[CaminoDeOro]

FWIW this is going to be a very long vent post, I know what I need to do, and with the meds I'm on currently I'm unstable but I bounce back a lot quicker from lows. I just need to rant and rage somewhere.

15 months ago in July I lost my home due to bipolar disorder, and started living with my ex (who overall really is great). That pushed me off a cliff into a truly crushing low, hitting the darkest state I've been in in many years by December.

Then in December my dad died and I ended up visiting a couple relatives in an extremely challenging environment (one of the relatives is an animal hoarder and a low-grade psychopath). I was there for 2 months and left when I knew I was close to destabilizing badly, came back, was in a mixed state for another 2 months until ***** got crazy enough that I woke up and cut it off at the knees by going back on zyprexa. Then I crashed again for maybe a month, nowhere near as bad as before but not great.

Then I started the DBT pre-program and had another couple solid hypo/mixed states which caused me to eventually crash in late July, at the same point I went off an allergy medication which (surprise!!!) is an SSRI, which deepened the crash, again, modest intensity, but still.

Shortly after that, I had a strategy session with my pdoc and we started testing different meds, which we knew would cause instability, but this is probably the best time for it since my ex is letting me live with her for free since I can't hold a job again yet.

Then in late August my ex's mom came up for two weeks. Back in December when I was at my lowest point, less than a week before my dad died, she decided it was a great time to sneak up when nobody else was home and tell me how she didn't want me here, etc, and suggest inpatient treatment as a housing option (lmfao, and this b--, er, lady was a family court judge, how she managed to have such blinding ignorance of the system after that really beggars belief, not to mention makes me wonder how many lives she ruined). She also grew up 2 towns over from my mom and is the same age. She has many mannerisms that are very similar, which set my teeth on edge years before any of this. My mom is a narcissist and I end up having a Pavlovian reaction to this woman where my old behavior patterns that evolved with my mom's lunacy will start to take over within about 3 days of being around her. tl;dr: she's toxic and she triggers me.

After I got back in February from that incident in December, I was living in the only spare bedroom in the house, so whenever she would visit I would essentially pack all my crap away and move out (I'm living here for free, remember). In August even though it was 2 weeks I knew better than to be around, so I stayed at a friend's house for 3 days and then literally lived in the woods for the remainder. Now granted I've wanted to go backpacking for a long time and have been working up to it physically and by getting gear, etc, so I made the best of it as a pilot project for backpacking. It was mostly in a campground and on national forest land in a very lovely area. So that part of it was nice and I did learn a lot of stuff I needed to know for serious backpacking, and really made the best of it. But, the reality remains, I essentially had to move out of my place for 2 weeks to live in the woods, and this is a huge disruption, and between bipolar and ADHD, disruptions are THE ENEMY because it takes me WEEKS to get back on routine after something lesser than what I just described. I mean for god's sake, I'm developing a get-back-on-routine routine with checklists and stuff, which says a lot about both how difficult disruptions are for me and how often they are happening.

Anyway, shortly after I moved back in, my ex told me that her mom had kicked the tenants out of the house she owns up here and would be taking all her furniture back to furnish the house. 90% of that furniture was in the room I was using. At least the mom will no longer be staying here and thus evicting me by default when she visits, but COME ON.

That was after my med change so I bounced back from the mood crash from that within 48 hours. But at that point - why unpack anything further, or set anything back up in my room, when all the furniture would be gone in a few weeks? So getting back on routine, which would have been hard enough, was severely impacted. Also, since coming back from the woods, the already existing avoidance I'd had of coming out when she and/or the kids are home got WAAAAY worse. The kids are intolerable at times but she's actually fine, this is my issue to work over in DBT, but the point is, it got worse and I'm still not past it.

THEN about 3 weeks ago my ex told me that she'd decided to swap bedrooms, so her bedroom would be in the room I'd been staying in, her OLD bedroom would become a den for the kids and TV, and I would move into a "room" consisting of room dividers and
a very large closet right next to my old/her new room and the stairs. So, I lose furniture AND have to move ALL my crap AGAIN, AND lose privacy right when noise and "people pressure" from the presence of people has turned into a trigger that drives me to hide to a really bad level.

