Greenstorm's Journal

Yesterday was a... group? for PMDD folks, put on remotely by a women's reproductive center. There was a psychiatrist and a gynecologist.

This is the first time I've heard someone say that a condition that removes 7-8 functional days per month and can cause extreme nonfunction and suicidality can count as serious, and therefore I'd be allowed to have more treatment than "maybe this birth control pill or SRI will help". It's the first time I've heard that my basically zero energy days, where I'm scared I'll die because breathing feels like it takes too much energy, is probably connected (58% of PMDD folks have lethargy as a symptom, and mine is just a little on the more intense side).

In part this means it's the first time I'm able to really admit how bad it is, because part of coping with something is minimizing it. My whole life I've planned around staying away from social contact, making decisions, and important events before my period. Things weren't "that bad" "most of" the time, and I had a lot of compensatory ability the rest of the time.

It's kind of like autism, though: the realization isn't entirely that it's bad for me, so much as that many other people have it so so easy in this regard.

Unlike autism this is something with a potential solution, and which I'm not in the least ambivalent about getting rid of. The gynecologist said that in extreme cases that don't respond to anything else, there's a drug that shuts down the ovaries for six months as a test, with a little bit of hormone supplementation to keep osteoporosis etc at bay. If that works, the ovaries can come out. This is after trying various birth control, psych meds, etc, but-- her examples of extreme cases are my everyday life.

It's also a reminder to me that I'm 21 days into my second type of birth control pill and things are pretty bad; they say after 3 months if it hasn't helped it probably won't, but I think this is not helping. It's put me at not exactly the bottom of my cycle, but pretty far into the bad stuff range. I'm taking it one day at a time but I miss my life. I miss not having to be so so careful with everything all the time, nd I realize that I've always had to be so careful with everything all the time because I always had to compensate for the bad times.

The clinic that ran the group doesn't take over my care, but they send information sheets to my doctor, and they're available to my doctor for consults on this stuff. I feel like someone has my back?

Fun fact: this isn't a hormonal disease, that is, there isn't a hormonal imbalance. It's an issue with the way the brain processes normal hormones and "normal" hormone fluctuations.

( Some symptoms, content sucks, sui etc )

Another night where I couldn't sleep.

There was a bunch of objectively good stuff in the day: I got the yard snowblowed, I had a good two-hour talk with the landrace gardening crew, I brought back a ton of grain and got it parked well. I'd expect to be happy or at least content. I didn't manage that at all.

I'm still super labile and my mind is not right. This is a couple days now; napping yesterday seemed to help some but I can't do that with work tomorrow.

I'm going to try eating and maybe that will help.

I tried reaching out to the gyne unsuccessfully on Wed or Thurs, I'm going to do so again tomorrow.

I'm getting scared.

My mind is in a bad way.

The voice that says I should never have trusted a medical professional to do any sort of follow-up care, and I never should have had the temerity to believe the system could ever help me feel better, is loud. I can't tell whether it's truth or where it's coming from.

Ugh. The last two nights I've had super intense night sweats, the kind where my entire sheet is soaked -- this is a first, and in increase in severity, since most of my life when I have these I've just been able to wake up at 3am, notice things are wet, and move to the other side of the bed to finish sleeping.

Last night was particularly bad since I woke up once an hour to move to a dry spot, ran out of dry spots, and eventually just gave up and slept on a towel.

I'm not really sure where it all comes from. My room is a normal temperature, same blankets and sheets as always. I have had these on and off most of my life but not nearly so bad, and it's been awhile.

To add to the fun I'm on day 8 of bleeding, which is longer than I've experienced before, and today I bled through my underwear, through my pad, and through my light-coloured bush pants while in the bush working with not just my coworker but with a first nations observer as well. This isn't the sort of thing that destroys me, and the blood mostly stayed up in the crotch area which tends to be obscured rather than running down the inside of the legs (admittedly I was climbing hills in front of folks a bunch of the day) but seriously.

I am so done with this. Can my body please give me a night of not oozing things so I can sleep, and then let me get about my job tomorrow? Please?

I've decided that next cycle I'll start the birth control pills my gyne recommended, I've been holding off because I don't really want to stick-handle the intense suicidiality that may be a side effect based on my past experiences. Seems like it's time to prep people to call in an emergency and see if I can rule that out as a solution to this so we can move on to the next thing.

Two nights up at 3am chasing off a bear; two nights ago with bear spray and last night the dogs just needed the reassurance of my presence to chase him off, and he stayed out of my line of sight. I guess this one learns.

I'm falling into what I think of as my natural sleep cycle: up earlier, tired by 8:30 or 9pm. This is the cycle where I pretty much never got to see friends when I lived in the city. It's pretty much keeping me from talking to Josh since he doesn't get home from work until fairly late, but it's helping my head feel clearer.

Last night didn't frost but tonight totally will. Fieldwork was cancelled due to high winds so I'm going to pull green tomatoes tonight; I pulled some last night (silvery fir tree, KARMA miracle, some katja) but there are a ton left. Pulling them and keeping them labelled is the challenging part. It would be good to know flavours, ripening times, and keeping times. I need to remember to pull my exserted orange/green cherry cross in to ripen too.

My mind is quiet finally. It's been awhile. I also am so busy; there's basically no free time in my near future.

I have some visitors booked for November, Josh and another set of folks. Mom may come up in Oct or very late Sept.

Okay.

Weeks back, maybe months back, when Tucker planned this trip he asked for what I needed around it. Asks number one, two, and three were not even near being on the table, they weren't a consideration. Ask four at least got a quick check-in before it was refused. Ask five was for some time to talk during the weeks he was gone, after his days with Sarah and not a week or two afterwards either, where we could reconnect and where there was space for me to talk about my feelings. Eventually (if she was going to be gone and he wasn't going to the convention yet anyways, and then after some pressing it would be created to work with either of those) he committed to a couple hours Friday evening (that's tonight) to talk.

