a month or two, though less and less as time goes on. I don't know what would take me back to functionality. Six months? Certainly fieldwork, as opposed to only deskwork, really does help.
This is the context in which my employee assistance line doesn't have staff to can handle someone who needs a counselor "sensitive to gender" (though after the second time through that in two years they have been reported and have now found someone for me to see in a month, we'll see how they are) and my doctor is booking six weeks out.
What would you do? What should I do?
Edited to add: I've started gardening again because I don't care what it costs, that's something I won't have taken from me. Maybe if I didn't garden I could slow loss of the work/food energy issue but that's not a choice I'll make. I will lose everything but the garden if need be.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-25 04:42 am (UTC)What I did was start saying no to a lot of things, scaled back my ambitions, and spent a lot of time idle, doing essentially nothing: sleeping, lying on sofa, watching old movies, browsing pinterest, just being low-key. I took a job with a lot of vacation, and used the vacation. Did a lot of wandering around cities alone, in silence. Not that any of it really "healed" but as you say: stabilized. I know I have a lower-than-before limit on my capacities now, and I can at least remain stable if I stay below that limit. It's embarassingly low, but I feel better having a feel for where the limit is than I did when I kept overshooting it.
Some of this is not reproducible advice because it requires money to compensate: to buy time or space or ease or security. And some is me-specific in terms of what nourishes me rather than you. But maybe a reproducible element is: get a bit ruthless about declining to do voluntary things that use more of your reserves than they replenish.
Good luck. If you want to talk or just have some silent company, I'm around.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-25 03:09 pm (UTC)