Anyway the Great Reshuffling as I call it, happened on the 27th. I'd spent many hours over several days prepping for this, as between ADHD and anxiety and disorganization and ultrarapid/ultradian cycling I knew it would take me that long. Meanwhile she literally spent like 3 hours one day moving stuff around, then on the 26th which I had earmarked to get all my crap moved, she worked from home (++anxiety), she then had the kids home that afternoon (++anxiety and then they had EPIC tantrums which fortunately I only heard a little bit of), THEN her band played a show at a pretty well known club, THEN she brought her on-again-off-again girlfriend home to be quite loud quite late... then she woke up the next day with a hangover and completed all necessary prep tasks for the Reshuffling in under 4 hours. I'm ranting about this because she is so much more efficient at getting tasks done and so much higher energy that it's often exhausting to be anywhere near it and makes me resentful as hell, especially when that comparison of effort is directly tied to a major disruption of my fragile recovery state. Dude I will be recovering from this Reshuffling for weeks, AGAIN, but now that all the stuff is moved and her room is set up she's already 90% good.

So anyway on the 27th, the movers were to come between noon and 4pm. I woke up anxious and with negative mood because of the bullsh*t I knew was coming. She was moving stuff around and I was having a VERY hard time being in the presence of anyone at all let alone her - again she's great, doesn't understand but is very supportive, this is my issue - so I was trying to make myself useful in other parts of the house and due to bad timing, as soon as I got somewhere to do something she would immediately materialize in that location. I was barely speaking at that point and having severe irritability and moderate anxiety. She went to get some food before the movers came, I'd been trying to put together shelves which were not cooperating and I partially destroyed them in a fit of rage, though I was able to partly conceal the damage, though I abandoned them and they are still half-assembled even now 3 days later. Anyway at that point I had DBT individual fairly soon, so I decided to gtfo and go to that. I got out of DBT individual at 3pm I went to get a med refill and decided to walk a couple miles back to calm down, and realized I was still not able to go back. So I went and got a good meal (see! skills! exercise and eating right!) and came back.

Now as part of the Reshuffling, said girlfriend had a spare bed she needed to store, so it seemed that letting me use it so I would at least have a bed was a good solution, so the movers were going to put it where I will be staying now. So after walking and dinner and chilling out with my phone for a while I'd wrangled myself back to a "provisionally stable" state. Got back, opened the door, she was upstairs setting stuff up in her room, and I got that visceral realization that somebody, her and/or partner(s) and/or kids, was going to be RIGHT THERE, RIGHT NEXT TO ME, a LOT of the time. Ugh. Then I got upstairs and found that the bed was a gross memory foam mattress and I'm a stomach sleeper and it had never occurred to me to check whether the bed was a civilized bed and not a giant sponge and that was IT. Previously during my staging and moving of everything I realized I would need to have my bed in the giant closet because I at least need a door to close for privacy and when I'm anxious, so I dragged the last of my stuff in there, set up power and networking and ventilation, stayed up til 7am the next day and by the end had essentially sealed myself up for like 26 hours.

I was physically a mess when I woke up, I could tell it had been hard on me and my brain was fried, basically spent hours just trying to hydrate and eat slowly and recover from the large amount of anxiety meds I'd had to take the day before, etc. Eventually she left for the night and I went downstairs and made another balanced meal plus food to take back upstairs. That was the 28th. For the 29th I planned to get up and force myself out immediately so this wouldn't become any more of a pattern. But after all that high energy activity and whatnot my ex had apparently planned a leisurely day at home finishing setup of her bedroom and the new den which involved going up and down the stairs 900 times and I just could not deal. I did manage to at least leave the door to my little roost open so she'd know I was awake - I seriously don't think she knew I was home on the 28th because I was so quiet - and so the cats could come in and out since they are always good to have around. And I got a shower during a time I knew she'd be out for an hour. Didn't eat very well though.

Fortunately my sleep isn't TOO badly disrupted by staying up all night the one time, it's returning toward where I need it to be. My mood is better today - the med change has been horrible for my stability but great for my resilience. But obviously the avoidance is not going to be something that's solved. My plan for today is to move some of the stuff around and put up the room dividers for the part of my area that isn't the roost (bed + closet). That area is actually the size of a midsize bedroom, although I have only a terrible desk and office chair, and one easy chair as furniture. And, set up desk and computers and whatnot. Also make some phone calls, maybe try to get into my pdoc early due to the med instability, get an allergist appointment so I can avoid the SSRI allergy pills next summer (ughh), eat some decent food. And if the kids are going to be here tonight, gtfo for a while, because I am NOT up to handling their nonstop tornado act. I also need to do my pill organizers for the week and my weekly planner.

