11 Nov 2017 - Catching Up
Morning.
I know that I said in my last post that I'd try to put things up at least a couple times a week. Clearly, I haven't done that.
Trying to find the motivation to keep regular updates is difficult to say the least, between the sense that I'm not keeping up with what I need to do (so why should I devote time and effort to something not necessary?) and the feeling that no one's following this or cares, even though I know that that's not the case. The fact that sharing what goes on in my head and my perceptions of things is incredibly difficult as it is - even if I'm talking to someone I otherwise trust - doesn't make things any easier.
I'm going to try to keep things simpler, for my own sake.
Today is November 11th, 2017. I've been taking Wellbutrin for a total of 131 days; 19 days ago, following a severe low (complete with active suicidal thoughts), I opted to increase my dosage from 300mg to 450mg daily. In the time since then, I haven't noticed much of a psychological benefit, but the high dose has more or less eliminated my appetite. Eating once a day, if that, has become my new normal, and I'm losing weight because of it. I want to lose weight, but not like this.
I don't know what, if anything, that happened in the past few months is actually worth sharing here. I wrapped up the collecting season, started classes. I started counseling again (I can't recall if I already wrote about this), and even though I like my counselor, I'm still struggling to be fully transparent with her. Reflexively, I downplay how things are going if they aren't going well and play it up if things are going great. Stephanie thinks that things are going relatively okay with me, and I don't have it in me to go "actually, I'm not doing alright". Whenever she asks how things have been, "things are alright" is always my response, regardless of how I actually feel, or how things have actually been going. I feel like, in telling the complete truth, I'd be disappointing her, even though I know that that's not at all how it works.
This perpetual disparity between what I know and how I feel intensifies my distress. Why can't the two ever agree?
Socially, things have been profoundly not great. More now than ever, I feel as though Favorite Person is drifting away, and even though Curly has made a concerted effort to make me feel included, her efforts don't quite mitigate how much it hurts to see that I'm no longer close to FP, and likely never will be again. And I don't know how to reverse that trend, because everything I want ultimately makes me feel like a parasite, even though the only thing I want at this point is to spend time with her, just us, because that's the only way that feels comfortable to me. I can't just hang out on the main floor with her, because Dave seems to never leave her side when they're both home and I can't tolerate Dave's presence. Or my own being on the main floor for that matter, because my only association with it is the deep, intense pain of enduring one of the most extended lows I've ever had to live through. That pain is branded on the place.
If you can't spend time with a person, because the way you need to socialize and what they're comfortable with aren't compatible, how can you hope to stay close to them? When you feel like you're being - like you've been - replaced, and you voice that, and you're brushed off, how can a relationship be maintained?...As much as I wish that I could be okay with the fact that Favorite Person seems much less inclined to invest energy into the friendship than I am, and to devote more of my efforts towards my relationship with Curly, I can't. I just can't.
Earlier this week, I attended the Entomological Society of America's annual meeting, in Denver. It was an amazing experience, being somewhere where I was surrounded by other entomologists, people as passionate about insects as I am, somewhere that I unequivocally belonged. I had the opportunity to meet not one but four of my internet friends, including Mama Goat, who honestly is probably the only person that actually follows this blog closely. It was surreal to meet someone that I've known for years for the first time. On account of the late hour (my plane landed a bit before 8pm) and the fact that I was deeply exhausted, having had only about three hours of sleep the night before, I couldn't spend as much time with her as I would have liked, but the time spent talking over tea and dinner and lavishing affection on her two cats, the rotund Dragon and very friendly Beacon, and conversing in the car to my Air BnB was deeply enjoyable. She left me with a bunch of gifts - a fox tail with a jingly bell (to ring whenever I'm sad), a bag of crumbly fudge from London, a Pink Freud mug that I find absolutely hilarious, and best of all, a well-loved little stuffed dog that she's had since childhood. I come from a family of women that love our stuffed animals, and all of my close friends have given me plushes at one point or another, even going back to the former best friend that broke my heart and shattered my spirit, so it felt in a way like a delightful inevitability.
I need to straighten my room up some so that I can put things in proper places. The little stuffed dog needs a proper place to live.
