Candor Creek

My guardian during depressive evenings. I went three months and nearly two weeks with no epipen (!!!!!!) which was a huge milestone for me. Avoided it twice in that time by taking a certain med during what I call pre-anaphylaxis, but tonight's attack descended hard and fast. I almost thought I'd need the second pen. Now is when I'll own up to the weird depression I've had for a week - and you'll see why in a moment. A particularly rough two weeks of PMDD came and went, I was good and active for about five or six days, and then the paralyzing fog knocked me out again. Finally called psych doc so that she knows and we are not adjusting meds yet for various reasons, all of which I agree with. One of these is that one of the symptoms of MCAS can actually be depression (and anxiety) due to all those mast cells mucking things up in that blood/brain barrier. This means that if I'm having an inflamatory response the depression could be a side effect of that. Fu...

Photo unrelated. Just wanted to show off the pizza I'm eating today. I'm not going to be seeing the Queen biopic. So a good chunk of my 30s has been learning that I don't have to like things just because other people do. I do love to see new things and to learn, and I want to try everything possible, but the concept of just not liking something seemed somehow rude or, at the very least, detrimental to a friendship - because so much of building relationships when you move a lot is trying to seamlessly slip into an environment you clearly weren't made for. It's easier to communicate and build relationships if you appear to enjoy everything the locals do. That's one of the cental tomes of in-group bonding. Thanks, undergrad social psychology. ;) My best example of this is playing video games. Damn near everyone I interact regularly with (yes, I interact) plays video games. Apart from the occasional side scroller or a vintage title or two I have zero drive...

Old friend. Something to celebrate, 13 years in the making. I've only publically alluded to this recently, but my first grad program (not the awesome one yall know about. I seldom talk about the other one) was genuinely traumatizing, to the point where there is a Sarah before that 9-month period and a Sarah after it. Sarah's already-established mental illness became genuinely crippling afterwards, affecting many things - including my performance in my next program, which still haunts me and likely always will. Among the many things affected was my ability to read. I'm not going to describe the experiences or anguish here today, but do know it was bad enough where I could not and have not read a book from cover to cover since 2005, academic or otherwise, and was seldom able to make it past the first few pages. As you'd imagine this made academics quite impossible; I left grad school after four years of rabid headbutting against the inside of my own skull due to mo...

This is what my kitchen CAN look like. My aging dog has been sick for a few days, which can lead to some late nights for me. We're close to the end of this episode, but I decided to give him another dose of the mix he needs to purge the badness from his system. I planned to stay up with him (rather than berate myself for terrible sleep habits as I normally do) so I'm doing dishes and laundry at 4AM in between taking him outside so that he'll expell the evil in his system outdoors rather than in the apartment. I am still hoping to tackle at least part of the living room. I wanted to have guests over for the Packer games this season but right now the living room is an atrocious mess, wholly unfit for visitors. Thursday is the Packers/Bears game, though, and I'm kinda tempted to give up and move what I haven't neatened up to the bedroom just to have people over. I'm holding myself to a standard ("you didn't keep house correctly the first time, you...