Uncertainty. in Mental Health

I am beginning to recognize some things about the way my brain has been working lately, things I’m feeling not too sure about. Usually when I’m having negative thoughts, I can recognize whether or not they are valid and true. You know, like, “Nobody loves me,” or “The world would be better off without me.” Those are not valid and true thoughts. I can talk myself out of them.

They are pretty clear-cut thoughts, though, and easy to overcome. Some thoughts I’ve been having recently are more nuanced. I can’t dismiss them out of hand. Some of them feel valid but not necessarily true, and others don’t feel valid even though they are technically true.

And other thoughts I have no way of knowing whether they are valid and/or true or not because they are thoughts based on… well, the imagined thoughts of other people. Like my mind has decided, “This person probably thinks/feels this way,” and then I pick up what feel like cues from that person to confirm my own thoughts. Yes, yes, confirmation bias, I am familiar. More often, though, I pick up what feel like cues that then lead me to the thought, cues that tell me, “This person is not taking me seriously right now,” or “Perhaps I should distance myself a bit.”

The distancing myself has always been a thing. I am an absolute champion at extreme social distancing. It should be an Olympic sport, I’d win the gold every time. Whenever I hit a period in my life where I’m feeling alienated, when I feel like I am being dismissed, my go-to is isolation. When I stop feeling comfortable in the world, I limit my world to the smallest area possible with as little human contact as possible. It’s not healthy. It leads to downward spirals of depression and anxiety. It is a thing I have always done and I don’t know how to… not. I don’t know how to express myself in a way that makes sense. I am generally not comfortable with asking questions, though I’m usually fine with answering them no matter how hard they are. I’m not even good at asking easy questions. And a lot of these thoughts could be resolved by asking a simple question, but… I guess it’s hard for me to ask questions when I fear the answer will match the negative idea in my head. I don’t ask because I’m afraid of the answer.

I sometimes wonder things about decent people that would definitely make them less-decent people. I think it’s because I have serious trust issues, you know? I trusted people and didn’t let myself wonder things about them until it was too late and there was no need to wonder anymore. And I would think to myself, “Maybe if I’d wondered sooner, maybe if I hadn’t been so trusting…” And that’s just fact, that I would have suffered so much less if I’d wondered more, looked deeper, let myself see the red flags.

Now I don’t even know what the fuck I’m looking for. Everything looks like a red flag sometimes. Every thing with every person… like, I’m suspicious of everyone now. I assume everyone has less-than-stellar intentions. And I also catch myself thinking things like, “I shouldn’t message that person, I’m sure it would just annoy them.” Because I lived the majority of my life as an annoyance to someone, and they all made it very clear. I don’t know how to not feel this way.

I used to have this dream, back when I was with the Sperm Donor, for years and years, a recurring nightmare. The settings and cast were different every time, but one thing was always the same. I was trying to talk to him, tell him something important, and he would laugh at me. Just laugh and laugh, that’s all, no matter what I said or how upset I was or how hard I was crying. I had that nightmare because that was my waking life. I also had begun to have another version of it with the Wanker before he went away. Several times, I would dream the same dream, trying to talk to him, pleading with him, crying, and he would just sit there with this smirk on his face, a look of total disdain. Because that was my waking life with him.

So now I have waking-nightmare thoughts about everyone. It’s like a default setting or something. I’m always wondering if… well, if anyone is taking me seriously or if they aren’t taking me seriously because none of my thoughts, opinions, and ideas are valid. It always comes back to that, you know. Am I valid? Can any of my muddled thoughts possibly be valid? Perhaps I should just stop speaking, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not anyone was taking me seriously. Perhaps I should just stop expressing my thoughts and opinions and ideas. I’m sure everyone would be much more comfortable with that, because I know for sure I make a lot of people uncomfortable.

I have a real hard time when I feel like people aren’t taking me seriously when I’m being serious. It’s a massive trigger for me, being laughed at or dismissed as if I am an idiot who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This has been happening at work. The people I work for believe the pandemic is no big deal because it hasn’t had any affect on them other than shutting down their business to dine-in service for a couple of months. March and April are the two slowest months of the year, anyway, and shit doesn’t really start happening until Memorial day, so they didn’t really lose that much business. Also, our head chef quit, left back at the end of March or beginning of April sometime, while I was quarantined at home against my will because they just took me off the schedule at the end of March (and I didn’t hear about it until much later because… well, fuck me, I guess).

Had a meeting with the father-owner (it’s a father-son thing) and expressed my concerns about the fact that we’re not requiring guests to wear masks to enter (as per the governor’s order). He laughed and said his brother, a Clorox rep, knows all about this stuff and it’s not airborne, anyway, and so masks don’t matter. I shit you not. His brother, a Clorox rep, knows more than the CDC and thousands of scientists and doctors around the world. Yep. And then, when I expressed my concern that I would not survive infection (he knows nothing of my medical issues, which include chronic lower lung damage - I’ve had pneumonia like 12 times in my life, at least) he literally scoffed and said, “Oh, come on, we have a friend with cystic fibrosis and she survived.” So, the one person he knows who had it survived, it’s no big deal, right? Fuck me, I should be willing to risk my health, up to and including my life just to keep the cogs turning in his money-making machine, am I right?

There are about 7 bazillion people in my tiny little town right now. Traffic to the bridge toll booth is backed up a minimum of 5 miles. Traffic at our one stop light in town is backed up at least a mile because they are all fools who bypassed a couple of other on-ramps to the bridge to get on the very last one. Except they’re not moving any faster than the parking lot that is the highway. I can’t go to my grocery store or gas station or bank, there are just too goddamn many people and not a one of them wearing a mask.

But hey, only 130,000+ people have actually died, and hardly ANY of them up here, so it’s no big deal.

We’ll see in two weeks, won’t we? We’ll see.

Oh, by the way…

Black Lives Matter.
Trump is a Nazi.
White privilege is real.
Institutional racism is real.
Put on a fucking mask.

Last updated July 10, 2020