The conference itself was amazing. I had the opportunity to attend so, so, so many interesting talks; some of them were in areas relevant to my interests and research, so I'll be contacting some grad students in the near future. Aside from the crazy amount of pure information to absorb from the talks, I also had a chance to look at posters, both from grad students and from other undergrads. Granted, I didn't look closely at them all - my method for choosing which posters to stop and read was asking myself "is this about bees" followed by "is this not about honey bees", which weeded out a lot. The one non-bee poster that stuck out to me, though, was a study of how dragonfly colors have diversified over time in a phylogenetic context, mostly because the graphic they used for a phylogenetic tree was stunning.
Even though she doesn't know that this blog exists, and I have absolutely no intention of ever, ever telling her, I especially appreciate that my friend Christy was at the conference and want to give her an extra special shout-out. Aside from the fact that she's another bee person, which automatically makes her good in my books, she kind of adopted me for a few days, letting me hang around and basically follow her from place to exhibit to symposium like a little lost sheep. The experience would have been much, much lonelier and much less enjoyable if she hadn't.
Coming back from the conference has been...rough, to say the least. Going from a place where I felt like I belonged, where I was supposed to be, where I had a group that I felt a part of, and where I was too busy to care if I was on my own, to here, where I don't have a group, and don't feel like I belong anywhere - like any space I occupy, physical and social, isn't mine to hold - has been hard. It's been like waking up from a dream that was far too good to be true, too pleasant to last. And I've voiced that to Favorite Person. At times, I just want her to be able to understand exactly what it feels like to walk through the world and feel like the place you are is not the place you belong, with no means of changing things so that it becomes where you belong and no way to leave for another. I want people to understand, because when you understand how it feels, you can understand behavior that stems from that feeling.
The sense now, of not belonging, is especially intense after tasting what it's like to be somewhere I'm meant to be. It's intense, but it doesn't induce the kind of blistering unhappiness that makes me want to take any action necessary to make the feeling stop. No, there's just a slow, grey, resigned sadness. Almost acceptance, that I don't belong here and never will, and that there's nothing I can do to change that fact.
I understand that the source of the feeling is purely internal and as little to do directly with my environment and situation, but it still hurts.
I toyed with the idea of trying to end all of my posts on a positive note, but that's not going to happen. That's not reality.
Until the next time I post, which should hopefully be sooner than a few months.
11 Nov 2017
I know that I said in my last post that I'd try to put things up at least a couple times a week. Clearly, I haven't done that.
Trying to find the motivation to keep regular updates is difficult to say the least, between the sense that I'm not keeping up with what I need to do (so why should I devote time and effort to something not necessary?) and the feeling that no one's following this or cares, even though I know that that's not the case. The fact that sharing what goes on in my head and my perceptions of things is incredibly difficult as it is - even if I'm talking to someone I otherwise trust - doesn't make things any easier.
I'm going to try to keep things simpler, for my own sake.
Today is November 11th, 2017. I've been taking Wellbutrin for a total of 131 days; 19 days ago, following a severe low (complete with active suicidal thoughts), I opted to increase my dosage from 300mg to 450mg daily. In the time since then, I haven't noticed much of a psychological benefit, but the high dose has more or less eliminated my appetite. Eating once a day, if that, has become my new normal, and I'm losing weight because of it. I want to lose weight, but not like this.
I don't know what, if anything, that happened in the past few months is actually worth sharing here. I wrapped up the collecting season, started classes. I started counseling again (I can't recall if I already wrote about this), and even though I like my counselor, I'm still struggling to be fully transparent with her. Reflexively, I downplay how things are going if they aren't going well and play it up if things are going great. Stephanie thinks that things are going relatively okay with me, and I don't have it in me to go "actually, I'm not doing alright". Whenever she asks how things have been, "things are alright" is always my response, regardless of how I actually feel, or how things have actually been going. I feel like, in telling the complete truth, I'd be disappointing her, even though I know that that's not at all how it works.
This perpetual disparity between what I know and how I feel intensifies my distress. Why can't the two ever agree?
Socially, things have been profoundly not great. More now than ever, I feel as though Favorite Person is drifting away, and even though Curly has made a concerted effort to make me feel included, her efforts don't quite mitigate how much it hurts to see that I'm no longer close to FP, and likely never will be again. And I don't know how to reverse that trend, because everything I want ultimately makes me feel like a parasite, even though the only thing I want at this point is to spend time with her, just us, because that's the only way that feels comfortable to me. I can't just hang out on the main floor with her, because Dave seems to never leave her side when they're both home and I can't tolerate Dave's presence. Or my own being on the main floor for that matter, because my only association with it is the deep, intense pain of enduring one of the most extended lows I've ever had to live through. That pain is branded on the place.