It's not over yet, though.

After all that, the mom is going to be here from the 31st through the 9th.

As I mentioned, she's now got her own house to stay in, but she is clingy af and will be here A LOT. I am staying at a friend's for 3-4 days starting the 31st and will be doing a fair amount of paid work there assuming I can remain stable enough to do it. But beyond that I really have nowhere else to go, I'm not organized enough to head out to the trees although I do have three-season camping capability and the weather would not be a problem. So, I am going to basically have to figure out how to be here almost never, until she leaves again. Because after all this, I mean even WITHOUT all this, being around her at all will be BAD for my mental health. She can fake nice really well, but it's the same way my mom does it. I will not be able to stop the narc-mom-related patterns from taking hold if I'm around her too much. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I start helplessly plotting middle class cold war mind games after a couple days exposure because that's what I grew up with with my mom. But my mom is a 3D chess player at that *****. I learned from the best. Ex's mom is the type to fumble for the ativan. If I get sucked into that type of behavior I will destroy her and that will cause problems for everyone, possibly even wearing out my welcome here even though my ex knows her mom is ridiculous and really only tolerates her at best.

So. Nothing will be calm until after November 9th. Then I have until mid-December when the mom comes up again and there's the whole holiday sh*tshow, now I love the holidays IF and ONLY IF I have a solid group of good people to be around, which has happened only a few times in my life. I have no money really. My little nest egg from when my dad died is almost gone. Yet I'm thinking I might fly back across the country to see the few friends I have remaining there after 10 years gone. I would be sleeping on floors and couches, many of my friends are working class or straight up poor, obviously this isn't stable, but I would be around people who I know and who know me, who've missed me, and who aren't toxic poor photocopies of my mom, in a city where I really have almost no one.

It's funny, having had to change therapists a couple times in the last year and also start DBT, I've told my history a bunch of times recently, and it's quite a thing to realize that stuff you were minimizing for so long because you've seen so much worse, is actually really bad. The amount of drag I've had put on me during my entire life from my family, and circumstances, and then the compound interest from depression and anxiety and later on bipolar cycling.... it really is a wonder I've never had a serious suicide attempt. Good god.

[CaminoDeOro]

...I spent all the time typing this and whatnot to get it out before I start actually doing stuff, I'm reading it over real quick, the front door opens and there are people here. My ex and at least one of the kids. This is how **** works, constantly, unendingly, a ceaseless waterfall of small disruptions punctuated by flash floods of large disruptions. It never ****ing ends. God, just GET AWAY from me, go ANYWHERE else.

[emgreen]

It sounds like you're in a whole world of hurt right now. First off, I'm sorry about your dad's death! Having clarified that, dealing with some family & folks (especially your ex -- even though you say she's "OK") can be a real mind funk. Add to that being bounced around, having to deal with your own family, your ex's mother...etc. All I can write is that I read your story & have shared many of the feelings you're currently having at one point or another. When my parents come visit & stay with us for a week each year, I want to blow my brains out. All I want to do is be alone. I should be grateful, however, that I still have my dad...even though we don't get along.

So, yeah. I just wanted to respond to what you've written - all I just wrote was a bunch of crap, though! I hope your moods stabilize soon & that you find some peace.

[Naynay99]

Hey. Sorry u are going thru so much. It's especially tough dealing with family and house
mates and stuff. Stressful and it's tough to have no privacy, especially when you are really low and desperately need somewhere you can go hide out and not be okay in peace. I hope things calm down and even out for you soon. Hang in there!

[emgreen]

You OK today? Sometimes when I purge emotionally I feel naked. I hope writing that stuff out helped.

[CaminoDeOro]

Thanks for all you guys have said. I am staying at a friend's house for a bit as it is better for me to do some physical labor outside in his yard and not be near even a mildly toxic person. She's not that bad. Just stunted and weirdly middle-class narrowminded. And yeah actually the fact that my housemate is my ex does add a bit of complication just because honestly I need to catch her up on what the hell has been going on with me because she is fine with it, it's just better that we check in from time to time. I wouldn't need to be quite so candid with someone I hadn't been in an intimate relationship with at one point.

I've been tracking my moods closely for a while and I am assembling charts and graphs. They're good for the shrinks and also her, we're both engineer types. lol

Anyway, mood better here. It's not great being on a couch and the house is super cold and dark but whatever. I knew to bring at least one therapy lamp and extra layers!