Problem Solving

I was pretty much set on hibernation yesterday; went on long walks, tended to the fur boys, ate what my stressed-out GI tract could handle and went through my patient data with a lice comb to classify what things required immediate attention and what could be left for later or ignored. I´m still not well – I´ve got the runs, and yesterday I threw up from stress after having read the newest doctor´s notes. I slept restlessly, but between 7-8AM I had a pleasant experience of an altered state of consciousness. I found myself floating in a space that wasn´t my room, over a table with objects from my childhood home. Some were related to trauma. (I need to talk about a specific white and blue porcelain pot in therapy on Monday; my mother would eventually start to store my toys and then her knitting needles in it, but by Jesus, that woman was twisted. It´s not relevant for my survival and future today, though.) Some were related to the occasional good memory. But what mattered was that I was literally above it all. I could smell coffee, toast, and marshmallows. I felt a presence, as if a voiceless whisper, tell me to hold on to that feeling and to store it in my body. I would be invulnerable to the employability evaluations clinic for as long as I could stay in that space, and I would need to risk making them ornery and request the timeline of the evaluations to be pushed later. Of course, this would now put me two messages in the red after they told me to not message them. But it is still better for me to leave an electronic footprint than to leave my future at their mercy.

The altered state deepened into a dream in which I was in a patient´s room at one of my old workplaces at the facility for disabled kids. I was being interviewed by a middle-aged man who seemed inclined to hire me despite me struggling to remember details about my work history. I was already wearing white scrubs, but something wasn´t feeling quite right: I felt like this was not what I wanted and needed to do, that my true calling was something else. I glanced out of the window to see a scorched black and red landscape with a black tower looming over the land, and my heart jolted in my chest; the gloomy sight filled me with joy and purpose, and it felt as if I was plugged in to some long forgotten memory, a buried self. I knew I´d get the job I was being interviewed for. But I also knew I wouldn´t take it because there was something else waiting for me out there.

I woke up and sent a polite message asking the doctor if we could bump the timeline of the interviews further up to allow me to deal with first things first. I attached a picture to it in which I explained what I had meant by sensing a presence of my other self in the room with me sometimes, and how we can merge, or integrate (which she had written down as if I was speaking about an actual person, which points to her already having decided what she wants to diagnose me with, which I need to protect myself from at all costs). In the shower, I remembered that in January I used to go to a psych nurse who understood dissociation and with whom I had rapport, and as she had spoken for me to my current treating psychiatrist, I don´t think she´d mind me giving the employability evals clinic her number, so I did that. There´s a chance they won´t read my messages, but I have an official autism diagnosis so they really should allow me to use alternative modes of communication, especially as it´s now been proven that they are not quite capable of understanding what I´m telling them.

I´ve done my best. So now it is time to mentally and emotionally move on. I have two hands and two futures: a family and a calling. I may have only one of them, or I may have neither, but what is absolutely clear is that the employability evals clinic is not the route to achieve either. Hopefully tomorrow will come with inspiration for another short story or a drawing. I feel relieved.

PS: I won 9,30e on Eurojackpot, so perhaps it´s an auspicious omen. 😀