If you can't spend time with a person, because the way you need to socialize and what they're comfortable with aren't compatible, how can you hope to stay close to them? When you feel like you're being - like you've been - replaced, and you voice that, and you're brushed off, how can a relationship be maintained?...As much as I wish that I could be okay with the fact that Favorite Person seems much less inclined to invest energy into the friendship than I am, and to devote more of my efforts towards my relationship with Curly, I can't. I just can't.
Earlier this week, I attended the Entomological Society of America's annual meeting, in Denver. It was an amazing experience, being somewhere where I was surrounded by other entomologists, people as passionate about insects as I am, somewhere that I unequivocally belonged. I had the opportunity to meet not one but four of my internet friends, including Mama Goat, who honestly is probably the only person that actually follows this blog closely. It was surreal to meet someone that I've known for years for the first time. On account of the late hour (my plane landed a bit before 8pm) and the fact that I was deeply exhausted, having had only about three hours of sleep the night before, I couldn't spend as much time with her as I would have liked, but the time spent talking over tea and dinner and lavishing affection on her two cats, the rotund Dragon and very friendly Beacon, and conversing in the car to my Air BnB was deeply enjoyable. She left me with a bunch of gifts - a fox tail with a jingly bell (to ring whenever I'm sad), a bag of crumbly fudge from London, a Pink Freud mug that I find absolutely hilarious, and best of all, a well-loved little stuffed dog that she's had since childhood. I come from a family of women that love our stuffed animals, and all of my close friends have given me plushes at one point or another, even going back to the former best friend that broke my heart and shattered my spirit, so it felt in a way like a delightful inevitability.
I need to straighten my room up some so that I can put things in proper places. The little stuffed dog needs a proper place to live.
The conference itself was amazing. I had the opportunity to attend so, so, so many interesting talks; some of them were in areas relevant to my interests and research, so I'll be contacting some grad students in the near future. Aside from the crazy amount of pure information to absorb from the talks, I also had a chance to look at posters, both from grad students and from other undergrads. Granted, I didn't look closely at them all - my method for choosing which posters to stop and read was asking myself "is this about bees" followed by "is this not about honey bees", which weeded out a lot. The one non-bee poster that stuck out to me, though, was a study of how dragonfly colors have diversified over time in a phylogenetic context, mostly because the graphic they used for a phylogenetic tree was stunning.
Even though she doesn't know that this blog exists, and I have absolutely no intention of ever, ever telling her, I especially appreciate that my friend Christy was at the conference and want to give her an extra special shout-out. Aside from the fact that she's another bee person, which automatically makes her good in my books, she kind of adopted me for a few days, letting me hang around and basically follow her from place to exhibit to symposium like a little lost sheep. The experience would have been much, much lonelier and much less enjoyable if she hadn't.
Coming back from the conference has been...rough, to say the least. Going from a place where I felt like I belonged, where I was supposed to be, where I had a group that I felt a part of, and where I was too busy to care if I was on my own, to here, where I don't have a group, and don't feel like I belong anywhere - like any space I occupy, physical and social, isn't mine to hold - has been hard. It's been like waking up from a dream that was far too good to be true, too pleasant to last. And I've voiced that to Favorite Person. At times, I just want her to be able to understand exactly what it feels like to walk through the world and feel like the place you are is not the place you belong, with no means of changing things so that it becomes where you belong and no way to leave for another. I want people to understand, because when you understand how it feels, you can understand behavior that stems from that feeling.
The sense now, of not belonging, is especially intense after tasting what it's like to be somewhere I'm meant to be. It's intense, but it doesn't induce the kind of blistering unhappiness that makes me want to take any action necessary to make the feeling stop. No, there's just a slow, grey, resigned sadness. Almost acceptance, that I don't belong here and never will, and that there's nothing I can do to change that fact.
I understand that the source of the feeling is purely internal and as little to do directly with my environment and situation, but it still hurts.
I toyed with the idea of trying to end all of my posts on a positive note, but that's not going to happen. That's not reality.
Until the next time I post, which should hopefully be sooner than a few months.
11 Nov 2017
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