Emotional Dumping

After my last post, I realized I have a deep need to emotionally purge or dump as I would refer to it. I feel better after having a hard cry and writing about what is happening. It's like the emotional equivalent of a cyst. For those of you who don't know, a cyst is a pocket that forms under the skin and dead skin continues to build up in it. Cysts have to be removed. I feel like my emotions have a cyst like pattern where they build and build, even old ones that I have held on to just build into these pockets and need to be removed.

This removal can look like out bursts of any emotion really but mostly sadness, anger, joy. The removal can also happen when I write and work through them, which is the healthier alternative I have been trying to implement as my emotions have increasingly become harder and harder to handle.

Almost immediately after an out bursts I feel relief (and with out bursts there is regret and shame because this is knowingly not healthy and doesn't feel like who I was or who I want to be) and with writing I often feel immediate relief. The issue I notice with writing is that I can still ruminate while writing and in some cases I just make my emotional cyst worse because of all the narrative going on in my head.

Therapy both individual cpt/dbt and EMDR based seem to help (at least reduce some of the trauma and retrain me to be healthier), also Al-Anon has helped me a lot to. My mother is an alcoholic, drug addict, and deals with bipolar depression. So the practices they teach help me understand what you I learned the things I have. However, it also teaches some practical things like how to not worry about what other people are doing and how to focus on yourself.

This journey is not an easy one nor is it always pleasant. *Hugs*

Keep your head up.

Things get better.

We are stronger than our emotions and like all things they are impermanent.

Emotional Mind vs Rational Mind Battle to the Death

I come from a traumatic history, it is almost impossible to figure out what is cptsd or MS. It feels like the more time that goes on the more impossible my emotions seems. It's like the person I think of myself as, this ration, but sensitive person is constantly in the boxing ring with this self abusive, angry, depressed, irritable creature.

I have been dealing with depression for a while, it comes and goes. Suicidal thoughts are part of that. I don't want to die, but I feel like I am at the base of a fourteener and I can't figure out how to walk, let alone climb a distance that vast. There are so many faucets to my emotional distress that I am overwhelmed.

I have a history of emotionally abusive relationships, that mimic those of my parents and grandparents. I am doing the best I can to stop the codependent habits I have, but it feels like the world is against me. My friend told me last night that the world is against me, that this place wasn't made for us to survive. That makes the sensitive person in me so beyond depressed. Who wants to keep living in a world or for a world that has placed every odd against you?

I am not saying I deserve anything, in fact, I feel the opposite. I feel like I am not even sure I was supposed to be born. I was born six weeks premature and I know my mother at points when she is drunk tells me she wishes that I wasn't.

I feel like I am in this place of not belonging and it is really hard to come to grips with all of my emotional trauma, plus make symptoms, plus codependency, and every day life. I am not sure how to move forward. I am not sure how to climb this mountains, especially when all the parts of myself seem to be in constant battle.

How can I tell if my emotional changes are MS related, trauma related, because of my current emotionally abusive relationship, or anything? I feel confused and lost. I don't want to quit or give up, the idea only fuels self hatred ideology. I want to succeed and I want to stop feeling like one minute I am okay and the next minute I am spiraling into a darkness.

I am afraid to take medication for depression and anxiety (I also have a lot of anxiety attacks) because I am so traumatized after my psychosis experience. I find myself almost wanting to be a level of depressed because joy scares me. I am a afraid to hit mania and go back into psychosis. I would quite be literally rather die before experiencing that. Of all the trauma in my life, that was the worst because I was the only causing damage and suffering to others where all the other trauma was done to me. Which yes, says a lot about me.

I know there isn't a lot of information about people who have this comorbid MS and cptsd and possibly bipolar relationship. So I hope you don't feel alone if you read this. When there is more than one issue, it makes what was already difficult, if not impossible, that much harder.

I will keep posting on this journey of recovery.

May this journey be kind to you.

