Venting Human Again - Diary

[Lavínia]

I'm trying to get better. I've noticed that the idea of death has become more distant, and living has become something I can accept. I started taking bupropion once a day. I think it affected my mood and gave me more energy, but I'm not sure. I started exercising, tried to put together a diet but it's still just a draft, so I'm focusing more on not eating junk food. No alcohol. I want to try to go back to living like a normal person, and I think I'll keep a diary about it in this post.

I tried to study math today. My mother told me to participate in a contest, so I have to study for a test. I haven't studied for 3 years. I tried to study the basics, the four basic math operations. I spent three hours trying to understand division. I would subtract a number, know the result, but write it wrong, and only realize it later. I calculated 17 + 19 with my fingers, felt insecure about the result, did it several times and had to check the calculator to confirm. In the test I took to get into high school, I aced equations and geometry, I was so good... I felt the weight of having given up on life. I abandoned that, and going back now seems impossible. I think I understand division now, I'll try to learn addition, subtraction, and multiplication tomorrow. I want to study, create my own problems, think, calculate, memorize, understand. This test has three pages of material that will be on it, I won't pass, but I want to have this focus to strive for something beyond work.
I have studying now. I have medicine. I have exercise, I want to like my body. I have energy. It's difficult and sad. I want to be stronger.

 

[paranoid]

Happy that you are trying to get better, all the best.

 

[Lavínia]

Today I did more division problems. I managed to do several without getting lost or making mistakes. It was still very frustrating to maintain my attention; I feel like while I'm on a line I get distracted and see the waves of the wind, grains of sand, leaves swirling and dancing in the air, and I start trying to understand their trajectory while I'm still drawing the line. I did exercises following a pattern to divide in descending order. I started with 1/30, then 2/29, 3/28, 4/27... Increasing the dividend and decreasing the divisor, thus ensuring different versions and 30 exercises. I think I got up to 12/19. I need to finish tomorrow to continue studying other things, mainly multiplication and all the basics.

My attention is very scattered, I have little focus, and a very high dependence on stimuli. I already knew this, but seriously, I'm addicted. I realized I was just spending all my time on YouTube, so I went out and study a little. I got up, ate something, and came back while thinking about finding stories to read and what I could do. Then I opened YouTube and spent about 2 minutes obsessively watching shorts. I felt trapped; it was so automatic. Looking at the metrics on my phone, I average 5 hours a day on YouTube. If it's a holiday or weekend, it's 8 to 10 hours. Wasted time. It's not time spent entertaining myself or watching something interesting; it's nothing. It's empty time where I constantly feel my day slipping away. I can't just uninstall YouTube, so I'm trying to change my way of "spending time" by only reading, even if it's just manga or fanfiction.

I tried writing a little, "distracting myself." I thought that if I couldn't write a story or something minimally interesting, I could write a nonsensical story just to learn my language better. It's been a long time since I put together a sentence thinking about all the punctuation and correct structure, and Portuguese is something you can easily get lost in. I couldn't do it. I wrote five lines in a notepad. I see that my writing is scattered like my thoughts; I consider this natural and even authorial, but it's also limiting. I'll describe the sun hitting a window, the scene transitioning to a creature made of lit wicks in the bathroom. My sun is a blinding white vastness that penetrates and invades the room with a passive but divine aggression; the creature's face is present in its absence. It has potential, but the way I present it and make it concise is awful. My writing seems limited, confusing, throwing words around haphazardly, without depth, so pretentious that I feel like I'm 10 years old.

Today may not have been a productive day, but I tried, and this is the path I want to continue. I didn't exercise, but I will tomorrow. I'm still taking my medication, and I think it might be working. There was a whole thing about accepting my body because of the scars and all the destruction I've done to it, but that can wait; I haven't improved it yet anyway. Today I did something, and that's good.

 

[Lavínia]

I didn't do much today. I worked. Studied just a little, very little indeed. During my break, I avoided just watching YouTube, alternating between reading a random story on AO3 and thinking about life. I had an anxiety attack because I felt lost, I think from so much dependence on quick video stimuli. I managed to hold on, but I kept thinking "where am I going?" while I was lost. I had my afternoon coffee and managed to get back to work. I could have been more productive with some pending tasks, but I think I managed well enough, I resolved some things and managed to train a new boy. At home I did some exercises, read some more stories, I felt a weight and tiredness that I shouldn't have. It's not that much effort, it's actually the minimum. And seeing the energy I had at the beginning of this, I don't recognize myself. Tomorrow I'll go for a walk early in the morning and try to do more. I feel insecure about all this, about whether I can take minimal care of myself for more than three days, but I want to continue.

