Friday, October 25, 2019

Metapost: Depression is bad; can't write, need money

Part of the reason I haven't been posting here is that everything is terrible at the moment.

I just came off of months of problems with getting my most important medication, I still haven't figured out what the fuck is wrong with my ADHD prescription so I haven't had that for ages.  (Definitely I haven't had it since the most important medication got sorted out.)

All of that disruption hasn't helped.  I was helping my sister a bunch, which sucks the life out of me to the point that helping her two or three days often means losing a week of productivity in my own home because it's not just the days that I'm not here, it's the days that it takes to recover from going there.  It usually takes more days to recover than days spent there helping.

(My leg's been doing weird things, so she hasn't had me doing any particularly great manual labor, but the mental/emotional drain is always high as fuck.)

She hasn't asked me to help for a while, which would make things better, except that I've been sick since the last time I did help her.  (Pretty sure I picked it up from her kids.)  It's not an "Oh my God, I'm gonna die" thing.  It's basically just a lingering chest cold, that's providing me with a perma-headache that makes all attempts at thinking kind of . . . "hazy" is the best word I've come up for it.  It also gives me this general sense of ickiness.

I've been passively suicidal for basically as long as I can remember, but I only recently learned that was an actual thing so it's sort of new to me even though I've had it forever.


One bright spot is that someone at Fimfiction (the My Little Pony fanfiction site) invited me to her discord server.  That's related to suicidal stuff.  In terms of thoughts, she's actively suicidal.  In terms of actions she's actively self harming.  Neither of these things are good, and hopefully they both stop, but having an internet friend who's extremely open in talking about her experience with those things is good.

I have mental healthcare, if things ever make the switch from passive to active I'll be getting professional help, but friends are important, and sometimes it's easier to talk to a friend you've never met and do it via a text only medium.  It's comforting to me to know that if that switch ever happens I'll have that sort of friend who can simultaneously relate to what I'd be going through and tell me "Don't act on those thoughts."

(Right now, the concept of intentionally hurting myself in any way throws a divide by cheese error, I've always been downright terrified of what might happen, what I might do, if that ever stopped being true.)

That's comforting to me, but it's not the majority of why her inviting me to that server was a good thing.  It's just having the people to talk to.  Pre-Discord, all of the internet communities I'd been part of were always public.  The only discord server I'd been on before this one was less . . . cozy, I guess.  Also, the people there drifted in a direction I didn't.  But mostly it's the less cozy thing.

This new group feels like something I haven't had before.  Something good.

Also we talked extensively about the assassination of Julius Caesar the other day.  (Caesar got offed because he didn't care what other people thought and/or couldn't read a room.  Augustus got what Caesar had wanted by caring about the sensibilities of others and being able to read a room.)  Geeking out with people is fun.


Switching gears back to stuff that's been going on that's been affecting here, it's been very hard to make myself eat and drink enough.  Dehydration and malnutrition have depression like symptoms even if you don't have depression, if you do have depression then they make those symptoms so much worse.  Another thing that does that?  Not getting enough sleep.  Guess what else I've been having trouble doing?

Secondary computer died.  The only thing that was wrong with it is the power socket, but I'd have to get a new part (a new socket) and solder it on to fix that.  I have never soldered anything in my life.  I want to, but I haven't yet.

I am now able to access the hard drive, which is good.

I somehow fucked up primary computer.  The power cord broke.  I got a new power cord.  It didn't charge.  Apparently getting stuck in "I can't charge mode" after a run in with a bad power cord is a known issue that's easy to troubleshoot.  I tried.

First off.  That wasn't the problem.  The problem is that the model of computer is very finicky to the point that cords that should be compatible with it won't charge it.  They'll power it, but unless it's exact same cord (slightly older iteration of the same cord with the same specifications will not work), the computer doesn't trust it enough to use it to charge the battery.

Got a new fresh off the assembly line cord from the manufacturer, and the computer charges just fine.  The problem is that I somehow fucked something up somewhere when I tried to deal with the problem it didn't really have.

I have no idea what that something is, or what that somewhere is.  All that I know is that when I attempt to start the computer I can get into the BIOS, where everything checks out, and I can run diagnostics, where everything checks out, but when it tries to actually start windows it freezes on the computer's logo screen.  Those spinning dots stop spinning.  Nothing happens.  Computer doesn't work.

It does this even if I try to boot from a USB drive.

Most everything on the internet says that if the diagnostics say everything is peachy, it's probably some kind of software problem, so booting from a USB recovery drive should help, and thus they give no advice on what to do if it doesn't.

Computer is under warranty, I just need to back it up.  Note that I have neither primary computer nor secondary computer at this point.  I have emergency back up "Chromebooks are cheap".  Chromebooks, I am finding, are less than ideal for backing things up.  I can access the hard drive (both of them, for there are two) but it looks like backing it up will be tedious, and I've been trying to gather the emotional energy to do it for a week or two.  So far, hasn't happened.


Through all of this I've still been trying to write, but it hasn't been going the best.  I'm lucky if I get a few sentences.  I never seem to get something that can actually be shared.

I do have some old stuff, that hasn't been put here yet.  I'm going to copy and paste one of those things over right after posting this.


And . . . money.  I need so much money.  And I'm behind on all sorts of things, and late fees suck, and so on.

And it's like . . . it's really important that I get ~$650 dollars in the next few weeks.  But it's also very important that I start catching up on all of the stuff that's already behind, and at this point I don't even know what to freak out about because everything is one giant homogeneous pile of, "Oh God, oh God; we're all gonna die."

The diffuse nature of the horrible is preventing me from focusing on anything, and that's not good.  I really should be desperately begging for money because I've allowed things to get completely out of hand to the point I can't fix it without major outside help, but . . . I don't even know where to start.

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