(hello.world) (lol.programmers)

Well, hey!

I don't talk to people much. I mean, I don't talk about myself to people much, and my current self-improvement goal is dealing with my growing sense of isolation, so I feel like this is something I could stand to change.

At the same time, I hate the idea of just hitting you guys up on Facebook and telling you about myself uninvited, or posting series of status updates trying to convey the enormity of my ongoing personal projects in as little text as possible. So, I thought 'fuck it, I got a domain and a blog - might as well use it!'

Old school n' shit, yo (yes, blogs are now old school).

Anyway! The last year has been a trip, and instead of trying to summarize everything, I'll start with the most recent event and work my way backwards, adding in little bits about other stuff as they become relevant. You're free to read as little or as much of it as you want. If you've read this far already, I appreciate it. This is so not something I'm comfortable doing, but comfort is complacency, and complacency is death, or some other analog that would be catchy on a bumper sticker or something.

I finally received the results of my SSI case review today, after five months of constant uncertainty about my future living situation. I still qualify for disability, so I'll continue to receive benefits, which means I'll get to keep my Medicaid (for as long as Medicaid still exists) and stay in this apartment (for as long as HUD exists) for 'about 3 years' until I have to do another review.

So, this is it: I am officially a long-term resident of Downtown Spokane. My apartment no longer needs to feel like a temporary thing, and I might actually start doing some of the things I want to do with it, which is exciting.

I don't know that I can properly express how much background stress this has caused me. The sheer amount of progress I've made in the last year only made it worse because it felt like it could all be taken away from me in an instant, and I'd have to move back in with my mom, which would not have been fun for anybody involved.

But I don't have to do that. My footing is stable for the first time in possibly ever. I'm stronger and more in control of my life than I've ever been. I'm far from perfect, and I'm fucking tired all the time, but I'm more able to be me than I've been up to this point.

Part of that, of course, is learning about who I really am, and that's been the most remarkable part of this leg of my journey.

I'm fucking beautiful. Those of you who've known me for a long time know that's not something I often think about myself. 

This process started in April of 2016, when I entered into the Intensive Outpatient Program at Frontier Behavioral Health (formerly Spokane Mental Health). The IOP program is built around something called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT. DBT is designed to deal with one specific group of disorders for which Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) does not:

Personality Disorders. 

When I enrolled at Frontier, I had an intake appointment where we looked at program options. I explained a bit of my history, and the intake specialist went ahead and checked me for a possible personality disorder diagnosis. Turns out I fit the criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder to a fuckin' T:

• Hypersensitivity to rejection and criticism
• Self-imposed social isolation
• Extreme shyness or anxiety in social situations, though the person feels a strong desire for close relationships
• Avoids physical contact because it has been associated with an unpleasant or painful stimulus
• Feelings of inadequacy
• Drastically reduced or absent self-esteem
• Self-loathing, autophobia or self-harm
• Mistrust of others or oneself; exhibits heightened self-doubt
• Emotional distancing related to intimacy
• Highly self-conscious
• Self-critical about their problems relating to others
• Problems in occupational functioning
• Lonely self-perception, although others may find the relationship with them meaningful
• Feeling inferior to others
• In some extreme cases, agoraphobia
• Uses fantasy as a form of escapism to interrupt painful thoughts
• This all in addition to general criteria for personality disorders

I mean, that's basically my whole life. To my recollection, I hadn't really be evaluated for a personality disorder to that point, and it ended up being a pretty important element to my recover efforts. Suffice to say, IOP has worked out pretty well for me.

I've also recently begun a form of therapy known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). This is a therapy for processing trauma, and is usually used in cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which, until a few weeks ago, I'd always been told I did not have.

Turns out my previous clinicians were wrong.

That's something I'm still kind of processing. I tried to get on SSI a decade ago, and they put me through a battery of psychiatric evaluations, and I was told that I didn't have PTSD. The person processing my application told me that I wasn't disabled, and that I  was 'just sad.'

I know it doesn't do a lot of good to think about what-ifs, but I can't help but wonder how much sooner I could have gotten to this point if I'd had this kind of diagnosis back then. Of course, there's no guarantee I would've had the level of self-awareness I have now if that had been the case, so, again, doesn't do much good to dwell on it.

Anyway, going in-depth on all that could take a whole series of blog posts, so I'll end this one here. Long story short: I'm doing much better these days, and I'm excited about the future for the first time in ever. In ever.