cptsdvictim's journal

Warning to avid readers: this is not a journal about healing, but one about retraumatization and not surviving.

Continuing from my previous threads on MSF, I slept a few hours. Picked up my prescription drugs. Had lunch and my free coffee. Will head to work in 15 minutes. Slow day today. Taking it easy.

Finished work. Got some s**t done today. Feels good. Charging my laptop in the cafe. No e-mails with CS papers today (probably another outage in arXiv systems). So, free time until dinner.

Watched

Good morning! I decided to take vacation in early July for a week. Planning to visit a few places to eat, drink tea and coffee, and see some museums. Will get to travel by train a bit too. All within the country. As I don't have my documents, I'm unable to travel outside the country. Will have to do with what I've. It's going to be fun. Although, I expect some places to vet letdowns but I'm going to explore them anyways. It's pretty hard when you're vegan.

Today was a good day. Relaxed in the morning. After taking my medicine prescribed by the ER doctor. Then I started work. Smashed it. Ate a good soup and had my usual decaf oat latte. Corrected a few things regarding the vacation. And now just booked my train tickets for the first city I'll visit (again). After dinner I'll head to the shelter. Put the bananas I bought in the cupboard. And wind down. Tomorrow is a good day, too. Will continue work, have a smoked tofu wrap with a decaf oat latte, work some more and then head for end of the week dinner: Chana Masala medium spicy with some green chilli. Can't wait!

Understanding Trauma - Part 25 - Subtle Trauma Part 2 - YouTube

The end of another successful day. My roommate has been away since yesterday which makes it all the more nicer.

Today I had my decaf Americano with oat milk and a croissant, followed by work, followed by lunch and a coffee, followed by more work and then ended with my favorite dinner time. Smashed it. I had to refactor quite a bit of code today as I ran into a limitation which I had to work around. Didn't seem to work at first despite doing everything by the book, though it ended up resolving by itself.

Now it's time to relax. I hope tomorrow I'll be alone. It'd be nice.

Almost forgot, didn't find the chocolate I usually buy on Saturdays for Sundays as they've ran out. So I bought toffifee (or toffifay as they're known in the US).

"Mine"

Lack of prevention of C-PTSD renders victims and propagation of abuse in a society. I, personally, suffered a double whammy: first, the lack of resilience on the West following World War II where Eastern Europe was abandoned to be subjugated and traumatized by the Soviet Union which traumatized my parents and subsequently passed down the complex trauma to me (systemic side and personal side), secondly, the direct abuse and neglect I experienced at the hands of my parents.

What this does to someone is they become an easy target for abusers. Just like it happened to me with a narcissist I just encountered in a shop. Instead of not giving him supply and waiting it out by gray rocking him, I offered to help. Partly because of my people pleasing tendencies, partly because I wanted to get over with (kind of abusing myself).

Worst part is that I'll never learn to be able to deal with them and learn from past mistakes because I was so retraumatized (and due to my nervous system and brain structure as a sociopath) that I'm unable to benefit from therapy ever again. At whose hands I got retraumatized? Drum roll. Eastern European relational therapist. Non trauma informed. Abuse in cycles. Systemic. She was very "resilient" herself.

Neurotypical people really just do things for themselves, to feel better, in the end. That's the truth. And if you are lucky, you were born in a family in which there wasn't too much abuse so you grew with just a bit of skew that can be addressed in therapy with another neurotypical person.

What societies need to do to become truly resilient is to do prevention of C-PTSD. This means investing in all layers of society (abuse is prevalent in all social strata).

Today was ok. Yesterday I worked a bit to get social media set-up. I still need to do YouTube. Got my coffee in the morning after spending 1h working. Did a few more hours later. Running into more issues I discover after fixing others. Ah, the life of a developer.

Finances wise, I might save some money and deposit in my savings account by end of tomorrow. This was unexpected.

New morning, new day. Yesterday evening, with the help of a friend, managed to secure YouTube channel for my app. All social media handles have been secured: tiktok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

This morning managed to fix some code for image uploading and image rendering. I still need to change it to handle errors which means going the old way but combined with the new way. Asked Gemini how to do it. Will try later today. For now, as a test, it works.

