What's Been Up With Me

If you haven't noticed (how can you not?) I haven't been posting a lot recently, and I wanted to explain why.

First off, I've been dealing with a ridiculous amount of exhaustion, and sleeping took up so many of my hours. In the time that was left, I needed to take care of my kids and my house and feed everyone and with whatever little bit of time I could squeeze out after that I worked on my son's room that we were building ourselves. 

Each time I worked on building his room, I was more or less incapacitated for a few days after with even more unrelenting exhaustion and back pain that made it hard for me to function, and even to sit up at my computer.

I had to spend a lot of my energy trying to fight to get my daughter into the type of school that was right for her and it wasn't easy at all and involved contacting many government officials, despite the fact that as someone diagnosed with autism, the education department is required to find her an appropriate school and even bus her to a further district if there is nothing appropriate nearby.

Fortunately, two weeks before the school year started the special ed department told me about a school that they hadn't mentioned beforehand, and in September my daughter started in a school that was so much better than the previous ones and just right for her. It is not a school specifically for kids with autism, but it is a general special ed school that has a bunch of autistic kids and also has many different services, like speech therapy which she needed, scholastic help, therapies, etc. She has had such a smooth transition to school and I'm really hopeful that with the right therapies she will start having an easier time. So that is a good update.

But in addition to that good stuff, I've been dealing with health issues, both physical and mental. 

I've been dealing with crippling anxiety the past two or three months. Anxiety so bad that it makes it sometimes impossible for me to function, even opening my email makes my anxiety skyrocket so I avoid it, which means that I end up avoiding working which isn't good for my pocketbook or my anxiety, and its a bad cycle. The anxiety, to be honest, is in large part surrounding money. I was waiting nearly a year for results of a court case and the financial repercussions are really not making me in a good headspace, which really, really sucks because one of my hugest triggers is financial insecurity due to my financial trauma. And then I had a car accident this past summer which ate away a lot of money on top of the money I was already needing to spend on the construction of my son's room which couldn't be pushed off any longer. There also have been some large unavoidable expenses that also hit me all at once, which really doesn't help. This money thing really, really, really gets to me and makes me want to curl up in a ball and escape from the world, which I can't do, but it does severely impact my functioning level. 

I have been waiting for the results of my getting approved for disability, which I really need for multiple reasons. I had three appointments already about that with different officials and each make my anxiety skyrocket to the point of puking... And now I'm waiting weeks for the results, and trust me, that is not helping my anxiety, because worrying about not getting approved for it scares the pants off of me.

It really, really, really doesn't help that I haven't been able to see my regular therapist since mid August because of health issues, so I've been using an alternative therapist but it really isn't the same and is just a stopgap measure. Fortunately I'll be restarting with my therapist again next week, and hopefully it'll help my anxiety some more.

And to top it all off, my body is giving me more trouble than before. Everything is spraining or otherwise hurting so often. I sprained my wrist and elbows on both hands simultaneously which makes it really hard to function, and especially hard to write at the computer. How did I do that, you ask? Killing a mosquito. Washing dishes. I dunno, ridiculous things like that. My knees and ankles have been hurting me a lot too. But worst of all is my back. 

The past week and a half has been the worst back pain I've felt in my life. Literally screaming in pain, and my medical marijuana and pain killers and lying flat down didn't help enough. But it helped somewhat. And my kids went to their dad for two days straight (one of my kids doesn't usually go) so I was able to literally do nothing other than lie down and that helped improve things enough so that on Tuesday I was able to go to a physical therapist (not my usual one since mine was on vacation) who worked on my back. It was so painful that I literally screamed in pain while she was working on me and I was dizzy from pain after she finished... but the next day I already started seeing improvement so it was worth it, but there's still pain left, so I'm still lying down and basically doing nothing else until I can go to my physical therapist once she comes back from vacation next week.

So... as you can imagine, it's been hard to get into the headspace, not to mention physically able, to blog.

I am really hoping to see some improvement soon and be able to function better and be a productive member of society soon.