 

[synthetic_suicide]

it's always a pleasure to read your writings, I am glad you're going to give life a chance!

 

[Lavínia]

Today I'd say I did well. I resolved quite a few pending issues at work, saw problems and made adjustments. In the morning I thought a lot about stopping, waking up later and sleeping just a little, I was so tired, even without doing much. I saw that my mother was still willing and I went with her flow to walk. We walked together, I listened to her more, I feel like I forgot who my mother was and that hurt, I disconnected so much from the world that she was just an adjective to me, and not a person.

I had to take a company medical exam and I went with my mother. I was very scared because a colleague from work was going to take it at the same time, and I didn't want her to talk to my mother. I lied to this colleague once about something. I was too anxious about it, about her possibly asking or hearing from my mother about it, and this lie coming to light. I'm a liar, and that was the worst lie I've ever told because it could be proven at any moment. I kept thinking about strategies and ways to get around this, or just to admit the mistake and swallow the despair. They met, but that subject didn't come up. I managed to talk to her, and it was a really nice moment; I decided to open up more. I downloaded Instagram and I'm thinking about maybe opening up socially. I know I'm being very hasty. I'm at a peak of enthusiasm, and that's a little scary; I've had this several times, and it usually ends in disappointment. I distanced myself from everyone I knew; I had a group of 5 to 10 friends, and I abandoned them, I stopped responding to them so much that they gave up. But I have this urge to talk more and open up more. I realized that improving for me means achieving the following points:

- Being a good person (patient, kind, and attentive)
- Being physically active
- Continuing to study without becoming stagnant
- Starting to talk to people again/making new friends

And I'm going to try to do them. I've studied division so much that I'm already confident in it, so I'm going to move on to multiplication now. The hardest part so far is being inflexible with myself. I need to have rules, I need to follow a path and have limits, to push myself, and I didn't think it would be this complicated. I need to control my temper, I can't have outbursts. I need to be more attentive. I can't isolate myself, but I can't talk too much either, I need to be restrained. I need to listen more, I can't stay still. I need to do more.

 

[Lavínia]

Today I didn't study. Hahaha. I'm at a really high peak of happiness, it's very strange. I have this, these ups and downs. I stopped going to about 4 psychologists when I was younger because I felt better and didn't see the point in treatment anymore. I want to stay at the top of this rollercoaster, stop the gears and keep admiring the sky. Last night I took photos! I looked for some old clothes in my closet, found some different dress shirts. I struck some poses, fixed my hair and took some pictures. I was rusty, it's been a while since I took any, and it's something I remembered I really enjoyed. Then I lost track of time adjusting the light, filters and color of the photo, editing a little here and there, and ended up sleeping very late. But it was worth it. I posted a photo on Instagram! I followed colleagues from work! I haven't seen their photos yet, it's kind of strange, entering someone's privacy and seeing their story. It made me want to try out some outfit combinations. I felt like taking more pictures, so I took another one! Of the sky with the moon... my cell phone camera is really bad, so the light looked like a lamppost, night photos are so blurry you can't even tell the difference... and I just realized it's not the moon, it's a lamppost! Damn. Tomorrow I'm going for another walk, I want to take more pictures, maybe post some poems too.

I got stressed at work because I had so many appointments, I even messed up and forgot to talk to two clients. I'll get back to them tomorrow, with a clean face and a bit embarrassed. But I tried, there were a lot of problems today. Friday is a holiday, so after tomorrow I'll be able to rest a bit and focus more on what I need to do outside of work. On the way to the bus, a stray dog kept looking at me, it started following me for a few blocks. I wondered if I should feed it or give it more attention, but I didn't have time and I don't have any more money to spend on animals. I was a little confused and stuck in this thought, wondering what to do. I want to be a good person, in my view a good person wouldn't ignore the dog like I did. This has always been a problem. I think I need to change these concepts to make it work, to be consistent with myself. If I can, I will help, that's it. Another thing is how to talk to people; some people on the street are far away. Is it ideal to say good morning and good night to them? At what distance should I speak? Should I always say it? A good person... I think they would say good morning to anyone, naturally. I've gone back to thinking about such simple things. Another day.

 

[laurent-iwnl]

Never been so proud of someone before
KEEP GOING!!!