Then, I'll need to fix a bug. After which, need to test the failure case of the UI. And then I need to implement tests after doing some housework.

This is going to be another set of changes with a bajillion modifications that will take me 2 days to review and merge.

Killed it. Bugs slashed. New findings have their own individual issue. App is working, mostly, as expected.

Got my lunch, decaf oat latte and read a bit of T.W. Rewarded myself with a Nutella crepe. Worked some more: still need to figure out how to get the tests working. I'll try something tomorrow morning most probably. Fingers crossed, though I don't have high expectations.

Listened to audiobook sociopath, had dinner and got in time for the quickest bus. Relax time now.

My apps Facebook account got disabled and despite making an appeal, they declined it. I guess this is one way to lose customers.

Final changes in. Aaanndd, the tests are failing. Spent the entire day trying to figure out how to make them work but nothing gives in. Asked the community. Argh! When I was so close. If I don't solve it by tomorrow morning I'm pressing ahead without them. Leaving them to be fixed later.

On Friday afternoon I'll meet a friend for lunch. I'm proud of myself that I kept a boundary: can't talk about my app. He was ok with it saying we can make conversation on subjects other than work. I'll see if he wants to talk about work and if so I'll make it clear that I can talk about work just not about this project (he'd need an NDA if we would talk about it).

Relaxing in a cafe now. Today, for lunch, I was pleasantly surprised to see they've brought in Malabar Curry. Of course, without hesitation, I bought a portion. I felt so good (still feeling good) after eating it. So good! The decaf oat latte (second one, after the decaf Americano with oat milk and a croissant in tbe morning) after the Malabar Curry was so good. Not a bad day today. Even had some small talk with B. the server of coffee I've in the morning on some days of the week. The staff there are awesome. Too bad I'm a sociopath and retraumatized. I wish I'd be more upbeat, connected and would know how to resonate with them. Most people find connection over complaining, nowadays. Not me. I wouldn't know what to say. I stick to the positive but then get stuck without knowing what to say. It's easier in writing and at distance. I guess my extreme anxiety, as my trauma therapist put it, is the culprit. Inside Out 2 resonated with me on this theme.

Gutenmorgen. After consulting with the community and receiving a few ideas, I debugged my tests further and realized what I was missing. Fixed them this morning. All is good when all is good. My changes will be complete (with the rest of the tests to be added later).

Today's going to be a looong day. I need to review my changes locally after merging all of them. Then I'll have a smoked.tofu wrap for lunch followed by a decaf oat latte. Then I'll review the changes some more and if no further modifications required, open a pull request. At which point I go through my changes once again and if all is good, merge. I hope by end of tomorrow I'll finish the reviews and merge.

It's coming together.

Another successful day. Tomorrow is the last day to get the changes merged in. Over 2800 additions and over 600 deletions. Another monstrous commit.

Now, relaxing. I'll hopefully have a soup for dinner and head for the shelter to relax. Counting the days until Saturday evening when I'll have Chana Masala. I watched some travel video from India and got my appetite for Indian food going, haha.

Hi. I'm listening to "Into the unknown" Frozen song in the cafe. It always resonates with me. I love this song.

Today I got the changes merged in. Noticed a few problems for which I opened a bug and other issues. They are in! Thousands of changes. I'm sooooo tired. Couldn't continue work so I took off early. 1 and a ½ hours earlier. Rescheduled the meeting with my friend to next Friday.

Tomorrow and the next week will be a easy going one. Nothing major, will just work on the issues I've opened in the past. Maybe I'll fix some bugs. Hopefully.

Tomorrow the day comes: Chana Masala. And before that, coffee with oat milk and a croissant in the morning, tofu wrap and a decaf oat latte for lunch.
Made also some progress on reading T.W. It's always so heavy. Right now I'll listen to Sociopath until dinner time. Just need to finish watching the debate between Trump and Biden. Got a few minutes left.

After all this 1 week of holiday will come. Pray for good weather, though I don't make expectations and will dress for rainy season with a hint of warmth.