The mystery of "Himmmm"

I'm still alive. Sort of.

In the past few weeks, I've had a grand total of twenty-one hours where things felt like they were going reasonably all right. Twenty-one. I went back and checked timestamps and counted.

I landed a short-term gig teaching dance for a bunch of kids. It wasn't absurdly lucrative, but if I could earn that much money every week I'd be fine long-term. I was on site for 6 hours a day M-Th and had a four hour evening on Friday. I wasn't even running around with the kids for all that much of it, I just had class periods separated by free time. It ruined me to the point where I was having trouble feeding myself and showering consistently. I would get out of there and try desperately to get something useful done and just stare at a wall, if I didn't lay down "just for a minute" and wake up hours later.

I don't think it's necessarily the physical activity that's the problem. I can do four hours of hardcore dancing in a day, I just have to do it over the course of eight or nine hours to account for the breaks. I think it is literally just that I have to be awake, out of the house, and ready to respond to people like I'm not exhausted or in pain or just kind of weird for many hours at a time, without any ability to regulate my own environment. The world is incredibly loud and bright and full of moving things most of the time. I'm terrible at filtering out the ones I don't need. It's either everything gets in, or I drop back inside my own head and actually have useful thoughts.

I know "being in the office" is not most people's idea of happy fun time recreational activities, but I don't think most people react like this.

The physical activity doesn't help, mind. There's a certain freedom inherent in realizing that literally everything is going to hurt, so I might as well do what I want. It's not muscle pain. I am, at this point, frankly in pretty baller shape. It's my joints, and the fact that I'm just so fucking tired so much. Moving hurts less than not moving, but everything hurts.

I am also apparently... not really developing breathing problems, since I've been this way all my life, but slowly coming to the realization that this is not normal? I am more or less okay if I ramp up slowly, but if I have to go from, say, a normal walk to suddenly running for the bus, my lungs feel over-expanded and like no matter how hard I try to inhale more, I can't take in enough. I just assumed that's what panting is like -- you read in books about people 'gulping' for air and so forth, why would it not be like that? I'd no idea that was weird or worrying until I tried propranolol for panic attack and got that every time I stood up. I probably wouldn't have even commented on it except it came with a gooey-feeling cough, which was new. I told the doctor and was politely reminded that I am allowed to call 911.

My response to it was to just cancel my evening and lie down to watch TV for a while. An ambulance seemed like a lot of fuss for something whose dosing schedule suggested it would wear off in 4-6 hours. The doctor did not seem reassured by my logic.

It's markedly worse when hot, and especially when it's also humid. Being fatigued does not help. We've had some muggy days lately where just having to get up from my seat in an air-conditioned train car and go immediately to standing, walking, and climbing the stairs out of the station into 90+ degree swamp weather tripped it. I can stave it off for a little bit if I consciously under-inflate my lungs when I feel it coming on, but it doesn't work forever. Plus "just breathe less" somehow sounds like a less than ideal solution to any problem.

It's no wonder I hated athletics as a kid. It hurt; I hurt myself a lot, since I discombobulate and I have no idea where I am in space; and whenever I started breathing hard I had to whoop for air and never felt like I got enough. You would think an adult would have noticed some of this somewhere along the way, or just asked me about it, but no.

On top of this, someone I thought was a good solid part of my support network apparently resented the hell out of me thinking that. They said nothing, and actually got mad at me when I was going through one of those phases where everything looked like it was going wrong and asked if anything was. So mad I made a mental note that this was apparently a relationship I could break if I got too neurotic about it, so I shouldn't indulge the anxiety. They told me off out of the blue in a lengthy email that arrived right in the middle of a work day.

I know it sounds like something that should maybe hurt but can also be tabled in order to take care of adulting, and I feel stupid that it's not. But I have no permanent support structure: My family is useless and I'm not cut out for what most people demand of a romantic relationship. My friends are all I have, and I have to take it entirely on faith that they'll let me know who they are. When one of them is lying about it, it calls the entire rest of my life into question. I should be able to hold it to a level of 'upset but function', but I can't -- I can't do my goddamn laundry because I can't stop crying long enough to get down the stairs to the basement, where the washer is.

Being unable to do shit makes me panic. I found that out years ago when I quit caffeine for a solid 6 months on the advice of a doctor, to whom I was complaining of anxiety. I have no idea whether or not it was helping on a biochemical level because my general existential terror goes through the roof when I can't get a list to hang together in logical order. Again, I don't have a permanent support structure. Nobody loves me, just because. My value to the world is what I can do for them. When I'm in a tailspin, I don't have enough executive function to take care of both myself and things I class as "work", and if I don't do the "work" things how I am going to earn my keep?

Grieving, anxious, exhausted, in pain, and unable to either get it together long enough to make meals or spare the cash to make someone bring me meals is not a great combination for getting anything done. So very little blogging has been accomplished. Sorry.