Subtle visual metaphor

I am almost shaking driving to the Queer Board Game Night at Megabrain Comics in Rhinebeck. I had been looking forward to it all week and had been all but dancing at the idea of the friends we might make, though I did not actually expect this. I just liked to pretend.

Then, some asinine commercial came on and triggered me--it's not worth saying which. I would hate to give them publicity. Even if it didn't trigger me, I would want nothing to do with what it was selling.

Sometimes, I can downshift the trigger enough that it seems it doesn't bother me.

By the time Amber and I are parked, I am in the middle of a miserable fight, and nothing is objectively happening. I've said nothing to Amber, and they have not noticed. It is entirely in my mind and is not a fight with them.

I am snappish and trying my damnedest not to be.

"We don't have to do this," they say. "We could do something else.

They mean this, but I tell them it is not what I want. "I am so tired of being broken."

They do not assure me I am not broken. Last weekend, we were supposed to go dancing, but I was physically sick. (I appeased us with Chinese food and a movie.) I would not ruin this again because my head was screeching static, not when we were within a hundred feet of our goal.

What is there to say of the board game night? In public, it is a performance. My brain wants me to be the least amount of crazy in front of other people, so it compartmentalizes. No one there would know what had occurred. I am fun and light. I play three games, two with Amber on the sidelines, while a woman with dyed red hair and rounded letters asks us Family Feud questions, confusing us by saying Gods when she means Guards. I eat a cookie brownie. I seem happy--I am happy--though my hypervigilance keeps pinging when the game results in proximal trigger words. I do not react but focus more intensely on playing pick-up sticks with Amber.

We return home, and I cannot stop myself from beginning to cry. Amber stands on a low chest of drawers so they can be taller than me, then hugs me as I cry into their sternum. They don't know the commercial, and I cannot tell them without triggering myself again. We agree to mute the commercials from now on, which we should have been doing as a matter of course. Who wants to hear them?

They've known me since 2011, and I still worry about what will happen when they discover I am broken--though it must be less than when they met me. I have put in the work, but I will never be done with it.

Once I have been triggered, it is not as though it goes away. Depending on factors, primarily external and including time without being triggered again, it can take days. It fades. Knowing it will because it always helps but is not a panacea. The only way out is through.

I sleep too much on Saturday and Sunday. I don't intend to. It is more that I wake up, decide to have breakfast, feed the cats, and then fall asleep. I have had a headache, so illness may play a part. I rarely used to get headaches, but now they stop me from dancing (or continuing to dance, having exacerbated it). Did I get Covid again and fail to notice? My physical and mental health are so intimately wedded that I often get depression instead of a sore throat.

Regrettably, I work where the residents have often never been taught the basics of hygiene yet paw at one another in a way that borders on romantic, so touch-starved and repressed are they. They are walking infection vectors. I can go days in the winter not seeing direct sunlight, and the education office is a windowless cinderblock room, which does nothing positive for my health.

Sunday, I drop Amber off to do laundry--the machines in our complex have been out of service for weeks--and talk to myself. "Your options are to fall into a depressive spiral or do something constructive. I would rather do something, so sort it out."

I opt to talk to my father on the phone, ostensibly to ask some tax questions, then discuss nothing of import. I face the sun on this not-frigid day. It is the first that it hasn't been overcast or raining in a while, so this may be all I need. I would never survive in an arctic country where the sun is even less of a presence. This is not to say I am vivid and happy in summer--not always, but more. My SAD lamp can only do so much and is hard to use effectively as I prepare for work. A bright light is nothing I can mistake for the sun.

I feel better, but not best. I was doing well all week and resent another weekend that was less than it could have been, with my imperfection to blame. I can do without getting in my way of doing things that would be better for me. I need social connections--though I could not tell you the names of anyone with whom we played board games--which cannot be found when I am licking my invisible wounds in my apartment.

I didn't retreat to my bed, lost to all utility, as I have. I do not think this is to credit my inner fortitude as much as not being as intensely afflicted. It may be to impute sleep and meds, though too much of the former may have done me only temporary good. I was aware I remained functional, but I cannot promise having forced myself from my home prevented that sort of escape. I had to cope or be insane. I was not keen on the latter.

I ascribe my idea of a daily baseline to musician Jill Sobule. I cannot recollect why, and the idea is too general to be easily searchable. Still, there is no harm in the attribution.

In essence, one wakes in the morning, and that is where one calibrates. If one is morbidly depressed, that's the starting point, not yesterday's or yesteryear's health. It makes progress more achievable. If one starts as a two, a three is worth attempting, even if a six is so far that trying would be torture. If you are at a three, maybe shoot for the six. And, if you can't get to a six or even four, you stayed at your baseline. Good job. You have no need to beat yourself and only make things worse. I consider this daily, though with varying success. I remember past successes, which cushions waking at a one.

I do not remember the last time I awoke there. I have fallen there in the course of the day because my brain shook out the wrong cocktail. What grates about this triggering is I had spent days above a seven, then plunged to a one. I could all but feel the plummet, my nails ragged, failing to slow my descent. I resent that I had looked forward to this, had planned for it, and had to then be mindful of anything that might encourage relapse. If only I could go out and leave myself at home, but I insist on coming wherever I am, like some desperate tagalong. What a joy it would be to be my best self without the tedium of bad biology and its ensuing mental illness. Which is my baseline? Which one is the truest me? I do not believe this person is found under blankets in my blacked-out bedroom, paralyzed with depression. He seems like an aberration, no one worth inviting to dinner.

I am, to my knowledge, monopolar. I do not race with a manic enthusiasm for life. At most, I feel liberated from my worst instincts, turned so small I barely remember their tugs. I wouldn't enjoy Mania if I could not turn it off. Instead, I have to nurse Anxiety and Depression as they egg one another on.

last watched: Resident Alien
reading: The World Outside Your Head