Output 9--Yup.

I was right. It's a Bad Brain day. I was supposed to tattoo my boyfriend today but I woke up knowing I wouldn't be able to. I told him it's better to wait a week, I just tattooed him last Sunday. That's hard on the body, and he doesn't heal that well. But Sundays are the only days I can be alone in the shop so I'm missing my only opportunity to practice this week.

I took another beta blocker about 45 minutes ago and did 20 minutes of "gentle floor yoga" along with a YouTube video. That was nice. I want to say "I should commit to doing that every day" but my ongoing crisis kind of involves running away from everything I commit to, so that would just compound my current fears (this particular fear being that I will always run away from everything I commit to).

What is that about? While I am slightly more likely to honor commitments to others, at least in the short term (see earlier post on the new perspective I have on my job history), if I make a commitment to myself, you can fucking forget it. I am just not that important to myself. And I get so wound up over all the great things I WANT to do (and preparing to do them by carefully researching and buying everything I need to do them) that I never ACTUALLY do, that I disappoint myself constantly. I fluctuate between knowing this is some kind of pattern of acting out on some kind of mental illness, and thinking I am just god damned lazy, as my father might put it.

God damned lazy.

My new psych doctor told me I absolutely have some kind of PTSD and eventually she will refer me to a trauma-based therapist. I believe her. I didn't use to believe that I was "fucked up." Just that I was depressed, or lazy. In fact I have been the de facto lay therapist for so many of my friends, helping them through mental illness crises while secretly believing I have my shit together MORE than they do. This has always been the case. I've always been able to find someone "worse off" to prove that I'm "not that bad," while secretly hoping that in reality, I WAS "that bad," and that someone would notice, and help me.

I guess that's what's happening now. Can I say that I'm kinda pissed it took this long to arrive at this diagnosis? I can't say for sure what my qualifying "trauma" was. My psych doc assures me that it can be a repeated, seemingly mundane thing I went through, like the daily bullying I had to put up with from my father AND from my classmates who could see how "sensitive" I was. I don't think I suffered any sexual abuse, but as a child of the 80s, I always figured the sexual abuse phenomenon was over-hyped: the Satanic Panic may have done damage by convincing those of us who knew it was a collective psychosis--and that regression therapy is a form of manipulation--that actual sexual abuse happens much, much less often than it actually does. It's just usually much less dramatic than we were led to believe.

I do feel like I have some kind of vague memory of something happening in the basement of the older couple who lived on the corner, and my Dad going over there to beat the shit out of the guy. But I also think I may have created the memory myself, like the time I hallucinated seeing Santa and crew on a roof across the street. When one hallucinatory elf fell to his death, I was inconsolable.

I will say that I have always detested what I consider to be "suggestibility" in people (and with good reason--we are currently in the middle of yet another National Collective Psychosis) and consider myself impossible to hypnotize. And when I try to meditate, it makes me supremely uncomfortable. People tell me to just keep trying, it doesn't have to be "perfect." That's not the issue. The issue is that meditating makes me anxious, like I'm so relaxed it's not safe.

Probably something to look into there, but I am already telling myself that I'm exaggerating.

I hope the beta blocker can help me push through all my drama around practicing music and making art, because I was hoping to do those things today. But I won't be tattooing Nerio. He has become really frustrated by (but still kind about) my tendency to constantly flip-flop on our plans. I haven't spoken to him about what my diagnosis means yet. Hopefully he will see that my behavior is explained by this. Latin American views on mental illness are very different from the Gringo tendency to basically identify with our diagnoses, especially amongst Gen Z people. Once again, a way in which I seem younger than I actually am. Whee.