A couple weeks before he left we had the "idk how you feel unless it directly affects me" (otherwise known as the "protect me from your feelings by not telling me about the hard ones because that's what people who love each other do" seriously do people live like this? deliberately?) conversation.

The weekend he left we has the "talking is hard, let's not do it much" conversation (otherwise known as "I'm getting emotionally overloaded and can't deal with so many feelings, can we take it down many notches").

We'd knocked around the idea of talking in the evenings he was gone, but my emotional regulation decided to try text instead, which is the context in which he stood me up that one night and gave the slight headtilt in the direction of apology an said he was doing great but just having these emotional experiences and didn't feel like he could compartmentalize them away to let me know he couldn't talk, or whatever (again running with the least charitable lens, I don't have an alternative lens on this one yet).

I sent a message saying that was kinda shitty and he said he thought he could stop being happy long enough to talk with me and I said he could be happy as long as he showed some fucking empathy (deeply paraphrased but probably pretty evenhanded). This was all by text.

After awhile he came back and said he'd still like to make time to listen to me on Friday, that he missed me, that he cared about me, that he was processing how he'd make the mistake around essentially standing me up, idk all the stuff. We had a meta-conversation about what kinds of things I wanted from that conversation (to be listened to while I talked about how I felt, to be validated, to be reassured, to hear how he was doing, to have my feelings understood as reactions and not as judgements) and what was on offer and so I decided to do it.

So this afternoon we were going to talk, but ended up text chatting instead. This whole week I was using text chat in communication with him deliberately to slow down the feedback loop, to keep intonation and expressions out of the picture and avoid misinterpretation there, to gauge how engaged he was and how interested. Basically we'd do a couple chats back and forth and if it felt terrible my thought was to then disengage; much easier than hanging up on someone.

And over chat he was... loving. As forthright as I've ever seen him. Reassuring. Communicative. Empathetic. Careful to double-check his assumptions. Concerned. So we stayed in chat for a couple hours having a "wtf has been going on and what are we going to do about it" conversation, one that was a reasonable follow-up to the mismatched needs conversation from before he left.

He said everything I wanted to hear, had been wanting to hear. He said it in the ways I wanted to hear it. He gave some reasons to believe things might go better in future, though I probably fed the setup for most of those in.

This is the hardest. It's the hardest part. It's the part where someone is scared enough of the real consequence of the end that they pull together every ounce of people-pleasing to be the person you want, instead of the person they need to be. It could also be what I always want it to be, what I always hope it could be: the correction of a misunderstanding, a river that will never stop flowing simply shifting its banks to a more favourable bed. That's happened to me, but it's not the most likely outcome.

I was given everything I wanted. I want it, so much, and I don't trust it to continue. I shouldn't trust it to continue, this concern is legitimate. How do I approach this? Do I reject it? Do I try it but stay suspicious? Do I just... go into it, and wait until next time it hurts?

I don't know. I'll sleep on it, and wake on it, and butcher pork on it, and clean the house and get the second bed ready and receive Josh on it (so many highways between here and there are closed he'll likely be delayed till late tomorrow), and cook with Josh on it, and harvest grain on it, and make pickles on it, and winterize the snowblower and tiller on it, and kill chickens on it, and can chicken stock on it, and catch up on work email on it, and go to the field to work on it. I'll feed the animals on it and peruse classifieds for a pickup truck on it. I'll live with it day to day and my heart and my body will want it to be true and if nothing suspicious happens they might convince me that it will be ok.

Either way I'll keep reaching out to my people, to the folks who supported me through the last week. I'll build that community and keep building it.

I don't know what happens next.

I hate being given what I want. It makes it worse when I lose it.

For so many years my heart was this badass standing wave of ground glass caught in a swirl of wind. Now it's just a lump of seeping muscle, oozing myoglobin and coming apart with any exposure to air.

Anconas, 34 eggs, 29 fertile, 18 hatched

Also first corn in the ground

Also drains working again

So tired

Ovulation on spring equinox. Dude.

It's the fuck or kill part of my cycle. No one I want to fuck is available.

In a week or two it'll be the no-energy eat-bloody-meat-and-sleep-a-lot part. I'll be in a shut down logging camp putting a bunch of kilometers on my legs and dealing with an extremely tricky political situation among 4 different entities. It won't be wild enough to pee in the bush or go swimming in the lake/creek, but it won't be civilized enough to have running water or electricity or toilets or cooking facilities other than what we bring ourselves.

I had an excellent conversation with my one coworker last time we did this; hopefully he has something similar in his back pocket this time.

Bah.

I'm planning the orchard. I've ordered birds (blue-egged quail, a greater breadth of breeding chanteclers and cayugas). All my seeds have arrived, mostly.

Preserving animals means worrying that no one will carry on after me, that my life's work will be lost because someone eats the pigs and doesn't keep breeding them or that there won't be enough genetic diversity to my geese and so the lines will die out (at least in north america).

Planting trees, though: that's weightless, and it's a rope into the future. I sit looking at my apple trees and wonder: who planted those? what types are they? what were they thinking when they placed them there? what did they do with the apples? I'm planting my apples on BUD118 and Antonovka, the trees could live a hundred or more years. I live in a place that is... not sheltered from climate change, though it is that, but resilient to it already. Someone will eat an apple that I plant, even if the moose eat most of the new growth when I am gone and the bears tear down most of the tree limbs. Or maybe by then we will be eating the bears.

So this year: I have all my animals, and I am planting trees.