Unexpected Symptoms

Ms feels like a mass of unexpected symptoms, often they can be exceptionally terrifying. This morning I believe I am experiencing Optic Neuritis, which is said to feel like a sharp pain behind your eye/s and can cause vision problems. I have been experiencing the sharp pain behind my right eye this morning. It is scary, my first through was "Could this be the start of a brain aneurysm?" I am also a natural over exaggerator, so I wouldn't take that too seriously. There is also a slight tingling sensation on the side of my scalp, above my ear and parallel to my eye. The sharp pain comes and goes, I have felt it twice this morning. It is an immediately stop what you are doing and grab your head kind of pain when it comes. Any optical problems really worry me, I would hate so much to not be able to see. I rely so much on my eyes, my favorite things to do require eyes, like art and writing. I imagine there are ways around it, but the idea is still scary. I had pretty serious deteriorating vision as a child, I wore glasses from the age of seven until 24 when I received PRK Lasik. When I was teenager I would joke that I was going to be blind by thirty, hopefully there was nothing prophetic in that. Not to sound like a complete neurotic hypochondriac. I am sure even if it happened I would figure it out like every thing else, but I really hope I don't have to and I am sorry for those people who have. MS is a weird disease and we must not think if it as taking from us, but changing our lives so that we might do the things the way we need to. <3

The Journey Part 2- Silence and abandonment

After the Pyschosis, which as an experience was easily the most traumatic thing I have ever been through, there were two things that made recovery exceptionally hard. The first one was feeling intuitively they misdiagnosed me and not knowing what was truly wrong. The second was having many people in my life including my best friend ot seven years and my boyfriend of two years at the time abandoned me. This made me feel so guilty for experiencing this, there were many times I just wanted to die. I am glad I didn't. I got to see my broken, shamble of a family come together in a way I never thought possible. I reunited with a childhood friend and her and I have a bond that I couldn't be more thankful for. Despite everything, there was good. I know how hard it can be to see that, but we all have to find the strength to move forward. I spent the next year and several months recovering, getting back on my feet. I got off all the psych meds they had me on and my therapist released me a little more than a year later. I moved out of my dad's house, went back down south and started the next part of the journey...

The Journey Pt. 1- Pyschosis

I first found out I had MS in 2015, but before I knew about the MS there was a lot of other things that happened and that no one else seems to talk about because of the taboo. In 2014, I experienced pyschosis for roughly 15 days, was hospitalized for 24 days, and healivy medicated with Depakote (a drug meant to treat bipolar disorder and epilepsy) for five months. They tried to diagnose me with bipolar disorder despite me knowing I didn't have it, that is why they kept me so long in the hospital because I refused their diagnosis. It was miserable and I knew the entire time I was dealing with something else, but no one heard me. This moment of my life was drenched with doubt and has riddled me with trauma even now, years later. It caused me to doubt my family, my friends, healthcare, but most of all my body and my sanity. It was terrifying and the fact that we spent thousands and thousands of dollars having me in the hospital, they didn't actually check me for signs of MS or anything biological- they found a label and stamped it on me and let me walk around in fear and distrust of myself.

The reality is that people with MS are 2-3x more likely to experience pyschosis than the general population and that is something the MS community needs to be more forthcoming with so we can support one another. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5295796/

"It's for your best interest, really."

Multiple Scerlosis feels keeping your mouth closed at every symptom because the second you say something or have a symptom, everyone around you starts to panick. It's being told a regular physical will do, they will pay for it, only for it to not "be enough information" and they don't pay for. (Not mentioning that this isn't routine, despite what they say, no one else in the office had one.) It's having to get into your Neurologist, who is booked until December, within eight days to get the right paperwork filled out. It is getting that paperwork filled out four weeks later out of luck and having them tell you, "We need your doctor to clarify what ambient temperature is." It is not being able to work and missing out on your pay check for months because people don't understand that you can only scratch the surface. All that unknown, we live with it.

Falling Asleep to Road Rash

Tonight, MS feels like the memory fragment of that time I fell off my razor scooter and cut my hands, knees, and feet up so bad I couldn't tell I was bleeding through the numbing burn left by the asphalt. The itching and stinging are like a song played by my skin, something to fall asleep to or something to drive you mad...